Books in Brief: Death of the Soul

Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer, by William Barrett (Anchor/Doubleday, 173 pp., $16.95)

A former editor of Partisan Review, William Barrett is an intellectual in the best sense of the word: As opposed to the centrifugal, merely analytical, dismembering minds of so many intellectuals nowadays, he joins to his critical sense an integrating mental power that is Victorian in its scope and moral seriousness. Death of the Soul is a brief, lucid history of the development of modern consciousness and philosophy, focusing on the progressive “loss of the self in the modern world,” and for Barrett this self means a soul: “How could a being without a center be really ethical?” he asks. Barrett is worried about anomie, “the alienation that runs through the whole of modern culture,” the sense of man become thing. He argues that the ultimate culprit is not science, but scientism: “The achievements in physical science and technology become the standard by which to measure thinking in all domains.” Thus Homo sapiens is abolished in favor of Homo sciens and a sensate culture in which, as Byron wrote pathetically but prophetically 175 years ago, “The great object of life is sensation.” In the face of the nihilism of so much modern thought and behavior, Barrett almost astonishes by being a New York intellectual actually in contact with the springs of religion. “The question arises,” he writes, “whether the soul, as such, can ever be truly human unless it is seeking God. And on that turns the further question, which Nietzsche was to claim as central to our history, whether mankind can survive as godless. That still remains to be seen.” From a man who has been at the very vortex of modernism for over half a century comes the assertion that “ultimately” the alienation of modern life, its anarchic nihilism, “will be healed only if the universe is believed to have some meaning in harmony with our spiritual and moral aims—which means, in effect, the discovery or rediscovery of God.” Death of the Soul is a distinguished addition to an oeuvre that is at once critical and modern, pious and traditional, characterized by dignity, precision, and eloquence.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer, by William Barrett (Anchor/Doubleday, 173 pp., $16.95)

A former editor of Partisan Review, William Barrett is an intellectual in the best sense of the word: As opposed to the centrifugal, merely analytical, dismembering minds of so many intellectuals nowadays, he joins to his critical sense an integrating mental power that is Victorian in its scope and moral seriousness. Death of the Soul is a brief, lucid history of the development of modern consciousness and philosophy, focusing on the progressive “loss of the self in the modern world,” and for Barrett this self means a soul: “How could a being without a center be really ethical?” he asks. Barrett is worried about anomie, “the alienation that runs through the whole of modern culture,” the sense of man become thing. He argues that the ultimate culprit is not science, but scientism: “The achievements in physical science and technology become the standard by which to measure thinking in all domains.” Thus Homo sapiens is abolished in favor of Homo sciens and a sensate culture in which, as Byron wrote pathetically but prophetically 175 years ago, “The great object of life is sensation.” In the face of the nihilism of so much modern thought and behavior, Barrett almost astonishes by being a New York intellectual actually in contact with the springs of religion. “The question arises,” he writes, “whether the soul, as such, can ever be truly human unless it is seeking God. And on that turns the further question, which Nietzsche was to claim as central to our history, whether mankind can survive as godless. That still remains to be seen.” From a man who has been at the very vortex of modernism for over half a century comes the assertion that “ultimately” the alienation of modern life, its anarchic nihilism, “will be healed only if the universe is believed to have some meaning in harmony with our spiritual and moral aims—which means, in effect, the discovery or rediscovery of God.” Death of the Soul is a distinguished addition to an oeuvre that is at once critical and modern, pious and traditional, characterized by dignity, precision, and eloquence.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).