Irrational Man

This is my forth book review to Rui&Ben.

I requested some recommendations for easier to read books on Existentialism and this is one of Ben's recs. I liked the large amount of context (although context for a very 1950s American perspective) that this book provides, both the historical (the aftermath of world wars) and personal for the four philosophers that it features. The book also focuses on the "core message" of each philosopher rather than giving an overview of their philosophies, which I find also beginner friendly. That said, it's still not the easiest to read since the language used back in the 1950s is different enough from current English. 

Nonetheless I still pulled many quotations:

On the many references to Dostoyevsky :D

Vladimir Solovev belonged to the first generation that felt the impact of Dostoyevsky as both prophets and novelist [... who] will be satisfied with no philosophic answers that fall short of the total and passionate feelings of his own humanity.

Although many aspects of the book is dated, Chapter Two opens with “No age has ever been so self-conscious as ours” and this statement is equally if not more true written in 2020. Continuing: “the task still goes on, as indeed it must, for the last work has not been spoken, and modern man seems even further from understanding himself than when he first began to question his own identity”. More  on our modern times:

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man’s power. [...] Buy it is also a power which has, like everything human, it’s 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.

In a society that requires of man only that he performs 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 be forgotten.

In the end the only authentic art is that which has about it the power of inevitability.  

The subjectivity that is generally present in modern art is a psychological compensation for, sometimes a violent revolt against, the gigantic externalizations of life within modern society. 

The first philosopher the book focuses on is Kierkegaard, which I've attempted to read the original writings of and stopped probably 10 pages in. His focus is being wholly Christian in a way that predates church as an organization.

The social thinking of the present age is determined, [Kierkegaard] says, by what might be called the Law of Large Numbers: it does not matter what quality each individual has, so long as we have enough individuals to add up to a large number - that is, to a crowd or mass. And where the mass is, there is truth - so the modern world believes. 

and similarly, "habits and routines are great veils over our existence".

The next philosopher is Nietzsche, which is famous for his quotation of "God is dead":

The waning of religion is a much more concrete and complex fact than a mere change in conscious outlook; it penetrates the deepest strata of man’s total psychic evolution - as Nietzsche, almost alone amongst nineteenth-century philosophers, was to see. Religion to medieval man was not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual’s life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual. The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which higher to the whole psychic life of Western man has been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the need of his spirit. A home is the accepted framework which habitually contains our life. You lose ones psychic container is to be cast adrift, to become a wanderer upon the gave of the earth. Henceforth, in seeking his own human completeness man would have to do for himself what he once had done for him.

 The third philosopher os Heidegger, whose idea of Being as a field is what I most closely agree with.

The fundamental mood [something we are, not something internal that requires a self to feel], according to Heidegger, is anxiety (Angst); he does not choose this as primary out of any morbidity of temperament, however, but simply because in anxiety this here-and-now of our existence arises before is in all its precarious and porous contingency.
^my interpretation is that anxiety is the primary mood because it has the strongest immediacy and the strongest reminder of the finitude of human existence. 

The last philosopher is Sartre, which the book argues isn't actually an Existentialist as his ideas follow Descartes' divide. His core message is related to freedom:

And the choice that each of made of his life was an authentic choice because it was made face to face with death

The essential freedom, the ultimate and final form of freedom that cannot be taken from a man, is to say No. this is the basic premise in Sartre’s view of human freedom: freedom is in its very essence negative, though this negativity is also creative.