FROM OUTSIDER TO POST-TRAGIC MAN: COLIN WILSON AND THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM

Colin Wilson is a very good example of what Isaiah Berlin called a "hedgehog," he who "knows one big thing." Whether he is writing about the Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff or the Dusseldorf sex murderer Peter Kurten, Wilson's subject is invariably the same, and has been since his first book, The Outsider. For nearly forty years, Wilson has been fascinated with the potentials of human consciousness and has produced under this rubric a massive and highly readable oeuvre on topics as diverse as existential philosophy, the occult, came and the psychology of murder, literary criticism, and sociology. In pursuit of his investigations, biographies of such dissimilar characters as Bernard Shaw, Wilhelm Reich, and Grigory Rasputin have emerged from his pen, as well as many novels and much incidental writing. His output is unquestionably prodigious: at last reckoning, the number of volumes from Wilson's hand exceeds one hundred. With so much material available from the source, what need is there of interpretation? Yet it is not unusual that with a body of work so large, sheer volume and diversity of interests may obscure, for the casual reader, the "one big thing" behind the multifeatured surface. This essay seeks to make clear that one big thing and trace its presence throughout Wilson's work.

To begin: What is the one big thing? Put briefly, Wilson's basic theme throughout his work is that questions of the meaning of human existence cannot be satisfactorily addressed without taking into account the intensity--or lack thereof--of human consciousness. With few exceptions, Wilson points out, the link between the two has been obscured throughout most of human history, leading the great sages of the past to agree that life has decidedly not been worth the candle. In Beyond the Occult (1988), he writes:

For as long as philosophy has existed, philosophers have been passing negative judgements on human life. Ecelesiastes thought all life vanity and vexation of spirit. Plato compared human life to men chained up in a cave, forced to look at shadows on the wall.... The Buddha says that all life is misery and bitterness. Lucretius says that life is a treadmill that leads nowhere, a desire that never finds fulfillment. And in 1818, Arthur Schopenhauer published the longest and most comprehensive attempt so far to prove that human life is meaningless and pointless. ... (p.71)

The major philosophical movement of the twentieth century, existentialism, shared Shopenhauer's pessimism. Heidegger tells us that "only a god can save us"; but as any reader of Heidegger knows, "we are too late for the gods." In Sartre, our position is even worse; the upshot of Being and Nothingness is that "Man is a useless passion.', What is profound about the existential attitude is its refusal to "give in" to a world that seems at best indifferent and, at worst, hostile. As Hemingway said, a man can be destroyed but not defeated. Yet while there is drama and greatness around the image of existential marl shaking his fist at a universe that takes no notice of him, there is also something quite absurd about it. When Byron and De Sade, and in a different way, Blake and Beethoven, thumbed their noses at a celestial authority, theirs was still a meaningful universe, and they could feel like heroes in their Promethean rebellion. But by the time we reach Sartre and Camus, the initial thrust of the Romantic rebellion has fizzled out. Carnus was right to see the change in attitude as a shift from Prometheus to Sisyphus. Prometheus suffered for stealing fire from the gods; Sisyphus had to be content pushing a rock uphill for eternity: things certainly had changed. Although in academic circles existentialism is decidedly passe, the second half of the twentieth century arguably has yet to produce a philosophy that can get us over this existential impasse and push us beyond our lingering spiritual exhaustion. One way of characterizing Wilson's work is to see it as a sustained analysis of this condition and a truly Promethean attempt to overcome it.

There are many ways to approach his basic themes. Early works of literary criticism like The Stature of Man (1959) and The Strength to Dream (1962) address the need for a revitalized vision of the hero in contemporary literature and attack the cult of "the little man." Both are part of the "Outsider Cycle," which culminated in his Introduction to the New Existentialism (1967), a brilliant summing up of Wilson's first decade of explorations (regrettably out of print these days). We could investigate his contributions to science fiction, The Mind Parasites (1967), The Philosopher's Stone (1969), and the less well known Space Vampires (1976)--the latter made, incidentally, into a dreadful film, luckily under a different name. All three are examples of Wilson' s ability to use genre fiction for philosophical ends. The Mind Parasites, for example, explores the implications of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology in the context of a horror story based on the "Cthulhu Mythos" of H. P. Lovecraft, at first sight a rather incongruous pairing. In the stimulating God of the Labyrinth (1970) Wilson employed such an unlikely vehicle as the erotic novel for similar ends. The Black Room (1971), an espionage thriller, investigates the effects of sensory deprivation on human consciousness. Ritual in the Dark (1960), Wilson's first novel, explores the dark theme of sex murder, and in recent years his ability to write highly engaging philosophical fiction has produced the Tolkeinesque fantasy of his Spider World series (1987-1992). In these and many other existential fables, Wilson follows his own dictum that the existential philosopher must be able to show his philosophy in action. "I am almost tempted to generalize," he wrote in 1969, "and say that no philosopher is qualified to do his job unless he is also a novelist.... I would certainly exchange any of the works of Whitehead or Wittgenstein for the novels they ought to have written. "[1]

Wilson's determination to keep his mind focused on the problem of "life"--one of his characters, the Wilsonian alter ego Gerard Sorme, is a young intellectual who spends his days "throwing his mind" at the problem of existence--has led to a remarkable series of biographies. Besides those of Rasputin, Reich, and Shaw, Wilson has produced an impressive collection of monographs on alternative thinkers like Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff, Jung, Ouspensky, and the infamous Aleister Crowley. Mention of Crowley brings us to Wilson's fascination with the occult, and contemporary readers may know him best for this. It may seem odd to link a critique of Heidegger and Sartre to the paranormal and such quaint practices as dowsing and ceremonial magic, but there is a direct link between Wilson's rejection of pessimism and the old existentialism and his belief in the untapped powers of human consciousness. Since publication of The Occult (1971), Wilson has keen recognized as a principal theoretician of the paranormal.

With a hedgehog as prolific as this, it is difficult to know where to begin. A systematic, step-by-step analysis would require a book; in recent years, at least one major study has appeared.[2] In any case, how does one connect, for instance, the sex life of Yukio Mishima with recent developments in split brain psychology?3 Yet such are the unusual components of Wilson's philosophy. What I can do in a general review of his work is present Wilson's basic arguments and show why I think they offer the strongest evidence for what I call "the case for optimism."

The Outsider

Any study of Colin Wilson must begin with "the Outsider," the key figure in all his work. Writers on Wilson are fond of saying he "burst upon the literary scene" with his precocious study of modern alienation: Wilson was twenty-five when The Outsider (1956) was published. His reputation as a boy genius had certain advantages. In his autobiography (Voyage to a Beginning [1969]) written, at thirty-seven, about halfway through his career to date, Wilson tells us that, like Lord Byron, he awoke one morning to find that his name had become a household word. This was no mean accomplishment for a young and unpublished writer who spent his nights on London's Hampstead Heath and wrote by day in the British Museum, not only to feel the inspiration of Shaw and Marx, but more immediately to save rent. Yet the initial acclaim soon soured. Wilson soon realized it was his youth and an unwanted association with the "duffle-coated Angry Young Men" of the fifties that had made him famous, not his ideas. In hindsight it is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise. The Outsider's basic theme is the lack of spiritual tension in modern society and the attempts of some individuals to achieve "intensity"--not a theme destined to find many admirers in the socially conscious, other-directed days of the 1950s. The sentiment that Wilson had achieved his fame on false pretenses sprang up quickly, most virulently among those critics who had initially sung his praises. A young Doris Lessing, whose concerns these days are much more akin to Wilson's, criticized The Outsider for its spiritual narcissism and its blatant concern for the individual.[4] Arthur Koestler, a writer with whom Wilson has much in common, summed up the general feeling when, in a roundup of literary events for 1956, he called The Outsider "the bubble of the year."

Today, Wilson himself winces a bit at this early work (see the preface to the most recent edition of Religion and the Rebel), but this is hardly unusual when a man of sixty-two regards his youthful self of twenty-five. Wilson may no longer feel that Outsiders crop up like pimples on a decaying civilization, but his belief in them as evidence of a profound shift in human consciousness remains. The Outsider is an individual desperate to escape the "triviality of everydayness, " in Heidegger's phrase. Wilson's first book is a study of several of these characters, actual men like T. E. Lawrence, or literary figures, like Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. Critics complained that the book was little more than a collection of quotations, linked by a flimsy scaffolding of notes. It is true that The Outsider emerged from Wilson' s notebook jottings on different thinkers and artists, but given his aim to create "a science of human engineering," as his character Gustav Neuman in the existential thriller Necessary Doubt (1964) calls it, it is difficult to see how he could have proceeded otherwise. Looking back on Wilson's fast attempt at honing in on his subject, we can see it in its true perspective: an initial exploration of a core problem, which we may clumsily refer to as "the unsatisfactoriness of human existence."

In his autobiographical writings, the most important of which after Voyage to a Beginning is the long introduction to Religion and the Rebel (1957), Wilson tells us that his early training was in science. As a boy, he dreamed of being a great scientist like Einstein. Science soon gave way to literature, and Einstein to Bernard Shaw, but the desire for objectivity remained. Although booksellers may shelve it in these section, The Outsider is not a work of literary criticism. It is much more a volume of existential philosophy, although not in the manner of the French schools--indeed, part of Wilson's intention in creating a "new existentialism" is to expand the notion of existential philosophy to include much more ground than the treatise-laden landscape of academic existentialists and phenomenologists. The book The Outsider is most reminiscent of is William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience ([1920] 1985), a similarity Wilson himself points out. Like James's classic, The Outsider is concerned with individuals at the extremities of human experience. It is an investigation into the extremes of affirmation and negation, what Thomas Carlyle called Ultimate Yes and Ultimate No. A brief list of the individuals covered may give an idea of the young Wilson's range, and why the initial reviews-- before the devastating critical enantiodromia--spoke of him as "walking into literature as a man walks into his own home." It is difficult to see how some considered the book hastily written, disorganized, and bereft of independent thought: The Outsider manages to link together such unlikely figures as H. G. Wells, Nijinsky, Hermann Hesse (Wilson has a fair shot at claiming credit for the Hesse revival of the sixties), T. E. Lawrence, Gurdjieff, Van Gogh, William Blake, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, and others in a common and, at the very least, highly stimulating argument. If, as Arthur Koestler said of it in his 1956 review, it smacks of Weltschmerz, this is understandable, being the product of a young Romantic who was obsessed with questions literally of life and death. All of Wilson's Outsiders faced, in one form or another, what he calls "the vastation experience," a term he discovered in James. Basically, this is a vision of utter meaninglessness, the overwhelming insight that human life is without purpose, a "tale told by an idiot. " In one form or another, "vastation" is the fundamental vision of the old existentialism and has been the common theme of most serious literature of the twentieth century. Yet so many of these Outsiders also experienced the opposite vision. From Nietzsche to Nijinsky, these extreme individuals also had moments of overwhelming power and meaning, a sense of almost godlike affirmation. For Nietzsche it came during a thunderstorm, when he felt the power of "pure will, without the perplexities of intellect." For Nijinsky, it was his feeling that "God is fire in the head." For Van Gogh, the vision burned in his "Starry Night." In literature it was the same: Hesse's Steppenwolf, determined to end his dull existence, has a vision of "Mozart and the stars." Camus's Mersault, in The Stranger, on the eve of his execution, realizes he is "happy." Even Sartre, whose particular brand of existentialism Wilson will take to task, grasps (through his character of Roquentin, as he listens to a jazz singer) that nausea--in the novel of that name--is not the ultimate truth of human existence.

Put simply, the Outsider's question is: Which is true, meaning or meaninglessness? Wilson opts for meaning, and the rest of his work is a singularly concentrated attack on the question of how Ultimate Yes, the vision of Mozart and the stars, and the sense of godlike affirmation can be achieved at will.

In his later work, Wilson is less concerned with the failings of modern society and the existential ignorance of the "insiders," those who, like William James's "once born," find the world quite satisfactory and are content with "everydayness." But in his early books he passionately rejects the modern world because it lacks the spiritual nutrition the Outsider seeks. For the early Wilson, the Outsider is the product of a society that has lost its spiritual values. The Outsider may have found an outlet for spiritual intensity in the society of the Middle Ages of ancient India, cultures that respected, indeed, were driven by, the urge to Godhead. But in the modern world such men are little more than misfits. In Religion and the Rebel, Wilson writes:

My vision of our civilization was a vision of cheapness and futility, the degrading of all intellectual standards. In contrast to this, the Outsider seemed to be the man who, for any reason at all, felt himself lonely in the crowd of the second-rate. As I conceived him, he could be a maniac carrying a knife in a black bag . . . he could be a saint or a visionary, caring for nothing but one moment in which he seemed to understand the world, and see into the heart of nature and Clod. (P.1)

In Religion and the Rebel (his second book), Wilson addressed the possibility of a religious solution to the Outsider's problem; and anyone familiar with only his first two books could be justified in seeing Wilson as a kind of religious existentiahst. His rejection of modern Westem consciousness with its "abstract philosophy" and "lack of spiritual tension" in "a materially prosperous civilization" was at its peak. Wilson again examines representative figures: Pascal, Jacob Boehme, Rimbaud, Wittgenstein, Whitehead--including, surprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in whose meteoric rise he recognized the dangers of his own notoriety. Critics panned the book outright--they weren' t going to be taken in by this young charlatan again--and many snapped "sour grapes" at Wilson's remarks about the evils of a too quickly- accelerated success. But if, as was becoming increasingly clear to Wilson, the answer to the Outsider's problem is to generate a sense of values more powerful than the mediocrity in which he must exist, he must seek out detachment and isolation. The subsequent policy of ridicule or silence that informed further Wilson criticism provided ample opportunity to test this theory.

After the bashing Wilson took over Religion and the Rebel, he left London and moved with his wife to a remote area of Cornwall, where he continued to write. The Stature of Man, whose English title The Age of Defeat was thought too depressing by its American publishers, addressed the loss of the heroic in modern literature and the rise of the "fallacy of insignificance" and the "worm's eye view" of human nature. The Strength to Dream (1962), an essay in existential criticism, examined the link between the imagination and the sense of value in writers as far afield as H. P. Lovecraft and Nikos Kazantzakis. The fifth book in the "Outsider Cycle," Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), is perhaps the most philosophical of Wilson's works on the linked themes of consciousness, imagination, and sex, and deserves to be better known. (Careful readers of Camile Paglia's Sexual Personae will discover a brief reference to it [1991, 426].) Here Wilson begins his thirty-year-long phenomenological investigation into the motivation behind human sexuality. His fundamental insight is that sex is one of the most powerful means of galvanizing the will and achieving intensity of consciousness, and his exploration of sexuality, deviance, and the psychology of crime that began here has produced an extraordinary series of books. A Casebook of Murder (1969), Lingard (1970), Order of Assossins (1975), The Criminal History of Monkind (1984), and The Misfits (1988) argue that crime and deviancy are fumbling, tragically pathetic attempts to achieve the one big thing: intensity of consciousness. They are short cuts, as it were, to reviving the "reality function, " a problem not limited to the unfortunate individuals he investigates in these works, as will be seen.

By the end of the Cycle, with Beyond the Outsider (1965), Wilson's analysis of the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of the twentieth century is over. He has absorbed what is fruitful and rejected what is outmoded in both the religious and scientific-humanist perspective. In summing up his thought so far, he is ready to present the first sketch of a new beginning, an initial experiment in a kind of "super- humanism," based on the evolutionary vision of Bernard Shaw and Julian Huxley and drawing on fundamental insights of two twentieth-century philosophers. In Introduction to the New Existentialism (1967), Wilson synthesizes aspects of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the epistemological theories of Alfred North Whitehead. The product is a philosophy of consciousness that provides a strong foundation for "evolutionary optimism."

Wilson derives two notions from Husserl and Whitehead that are fundamental to the new existentialism. From Whitehead he adopts the notion that human beings possess two different modes of perception. Whitehead called these causal efficacy and presentational immediacy. Wilson understandably translates these into meaning perception and immediacy perception. Whitehead's point is relatively simple: in emphasizing the minute particulars of lucid sense-perception, modern epistemologists- -basically, the empiricists Locke and Hume--ignore the vast field of less articulate pattern in which these particulars are embedded. Or, as the saying goes, we don't see the forest for the trees. Wilson' s point is that the "value-free" universe of materialist science (in which the "really real" things are neutral quantities like mass, speed, location, and the like--all discrete particulars abstracted from the great surround) fails to take into account evidence provided by the "other" mode of perception. In other words, in modern materialist science, immediacy perception cancels out meaning perception. For Wilson, as for Whitehead, the massive sense of meaning I receive from a sunset is, in my assessment of the character of the world, as admissible as the evidence of the electromagnetic theory. For meaning perception, the sunset is drenched in value and importance; for immediacy perception at its most refined, scientific materialism, it is merely a collection of wavelengths. According to Wilson, human beings "eat" meaning; we need the equivalent of an evolutionary nutrient, which we receive in our satisfactory contact with and, in Whitehead's term, prehension of, the world. Immediacy perception, however, makes it impossible for us to digest meaning; hence nausea and the absurd. Far from the fundamental state of human consciousness, Sartre's nausea is the result of an overemphasis on immediacy perception and a lack of meaning perception. In fact, it is the loss of meaning perception that is responsible for the Outsider's vastation--and for the dreary, pessimistic philosophies built on it.

But it is from Husserl that Wilson adopts perhaps his most basic weapon in the arsenal of the new existentialism. Husserl made the absolutely critical discovery that "perception is intentional." "Intentionality" is fundamental to Wilson's philosophy. If he has one core insight from which all the rest follow, it is this: Human beings suffer from a kind of passivity neurosis, or as William James put it, "a habit of inferiority to our full self. " Academic phenomenologists may find Wilson's use of Husserl naive but in a very basic sense, Husserl's insight is that perception is something we do, not something that happens. Consciousness does not reflect the world; it reaches out and grabs it. Yet because of our habit of passivity, we fail to recognize this. The world appears dull and routine because we fail to make the effort to grasp its complexity. All of Wilson's work is related to this theme. We can open almost any of his books at random; we soon encounter some variant of this. Here is a paragraph from Beyond the Occult:

If we can grasp this fact--that our senses are so dull that we are little better than sleep-walkers-then we can also begin to see that when we experience a sense of meaning, it is because our senses have been opened a little wider than usual, to admit a wider range of reality. In its normal state, the brain is like a piano whose strings are damped so that each note vibrates for only a fraction of second. In these "wider" states of mind the strings go on vibrating and cause other strings to vibrate. One thing suddenly "reminds" us of another, so the mind is suddenly seething with insights and impressions and ideas. Everything becomes "connected." We see that the world is self- evidently a bigger and more interesting place than we usually take for granted. There is no question here of illusion or of being somehow "intoxicated" with energy. We are simply in a state of wider perception. The brain is operating a little closer to normality instead of in this grossly subnormal state that usually makes life such a burden.

Passivity neurosis, then, is behind the loss of meaning in the modern age. Philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger have told us that we must realize that our most cherished beliefs are illusions and that we face a purposeless universe without appeal. The problem, ironically, is much more simple than that: we are, as Gurdjieff would say, improperly working machines. Wilson's Outsiders are individuals who occasionally worked well, with the result that they perceived the self-evident meaningfulness of existence. The problem was--is--that they didn't know how to perceive it at will. A Van Gogh who could call upon his vision of the "Starry Night" would not have killed himself, leaving a note that "misery never ends." Similarly, poets like Keats and Shelley may not have come to see the world as a "dim, vast vale of tears," and death as an escape from it. Passivity neurosis has hounded human consciousness for centuries--Vanitas vanitatum is the wisdom of the ages--and Wilson's work after this point is an attack on this utterly simple, yet tragically fatal mistake.

Life Failure, the Robot, and the St. Neot's Margin

Wilson managed to compress these insights into a single lecture; the result is perhaps the best short introduction to his ideas. Originally written for an anthology of humanistic psychology, "Existential Psychology: A Novelist's Approach" (collected in The Bicameral Critic, 1985) examines the problem of "life failure" using two key concepts: "the robot" and "the St. Neot's Margin." These ideas are crucial to an understanding of Wilson's philosophy; it is essential to grasp exactly what he means by them.

At the outset of Voyage to a Beginning, Wilson writes that all his conscious life he has been obsessed with a fundamental problem.

There is a certain problem that nags me all the time, and has always done so, in one form or another. It is this: on the one hand there is the world, an immense and complex and beautiful place, with enough interests in it to occupy a man for a million years. And on the other hand there is the curious narrowness, limitedness, of human consciousness. We are like blinkered horses; we are aware of almost nothing except the minute we are living in, the room we happen to be sitting in. Why? Why has nature blinkered the human will? Why do so many of us die, stolen, as a burglar might steal the silver? But when a civil servant retires after forty years, and finds himself curiously bored and miserable, the idea of freedom becomes blurred and indefinite; it seems to shimmer like a mirage. (P.9)

This "mirage of freedom" can lead to extreme measures. For example, as Wilson is fond of mentioning, it led Graham Greene to play Russian Roulette, with a curious result. In an essay called "The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard," Greene remarks that when he heard the click of the hammer on an empty chamber, he experienced "a feeling of delight, and a sense of the meaningfulness of life." Again, the paradox can be seen in the fact that, as Wilson tells us, Jean Paul Sartre, the philosopher of freedom, never felt quite so free as when he was a member of the French Resistance and was in danger of being caught by the Nazis.

Crisis, as Wilson has noted in almost every one of his books, can shake the mind out of its passivity and can throw off life failure. But this leads us to a paradox. Mankind has labored to eliminate crisis; civilization is one big crisis reduction program. Some romantics have suggested, then, that we get rid of civilization, since it seems to be the cause of the problem. It is true, Wilson agrees, that many of our modern problems, such as alienation and meaninglessness, would be unheard of in a more primitive society. The answer to these, Wilson suggests, isn't to relinquish civilization--as writers like D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and so many others have advised--but to master consciousness. The modern world, for all its mediocrity and nervous agitation, Wilson tells us, isn't the Outsider's most pressing problem--indeed, in a certain sense they have never had it so good. More dangerous are his own weakness and self-ignorance.

Yet crisis certainly explains much of the Outsider's eccentric behavior. Crisis galvanizes the will, and in a society in which crisis is minimized, the more creative and strong-willed individuals--those whom Wilson calls the "dominant 5 percent"--will seek out crisis in order to feel more alive. This is behind hyperbolic statements like Nietzsche's "it is a good war that hallows any cause," and William James's call for a "Moral Equivalent of War." Other individuals took more direct routes. T. E. Lawrence, sick of his "thought-riddled nature," galloped at the head of the Arab revolt, then cast himself into anonymity by joining the Royal Air Force as a humble private. Byron swam the Hellespont, Hermann Hesse wrote a novel about a retiring intellectual of advancing years who is also "a savage wolf of the steppes," thus depicting his own crisis amidst the fleshpots of Basel in the twenties. It was not, Wilson tells us, civilization that these, and others, rebelled against when they threw themselves into crisis. It was the limitations of consciousness.

One of the causes of these limitations Wilson calls the robot. At the outset of the lecture mentioned above, Wilson introduced himself as a phenomenologist, remarking that his concerns are closely related to those of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. He added, however, that he has "never yet opened a book on phenomenology that stated clearly the nature of its central obsession." He suggested he would try: Phenomenology may be understood as the archaeology of "willed intentions." One such stratum of intention is a very useful but troublesome collection of habits he calls the robot.

I am writing this on an electric typewriter. When I learned to type I had to do it painfully and with much nervous wear and tear. But at a certain stage a miracle occurred, and this complicated operation was learned by a useful robot whom I conceal in my subconscious mind. Now I only have to think about what I want to say; my robot secretary does the typing. He is really very useful. He also drives the car for me, speaks French (not very well), and occasionally gives lectures at American universities.

But there is a problem:

If I discover a new symphony that moves me deeply, or a poem or a painting, this bloody robot promptly insists on getting into the act. And when I listen to the symphony for the third time, he begins to anticipate every note. He listens to it automatically, and I lose all the pleasure. He is most annoying when I am tired, because then he tends to take over most of my functions without asking me. I have even caught him making love to my wife.

So when life "fails," it is because we have handed over our perceptions to the robot. T. S. Eliot asked, "Where is the life we have lost in living?" Wilson replies: In the hands of the robot.

But it would be a mistake, Wilson tells us, to think of the robot as a villain. He is, after all, a tool. Children enjoy the "glory and freshness of a dream" because they lack a highly developed robot; but children are also easily overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the world. (I recall severe bouts of depression over an inability to tie my shoe laces.) Simple organisms may do without a robot; even something as complicated as a dog manages fairly well without one. (Wilson remarks that Descartes was dead wrong about animals; they are absolutely unrobotic.) A dog may exult in orgasmic delight at the prospect of encountering once again the same trees and bushes he frequented yesterday, but this pristine appreciation comes at a price. He is at an evolutionary standstill. Evolution, Wilson tells us, is the process of acquiring new habits, a belief he shares with Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, and, more recently, Rupert Sheldrake. We all know you can't teach an old dog new tricks; but even a young one has a severely limited repertoire. This is because he lacks a robot: an accumulation of skills and habits, at first learned consciously with much agony and effort, then absorbed by some subconscious element that proceeds to employ these at the behest of the conscious mind; what the philosopher Michael Polanyi, in a different context, but studying the same phenomena, called tacit knowing. And while it is the robot who robs us of the glory and freshness of the dream, the way out of robotic consciousness is not through dismantling the robot, which Wilson sees as essentially the virtue of psychedelics and other, less drastic measures such as yoga and zen, but through learning about him and, eventually, gaining mastery over him.

Closely related to the robot is the problem of the indifference threshold, or, as Wilson often calls it, the St. Neots Margin.

The St. Neot's Margin gets its name from the area of England Wilson was travelling in when the insight came to him. How he arrived at it is an amusing tale, which I will leave the reader to discover. Suffice it to say that Wilson recognized an odd truth about human psychology: There is an area of the human psyche that does not respond to pleasure but that can be reached by inconvenience. In his terminology, when we are dominated by the robot, we take security and comfort for granted; it is only when these are threatened that we respond. This may not strike us as terribly original; after all, literature and folk psychology are littered with cynical epithets about man's thanklessness. But, Wilson asks, why should inconvenience get through to us? What is wrong with human nature?

Intentionality and Living Dangerously

Wilson concluded that the threat of inconvenience and its removal somehow throws us over the indifference threshold: then, instead of being, say, 51 percent robot and 49 percent "me", I am 51 percent "me" and 49 percent robot; it is that 2 percent either way that makes all the difference between living our life and having the robot live it for us. Have we then found an answer to the Outsider's--and everyone else's--problem? No. We have seen that civilization aims at reducing inconvenience. We are still left with the paradox that mankind has labored to create a civilization that requires us to put a gunbarrel to our heads in order to enjoy it. Nietzsche knew this when he advised his "new philosophers" to "live dangerously." Shaw suggested the same thing thirty years later in Heartbreak House. Captain Shotover, in search of the "seventh degree of concentration," tells Ellie Dunn that at her age, he "looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely." But civilization is out to eliminate danger, horror, and death, and Shaw, like Wilson, is all for civilization. How can we escape the paradox? Do we labor to create civilization only to enjoy throwing it over?

Intentionality, Wilson suggests, is the key. Why did Graham Greene experience a sudden realization of the meaningfulness of life when he heard the hammer click? Because the thought of his impending extinction concentrated his consciousness; when he realized he was still alive, he breathed a great sigh of relief and literally opened up. In Whitehead' s terms, he went from presentational immediacy to causal efficacy. In Hesserl's, his perception suddenly became more intentional. A crisis had forced him to make a greater effort than he was accustomed to. The fact that the world he then experienced was the same world he was bored to tears with shows that it was not the world that changed, but that Greene had simply put more effort into perceiving it. The mechanism, of course, was unconscious; Greene did not say "Well then, let's make an effort now, shall we?" If he did, he could have dispensed with the revolver. Wilson's point is that, silly as Greene's action was, it worked.

Other victims of life failure had similar experiences. Dostoyevsky experienced a mystical vision at the wrong end of a firing squad: at the last minute he was reprieved and Dostoyevsky saw into the absolute value and meaning of human life. We must admit that a firing squad is a rather cumbersome stimulant to carry around; yet most young people search for danger, horror, and death in some form or another. That is why motorcycles and violence are the perennial favorites of the modern teenager. The problem of life failure isn't limited to Outsiders, although they experience it in its most concentrated form. It is behind all human activity, even, as Wilson makes clear in his studies on the psychology of murder, serial killing. And it is the killer who makes clear that living dangerously is no answer to the problem of life failure. Yet if Wilson's ideas on the evolution of consciousness are correct, then we are no longer speaking of only a few Outsiders here and there, but of a whole generation of individuals dissatisfied with life failure and the safe civilization apparently responsible for it.

Now, civilization can endure a few of its best minds blowing themselves up, as Nietzsche? Van Gogh, and Nijinsky did; it may even survive a whole brood of its children succumbing to life failure or to their Pyrrhic victories over it (Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and countless less famous souls were, if not destroyed, at least severely damaged by drugs and: alcohol). But if, as Wilson argues, there has been since the eighteenth century and the Romantics a shift in human consciousness--manifesting in such phenomena as the rise in sex crimes and the peculiarly feverish character of Victorian pornography- -then the next big offensive against life failure may be on a scale larger than any we've known. Civilization cannot absorb a whole generation seeking danger, horror, and death. Wilson believes that the rise of the motiveless murder--the signature form of murder in the late twentieth century--is an indication that life failure has reached such depths in some individuals that they are driven to acts of brutal violence in order to experience, however briefly, the "life they have lost in living,"; the life, that is, handed over to the robot.

Clearly, some answer other than living dangerously must be found. And that is precisely what Wilson set out to do.

Maslow and the Peak Experience

After the Outsider Cycle, Wilson produced a study of American psychologist Abraham Maslow, New Pathways in Psychology (1972). In Maslow's "peak experiences," Wilson discovered a corroboration of his own ideas, as well as a kindred spirit in Maslow himself. What attracted him to the psychologist was Maslow's remark that he was "tired of studying sick people and wanted to study healthy people instead." Both Wilson and Maslow were interested in "the higher reaches of human nature. " Maslow acknowledged as much by frequently mentioning Wilson's work, specifically The Stature of Man and its critique of the dominant "worm's eye view' of human nature. Wilson reciprocated by making Maslow' s theory of the "hierarchy of needs" central to his phenomenological analysis of the history of murder.

Perhaps what is most important for our understanding of Wilson's philosophy of consciousness is his rejection of Maslow's belief that peak experiences, the sudden bursts of joy and well-being that Maslow discovered most healthy people enjoy frequently, could not be had at will. Maslow believed they were a byproduct of fruitful activity; a similar notion about "meaning" was held by the psychologist Victor Frankl. Wilson believed that Maslow was mistaken, not because peaks were important in themselves, but because they are experiences of consciousness operating at normal capacity. The peak experience is simply a moment of non- robotic consciousness, and since robotic consciousness is abnormal- -as we must regard a consciousness that leads to life failure and, in its worst cases, suicide--then to suggest that peaks can be gotten at will is merely to point out that we can, with effort, achieve normality. It is not so much that Maslow was wrong, as that he failed to see that intentionality--will--can be a factor in generating peaks. If so, he had ignored something that he in fact knew. Wilson remarks that Maslow had once pointed out that when he had gotten his class to remember past peaks, they suddenly started to have more of them. Just the thought of peaks somehow increased them. Once his students turned their attention--their intention--toward them, peaks came quite easily.

By this time Wilson had already known that an act of concentration can lead to a peak and non-robotic consciousness. In his little book Poetry and Mysticism (1969)--one of the best introductions to his work--written at the behest of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wilson introduced his notion of "duo-consciousness," the curious capacity of human consciousness to exist in two realms simultaneously. All poetry--all art and philosophy, for that matter--is an attempt to create this form of peak. Sitting in my room reading a volume of history--say Gibbon's Decline and Fall- -I can experience the curious sensation of being here in Los Angeles and at the same time in ancient Rome. The simultaneity creates a kind of peak, and I suddenly recall what a fascinating place the world is. Apparently, Maslow was wrong; we create peaks all the time--or, rather, we are constantly slipping into states of normality--and it seemed that simply thinking about them, as Maslow's students had, can bring them about. The situation is rather as if someone were in a constant state of nausea--the physical kind--and only occasionally felt up to digesting a meal; if he told us he had gotten used to it because "that's the way it is," we would hasten to point out that he had gotten his priorities wrong. According to Wilson, we are all in a similar state regarding consciousness, and peaks are moments of good digestion. But if, as was the case with Maslow's students, thinking about a good digestion can make it more frequent, then surely sitting around waiting for it to happen tells us less about our digestive powers than about our own laziness and lack of will. If interest can tighten the mind--make it more intentional--than surely this is an altogether more manageable and safer means of throwing off the robot than Russian Roulette and living dangerously. And if this is the case, Wilson concluded, then non-robotic consciousness should be as easy to teach as mathematics. Life failure and the tragic view of existence are simply the products of a misunderstanding--one rectified, Wilson believes, through a phenomenoligical analysis of consciousness.

Faculty X, the Ladder of Selves, and Upside-Downness

After these initial explorations in existential psychology, Wilson embarked on a somewhat different series of investigations. The result was a formidable theory of the paranormal and a tentative sketch of the vast potential of the human mind, although his background in science and philosophy initially made him skeptical about the paranormal. As he researched material for The Occult (1971), an encyclopedic history of "lunar knowledge," Wilson discovered that, on the contrary, the evidence in favor of the paranormal is overwhelming. One result of this was "Faculty X," a development of his earlier notions of "duo- consciousness." Put simply, Faculty X is the ability to perceive " the reality of other times and places"--not really an occult faculty at all, but, like peaks, something that each of us, in some form or another, experience fairly often. What is wrong with human beings, Wilson argues, is that we are trapped in the present moment; our consciousness is stuck in whatever "now" we are in, as a fly is stuck to flypaper, and we forget the vast, complex universe that surrounds us. Such a situation, as can be readily seen, is a variation on the problem of life failure; a consciousness limited to the "reality" of whatever is in front of it can easily slip into a state of mind like that of Beckett's characters who, while waiting for Godot, find that "there is nothing to do. " Faculty X is our ability to see beyond whatever is before us at a particular moment and to grasp the reality of other times and places; and since human beings work best when driven by long-range goals, Faculty X is the evolutionary faculty par excellence.

Perhaps the most famous example of Faculty X is Proust's tasting of the madeleine dipped in tea that begins Recherche le Temps Perdu. Perhaps less well known is Arnold Toynbee's account of his "time slip" from the early twentieth century to the Greece of the 1820s, at the site of the ruined citadel at Mistral Suddenly, the historian found himself no longer idly gazing at the ruins as they stood in 1912, but in the midst of the massacre of almost a century ago. Examples like these fill the pages of The Occult and its sequel, Mysteries (1978).

For sheer range and imaginative stimulation, Mysteries is one of Wilson' s best books. He hovers over the vast field of the paranormal and "fringe science," employing the bird's eye view, discussing the work of T. C. Lethbridge, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Jung, Yeats and the Golden Dawn, flying saucers, ley lines, time travel, precognition and multiple personality. (One of the most delightful chapters is, interestingly enough, entitled "The Curious History of Human Stupidity. ") Throughout all this he develops two important theories: "the ladder of selves" and "the right man," the latter a notion adopted from the science fiction writer A. E. Van Vogt that plays a key role in Wilson' s philosophy of crime. "The ladder of selves" has a more personal origin. Following a series of panic attacks brought on by a demanding work schedule, Wilson discovered that if he forced himself into a state of wakefulness, in an effort to ease the panic, it was as if a higher, more mature self rose up within him. He christened this the school mistress effect. Speculating on the similarity between this experience and multiple personality, Wilson concluded that the human psyche contains many levels, what he called a ladder of selves, a notion we find in much esoteric psychology. More importantly, Wilson realized that all of us spend most of our time in a condition not dissimilar to his panic attacks, which were essentially a state of self-division.

They began with a fatigue that quickly turned into a general feeling of mistrust of life, a loss of our usual feeling that all is (more or less) well. Then the whole thing was compounded by the old problem of self-consciousness.... If I woke in the middle of the night and tried not to feel tense, my heartbeat would accelerate and the panic would begin . . . the panic . . . was caused by a lower level of my being, an incompetent and childish "me." As long as I identified with this "me," I was in danger. But the rising tension could always be countered by waking my self up fully and calling upon a more purposive "me." It was like a school mistress walking into a room full of squabbling children and clapping her hands. (Pp. 27-28)

In later books, such as Poltergeist (1981) and Beyond the Occult, Wilson develops his insights into the "lower self," the seat of negative emotions. This negative state he has christened "upside-downness," essentially a condition in which the place of higher values--long- range, objective goals--is usurped by lower ones. Those "lower" values are invariably ego-centric and emotional. A wariness toward emotion runs throughout Wilson's work, and one can say that while many today are interested m awakening the inner child, Wilson is much more concerned with having it grow up. Upside-downness, he argues, is the norm in our culture. And it is particularly dangerous because our pessimism is the consent of reason. We think we should be pessimistic because the most influential minds of our time have told us we have good reason to be. But such reasoning is flawed, a result of the failure to grasp the importance of Husserl's insight. We feel that reason is shallow, and that we must face up to living in an absurd, indifferent universe. Those who can manage this acquire a certain grandeur; they are "tough enough" to face the "truth." But the truth, as Wilson tells us, in eludes peak experiences, Faculty X, the higher self--all realities that point to the fact that while we may not be gods, we are still much more powerful than what the worm's eye view would have us believe. Yet our passivity neurosis, coupled with a thoroughly pessimistic culture, leads us to reject this objective assessment. We instead accept the worm's eye view and continue to make mountains out of molehills, wasting our energy on trivial problems and complaining like spoiled children that the world doesn't go out of its way to make us happy. Wilson's answer to this reprehensible state of affairs is that the objective rational ego, like the inner school mistress, must clap its hands and take control.

Readers will notice that this emphasis on the rational ego is uncommon today. In an odd sort of symmetry, Wilson has moved in an opposite direction to the general trend away from reason and the ego, whether it is goddess worship or the sophisticated nihilism of Jacques Derrida. The story of how Wilson arrived at this conclusion began with his interest in split-brain psychology and with a fascinating book called Frankenstein's Castle (1980). Long ago, Wilson recognized that the unconscious mind, as well as being the source of our vital energies, possessed remarkable abilities. Through his research into the occult and paranormal, Wilson became convinced that the psyche could do practically anything, from levitating a piano, as did the famous nineteenth-century medium Daniel Douglas Home, to determining in a matter of seconds, as do idiot savants, whether a six-digit number is prime or not. But the odd thing, Wilson discovered, was that this magician--who for all intents and purposes inhabits the right cerebral hemisphere --could be commanded by, and will obey, the common, everyday ego. This was something new.

Stan And Ollie

Wilson summarized these insights in what he called the"The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness."

The analogy between the old comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and the dynamics between the right and left brain--or, more broadly, the unconscious and the conscious mind--may strike us as odd, but it is singularly apt. In Frankenstein's Cast/e, Wilson remarked that although Freud was right that the unconscious is much more powerful than the conscious mind, he was wrong to believe that, therefore, it was in control. This scenario, of the unconscious fording it over the puppet-like ego, became very popular in the twentieth century and contributed significantly to the feeling of helplessness and the worm's eye view. (Wilson has even taken Jung to task for this; see C. G. Jung: Lord of the Underworld [1984]). Wilson argues that the opposite is the case: the unconscious mind takes its cues from the conscious ego. He was led to this unfashionable conclusion via a strange route: through an odd book, The Law of Psychic Phenomena, written by Thomas J. Hudson and published in 1893; and through the discoveries of an American doctor, Howard Miller. In different ways, both had hit on a singular insight: that the magician in the unconscious can be commanded by a voice of authority. In most cases this was the voice of a hypnotist. Yet when Howard Miller hypnotized his patients and suggested to them that, as he extracted their teeth, not only would they feel no pain but they would also not bleed--a suggestion followed to the letter. Miller himself exercised no "power" over them; he had merely given the unconscious magician an order. Why, Wilson asks, couldn't they order this magician themselves? The answer, Wilson realized, is that the right brain doesn't believe the left. It knows he is a weak, vacillating fool. To get anything out of the right brain, the left must somehow convince the right that he's the boss. Enter Stan and Ollie.

In a brief essay outlining his theory, Wilson remarks that in the old Laurel and Hardy films, Stan, the emotional one, takes his cues from the "realist," Ollie. If Ollie pulls a frown, Stan breaks out in tears; if he has a grin, Stan is ecstatic. Ollie is the ego, and Stan the unconscious. Stan's reactions are always greater than Ollie' s, yet he looks to Ollie to see how he should react. If we can imagine that instead of a bulky lump of neurons, our skulls are inhabited by Stan and Ollie, we can understand Wilson's point. I, Ollie, look out, see the Hollywood hills--or rather, barely see them--and comment that it's another miserable, smoggy day. Stan, my unconscious, hears me and sends out distress signals, flooding me with a feeling of despair, and setting me on the road to upside-downness and life failure. Now, Wilson asks, what happens if Ollie, for some unlikely reason, feels happy? Remember Maslow's students? If Stan is persuaded that all is well, he'll send up waves of well being, and Ollie will enjoy a peak. Now, the peak itself is relatively unimportant; what is important is our realization that we have an objective reason to feel happy. Happiness is, to hazard a definition, perceiving the world objectively, and peaks are moments in which we see this. Wilson believes that an attitude of cheerful optimism and the determination not to give way to upside-downness should, over time, convince Stan that it is all right to send up much more psychic energy than he does at present. And we must remember that it isn't Stan's fault that he holds a tight purse on our inner vitality, since we--the Ollies--are always telling him what a dull and boring place the world is. If we Ollies begin to convince him and ourselves that this is untrue, then he will release the kind of energy he normally reserves for really important things, such as a crisis. Consciousness, then, would be much closer to a kind of permanent peak, that is to say, normal.

Criticisms and a Summing Up

This article can only skim the surface of Colin Wilson's forty-year career. Such brevity may fail to present his philosophy convincingly. Indeed, the critical response to Wilson's thought has, on the whole, been unfavorable. The general critics have never gotten over the idea that he is a "cracked egghead," a tag he acquired in the early days of the anti-Wilson campaign. His position with the serious critics hasn't been very good either. In keeping with the myth that if a work of ideas is readable, even enjoyable, then it can't be serious, Wilson' s attack on twentieth-century pessimism has had little effect on the intelligentsia. Aside from Maslow, I can't recall one major thinker that has given Wilson's work the serious consideration it deserves. The general trend toward a kind of blase Spenglerian decline does not suggest a sudden change in this situation. At the end of a recent compilation of his writings on the occult,5 Wilson remarks that "we remain trapped in a negative culture, whose cult figures are artists and writers who remain convinced that life is basically meaningless or tragic." He quotes Roland Barthes to this effect: ". . . the art of living has no history; it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good. . . ", a refrain we have heard with slight variation since Schopenhauer and which in recent years has taken on a slightly more esoteric pitch in the works of Derrida, Lyotard, and others of the poststructuralist school. Though not quite in isolation, Wilson has been an odd man out, producing book after book, building on the initial ideas he first put forth in The Outsider. His belief in the evolutionary role of the artist-thinker places him far outside contemporary notions of the "end of the author"; writers who believe in themselves and their mission have a hard time of it today. There have also been a few more pointed attacks. Susan Brownmiller has criticized Wilson' s interest in sex killings, suggesting that his interest in them may be more than philosophical.[6] The ardent debunker of parapsychology, Martin Gardner, has come close to petulant name-calling, referring to Wilson's books as "scribblings" and to Wilson himself as an "irresponsible journalist of the occult."' Wilson's admittedly radical belief that poltergeists may very well be actual spirits and not the work of the unconscious mind--as more conservative theorists believe--may account for Gardner's animus. Yet a reader of the encyclopedic Occult or Mysteries may find it difficult to discern wherein Wilson's irresponsibility lies.

In any case, whether or not we agree with the specifics of his arguments, since he burst on the literary scene thirty-seven years ago Colin Wilson has been a voice of optimism, a rare thing these days. In a time when a veritable industry exists dedicated to the decline of the West, Wilson has refused to accept this prognosis and has instead written steadily about the future in terms of hope and achievement. He may, as some critics have said, have never gotten over Shaw--listening to a radio broadcast of Man and Superman was perhaps the single most decisive event of the young Wilson's life; and his Victorian belief in progress and heroism may seem antiquated amidst our own cool scepticism. But, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, it's not enough that an idea be fashionable, it should also strive for truth.

In The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno wrote:

We have seen that the vital longing for human immortality finds no consolation in reason and that reason leaves us without incentive or consolation in life and life itself without real finality.

All of Wilson's work is an attempt to show that this conclusion is incorrect. Unamuno,: like other philosophers of the tragic, asks us to face an unfathomable universe with courage, even good cheer. There is something great in this stoicism; yet itis as obsolete as the nineteenth- century materialism to which it was an admirable reaction. As early as Religion and the Rebel, Wilson wrote that "although the ultimate reality may be irrational, man's relationship to it is not." After a career devoted to analyzing what that relationship is, Wilson no longer believes that the ultimate reality must be irrational. He goes so far as to suggest it may even mean well by us, and that we ourselves are to blame for most of our problems. The tragic view of life, he has come to see, is often little more than an excuse for self-pity and laziness.

Human beings, Wilson tells us, are purposive beings. As he wrote in The Philosopher's Stone, "The will feeds on enormous vistas; deprived of them, it collapses." Critics who chide him for being a metaphysical sensualist, chasing after peak experiences, miss this point entirely. The pleasurable aspects of peaks are the least important thing about them; the meaning they reveal is useless unless we make an effort to understand it. Wilson has no truck with the anti-intellectuals and is highly critical of the use of psychedelics to produce higher consciousness. Psychedelics may reveal a universe full of meaning, but he believes they immobilize the will, making it impossible for us to grasp any meaning at all. This, Wilson suspects, is why the archaic revival of the 1960s petered out. Human beings are meant for something more than to "let it all hang out," or to "turn off their minds, relax, and float downstream." They are meant to grasp reality. But reality is a bore; hence drugs, deviancy, crime, crisis. Yet as Wilson wrote in The Craft of the Novel (1975), "Reality is not what happens to be most real to us at the moment. It is what we perceive in our moments of greatest intensity.

This theme surfaces again and again. Yet intensity alone is not an answer. We have seen how the Outsiders fared in their quest for it. Wilson grasps the missing component when he speaks of the "peculiar power of the imagination (that) enables us to cling on to this vision after the intensity has vanished." This is one of his most important insights: imagination is not an escape from reality, but a means of grasping it. I emphasize this notion of grasping because it evokes the purposiveness of thought, its intentionality, a notion we must "grasp" if we are to throw off the Cartesian passivity that has characterized the modern view of consciousness as a kind of mirror reflecting the external world. In a sense, Faculty X is not a new faculty at all but merely a heightened manifestation of our ability to grasp reality. The human predicament is that one is stuck in the present. In existential terms the human being is "contingent." Yet if Faculty X shows us some measure of what normal consciousness is really like, then all notions of "facticity," "thrownness, " "abandonment"--the whole litany of existential shipwreck--are acute descriptions of a misunderstanding about consciousness, not the ultimate state of things. Then dread and anxiety, instead of fundamental ontology, become the great indicators in the course of human evolution that the passive model of consciousness is incorrect, unlivable, and absolutely debilitating. Such a view may still dominate but it is on its last legs, as a look at what is produced under its aegis these days shows.

From this perspective, our greatest error is the belief that reality is whatever is before our eyes, yet any lover of literature and ideas knows this is false. If I sink into the Iliad, the Meno, The Brothers Karamazov, or even one of Wilson's books, I enter a reality a thousand times deeper, richer, and wider than what I see at the end of my nose. We are emphatically creatures of the mind and the imagination; our evolution has been a long road, filled with many detours, to this goal, and Wilson believes we are just at the brink of reaching it. Until we do so, we will be plagued with life failure and our dubious attempts at living dangerously in order to get over it. The Romantics, he tells us, had the answer in their grasp; yet they failed to understand it. Like the psychedelicists of the 1960s, the Romantics were, in Wilson's view, essentially passive. Bathing in the warm flood of ecstasy and meaning, they cried out against a harsh world when faced with cold reality. Because they misunderstood the nature of the will, the Romantics suffered a depressingly high death rate. The existentialists who followed were tougher. They sought out reality, in many cases embracing as stark and inhospitable a universe as possible in their desire to live "authentically." Yet from Wilson's perspective, they too made an unfortunate mistake. The existentialists assumed the universe was indifferent, practically hostile to human destiny. We were "thrown into the world," "condemned to be free." Too much meaning weakened the Romantics' grasp of reality; too much reality allowed the existentialists no vision of meaning. Colin Wilson's lifework has been an attempt to bring together the realist and the romantic, to bring the vision of the Romantics under the scrutiny of existential analysis.

He is optimistic. A change in human consciousness is imminent. One sign of this, he believes, is the rise of the novel in Western culture. The novel, more than anything else, has been the greatest stimulus to Faculty X in modern times. Suddenly, with the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740, whole populations could experience the "reality of other times and places," instead of merely the narrow confines of the present moment. Paradoxically, fiction led to an increase in reality. For the first time human beings began, as yet only dimly, to grasp the true nature and power of the imagination. Reality was no longer the brute world "out there"; reality resided within, or, as Kierkegaard in the next century would say, "Truth" became "subjectivity. "

This realization has gradually dawned on men and women ever since. Hence the Outsiders, human beings with a passion for intensity of inner experience; hence, also, the "creative minority which Wilson calls "the dominant .5 percent." Unlike "the dominant 5 percent, " who express their dominance in relatively unremarkable ways as pop stars, drill sergeants, police officers, business men, group leaders of any kind--and in more dubious ways as criminals and assassins-- the dominant .5 percent are individuals interested in creativity for its own sake. In Maslow's term, they are self-actualizers. They are determined to inhabit mankind's true environment, the mind, and Wilson believes they point to the next step in human evolution. Perhaps when this fact is truly grasped--and Colin Wilson's forty-year career has been, if nothing else, one long argument toward this end- mankind will leave its tragic inheritance behind.

NOTES

[1.] Colin Wilson, Voyage to a Beginning. (New York: Crown, 1969), 264.

[2.] Howard Dosser, Colin Wilson: the Man and his Mind. (Longmead, England: Element Books, 1990). Dosser's is the first full-length study of all of Wilson's work. Earlier works like K. Gunnar Bergstrom' s An Odyssey to Freedom (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala Univ., 1983) concentrate on one aspect of it; in Bergstrom's case, Wilson's fiction. Clifford Bendau's Colin Wilson: The Outsider and Beyond (San Bernadino, Calif. : Borgo Press, 1979) is a very useful but brief introduction to Wilson' s main themes.

[3.] As in The Misfits (London: Grafton Books, 1988) and Access to Inner Worlds (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1990), respectively.

[4.] In Declaration (London: Readers Union, 1959), Lessing remarked (p. 25) that "Mr. Wilson may find the desire of backward people not to starve . . . rather uninteresting but he and people like him should at least try and understand it exists .

[5.] In The Mammoth Book of the Supernatural (New York: Carrol & Graf, 1991) P. 550, Wilson quotes from Barthes on Barthes.

[6.] In Against Our Will--Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam, 1990), Brownmiller writes (pp. 326-327) of Wilson's "attraction to male slayers of women," calling his Casebook of Murder (New York: Cowles, 1969) a "sprightly compendium of sex slayings," in which he "displays no queasiness." Wilson's failure to display "queasiness," Brownmiller implies, places him in close proximity to the subjects of his investigation. The fact that murder interests Wilson because it is "the most extreme form of the denial of human potential" seems to have escaped Brownmiller' s attention. The excellent introduction to the Casebook of Murder, from which I quote, spells out Wilson's aims in studying crime and dispels any notion that he is a gleeful sensationalist.

[7.] In The New Age (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), 180-181.

REFERENCES

de Unamuno, Miguel. 1931. The tragic sense of life. London: McMillan.

James, William. [1902] 1985."Varieties of religious experience." In The works of William James. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Paglia, Camile. 1991. Sexual personae. New York: Vintage Books.

Wilson, Colin. 1956. The Outsider. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1957. Religion and the rebel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1959. The stature of man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1960. Ritual in the dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1962. The strength to dream. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1963. Origins of the sexual impulse. New York: Putnam.

-----. 1965. Beyond the outsider. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1967a. Introduction to the new existentialism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

-----. 1967b. The mind parasites. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House.

-----. 1969a. Voyage to a beginning New York: Crown.

-----. 1969b. The philosopher's stone. London: Arthur Barker Ltd.

-----. 1969c. Poetry and mysticism. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

-----. 1970a. God of the labyrinth. Berkeley: Wingbow Press.

-----. 1970b. Lingard. New York: Crown.

-----. 1971a. The black room. London: Sphere Books.

-----. 1971b. The occult. New York: Random House.

-----. 1972. New pathways in psychology. New York: Taplinger.

-----. 1975. Order of assassins. London: Granada.

-----. 1976. Space vampires. New York: Random House.

-----. 1977. The craft of the novel. London: Victor Gollanz.

-----. 1978. Mysteries. New York: Putnam.

-----. 1980. Frankenstein's castle. Sevenoaks, England: Ashgrove.

-----. 1981. Poltergeist. London: New English Library.

-----. 1984a. Criminal history of mankind. New York: Putnam.

-----. 1984b. C. G. Jung: Lord of the underworld. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England: Aquarian Press.

-----. 1985. The bicameral critic. Salem, Mass.: Salem House.

-----. 1986. The Laurel and Hardy theory of consciousness. Albany, Calif.: Broadside Editions.

-----. 1987-1992. Spider world series. London: Grafton Books.

-----. 1988. Beyond the occult. London: Bantam.

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By GARY LACHMAN Gary Lachman is an independent writer living in Los Angeles. He has published several book reviews and articles in the fields of philosophy and popular science in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Journal for Anthroposophy, Common Boundary, Quest, and ReVision. Mr. Lachman has also been a composer and performer with the rock group,"Blondie."

Copyright 1994 by Heldref Publications. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of Heldref Publications.

Lachman, Gary, From outsider to post-tragic man: Colin Wilson and the case for optimism.., Vol. 16, ReVision, 01-01-1994, pp 131.

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