William Barrett (philosopher)

• 1. Introduction

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  William Christopher Barrett walked into City College of New York at the age of fifteen. He was not a typical freshman. He was a teenager sitting in philosophy lectures, working out ideas that most adults never bother to think through. That early restlessness never left him. By the time Barrett died on the 8th of September 1992, aged 78, he had spent decades insisting that philosophy belonged to everyone, not just the credentialed few. The questions his life raises are still alive. What does it mean to make difficult ideas legible? Who gets to hold the keys to philosophical thought? And what happens when a writer decides that the gap between experts and everyone else is itself the problem worth solving?

• 2. The Making of a Public Mind

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  Barrett began his formal studies at the City College of New York before most teenagers had finished high school. He went on to earn his PhD at Columbia University, the kind of credential that typically pointed toward a cloistered academic life. He chose something different. He became an editor at Partisan Review, one of the most intellectually combative magazines of the twentieth century, and later served as literary critic at The Atlantic Monthly. Those two positions put him at the intersection of literature and ideas, at a time when American intellectuals were actively debating the shape of the postwar world. Like many of his peers, Barrett passed through a period of attraction to Marxism before pivoting toward European philosophy, particularly existentialism.

• 3. Friends and Influences

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  Barrett was a good friend of the poet Delmore Schwartz for many years, and that friendship was characteristic of the intellectual world he inhabited. He knew Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, and Albert Camus. The writers and thinkers who shaped his philosophical outlook were even more consequential. Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger each left a deep mark on how Barrett read the modern condition. He also served as editor of D. T. Suzuki's 1956 classic Zen Buddhism, which placed him at a meeting point between Western existentialism and Eastern thought. In fiction, Barrett's preference ran to the great Russian novelists, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky held a particular place in his thinking.

• 4. Writing for the Non-Expert

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  Barrett's most enduring contribution was his willingness to write philosophy for people who had not spent years inside a university. His 1958 book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy brought existentialism to readers who had never encountered Heidegger or Kierkegaard in an academic setting. The Illusion of Technique, published in 1979 by Doubleday, examined what it meant to search for meaning inside a civilization increasingly organized around technical systems. Both books remain in print, which is a rare distinction for works of philosophy. Barrett's approach was so deliberate that it gave rise to what is now called Barrett's Law: his own formulation that not everyone who might read the productions of scholarly writers is an expert in the fields discussed. That principle, which Barrett articulated on page 99 of one of his works, amounted to a quiet challenge to academic culture.

• 5. A Life in Books

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  Barrett held a professorship in philosophy at New York University from 1950 to 1979, and later moved to Pace University. Over those decades he produced a steady body of work that moved between philosophy, cultural criticism, and memoir. What Is Existentialism? appeared as early as 1947 through Partisan Review, with a Random House edition following in 1964. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, a four-volume work co-edited with Henry D. Aiken, came out in 1962. Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century arrived in 1972, published by Harper Bros. His 1982 memoir, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals, offered a personal account of that mid-century world of competing ideas. Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer, published by Doubleday in 1986, traced a philosophical arc from Descartes to the digital age. Barrett died of cancer of the esophagus in 1992, survived by his daughter Nell Barrett and her children Clinton and Georgia.