PERSON
William Barrett
The American philosopher who spent his career excavating the dimensions of human existence—anxiety, wonder, the confrontation with mortality—that the rationalist tradition systematically excluded, and who foresaw, with extraordinary clarity, that Western civilization would eventually produce a machine embodying that tradition’s definition of the human, and that the confrontation with the machine would force us to choose between two portraits of ourselves.
Barrett’s central argument is that the rationalist tradition beginning with Descartes performed an amputation: it separated the thinking subject from the living body, the reasoning mind from the anxious, wondering, mortal creature that actually sits beside the stove—and then declared the thinking part the definition of the human. Everything else—the body’s dread, the stubborn wonder at existence, the hunger for meaning—was demoted to accident. Inessential. Noise. His 1958
Irrational Man, one of the most influential philosophy books published in twentieth-century America, brought
Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre to an American public that had been trained on pragmatism and technological optimism, and he showed that the European tradition of existentialist thought was not morbid but urgently relevant to a civilization that had achieved extraordinary material power while growing spiritually impoverished. In
The Illusion of