{"author":"William Barrett","author_id":"William+Barrett","total_quotes":21,"quotes":[{"text":"The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["civilization","culture","historicism","history","philosophy"],"id":7425,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"The more severely he struggles to hold on to the primal face-to-face relation with God, the more tenuous this becomes, until in the end the relation to God Himself threatens to become a relation to Nothingness.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["doubt","god","meaninglessness","nakedness","nothingness","relation","religion","self"],"id":17887,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["acceptance","anti-hierarchy","celebration","meaning","modern-art","nihilism","rejection-of-canon-of-values","the-negative"],"id":34311,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"If science could comprehend all phenomena so that eventually in a thoroughly rational society human beings became as predictable as cogs in a machine, then man, driven by this need to know and assert his freedom, would rise up and smash the machine. What the reformers of the Enlightenment, dreaming of a perfect organization of society, had overlooked, Dostoevski saw all too plainly with the novelist's eye: namely, that as modern society becomes more organized and hence more bureaucratized it piles up at its joints petty figures like that of the Underground Man, who beneath their nondescript surface are monsters of frustration and resentment.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["bureaucracy","existentialism","freedom","frustration","pedantry","predictability","resentment","science"],"id":79251,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"What has to be accepted, the given, is forms of life.' (Wittgenstein) This is the fact, the given, from which all thinking must start; and thinking, which starts from this fact, is in turn itself but another form of life.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["fact","forms-of-life","starting-points","the-given","thought"],"id":116030,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"Modern Existentialism... Is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["culminating-insight","europe","existentialism","legacy","world-culture"],"id":120058,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically 'meaningful,' while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the 'meaningless.' Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it. Existentialism, whether successfully or not, has attempted instead to gather all the elements of human reality into a total picture of man. Positivist man and Existentialist man are no doubt offspring of the same parent epoch, but, somewhat as Cain and Abel were, the brothers are divided unalterably by temperament and the initial choice they make of their own being.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["existentialism","human-nature","man","positivism","science-vs-everyday-knowledge","self"],"id":179122,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and 'fundamentally real,' while our most intimate experiences are labelled 'mere appearance' and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only 'in my mind,' then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from 'higher grade' to 'lower grade' organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["abstract","concrete","experience","holism","mechanism","phenomenon","reductionism","vitalism"],"id":234690,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["evidence","experience","fact","knowledge","phenomenology","proof","truth"],"id":295456,"author_id":"William+Barrett"},{"text":"From what deep springs of character our personal philosophies issue, we cannot be sure. In philosophers themselves we seem always able to notice some deep internal correspondence between the man and his philosophy. Are our philosophies, then, merely the inevitable outcome of the body of fate and personal circumstance that is thrust upon each of us? Or are these beliefs the means by which we freely create ourselves as the persons we become? Here, at the very outset, the question of freedom already hovers in the background.","author":"William Barrett","tags":["character","determinism","freedom","philosophy","psychology","self-definition","wisdom"],"id":318830,"author_id":"William+Barrett"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}