Pursuit of the Really Real

By James Atlas

THE ILLUSION OF TECHNIQUE by William Barrett;

Anchor/Doubleday; 359 pages; $12.95

Philosophy, William Barrett once confessed, is "a very dubious profession" in America. But in his new book, The Illusion of Technique, Barrett vigorously rehabilitates the profession. For better or worse, he writes, philosophers have made the modern world: "If there had not been those early Greek thinkers who created philosophy, there would be no atomic bombs." Barrett's narrative of the stages in between is highly speculative. But his hold on elusive ideas is so sure, his erudition so vast and effortless, that a coherent historical design gradually emerges: Aristotle's invention of logic culminated in the scientific discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th and 17th centuries, and, two centuries later, in the Nietzschean quest for "mastery over nature by its own instruments." This is the essence of scientific technology.

And what has this technology accomplished? In Barrett's dour view, it has enslaved us. William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution have brought forth even more hellish inventions to refuel the Western world's "frantic dynamism." Solzhenitsyn's Gulag, B.F. Skinner's proposals for a "technology of behavior" and the threat of nuclear holocaust complete a disastrous legacy.

These are familiar indictments, but Barrett enlists them in a new cause. In Irrational Man, his classic treatise on existentialism, the author warned that man's sheer cleverness could provoke his ruin. In The Illusion of Technique, Barrett argues that even if we survive, the familiar world may well recede from our grasp, supplanted by systems that aspire to control human destiny. Barrett contends that philosophy can recall us to that world. To support his claim he cites three modern figures: Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James. However divergent in their styles of thought, they shared Kant's conviction that freedom was the principal issue philosophy had to address. For Wittgenstein, freedom resides in the ambiguity of language; for Heidegger, in the fluid, indeterminate character of being; for William James, in the workings of a moral will. What Kant considered the "other two grand questions," God and immortality, issue from our awareness of the liberty that lies "within our own hands"--for Barrett, the freedom to believe.

This demonstration of how philosophy informs "the whole life of humanity" is no academic exercise. Barrett is convinced that the history of ideas foreshadows the fate of the Western world. His vision of the future, in both its American and Russian versions--Skinner's programmed Utopia vs. the triumph of Soviet totalitarianism--sometimes sounds like a science-fiction scenario. A former Marxist, Barrett shares with other victims of the god that failed a dramatic anxiety about the menace of Communism.

Why this apparent digression on Realpolitik in a philosophical work? Because "the metaphysical and political aspects of freedom are in the end inseparable." Ideas are for Barrett, as they were for Plato, "really real"; he writes of them in a confiding, passionate voice that has more in common with his literary heroes--Kafka, Forster, Beckett--than with the philosophers who frame his argument. One luminous interlude is given over to a meditation on a typical morning, afternoon and night in the author's life, glimpsed through the lens of Heidegger's concept of "Being." Our daily lives, Barrett insists, can disclose our deepest experiences of the world. Boarding the train, reading the newspaper contemplating the objects in his study he dwells on the mystery that the world exists at all. Late at night, he gazes at the stars, infused with a sensation that men are "strangers in the universe . . . homeless within the world." In these pages, the mystery of transience and death declares itself with a poignant insistence.

Our foremost chronicler of existentialism has wearied of its lessons; nihilism is "a theatrical nightmare . . . the epidemic of our time." Now 64, Barrett finds him self at once exalted and bewildered by the discovery that freedom lies in the recognition of mortality. His testament to that condition recalls in spirit the fierce, eloquent poems Yeats composed in his old age.

--James Atlas

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