William Barrett Quotes & Sayings

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. — William Barrett

To discover one's own spiritual poverty is to achieve a positive conquest by the spirit. — William Barrett

The nature of consciousness is to point beyond itself. It is a tending toward or pointing to ... Since consciousness points beyond itself, it is in its very being a self-transcendence. — William Barrett

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. — William Barrett

There is no truth that does not ultimately rest upon what is evident to us in our own experience. — William Barrett

Mechanism as a philosophic doctrine might be defined as the belief that the last machine which human ingenuity has created gives us the final form of reality. — William Barrett

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived. — William Barrett

Man's feeling of homelessness, of alienation has been intensified in the midst of a bureaucratized, impersonal mass society. He has come to feel himself an outsider even within his own human society. He is trebly alienated: a stranger to God, to nature, and to the gigantic social apparatus that supplies his material wants.
But the worst and final form of alienation, toward which indeed the others tend, is man's alienation from his own self. 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. — William Barrett

What you find in the mirror you will find in the reality it mirrors. — William Barrett

We really know time, says Heidegger, because we know we are going to die. Without this passionate realization of our mortality, time would be simply a movement of the clock that we watch passively, calculating its advance - a movement devoid of human meaning. — William Barrett

Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of this or that definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. It is precisely Nothingness that makes itself present and felt as the object of our dread. — William Barrett

Our freedom is the way in which we are able to let the world open before us, and ourselves stand open within it. — William Barrett

Truth and untruth weave the seamless web of human nature. — William Barrett

Hunger is not the worst feature of unemployment; idleness is. — William Barrett

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. — William Barrett

Even if there were no ear for them but the void, our prayers would still be the only things that sanctify our existence. — William Barrett

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety. — William Barrett

If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truth can there be, if there is death? — William Barrett

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. — William Barrett

What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, whenever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation. A return to the sources; "to the things themselves," as Husserl puts it; toward a new truthfulness, the casting away of ready-made presuppositions and empty forms - these are some of the slogans under which this phase in history has presented itself. Naturally enough, much of this stripping down must appear as the work of destruction, as revolutionary or even "negative": a being who has become thoroughly questionable to himself must also find questionable his relation to the total past which in a sense he represents. — William Barrett

The happiness of mankind, if it ever should come to pass, would still leave men asking: Why? What point to it? To what end? — William Barrett

The path of specialization leads away from the ordinary and concrete acts of understanding in terms of which man actually lives his day-to-day life. — William Barrett

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. — William Barrett

In teaching the young you have to satisfy the schoolchild in yourself and enter the region where all meanings start. That is where, in any case, the philosopher has perpetually to start. — William Barrett

The bond that attaches us to the life outside ourselves is the same bond that holds us to our own life. — William Barrett

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our nose is what we see last. — William Barrett

The philosopher seeks a generality beyond the boundaries of science; he attempts to frame a comprehensive and coherent framework of ideas within which the partial results of science may become more intelligible. — William Barrett

We exist within the question of God. — William Barrett

We must be free for the truth; and conversely, to be able to be open toward the truth may be our deepest freedom as human creatures. — William Barrett

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. — William Barrett

Since the Greeks, Western man has believed that Being, all Being, is intelligible, that there is a reason for everythingand that the cosmos is, finally, intelligible. The Oriental, on the other hand, has accepted his existence within a universe that would appear to be meaningless, to the rational Western mind, and has lived with this meaninglessness. Hence the artistic form that seems natural to the Oriental is one that is just as formless or formal, as irrational, as life itself. — William Barrett

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. — William Barrett