Books: Pursuit of the Really Real

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Why this apparent digression on Realpolitik in a philosophical work? Because "the metaphysical and political aspects of freedom are in the end inseparable." Ideas are for Barrett, as they were for Plato, "really real"; he writes of them in a confiding, passionate voice that has more in common with his literary heroes—Kafka, Forster, Beckett—than with the philosophers who frame his argument. One luminous interlude is given over to a meditation on a typical morning, afternoon and night in the author's life, glimpsed through the lens of Heidegger's concept of "Being." Our daily lives, Barrett insists, can disclose our deepest experiences of the world. Boarding the train, reading the newspaper contemplating the objects in his study he dwells on the mystery that the world exists at all. Late at night, he gazes at the stars, infused with a sensation that men are "strangers in the universe . . . homeless within the world." In these pages, the mystery of transience and death declares itself with a poignant insistence.

Our foremost chronicler of existentialism has wearied of its lessons; nihilism is "a theatrical nightmare . . . the epidemic of our time." Now 64, Barrett finds him self at once exalted and bewildered by the discovery that freedom lies in the recognition of mortality. His testament to that condition recalls in spirit the fierce, eloquent poems Yeats composed in his old age.

—James Atlas