DEATH OF THE SOUL
William Barrett
Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday 1986
When academic philosophers speak, few outsiders listen. Most professors, you see, "do" analytic philosophy, which, though it was inspired by the powerful minds of G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, has all too often degenerated into a narrowly technical exercise, far removed from ordinary life. Not only does the analysts' language tend to be cramped and artificial, but their subjects are rarely such as to cause the pulse rate to quicken. Concerning those things that from time to time preoccupy even the most unreflective of men--love, death, courage, suffering, God--they have little or nothing to say. Such words, they patiently explain, are meaningless, in the strict sense that scientific inquiry cannot put them to the test. In their place, they offer us rigorous and sometimes inventively arcane logical investigations and linguistic clarifications. As a consequence, they have widened perceptively the gulf that separates them from lesser mortals; it is the uncommon academic who has the desire, let alone the ability, to enter into discussion with the uninitiated.
This circumstance has always troubled William Barrett, who, in the course of a long and distinguished career, has made it his special mission to engage a wider audience without so much as the appearance of condescension. But then Barrett has not always been an academic. In The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982), his finest book to date, he recalled how, at the end of World War II, he returned home from the European theater and joined the Partisan Review's editorial staff. He did so because he was impressed by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, the magazine's chief editors, and by the imposing list of contributors from both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, as a Marxist he shared the Review's radical but decidedly anti-Stalinist sympathies. In a ringing editorial entitled "The 'liberal' Fifth Column" that he published in the magazine's pages in 1946, Barrett took The Nation and The New Republic severely to task for their uncritical treatment of Soviet policies. "They will," he wrote, "continue to think that Stalin's totalitarianism is somehow different from Franco's, different from Hitler's. Alas yes; the considerable difference is that the former is able to enlist 'liberal' support." He preferred to think that his own, and the Partisan Review's, Marxism was purer, uncorrupted by the temptations of power and properly scornful of the "socialist realism" that Stalin and his cultural inquisitor Andrei Zhdanov prescribed. Echoing Bertolt Brecht, Barrett and his friends insisted that authentic Marxists should defend artistic modernism.
But Barrett brought something more to the magazine than his commitment to Marxism in politics and modernism in art. Just back from Europe, he read European languages and kept abreast of the new currents of thought then sweeping across the old continent. In particular he was able to interpret for Americans that broad philosophic tendency called existentialism, so perfectly suited to peoples who were struggling to come to terms not only with death and destruction on a vast scale, but with the shattering implications of collaboration and organized mass murder. It was due in part to his reading of the existentialists that Barrett began to entertain second thoughts about the Partisan Review's otherworldly Marxism; parlor radicalism, he came increasingly to recognize, was an example of what
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