I first read William Barrett's Irrational Man back in college and was inspired to spend the next several years reading Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka,, Berdyaev and Shestov. Quite a rewarding experience.

Having also participated in the arts and music and the study of aesthetics for many years, I revisited Barrett's book with an eye to what he has to say about existentialism's connection to modern art. Again, a most rewarding experience.

So, with this in mind, and also recognizing many others have posted reviews here, I will focus on The Testimony of Modern Art, offering three Barrett quotes coupled with my comments.

"The ordinary man is uncomfortable, angry, or derisive before the dislocation of forms in modern art, before its bold distortions, or arbitrary manipulations of objects." Barrett is pointing out the heart of the issue with modern art: it doesn't matter if the art is created by Picasso, Mondrian, Pollack, Dali or Rothko - non-realistic, abstract art is anti-middle class mindset, anti-Walt Disney, and counter to a routine, regimented, unexamined, on-the-surface way of living.

"Modern art thus begins, and sometimes ends, as a confession of spiritual poverty. That is its greatness and its triumph, but also the needle it jabs into the Philistine's sore spot, for the last thing he wants to be reminded of is his spiritual poverty." Again, if people in modern mass society today spend their lives in TV stupor, listening to muzak, preoccupied with the size of their houses and their cars and fretting over their pensions, this is spiritual poverty plain and simple. Barrett sees modern art as needle number one and existentialism as needle number two sticking and jabbing and pricking and poking people to wake up to the depths of their own human experience. Recall how Kierkegaard said he wanted to be the Socratic gadfly of Copenhagen.

"This century in art, André Malraux has said, will go down in history not as the period of abstract art but as the period in which all the art of the past, and from every quarter of the glove, became available to the painter and sculptor, and through them became part of our modern taste." This infusion of the world's non-Western traditions continues today. For example, if an American artist tomorrow combines realistic portraiture with Japanese brush strokes, any gallery-goer wouldn't think twice. Our modern day culture is truly a world-culture. Would you be at all surprised if your new next door neighbors were from India, China or Brazil; or, if another neighbor explores African dance or Kung Fu or Tibetan Buddhist meditation? The point Barrett is highlighting here is that the old, conventional, self-contained, exclusively Western categories that served Western societies for centuries are blown open by global future-shock. Thus, more fertile ground for modern artists, philosophers and writers.

One last comments, this one from the section The Rational Ordering of Society, where Barrett says, "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 - usually to be dropped below the surface of consciousness and forgotten." If anything, with the advent of cell-phones, blackberries, I-pads and the internet, people are spending more waking hours fulfilling their role and function within society today then back in 1958 when Barrett wrote these words.

No doubt about it - reflecting and living one's life from one's spiritual and artistic depth is a great challenge in our brave new computerized world. Challenging but not impossible. Reading and reflecting on the existential philosophers is a way to reclaim our full humanness. I offer the following recommendations:

For anybody wanting to pursue a study of Existentialism, I would recommend reading the following literary works. All are short and each one can be read in a day:

Notes from Underground - Dostoyevsky
Metamorphosis - Kafka
The Death of Ivan Ilyich - Tolstoy
The Wall - Sartre
The Stranger - Camus

For those wishing to study Existentialism more as a philosophy, here are my recommendations (note: none are by Heidegger or Sartre, since the philosophic writing of these two authors tends to be dense and turgid):

The Meaning of the Creative Act - Berdyaev
Slavery and Freedom - Berdyaev
Attack Upon "Christendom - Kierkegaard
The Dawn of Day - Nietzsche
I and Thou - Buber


William Barrett, long time philosophy professor at NYC and interpreter of existentialism, 1913-1992