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The Outsider

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Spurgeon, Brad. Colin Wilson: philosopher of optimism, (2006), Manchester: Michael Butterworth ISBN 0-9552672-0-X Wilson followed The Outsider with six philosophical titles, which have become known as The Outsider Cycle: Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat ( The Stature of Man in the U.S., 1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider (1965) and the summary volume Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). These were accompanied by a string of novels aimed at putting his philosophical ideas into action. At this point Joy walks through the room and he tells her amiably: 'I was just saying how difficult it was the first time I got into bed with you.' Joy smiles her sweet smile and says: 'Well I'm just taking the rubbish out.' So the book did a great deal for me. I ceased to be stigmatised as an Angry Young Man and became a more-or-less respectable member of the literary establishment. Since I was by then 40, and we had three children, I was rather relieved.

Somewhere in the world, there is a man who believes that people in Oxford are so obnoxiously elitist that they jeer openly at the efforts of total strangers to improve their minds. Alas, as it turned out, Colin Wilson wasn't even a flash in the pan so much as an accident in the kitchen sink, and his preposterous rise and ludicrous fall served only to humiliate an already embattled literary establishment and further discredit their devotion to modernism and all things European.

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Howard F. Dossor Colin Wilson: the Man and His Mind (1990) Element Books, pp 318–319. ISBN 1-85230-176-7 Dalgleish, Tim The Guerilla Philosopher: Colin Wilson and Existentialism (1993), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-47-0

Wilson was born in Leicester to Arthur, a shoemaker, and his wife, Hattie, who passed on her love of reading. "My mother did not particularly enjoy being married, any more than my father did," he wrote in a memoir. Wilson went to a local technical school, where he did well at physics and chemistry, and left at 16 to work in a wool factory. He had spells as a laboratory assistant, tax clerk, labourer and hospital porter. Vehemently alienated from all materialistic and collective life, he grew obsessed, he said, with the notion of being a Buddhist tathagata (truth-seeking wanderer).Stanley, Colin (ed). Colin Wilson, a celebration: essays and recollections (1988), London: Cecil Woolf ISBN 0-900821-91-4 How does the outsider influence society? And how does society influence him? It’s a question as relevant to today’s iconic characters, from Don Draper to Voldemort, as it was when The Outsider was initially published. A fascinating study blending philosophy, psychology, and literature, Wilson’s seminal work is a must-have for those who are fascinated by the character of the outsider. Characters are then brought to the fore (including the title character from Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf). These are presented as examples of those who have insightful moments of lucidity in which they feel as though things are worthwhile/meaningful amidst their shared, usual, experience of nihilism and gloom. Sartre's Nausea is herein the key text – and the moment when the hero listens to a song in a cafe which momentarily lifts his spirits is the outlook on life to be normalized. Wilson disagrees. "I suspect that I am probably the greatest writer of the 20th century," he says. "In 500 years time, they'll say, 'Wilson was a genius', because I'm a turning-point in intellectual history.'

For me [fiction] is a manner of philosophizing....Philosophy may be only a shadow of the reality it tries to grasp, but the novel is altogether more satisfactory. I am almost tempted to 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. [18] No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them.

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His passionate inquiry into his themes continued but critics deserted him. He went out of fashion and – though he published more than 100 works – he survived financially only because many of those dealt with murder or the occult as pathways to the insights that fascinated him. His readership grew to include murder buffs, UFO spotters and new age believers. Typical of this later output was Alien Dawn (1998), marketed with the line "the evidence is overwhelming – they are here". Serialised in the Daily Mail, it undoubtedly made more money than any of his philosophical books. Stanley, Colin (ed). The Sage of Tetherdown: Recollections of Colin Wilson by his friends (2020) Nottingham: Paupers' Press. ISBN 9780995597884 As a child he was so introverted, so uninterested in other people, he might have been diagnosed today with Asperger's syndrome. 'I wouldn't be surprised. I wasn't cut off from other people, but, as I keep saying in The Outsider, other people were the trouble. They kept intruding into my world whether I wanted them to or not, because what they did was to drag me away from the world of ideas and abstractions I wanted to be in. When I was a teenager I was a total romantic escapist. My world was books. I felt as Axel did in the Villiers de L'Isle-Adam play - 'As for living, our servants can do that for us.' But that all changed when I was 16 and discovered Rabelais. Suddenly I had that wonderful feeling - my God, life is good after all!' Sure, I know it hurts, he seemed to say, but what of Dostoevsky and all the Other Outsiders who TURNED THEMSELVES AROUND AND MADE A MAN OF THEMSELVES? Wilson's defects – enough to undo him as a thinker – were an imperfect analytical ability and a protective conceit that left him virtually impervious to the rational or intuitive arguments of others. Yet the literary establishment's handling of his first books remains one of the more memorable intellectual disgraces of our time. He said, "I would like my life to be a lesson in how to stand alone and to thrive on it."

It is not that the “outsider” wants the merely impossible. That would be understandable. One can’t get the moon but if he cries for it long enough he may some day fly there. Strictly speaking, every ideal worthy of man is impossible of complete realization but it can still serve as a guide to choice and action. There is a difference between an ideal that cannot be attained and one that is senseless. An analogous situation holds for the logic of the emotions. One can be sad about the world but one cannot sensibly be indignant with it or shake one’s fist at it unless he believes nature is animate or that it is responsible for its own state. The “outsider” does not believe anyone is responsible for the nature of nature but he is nonetheless in revolt against it. He is a man who, having given up his belief in the existence of God, is still lacerating himself over the problem of evil, unaware that there is no problem of evil to a naturalist but only problems of evil, some remediable, some not; it is not usually possible to determine which is which until human beings pit their courage and intelligence against the obstacles in the struggle to solve them. The Occult did a great deal more than make me “respectable”. It also served as a kind of awakening. Before 1970, I had been inclined to dismiss the occult as superstitious nonsense. Writing the book made me aware that the paranormal is as real as quantum physics (and, in fact, has a great deal in common with it), and that anyone who refuses to take it into account is simply shutting their eyes to half the universe. More about The Occult Meanwhile, the prolific Wilson found time to write about other subjects that interested him, even on occasion when his level of expertise might be questionable. The title of his opinionated 1964 volume on music appreciation, Brandy of the Damned, inspired by his enthusiasm for record collecting, [17] used for its title a self-deprecating reference from the onetime music critic Bernard Shaw. The full quote (from Man and Superman) is: "Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?” Now, this might not sound precisely like enjoyable holiday reading, but once you open this book and begin to grasp its central idea, I defy you not to be hooked! Wilson takes your mind to new limits, demolishing mental walls as if they did not exist, in such a way that you can never look at mundane existence in quite the same way again.The first sign that something was up came two days before publication, when an excited article in the Evening News heralded Wilson as "A Major Writer". The next day he was acclaimed by the two most important critics in the country - Philip Toynbee in the Observer and Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times. "Luminously intelligent," declared an overjoyed Toynbee of Wilson's book. Connolly pronounced it to be "extraordinary", "one of the most remarkable first books I have read for a long time". When it appeared in the bookshops on Monday, it sold out by the end of the afternoon. Feldman, Gene and Gartneberg, Max (editors) (1958). Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men . New York: Citadel Press. {{ cite book}}: |author= has generic name ( help) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) Published to immense acclaim in the mid-1950s, The Outsider helped make popular the literary concept of existentialism. Authors like Sartre, Kafka, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky, as well as artists like Van Gogh and Nijinsky, delved for a deeper understanding of the human condition in their work, and Colin Wilson’s landmark book encapsulated a character found time and time again: the outsider.

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