William Barrett, Irrational Man.

A Study in Existential Philosophy, Anchor Books,

1962

[all B mine]

1. The modern university is as much an expression of the specialization of the age as

is the modern factory. […] Modern science was made possible by the social
organization of knowledge. The philosopher today is therefore pressed, and
simply by reason of his objective social role in the community, into an imitation
of the scientist. [6]
2. The reception given the new movement by philosophers was anything but cordial.
Existentialism was rejected, often without very much scrutiny, as sensationalism
or mere “psychologizing”, a literary attitude, postwar despair, nihilism, or heaven
knows what besides. [9]
3. Heidegger and Jaspers are, strictly speaking, the creators of existential philosophy
in this century: they have given it its decisive stamp, brought its problems to new
and precise expression, and in general formed the model around which the
thinking of all other Existentialists revolves. [11]
4. [ > reductia transcendentala] By insisting that the philosopher must cast aside
preconceptions in attending to the actual concrete data of experience, Husserl
flung wide the doors of philosophy to the rich existential content that his more
radical followers were to quarry. [12]
5. Jaspers – The philosopher […] who has really experienced the thought of
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can never again philosophize in the traditional mode
of academic philosophy. [12]
6. Ideas are not even the real subject matter of these philosophers – and this in itself
is something of a revolution in Western philosophy: their central subject is the
unique experience of the single one, the individual, who chooses to place
himself on trial before the gravest question of civilization. [13]
7. Though Kierkegaard was a Dane, intellectual Denmark in his time was a cultural
province of Germany, and his thought, nourished almost completely by German
sources, belongs ultimately within the wider tradition of German philosophy.
Modern existential philosophy is thus by and large a creation of the German
genius. [14]
8. Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to
be labeled an Existentialist [the black sheep of the Pragmatic movement]. […]
There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the
Epilogue to Varieties of Religious Experience puts the case for the primacy of
personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has
ever done. [18-19]
9. Some of Kierkegaard’s books, such as The Sickness Unto Death and The Concept
of Dread, are still frightening to our contemporaries and so are excused or merely
passed over as the personal outpourings of a very melancholic temperament; yet
they are the truthful record of what the Protestant soul must experience on the
brink of the great Void. Protestant man is the beginning of the West’s fateful
encounter with Nothingness. [29]

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10. Journalism has become a great god of the period, and the gods have a way of
ruthlessly and demonically taking over their servitors. In thus becoming a state of
mind […] journalism enables people to deal with life more and more at second
hand. [31]
11. def! Existential philosophy […] is […] a product of bourgeois society in a state of
dissolution. [34]
12. In a society that requires of man only that he perform competently his own
particular social function, man becomes identified with this function, and the
rest of his being is allowed to subsist as best it can. [36]
13. Art is the collective dream of a period. [41]
14. In the end the only authentic art is that which has about it the power of
inevitability. [43]
15. Irritation usually arises when something touches a sore spot in ourselves, which
most of the time we would like desperately to hide. [43]
16. In the course of the brute random flow of detail that is the last day of his life,
Quentin Compson [Faulkner’s Sound and Fury] breaks the crystal of his
watch. He twists off the two hands and thereafter, the watch continues to tick
loudly but cannot, with its faceless dial, indicate the time. [53]
2 James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night, II >
Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours,
Detach the hands, remove the dial-face;
The works proceed until run down; although
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go. [8]

17. The temporal is the horizon of the modern man, as the eternal was the horizon of
the man of the Middle Ages. [53]
18. def! Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age. [65]
19. [ > Hebraism] This sinfulness pervades the whole being of man; it is indeed
man’s being, insofar as in feebleness and finiteness as a creature he stands naked
in the presence of God. [71-72]
20. There was a Promethean excitement in Job’s coming face to face with his Creator.
[73]
21. The problem of death lies at the center of the religious consciousness – Unamuno
was really following St. Paul when he argued this. [94]
22. Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine
(in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? – and this shift is decisive. [95]
23. The Devil in fact, Damiani [ > Peter Damiani 1007-1072] says, was the first
grammarian, tempting Adam in the Garden of Eden with the promise “Ye shall be
as gods”, and thus teaching him to decline the word “God” in the plural. [99]
24. Jacques Maritain – existentialismul este cuprins in tomismul secolului 13 (!)
25. the relation between essence and existence >>

The essence of a thing is what the thing is; existence refers rather to the sheer fact
that the thing is. Thus when I say “I am a man,” the “I am” denotes the fact that I

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exist, while the predicate “man” denotes what kind of existent I am, namely man.
[102]

Modern existentialism, particularly in the writings of Sartre, has made much of the
thesis: existence precedes essence. In the case of man, its meaning is not difficult to
grasp. Man exists and makes himself to be what he is; his individual essence or nature
to be out of his existence. […] This is one of the chief respects in which man differs
from things, which do have fixed natures or essences, which are once for all what
they are. [102]

26. existentialism = anti-Platonism

Plato’s is the classic and indeed archetypal expression of a philosophy which we may
now call essentialism, which holds that essence is prior in reality to existence.
Existentialism, by contrast, is the philosophy that holds existence to be prior to
essence. [104]
27. Nietzsche – Mankind must become better and more evil. [125]
28. With the exception of the German poet Hölderlin, Wordsworth was probably the
most philosophic poet of Romanticism. [125]

Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.

2 read Wordsworth - Resolution and Independence

2 read Coleridge – Dejection: An Ode

29. Rimbaud burst like a rocket in the sky of French poetry, and then by the very
force of his trajectory was carried beyond it. [132]
30. Once having lost contact with the natural world, however, man catches a dizzy
and intoxicating glimpse of human possibilities, of what man might become, in
comparison with which the old myths of the magician and the sorcerer seem
pallid indeed. Rimbaud was the poet of these possibilities as Nietzsche was to be
their thinker. [133]
31. The will to power – the demoniacal will to power – was thus discovered by
Dostoevsky before Nietzsche made it his theme. [137]
32. The Death of Ivan Ilych -- perhaps the most powerful description in literature of
what it means to face death. [143]
33. [Kierkegaard] chose what he had to become. This does not in the least mean that
it was not a free choice; on the contrary, it had to be renewed freely day by day,
through the rest of his life, if it were to be given meaning. [154]
34. Any man who chooses or is forced to choose decisively – for a lifetime, and
therefore for eternity since only one life is given us- experiences his own
existence as something beyond the mirror of thought. [163]
35. It is thus by an act of courage that we begin to exist ethically. We bind
ourselves to ourselves for a lifetime. [165]

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36. The real line of difference between the ethical and religious [...] has to do
with the uniqueness of the individual, the singleness of the single one, and
with the calling of the religious man, who has to break with the ordinary
moral code that his fellow citizens approve. [166]
Religious stage – insecurity

37. Where then as an abstract rule it commands something that goes against my
deepest self […], then I feel compelled out of conscience – a religious
conscience superior to the ethical – to transcend that rule. [167]
38. “appropriation” – coming from the Latin root proprius, meaning “one’s own”.
[171]
39. He who would make the descent into the lower regions runs the risk of
succumbing to what the primitives call “the perils of the soul” – the unknown
Titans that lie within, below the surface of our selves. [180]
40. “All my life I have compared myself to Christ,” exclaims the tramp in Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. [183]

2 read – Schiller, Letters on Aesthetic Education

41. The dwarf is the image of mediocrity that lurks within Zarathustra-Nietzsche, and
that mediocrity was the most frightening and distasteful thing that Nietzsche was
willing to see in himself. [193]
42. Sein und Zeit (1927) – a kind of systematic Bible – sometimes almost an unread
Bible – of modern Existentialism. [211]
43. Leibniz has said that the monad has no windows; and Heidegger’s reply is that
man does not look upon an external world through windows, from the isolation of
the ego: he is already out-of-doors. [217]
44. One of the most remarkable things about Heidegger’s description of human
existence is that it is made without using the term “man” at all. […] His analysis
of existence also takes place without the use of word “consciousness”, for this
word threatens to bring us back into the Cartesian dualism. That Heidegger can
say everything he wants to say about human existence without using either “man”
or “consciousness” means that the gulf between subject and object, or between
mind and body, that has been dug by modern philosophy need not exist if we do
not make it. [218]
45. Buber’s criticism of Heidegger – in Between Man and Man ! [236]
46. [Jaspers and Buber] – to put it in blunt American, as thinkers they are not even in
the same league with Heidegger . [236]
47. After Heidegger, we feel the need of a new Kierkegaard to pump back living
blood into the ontological skeleton of the Heideggerian Dasein. [237]

2 read – Sartre – What is Literature? [1947]

2 read – Sartre – Cartesian Freedom

48. This Cartesian God, says Sartre, is the freest God that man has ever invented.
[244]

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 49. Where Sartre goes beyond Heidegger is in giving a more detailed elaboration of
the negative side of human existence. [247]
50. Sartre has advanced as the fundamental thesis of his Existentialism the
proposition that existence precedes essence. This thesis is true for Heidegger as
well, in the historical, social, and biographical sense that man comes into
existence and makes himself to be what he is. But for Heidegger another
proposition is even more basic that this: namely, Being precedes existence.
[…] This is why Heidegger has declared, “I am not an Existentialist” – because
the Existentialists of the Sartrian school do not grasp this priority of Being, and so
their thinking remains, like that of Descartes, locked up in the human subject.
[248]
51. The fact is that despite Sartre’s enormous strictly literary output, men like
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had more of the artist in them. [250]
52. His first novel, Nausea (1938), may well be his best book for the very reason that
in it the intellectual and the creative artist come closest to being joined. [251]
53. The Flies – the cosmic Gestapo chief Jupiter. [252]
54. A Cartesian subjectivity (which is what Sartre’s is) cannot admit the existence the
existence of the unconscious because the unconscious is the Other in oneself; and
the glance of the Other, in Sartre, is always like the stare of Medusa, fearful and
petrifying. [256-257]
55. If we strip Sartre’s psychology of its particular philosophical terminology, it turns
out to be fundamentally and Adlerian psychology [based on the Will to Power].
[258]
56. In modern psychology particularly (philosophy since Descartes), man has figured
almost exclusively as an epistemological subject – as an intellect that registers
sense-data, makes propositions, reasons, and seeks creativity of intellectual
knowledge, but not as the man underneath all this, who is born, suffers, and dies.
[276]

2 read Hemingway – A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (in the volume Winner Take
Nothing – 1933)