NONFICTION - April 20, 1986

DEATH OF THE SOUL: FROM DESCARTES TO THE COMPUTER by William Barrett (Anchor: $16.95). The history of the American mind is, in large part, the history of intellectuals coming to grips with mass audiences. Writers of all disciplines and abilities--from Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James to William Jennings Bryan and Robert Hutchins--have sought with varying success to integrate the deliberations of the intellect into ordinary life.

William Barrett, chairman emeritus of philosophy at New York University and well-known interpreter of existentialism, stands squarely in this tradition. The imposing title of his new book announces a big theme: the progressive fragmentation of the concept of mind in the modern age. He wants to take to a wide audience the philosophical message that we have become seduced by a model of consciousness which denies the very notion of human spirit.

Barrett traces the seeds of this destruction of modern consciousness to the turn of mind symbolized by Descartes: the disembodiment of the subjective “I” and its progressive alienation from the objective “world.” His sketch of this historical development is a masterfully succinct exposition of themes dominant in western philosophy in the last 300 years.

But this style of writing has its dangers. Barrett’s conclusion that the reductionist paradigm of mind infects every aspect of modern culture advertises the chief weakness of popular philosophy: oversimplification. His assignment of Gilbert Ryle, Martin Heidegger, computer logicians, deconstructionists, and almost everybody but religious thinkers to the common bin of reductionism is a disputable claim at best. Indeed, the insights generated by contemporary philosophers into the complexities of language have demonstrated that there is more than one way to save souls and minds.

Still, Barrett’s arguments invite further discussion, testimony to the overall value of an accessible book of philosophy.