Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett (PDF)

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Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.

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⭐Great book. My favorite of all Barrett’s work. He clearly sees the underlying irrationality of mankind’s nature (although he seems to believe man no longer possess “instincts.) This is the reason, I believe, he misses CG Jung’s importance.Barrett was a cultural anthropologist– studying collective behavior. But it was his fine mind that developed a skill in weaving material from many disciplines into his work, including psychology. Psychology is a study of individual behaviors and motivations. And so he relied upon Fruedian psychology, which was a systematic effort to develop generalized theories of human psychology. Although he recognized Carl Jung’s contributions, Barrett did not make much use of Jung’s “theories” in this work. Jung experienced much the same breakdown of egoic control as Freud himself did during his earliest work and spent most of the rest of his life working through the dynamics of the personal transformation stemming from his inner experiences. As a result, he found the sexual dysfunction explanations of Freud insufficient to explain his expeirences. This took him into a broader search into the metaphysical sources of dysfunction than did Freud. As a result, Jung discarded “any goal for a generalized theory to explain psychological illness”, arguing for an understanding of the irrational, which he called the “unconscious” and a requirement to work within on the symbols that come with dreams, visions, and synchroniticies. He developed inner work to cooperate with the inner dynamics while warning of the dangerous energies that come with an influx of energies from the depths of the mind. Thus, there is no generalized method for all people. One must work with the experiences of a patient to aid him or her through his personal confusion and transformational experiences to find meaning and a relationship to the Infinite. In this way, he might sustain himself in life and ground himself on this earth. Thus, the analyst should not try to use any standard general theory of psychology to direct the patient to return to society where he was previously situated. The patient must be helped to stand alone in his life and endure the pain, disappointments, and insecurities of life. Jung thought that only spirituality might sustain him or contain him in that way.. Jung’s ideas were not for everybody, but they were very important to understand the devastating effects of cultural order and culture’s existential effects on the psyche. Order itself destabilizes the psyche. And rationality itself is the mechanism by which it does so.Mankind is not rational by nature. We have an animal nature which we increasingly ignore to our peril. When rationality, order and the straitjacket of our cultural morality, rules of behavior, and ideals become too stressful for the individual in culture, there occurs these catastrophic breakdowns of ego which can devastate lives. It is therefore the rigidities of culture itself which instigates mental illness by creating “existential stress” due to a conflict between mankind’s animal foundations and his more mental capacity to handle stress. The problem for Jung as an analyst was to restore the harmony between the psyche and the human animal aspect of the individual and to restore his awareness of his connection to God through a religious experience. Such experiences could be found in a patient’s dreams during his illness.Ego is a complex and therefore functions as a means to escape the pain of life through attempting to evade the essential unreasonability and painfulness of life. It is a form of neurotic distortion of our full consciousness.. But it has been idealized as a kind of separate consciousness that is “who we are.” It is not who we are, but it is a stabilizing influence in culture because culture is man’s attempt to generalize agreement on what reality must be for us to “advance and control” our lives. We create therefore a rigid environment which becomes a disease. The result is mental illness for many because order becomes too dominating a factor in people’s lives. We cannot ignore man’s fundamental irrational nature by overlaying our cultiural image of ourselves with too many ideals of reason, order and morality upon all mankind. Nor can we project ideals upon man that are not in his instinctive nature. These rigidities in our manufactured environments create stress, separation, and existential life. These projections may be of the light to one person but dark to another. We ordinarily view these ideals or projections as “good” all the time, of course, and are outraged when man disappoints us by not rising to “goodness”.. That does not make man evil or rational when he is not rational. Rationality, I would argue, was a trick we began playing on ourselves and others to avoid pain and failure in life. It instead creaed its own form of pain by separating us from our irrational nature. It organized and discriminated among “things” for us mentally or emotionally. It did not, among mankind, avoid pain or failure. It only was a way of thinking in which we could create an illusion of process and control. Nature lacks process. Plants and animal life lack control. There is no thinker, no will, and no reasoner. among such life forms in nature. Neither is there among man at the level of the animal in Mankind.. We are in illusion about what we are and what we are actually doing when we attempt to “reason.” Underneath, we remain mostly irrational animals who expanded “reason” and learning and group effort into our method of adaptation. . And it is this layer of ourselves–irrationality– which rules our “conscious” behavior, regardless of our using logic to justify why we do what we do.First and foremost we need to get to know this part of ourselves (whether we call this layer of our selves “nature” or instinct, Will or archetype).

⭐Years ago, this book convinced me to throw Atlas Shrugged out the window. It is on my top ten list of works that have personally influenced me. Along with George Orwell’s essay Notes on Nationalism, Irrational Man has instilled in me a deep distrust of systems that provide easy and simple solutions, but it did so without turning me into a cynic.Why are we here, what’s it all for, what’s the meaning of life? Are these empty questions? I think they are but where does the obsession to answer them come from? What can we do to satisfy this urge? The Existentialists sought to answer these questions and now their program is pretty much over, but did it fail or succeed? I’d say both.Existentialism fails utterly in providing a clear picture of what Man is. It doesn’t resolve our angst, it doesn’t tell us where we fit in the universe. On the other hand, Existentialists had the courage to ask these questions out loud at a time when physics and engineering seemed to be making us Masters of the Universe.Barrett first makes a successful case for modern art. Abstract art was quite controversial even as recently as the 50s but Barrett argues that artists could not have produced anything else. Certainly they could have copied the styles of the Renaissance masters, but such work would have been stale, limp, lifeless. We then are shown the limits of reason. When politicians were extolling the virtue of the “clean” hydrogen bomb and when all accepted the assertion, something just had to be wrong. We had mastered things but finding we were on the brink of self destruction and that it was our own fault, could we say that we had we mastered ourselves?The next section looks at four philosophers that represent Existentialism as it stood in 1957: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre.Kierkegaard and Nietzsche particularly deserve our attention. They lived through, in the 19th century, their own personal angst ridden existential crisis, well before the malaise spread to more and more people in the 1940s and 1950s. They were not academic philosophers but they had mastered academic technique and it is by choice and necessity that they expressed themselves as passionately as they did. Their answers were diametrically opposed: Kierkegaard’s was to have Faith, while Nietzsche’s was that God was dead.Heidegger had many years of active life left to him when Irrational Man was published, so perhaps Barrett can be forgiven his enthusiasm for this pseudo-philosopher superstar. At least he does a good job of explaining clearly what it was that bothered Heidegger:”… a table is an article of furniture; articles of furniture are human artifacts; human artifacts are physical things; and then, with the next jump of generalization, I can say of this table merely that it is a being, a thing. “Being” is the ultimate generalization I can make, and therefore the most abstract term I can apply to it, and it gives no useful information about the table at all.”If Heidegger had stopped there, everything would have been fine. Arguing about the meaning of the copulative verb “To Be” yields no wisdom at all. Instead of accepting this answer Heidegger throughout his career deconstructed language for thousands of pages, trying to convince us that this most general of abstraction needs to be abstracted again, that we must go back 2500 years to the dawn of philosophy and change our minds. That’s tripe. Verbiage isn’t an answer and Heidegger belongs in the dustbin.Sartre, another philosophy superstar, fares better. As an academic philosopher he was as guilty of meaningless drivel as Heidegger was, but as a playwright and novelist he illustrated the angst of his time with force and clarity.Barrett does close with an answer and to my mind it justifies the entire Existentialist project. He relates the story of the Furies from the plays of Aeschylus. Orestes killed his mother to avenge her murder of his father, but the primal instinct against matricide is older than society and reason so the Furies, being ancient earth goddesses, move to tear Orestes apart. Apollo intercedes on behalf of Orestes, but the parties find themselves in a stalemate. Athena intervenes to resolve the issue. Orestes is saved but humbled before the Furies. We must respect these ancient urges and instincts within ourselves; we must acknowledge our animal nature rather than repress it. We cannot reason away our urges.The existentialist project doesn’t tell us who we are or what our place in our universe is. I think no philosophy can do that; such questions are unanswerable. But it does tell us what we can do. We exist, we must deal with that.Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

⭐The author traces the origins of existentialism to its roots contrasting it to the origins of western rational Platonic thinking. Coming forward in western history, those roots can be seen in mediaeval religion, then Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Sound daunting? Well it’s not… due to the clear quality of the author’s writing, the book’s relevance to life today is exceptionally clear. His personal insights are such that, if you could describe a book on philosophies as a real page-turner, this one is it. Highly recommended for its insights into today’s global nihilistic rationalist culture.

⭐Anyone interested in the intellectual history of the 20th century must read this book. It sets out in lucid language the ideas of the major existentialist thinkers. It is a master-work.

⭐Amazing. I’m not a big fan of many existentialist authors past Kierkegaard, and I’ll admit I went into this expecting the whole “Sartre is amazing, existence precedes essence” nonsense. But I was humbled, because this book not only gives Hegel the proper pride and place in describing his influence on existentialism, but also even taught me quite a bit on Kierkegaard and Heidegger I didn’t already understand. It will teach you a lot of what you may not have understood in texts such as “Concluding Unscientific Postscripts” and “The Present Age”, and “Being and Time” and also explains the flaws of Nietzsche and Sartre in relation to these 2 in my opinion greater thinkers, also explaining why Heidegger does Nietzsche better than Nietzsche and why Sartre didn’t understand a thing he was talking about. Really would recommend for anyone, beginner or expert.

⭐In such a short space of one book Barrett outlines the origins of Existentialism then of its various forms from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Camus and Sartre, through Heideggar and Jaspers.I recommend this for all students of Existentialism before they go on to read some of the others. One is often confused by the different approaches of the well known names of existentialist writers. Barrett gives us a very readable overview and to my mind a very scholarly, and well written one.The book is not written in technical language, nor in teh jargonm so beloved of academics.

⭐I first read this book when completing a philosophy degree in the mid 1990’s and it set down the template of what a good book should be- solid, substantial but accessible to the general reader. Great buy and covers so much. Spent a year taking it in. Would like to buy this for my students but yet want them to stumble upon this gem for themselves and have that same delight of reading a great book for themselves

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