William Barrett writes beautifully and clearly and modestly. In this book, which is founded on the figure of Martin Heidegger, he carefully traces the latter's insights to modern Western consciousness, as a reading of the trajectory of post-Greek thought via Descartes, Kant and Nietzsche to our current technocratic, instrumentalist, metric-fixated autism.
Reading his exposition, published in 1964, sixty years down the line, only makes its value - as well as the value of Heidegger's diagnosis/prognosis - more plain. We've followed a corridor that has led us to a juncture where physicists and their deathly insights hold the future of our species in the balance, and where, somehow, this seems like a sane proposition.
We've been two thousand years on the journey and we're a long way down the corridor, and for those unconvinced by the mewlings of Musk and the seductions of Schwab, the prospects are bleak. Yet Barrett urges cautious optimism, "The silent power of the possible is still at work in man. At the end of the long corridor of night some other possibilities may reveal themselves to man, and human civilization may take a new turn ... The new possibilities will have to be changes of the total outlook of man." Agreed.