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Title: Irrational Man : A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett ISBN: 0-385-03138-6 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 01 July, 1962 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.12 (17 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Uugh. It's a neophyte nightmare.
Comment: I'm not a student of philosophy, but have long identified myself with the usual definition of existentialism: Non-existence of a "God" in the traditional sense, isolation of the individual in an indifferent universe, freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts. I assumed that Barrett's book would be a great introduction to existential philosophy. Instead it was page after brutally incoherent page on the history of thought before existentialism, and then obscure, esoteric reflections and uninteresting and seemingly irrelevant biographies about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. In short: it was awful. There was no substance to it. No descriptions with comparisons to previous or concurrent schools of philosophy. No examples of, support for or shortcomings in the application of existentialism in 20th or 21st century life. And if it was there, I couldn't see it. So confusingly written was the text that I often had to read and re-read at least one paragraph per page because it just didn't make sense.

I'm willing to accept that it was my expectation and not the content of the book that is at fault, and I also acknowledge that the content could simply be over my head. But Irrational Man, to me, was an absolute waste of time that took this avid reader very nearly four months to slog through and left me without gaining an ounce of insight. Thumbs down, big time.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Must Read for Those Interested in Existentialism
Comment: The book largely responsible for bringing the existential thought patterns to America, Barrett's book is a wonderful read. Unlike so many critical books and works of philosophy which are dry and dull, Barrett is a colorful writer with great imagery and a flowing language. He sums up beautifully the historical and social factors that lead to the existential revolution as well as captures the feeling of alienation that modern man feels almost as well as Camus did in Sisyphus.

Minds like Kierkegaard, Hiedegger, and Sartre are brilliant, but often their writing is convoluted and complex. Barrett simplifies their concepts while giving a thorough and clear exposition of them. After reading this book, a person will have a good basic knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of existential philosophy and should be able to converse with others who are knowledgeable on the subject. I heartily recommend it to those who feel as if they are a stranger to the rest of humanity and to themselves.

Rating: 2
Summary: A very mixed bag
Comment: An often good introduction to Existentialism, but a book with several negatives. First, and least important, having been written in the late 1950s, it shows its age. Psychoanalysis was still taken seriously in those days, at least among the literati, and it is given credence throughout the book as an illuminating paradigm. People to whom the disputes between Freud, Adler, and Jung are of any interest are by now a diminishing few, at most. The book's numerous allusions to looming nuclear annihilation are a relic of those "duck and cover" times, and Barrett's repeated criticism of American culture for its materialism, pace, and emphasis on technology, and of Americans for being less philosophically sophisticated than the Europeans, are hackneyed.

Barrett is obviously a fan of Existentialism, and the writing tends to be overwrought, with too many concepts and ideas described as 'momentous', 'crucial', 'powerful', 'urgent', 'profound', and so forth. Part of the problem here is that the fundamental ideas of the Existentialists have become part of the culture during the last 50 years, and they no longer strike today's reader as particularly earth-shattering. Some of that space should have been used to explain basic ideas more clearly. Barrett does not do a good job of elucidating the basic essence-existence distinction, and his presentation of the Problem of Nihilism is unhelpful, for two examples.

But the really objectionable thing about the book is its political dishonesty. The chapters on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche contain good biographical detail and specific information about how these men's ideas were reflected in their lives. But there is none of that, suddenly, when we get to Heidegger and Sartre. About Heidegger's background we are told only that he was "of peasant stock, strongly attached to his native region of southern Germany, and one feels this attachment to the soil in his thinking". Blood and Soil? That's appropriate, since Heidegger was an enthusiastic and active supporter of the Nazis during World War II. Did his philosophy cause him to turn to Nazism? Or was it just the inducement of the university rectorship the Nazis gave him? Incredibly, this well-known and despicable history is nowhere analyzed, mentioned, or hinted at by Barrett.

In the chapter on Sartre, we learn that "The Resistance came to Sartre and his generation as a release from disgust into heroism" and that "The experience of the Resistance gave the figure of Descartes even greater importance since in the Resistance Cartesianism could be incarnated in the life of action". That makes it sound like Sartre was an active and heroic member of the Resistance, when he was nothing of the kind. Andre Malraux (whom Barrett criticizes for his "military metaphors"!) pointed out with some bitterness that while he was facing the Gestapo as a member of the Resistance forces, Sartre was safely advancing his career in Paris by putting on plays and doing his writing under the auspices of the German censors. Paul Johnson notes that the emphasis on Heidegger in Sartre's work gave him a leg up with the Nazis, and he had no trouble getting his work published and his plays presented. Satre himself said that "We have never been so free as we were under the German occupation". So much for Sartre's release from disgust into heroism. And so much for the ethical content of Existentialism.