The Will to Power Versus the Will to Prayer: William Barrett's The Illusion of Technique Thirty Years Later
Rent from DeepDyve- The Will to Power Versus the Will to Prayer:William Barrett's The Illusion of Technique Thirty Years Later
Two Renegade Pragmatists
As the 1970s were ending, two books were published that drew extensively on classical American philosophy. Both were by eclectic thinkers who sought to build bridges among American, Continental, and Analytic philosophical traditions. Each book celebrated three exemplary thinkers. Wittgenstein and Heidegger were the common choices. The different American philosopher sent a significant signal about contrasting emphases. Published in 1979, Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature supplemented Wittgenstein and Heidegger with John Dewey. William Barrett's The Illusion of Technique, one year earlier, had chosen William James. Rorty's book, because of its subsequent influence, pointed toward the future. Barrett's book, whose thirtieth anniversary we celebrate this year, was quite different. It was sort of backward looking. Pulling together themes from his career, Barrett interwove Heidegger's emphasis on Being, Wittgenstein's flirtations with mysticism, and the centrality of hopeful commitment that marked James's appreciation of religion. The existentialism and liberal religious thought that had dominated through the sixties and early seventies were here being given one final summation.
This year, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Barrett's work, I wish to take a new look at his text. Several reasons conspire to make such an effort worth-while. First, in remembering Barrett we recall someone well versed in American Pragmatism who took that influence in a syncretic rather than a school-follower direction. Second, there is the simple piety accorded to an important bridge figure, Barrett himself, who helped bring philosophy to a wider audience.1 Third, there is also his unique amalgam of Heidegger and James, an amalgam that provides fruitful hints for a twenty-first-century Pragmatist-inspired philosophy. This amalgam culminates in an alternative to Rorty's extension of Pragmatism in the [End Page 24] direction of "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity." For Barrett, the central triad would rather be "Eros, Irony, and Prayer." This is an odd assortment. Those of us familiar with recent conversations in classical American philosophy will realize immediately that these three pivots—eros, irony, prayer—do not represent the dominant themes at meetings of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy.2 It is precisely for this reason, because Barrett offers an alternative way of building on Pragmatist roots, that it is worth taking a new look at his work on its thirtieth anniversary.
The heart of Barrett's analysis can be summarized in the title I have given to this essay: "The Will to Power Versus the Will to Prayer."3 His main concerns, indicating clearly why he favored James over Dewey, can be straightforwardly articulated. Modern philosophy culminates in various forms of instrumentalism. Instrumentalisms, no matter how finessed, nuanced, or refined, bring with them certain basic orientations: (a) they prioritize means–end thinking; (b) they encourage an attitude that considers objects as what Erazim Kohak called manipulanda (1984, 18), that which exists in order to be manipulated, reconstructed, altered in the service of particular ends chosen by the subject; (c) control becomes a major concern; and (d) a lingering ideal of closure or completeness haunts the entire project. Philosophy's focus is not on life enigmas to be puzzled over. Rather, there are "problematic situations" awaiting resolutions. Barrett worries that a world dominated by this sort of thinking will always be accompanied by a fundamental sense of alienation. Humans, whose own lives are touched by the enigmatic, the tragic, the open-ended, even the mysterious, will fail to come to terms with those dimensions so long as instrumentalist models guide thinking.
Technology, Technique, Freedom
Barrett's discussion centers on the question of freedom.4 This topic remains a live one, even though the specific foils addressed by Barrett, Skinnerian behaviorism and communist totalitarianism, have faded away. For Barrett, freedom does not mean sheer randomness, the Sartrean absolute options open to everyone at every time. We are encultured, embodied creatures. As such, many channels have already been cut for us by biology, culture, and personal history. Freedom understood as the ability to do whatever I want whenever I want...
