Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST (Join here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life. (A space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living!) This Friday, we continue our exploration of existential philosophy with Irrational Man by William Barrett, initially published in 1958.
Check out our bookshelf below for previous and future reading.
A Study in Existential Philosophy
As discussed in How to Think Like an Existentialist and How to Be Yourself — Like Nietzsche, Existentialism is challenging to define. Existentialist thinkers explored issues related to meaning, purpose, anxiety and authenticity, freedom, absurdity, and the value of human existence.
Among the earliest figures associated with Existentialism are philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In the 20th century, prominent existentialist thinkers included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Paul Tillich.
In the short book, What is Existentialism? Beauvoir described the first error as believing Existentialism can be distilled to “one of two immediately efficient, simple expressions.” But, if one must, we could think of Existentialism as a form of philosophical inquiry exploring the problems of human existence.
How to Think — Like Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard (1813—1855) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author widely considered the first existentialist philosopher. In his chapter on Kierkegaard, Barrett explained, “He never aimed at being a philosopher, and all his philosophy was indeed incidental to his main purpose, to show what it means to be a Christian; just as this was, in turn, incidental to his task in life—that of becoming one.”
The problem for Kierkegaard was personal: he had chosen to be a Christian, and he had constantly renewed that choice with all the energy and passion of his being. He called his book Fear and Trembling “a dialectical lyric,” and the phrase would be a good description of nearly all his writing.
Barrett writes,
To make his position clear, Kierkegaard elaborated three levels of existence—the aesthetic, ethical, and religious—and his clarification of these levels represents one of his most significant contributions to philosophy. …
For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic attitude can be only a partial, never a complete, attitude toward life. He does not discard it but preserves it within the more integrated and total attitude that must supplant it as we become more seriously involved with ourselves and our life. The three “stages on life’s way,” as Kierkegaard calls them, are not to be taken as different floors of a building.
Kierkegaard believed a formal theory of ethics would be perfectly empty if not for the fundamental act of ethical existence by which we let values come into our life. The fundamental choice, says Kierkegaard, is not the choice between rival values of good and bad but the choice by which we summon good and bad into existence for ourselves.
Selected Passages
The irony is delicious and thoroughly Socratic, and appropriately so, since the task it marked out for Kierkegaard was parallel to that of Socrates. As the ancient Socrates played the gadfly for his fellow Athenians stinging them into awareness of their own ignorance, so Kierkegaard would find his task, he told himself, in raising difficulties for the easy conscience of an age that was smug in the conviction of its own material progress and intellectual enlightenment. He would be a modern and Christian gadfly as Socrates had been an ancient and pagan one. […]
— William Barrett, Irrational Man
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Perennial Meditations to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.