William Barrett (philosopher) Quotes (1913-1992)

“One does wish that Sartre would pause for a while to regroup his forces. The man really does write too much.”

“Faith can no more be described to a thoroughly rational mind than the idea of colors can be conveyed to a blind man.”

“That existence has meaning, finally, only as the liberty to say No, and by saying No to create a world.”

“The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age.”

“Journalism has become a great god of the period, and gods have a way of ruthlessly and demonically taking over their servitors.”

“The instincts of man are so earth-bound that they shrewdly sense it whenever the approach of logic threatens them.”

“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.”

“Nietzsche's life has all the characteristics of a psychological fatality.”

“Anyone who attempts to gain a unified understanding of modern art as a whole is bound to suffer the uncomfortable sensation of having fallen into a thicket of brambles.”

“Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be an Existentialist.”

“Heidegger's philosophy is neither atheism nor theism, but a description of the world from which God is absent.”

“The will to power is weakness as well as strength, and the more it is cut off and isolated from the rest of the human personality, the more desperate, in its weakness, it can become.”

“Plato began his philosophic career as the result of a conversion. This is surely an existential beginning.”

“The decline of religion in modern times means simply that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of man's life, and that the Church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being.”

“Now at the end, we come back to the beginning: to the situation of the world here and now, from which all understanding must start and to which it must return. In all existential thinking it is we ourselves, the questioners, who are ultimately in question.”

“We do not ask ourselves what the ultimate ideas behind our civilization are that have brought us into this danger; we do not search for the human face behind the bewildering array of instruments that man has forged; in a word, we do not dare to be philosophical.”

“Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society.”

“The essential freedom, the ultimate and final freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. This is the basic premise in Sartre's view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though the negativity is also creative.”

“Where feudalism is concrete and organic, with man dominated by the image of the land, capitalism is abstract and calculating in spirit, and severs man from the earth.”

“As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people.”