In this slim and engagingly personal book, William Barrett attempts to sketch the fate of the self in Western philosophy from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. He variously describes his theme as “the drama of mind within our modern Western civilization,” “the search for the self,” and “the loss of the self in the modern world.” Like Irrational Man (1958), which probably remains Mr. Barrett’s best-known work on philosophy, the present volume is gently existentialist in orientation; like his more recent The Illusion of Technique (1978), it exhibits a deep suspicion of modern science and technology; and like all Mr. Barrett’s work, Death of the Soul is clearly written and easily accessible to the general reader. Mr. Barrett remarks in the course of his discussion that “philosophy loses much of its vitality if it loses contact with the life of the people.” His direct, if not particularly elegant, style of writing assures him of the vital contact he admires.

The book’s central thesis is that since Descartes and the birth of the “new science” in the seventeenth century, man’s self or “soul” has been increasingly threatened by Western culture’s commitment to objectivity and scientific rationality. In the competing philosophical theories of the self that have been bequeathed to us, Mr. Barrett finds a vivid record of reason’s self-depredations. “The presence of mind is everywhere in the formation of this science,” he writes,