William Barrett: Irrational Man, a Study in Existential Philosophy

William Barrett's IRRATIONAL MAN has been accepted as the finest definition of existentialism ever written. With superb clarity and understanding, he describes the roots of existentialism in ancient thought, and traces its appearances in the art and reflection of such men as St. Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book is four long chapters in which he explains the views of its foremost spokesmen-Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre.
Professor Barrett makes clear that existentialism is anything but a barren abstraction fit only for the classroom. Whenever men have insisted on the limits of reason, declaring that logic alone cannot account for the guilt, dread, anxiety, alienation, and latent meaninglessness of life, they have been taking an existentialist stand, For "Existentialism," as William Barrett writes, "whether successfully or not, has attempted to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man," and any picture of man that fails to consider the irrational element, the absurd, will be incomplete. In Pascal's phrase, the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know; and, because existentialism will not ignore these reasons, because it insists that the subterranean impulse, the Furies within all of us, must be recognized, because it realizes that in this atomic age we are in such peril of ceasing to exist before we have even known what our existence means-because of these acute and urgent insights into the crisis of modern man, existentialism has become the philosophy for our time.