Howard F. Dossor, who died last month, was the author of the pioneering book Colin Wilson: the Man and his Mind, published in 1990. I bought it that year after having only read a handful of Wilson titles previously. I was unaware of both the author and this study, but plonked down ten quid on the Waterstones counter as soon as I saw it. Before reading this book my overall knowledge of Wilson was limited to what I’d seen on the blurbs of a few of his paperbacks. Mr. Dossor’s book changed all that, giving me for the first time a bird’s eye view of Wilson’s overall intentions. This was utterly invaluable; without it, I’d have struggled to see the full picture of Wilson’s ‘existential jigsaw puzzle’. To give one negative example, I was then still unaware of the critical stand off between Colin and the literary mainstream, presuming rather naively that he was as respected by them as he was by me. Not so! Chapter 9 of The Man and his Mind deals with the critical response which took me by surprise at first. Why don’t they like these books which I find so exciting and informative? Am I wrong in feeling so strongly about Wilson’s ideas when the broadsheets dismiss him with comic offhandedness, I wondered. In the long term – of course not! But with Dossor’s map the journey could begin properly. It’s certainly amusing to look at the Wilson bibliography in Howard’s book in 2022. Back in 1990 I was determined to find all those other titles – all eighty-odd of them, up to Existentially Speaking (1989). My copy of the Paupers Press Wilson bibliography lists another hundred titles, and it only covers up to 2015… 

Dossor modestly described his book as a “stop-gap” but it was so much more than that. The gathering together of much obscure information between two covers made it an indispensable guide for many years. I’m as glad that I thanked him for it (via email; his response was as courteous as I’d expected) as much as I’m grateful to have made a few ‘pilgrimages’ to Wilson’s house in Cornwall. “It seems most likely that critics analysing [Wilson’s] work in the middle of the twenty-first century, will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him” writes Dossor at the end of his book. “But it is not merely for their sake that he should be examined”. And it isn’t. In our twenty-first century environment of divisive technological distraction and blandly orthodox ‘life failure’, of spiritual laziness and boring dogmatism, Wilson’s vigorous phenomenological existentialism remains a gift for individuals strong enough to swim against the current, to live out this lived philosophy. It certainly worked wonders for me. 

And it still does. 

So thanks again, Howard. 

Farewell also to Laura del-Rivo, Wilson’s beatnik muse, and to Thomas F. Bertonneau – a delightfully open mind from a world of closed academia. RIP both. 

With thanks to George C. Poulos for the email notification yesterday. 

Despite his numerous writings on mysticism and visionary experience Colin Wilson remarked in 1966 that his philosophy was not for readers who want “immediate and startling results […] sudden conversion, blinding visions”. Instead, his ideas are concerned with a careful inquiry into consciousness and with our attitudes towards life. 

By the time he wrote this his controversial writing career was a decade old and he would sum up his basic philosophical credo – the ‘new existentialism’ – in an introductory book of that title. Dissatisfied with the bleak outlook of post war existentialism as represented by Heidegger and Sartre, he returned instead to the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl, whose philosophy was a primary motivating force on existentialism (and later, Derrida’s deconstruction). Despite now being over half a century old, Wilson’s Beyond the Outsider and The New Existentialism remain the most exciting and accessible introductions to this obscure method of consciousness control outside of the incestuous bubble of academia. 

Wilson did not begin to discuss Husserl until the start of the 1960’s. He is first mentioned (to my knowledge) in Wilson’s opening essay in a pioneering true crime book, The Encyclopedia of Murder. Wilson would write a lot about phenomenology for the first half of the decade and it’s methodology can be felt lurking throughout most of the rest of his work – even a potboiler such as Unsolved Mysteries: Past and Present (“From Arthur and Merlin to vampires and zombies” reads the garish cover) manages to briefly discuss Husserl’s last work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Wilson thought of Husserl as originally something of a poet and mystic rather than the stern logician he appears to be (originally a mathematician, Husserl’s first book was on arithmetic). 

“From the superficial, however, one is led into the depths” says Husserl, paraphrasing a line from the the second part of Goethe’s Faust. Wilson remarks that Husserl believed that the study of phenomenology would lead to the Goethe’s ‘Mothers’, the ‘keepers of the key to the ultimate sources of being’ (“goddesses unknown to mortal mind … named indeed with dread among our kind” says Mephistopheles). [1] In a somewhat underappreciated satirical move, Wilson would invoke Husserl alongside the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft in a series of ‘Brechtian’ piss-takes: The Mind Parasites, The Return of the Lloigor and The Philosophers’ Stone, the first two of which were originally published by the Lovecraft concern Arkham House. “A round square, a regular icosahedron and similar a priori impossibila are in this sense ‘unpresentable’. The same holds of a completely demarcated piece of a Euclidean manifold of more than three dimensions…” writes Husserl in the Logical Investigations [V: §44], sounding rather like a classically educated Randolph Carter attempting to describe something equally ‘unpresentable’ from Lovecraft’s pantheon. At the end of his gripping history of occultism (1971) Wilson gives credence to the will-driven experiments of the various mages discussed but ends by announcing that the greatest step forward was made when Husserl began investigating the intentional structure of consciousness circa 1900. Despite its roots in the scientific method, phenomenology was intuited as a mystical discipline – “a doctrine of the will” – by Wilson. Understood properly, Wilson was quite brilliant at leading from the seemingly superficial – those airbrushed Panther paperback covers with their sensationalistic blurbs  – into the phenomenological depths of consciousness discussed inside. Alas, his critics scoff at the surface but almost never discuss the depths, the phenomenology. 

In his major work, the first book of Ideas, Husserl insists that there is “no ‘royal road’ into phenomenology” [§96]. “Our procedure is that of an explorer journeying through an unknown part of the world, and carefully describing what is presented along his unbeaten paths, which will not always be the shortest”. So, no immediate and startling results, sudden conversions or blinding visions. However, the first practical discipline of the phenomenological method – to become constantly aware of the intentionality of all of our conscious acts – is no more difficult that learning a language. “What is happening” writes Wilson in Beyond the Outsider “is that the problem expressed by the mystics – and by Blake in particular – has been first of all expressed in terms that would have been acceptable to Descartes”, i.e. scientifically. Phenomenology is a science of consciousness. 

The above quote appeared in an appendix detailing Wilson’s experiment with mescalin – he was disappointed. He later admitted that ‘the sixties’ essentially passed him by; he had after all already been writing about Hermann Hesse and consciousness expansion since The Outsider had appeared in 1956. Ten years on he summed up his new existentialist credo to some enthusiasm but little academic interest. 1966 was the year that the ‘counterculture’ began to assert itself and it was when Derrida introduced deconstruction to Americans via a critique of Husserl; meanwhile, Foucault was on the bestseller list in France. In his remarkable study of the soundtrack to the era, Ian Macdonald lays out a powerful description of a subliminal change of awareness which happened during this decade. He calls it the ‘revolution in the head’. Akin to the psychological effects that Marshall McLuhan had noted during the switch from print based linearity to multifocal multimedia, this revolution was “an inner one of feeling and assumption” amongst the general public. Currently living in a state of “greedy simultaneity” society is “now functioning mostly below the level of the rational mind in an emotional/physical dimension of personal appetite and private insecurity” with individuals forever guarding their own “jealously levelled standards”. [2] This can be seen, he says, in the “cynical egalitarianism” of deconstruction: “a levelling crusade on behalf of the aesthetically deprived” which ideally suits the philistinism of both left and right. “A malignant rot has spend through the Western mind since the mid Seventies: the virus of meaninglessness”. [3] Of course, Wilson had been fighting an almost single-handed battle against this virus for several decades. The third installment of his Outsider series was The Age of Defeat, a book about “unconscious assumptions” in an inner-directed/other-directed society. Husserl would have perhaps called this assumptive state the natural attitude of the ‘normal’ man, as opposed to the phenomenological attitude of his explorers (Wilson would call them Outsiders). 

The state of instantaneous/simultaneous perception that MacDonald labels the revolution in the head can be clearly heard in the music of the era. Jim Morrison sang that he wanted the world and he wanted it NOW, sounding like one of the Romantics dissected in Wilson’s debut. In light of his opening comments about instant visions, it is significant that Wilson wrote a book about the quick cures of ‘charlatan messiahs’ which – in its original edit – examined the thinkers Derrida and Foucault alongside more obvious examples such as Charles Manson and the Rev. Jim Jones. “If the definition of a messiah is one who is more concerned with collecting disciples than the truth of what he is saying, then most of France’s post-war intellectuals qualify as messiahs rather than philosophers [with their audience] expected to nod in agreement as they are subjected to a barrage of increasingly absurd propositions”. [4] 

Relevant to Wilson’s thesis would be these two sudden conversions and blinding visions, both shaped by LSD in Death Valley, California. Manson’s 1968 ‘helter-skelter’ and Foucault’s 1975 ‘limit-experience’ were mostly soundtracked by aleatory electronic noise (The Beatles’ Revolution 9 and Stockhausen’s Kontakte). Foucault’s biographer James Miller writes that the above experience, like most of the pivotal events of his life, “happened largely by chance” – hence Foucault’s rejection of what Husserl meant by ‘intentionality’, which according to MacDonald is a very dangerous attitude. “[To] treat chance-determined productions as identical with material intentionality vested with meaning is to meddle in a relativism that can only escalate towards chaos – and chaos draws psychopaths”. Use of random experiment and the free-floating meanings they generate were intended as “harmless fun for Lennon” but when interpreted by psychopaths like Manson and later, by Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman – “in the end they returned to kill him.” [5] Wilson’s studies on the psychology of crime have always challenged the selfishly ‘interpretive’ criminal mind and its ability to deceive itself. Divorced from intentionality, randomness can lead to meaninglessness which can eventually be fatal. Manson’s tedious race war and Foucault’s ludicrous ‘suicide festivals’ were brutal demands for immediate satisfaction, all too common in the ongoing age of “post-religious egotism” and the instantaneous/simultaneous state of awareness which accompanies it. Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl replaced the careful analysis of intentionality with the kind of “harmless fun” mentioned above (‘play’ was an often used term in deconstructive salvos) and the embittered, relativistic sectarianism which now underpins dialogue from both left and right is it’s legacy. Wilson rejected Derrida’s use of Husserl because he believed that Derrida did not grasp what was meant by intentionality. It is not, he said “merely the arbitrary imposition of our fantasies on a featureless ‘reality’” – a statement that unfortunately describes the mentality of the 21st century with uncanny accuracy. 

Introducing his bestselling ‘archeology of thought’ to English readers Foucault singled out “the phenomenological approach” as the one which he completely rejected. His conclusion – than man is a recent invention nearing its end – is for Wilson merely a restatement of Sartre’s ‘man is a useless passion’ which rounded off Sartre’s own epic dismissal of Husserl. In Beyond the Outsider Wilson offers the rather more optimistic statement that “man does not yet exist” – human beings are so dependent on external pressures and forces that we hardly experience what could be called reality, except in moments of intensity (like Sartre remarking he had never felt so free as when he was living in occupied France). In fact, Wilson compares our ‘normal’ state of perception to martial law. Our “capacity for distinguishing” (i.e. intentionality) filters off the information overload that surrounds us. “But our perception is still a second best, many degrees better than the original chaos, but a long way from the possibilities of seeing order and meaning in the universe”. [6] Thanks to this emergency state, we have forgotten existence, as Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time. We cannot begin to proclaim final judgements on universal meaninglessness or the end of man while our perceptions are so feeble. 

The illusion of ‘passive perception’, that we can only be stimulated by outward forces – like Sartre’s waiter whose head empties alongside his cafe – can be seen at work in Foucault and Derrida’s twin obsessions of history and language, immense blind forces that control us like puppets. Wilson’s own explorations into the intentional structure of consciousness clearly demonstrate the fallacy of this view. Husserl’s phenomenology “could be likened to a kind of archeology. When I speak of ‘myself’” writes Wilson, “I am speaking about the uppermost layer of willed intentions”. Underneath this “lies the realm of my acquired habits” like typing or driving. Several layers below are our sexual intentions which Wilson insists can be studied as willed intentions; his Origins of the Sexual Impulse, 1963, is an attempt to do this very thing. In archeological terms this layer would be Troy or Babylon; below this “lie the mental equivalents of the Miocene, the Jurassic, the Carboniferous”: these primal layers are examined by Wilson in his series of occult books. [7] Wilson’s term for this archeological structure (“compacted layer upon layer of willed intentions”) is ‘the robot’, a metaphorical piece of tech that transforms slowly learned willed intentions onto the layer of acquired habits, the things we do habitually or ‘instantaneously’. Unfortunately the “obsessive tidiness” of this device also transforms too much of life’s texture into a homogeneous mass, a state where everything seems static and meaningless and we feel that we are merely reflections of our environment. 

1966 was the year that Wilson fully developed one of his most intriguing concepts: the phenomenological faculty – “to coin a rather clumsy phrase” – which was shortened to Faculty X and thoroughly examined in his book The Occult. This ‘latent sense’ is the possibility, mentioned above, “of seeing order and meaning in the universe” against the “second best” of our normal (or natural, as Husserl would have it) perception. Proust devoted over three thousand pages to examining this “dormant faculty” (as he called it). This fact is itself an indication that the carefully disciplined phenomenological method cannot be an immediate quick cure or instant satisfaction; as Wilson says, it’s development requires the patience of a skilled watchmaker. “If I want to combat my boredom and life-devaluation it is necessary for me deliberately to exercise my phenomenological faculty, to train it as I would train my body for some sporting event”. Poetry and literature are by-products of this activity, he writes. [8] 

Addressing an audience in 1967 Wilson repeated the “absurd possibility” that man does not yet exist. [9] Using an image from H. G. Wells, he compares those who attempt to develop the phenomenological faculty to evolving amphibians, struggling to live on dry land. Sartre’s cafe proprietor is firmly a sea-dweller, contained by his reflective environment and dependent on external forces and objects for meaning. This ‘evolutionary phenomenology’ is fully examined in Beyond the Outsider, particularly in the final chapters. Wilson compares the habitual mentality of Sartre’s  ‘sea-creature’, totally dependent on the reflection of outward circumstances, to a vestigial tail or appendix, an evolutionary dead end. Instead we should be looking inward, towards the interior forces we have at our disposal, those layers of willed intentions that can be examined by phenomenological analysis. Through this, says Wilson, we can change our conception of ourselves. 

[1] Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern Uni. Press, 1970, p. 355. Goethe, Faust/ Part Two, Act 1: A Gloomy Gallery, Penguin 1967, p. 76 infra. (Mephistopheles’ cry ‘Then to the deep!’ – a favourite of Husserl’s – is on p. 78). 

See also: Wilson, Colin, The New Existentialism, Wildwood House, 1980, p. 62. Speigelberg, Herbert, The Phenomenological Movement vol. one, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1976, p. 160. 

[2] MacDonald, Ian, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles’ Records and the Sixties, Fourth Estate, 1997, pp. 24-25. MacDonald dismisses the fashionable idea that the various countercultural strands – the new left, etc – were responsible for this switch; it was rather the case that they were warning against it, however ineptly. “As such, the events of 1968 were a kind of street theatre acted out by middle-class radicals too addled by theory to see that the real Sixties revolution was taking place, not in the realms of institutional power, but in the minds of ordinary people.” [ibid] 

[3] ibid. pp. 29-30 

[4] Wilson, Colin, Below the Iceberg: Anti-Sartre and other essays, Borgo Press, 1998, p. 106 (the relevant essay was cut from the book that became The Devil’s Party) 

[5] MacDonald, ibid p. 274. He remarks that such procedures are mostly harmless when confined to small gallery or literary audiences. However, he also points out that Revolution 9 is “the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artifact”. 

[6] Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: an archeology of the human sciences, Tavistock Pub. Ltd., 1970, p. xiv, p. 387. Sartre, J. P., Being and Nothingness, Routledge Classics, 2003, p. 636. Wilson, Colin, Beyond the Outsider, Carroll & Graf, 1991, p. 167. Wilson, The New Existentialism, ibid p, 70. 

[7] Wilson, Colin, ‘Existential Psychology: A Novelist’s Approach’ in The Bicameral Critic, Salem House, 1985, p. 52.

[8] Wilson Colin, ‘Phenomenology and Literature’ in  Eagle and Earwig, John Baker, 1965, p. 97

[9] Wilson, The Bicameral Critic, ibid p. 54

“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning” wrote the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1]. Commenting on this famous line in the introduction to the 1965 collection Eagle and Earwig, Colin Wilson remarks that even suicide is a meaningful act. He mentions an “interesting book” entitled Suicide and Scandinavia by Herbert Hendin, who “says that if a man could be interviewed in mid air between the top of a skyscraper and the pavement, his feelings might be very different from those he had a moment before as he prepared to jump”. As Merleau-Ponty says there are no gestures which do not carry meaning – even the embarrassed silence at some political platitude is meaningful in that it expresses an intentional lack of interest, a rejection of what he calls ready-made formulas. Gurdjieff dismissed such artificial things as “the glamour of new slogans” – the shallow imitation of old racial, religious, academic and commercial ideas which would later be known at the end of last century as postmodernism. Like the existentialism that preceded it, the grandly titled ‘postmodern’ trend was based largely on the misunderstanding of an obscure philosophical method known as phenomenology. Colin Wilson soon fitted this useful method to his ‘Outsider’ credo as the sixties dawned but it would be fair to say that very few have really noticed; his summing up of an evolutionary phenomenology (‘new existentialism’) in 1966 still remains little known. In the mid sixties the academy gleefully swallowed discourse, épistémè and deconstruction and now appears to be suffering complications as if from an act of slow self-harm. 

As committed to the phenomenological method as Merleau-Ponty, Wilson knew that this recognition of meaning was obscured by what its founder Edmund Husserl called the natural standpoint or ‘natural’ (sic) or naive attitude. With under appreciated sarcasm Husserl stated that this attitude was the native environment of the ‘naive man’ or ‘normal individual’. Although Wilson did not discover Merleau-Ponty’s influence Husserl until after The Outsider, he admitted that it merely strengthened principles that he had been carrying out for most of his life. In 1957 he had defined an ‘insider’ as someone who “fills his consciousness with a selected ‘order’”, that is to say, a natural-attitude dweller [2]. A year earlier Wilson had imagined this state as a heavily fortified and technologically advanced castle on a remote island – and if this image wasn’t severe enough, the jailer had hypnotised the prisoners so that they believe they are the prison. Perhaps influenced by parables that Gurdjieff told Ouspensky and owing an obvious debt to Plato’s cave, this ‘situation’ (as Wilson calls it) is currently too close to reality to be described as purely metaphorical. 

By 1965 Wilson was describing the natural attitude as a perceptual prison, a “narrow, personal little world that is soon exhausted by the act of living” and he had likewise begun to define his term ‘outsider’ more strictly or rather, more phenomenologically. An outsider is someone who craves to live outside the natural attitude, a metaphorical sea creature who wishes to evolve and live on dry land, the terra firma of the mind and ideas. Sartre’s waiter whose head empties as his cafe clears of customers is totally at home in this “sea of static personality” as it is described in the sixth chapter of The Outsider, a chapter concerned with identity. Against this personal stasis Wilson seeks to find a way back to the “true ‘I’” – a phenomenological statement worthy of the Husserl that Merleau-Ponty admired so much, the later Husserl. In his final book Husserl spoke of a “universal life of self-responsibility” and an ability to “shape oneself into the true ‘I’, the free autonomous ‘I’” [3]. These tasks involve agency and autonomy, but unfortunately such self-motivations are absent from today’s dominant theories about identity which have their roots in ‘old’ (sic) existentialism, post-structuralism and postmodernism. 

Wilson was keen to point out that Husserl’s natural attitude is merely a temporary convenience rather than the eternal truth of the human condition. We naively or naturally think that we interpret reality as neutrally as a camera lens but even a little reflection on this process will show this to be untrue. Perception depends on paying attention, and as soon as we do that we begin to select, filter and distort – Husserl labelled this subliminal process ‘intentionality’. “The natural standpoint is as filtered and distorted with prejudices as the vision of a madman” comments Wilson (the prisoners in the castle think they are the castle). But this is not to say that everything is relative and that reality remains elusive. Husserl proscribed a method to filter out the filtering which is known as bracketing or epoché (suspension or ‘stopping’ – Gurdjieff might have approved). Descartes naively imagined the ‘I think’ as a flat polished mirror which simply reflected reality back to us, but Husserl showed that this ‘mirror’ of consciousness is a variable; sometimes concave, convex, broken into shards, distorted through powerful microscopic and telescopic lenses, covered in layers of dirt – and until we understand and clear away these distortions we will continuously mistake parts off ourselves (our prejudices) for reality itself. All attempts to eradicate individual and social prejudice will fail unless this very deep enigma is thoroughly examined. “If I carry out the [transcendental] reduction for myself” wrote Husserl, “I am not a human ego”. In the chapter on identity Wilson asks the existential question ‘who am I?’ and rejects the usual bourgeois ‘social’ answers, instead accepting that the true ‘I’ is our genuine identity [4]. Like Husserl had said, until we exist in the phenomenological attitude rather than the murky naive attitude, the clarity of genuine (‘first’) thought and philosophy is impossible. 

Wilson calls the natural standpoint ‘Zola’s fallacy’ after the novelist who was part of the literary movement known as realism or more significantly, naturalism. Émile Zola thought of himself as a neutral reporter but his selection of brutal ‘facts’ show a bias toward humanity at its worst. Based on a real criminal case, one novel was an expression of his theory that “love and death, possessing and killing, are the dark foundations of the human soul” [5]. Zola’s naturalism is a good example of the natural standpoint at work. “It is true that he believes in social justice, and it is this concern with human suffering that makes Germinal his masterpiece” writes Wilson. “But his overall view of human existence is still that it is tragic and futile”. Zola thought that to truly see things they must be seen in “as sordid and pessimistic light as possible” he comments. “The phenomenologist’s objection is that the meaninglessness is as imposed as any other meaning. Art therefore cannot be regarded as an escape from reality unless it it is a total rejection of the natural standpoint” – i.e. a rejection of the fallacy of insignificance, the given cultural attitude of ‘meaninglessness’, which according to Merleau-Ponty cannot be taken seriously. 

Husserl himself was a logician and mentioned artists such as Dürer and Böcklin only in passing. Wilson sometimes remarked that Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are rather unsatisfying as philosophers. For instance, neither are as stylistically enthralling as Nietzsche; although Husserl sometimes sounds strangely similar (“calling to us like a mystic voice from a better world … as though such a voice would have something to say to free spirits like us” he writes in the first book of Ideas, § 145). Husserl essentially jotted as he thought – very, very rapidly – and so his philosophy is not a ‘system’ and his terminology is often modified without any warning. Therefore the ‘phenomenology’ (descriptive psychology) of the Logical Investigations is nascent compared to the phenomenology presented in Ideas twelve years later. Wilson thinks that this unsatisfactoriness “is inherent in the nature of the task” and suspects that Husserl was a poet by temperament as he would eventually speak of uncovering the secrets of the transcendental ego (the true ‘I’) with reference to the ‘Mothers’ in the second part of Goethe’s lengthy poem Faust. Goethe was inspired by a passage in Plutarch who described a realm of cosmic truth “wherein lie motionless the causes, forms, and original images of all things, which have been and which shall be” – the Mothers. In the first act (‘A Gloomy Gallery’) Mephistopheles gives Faust a key and tells him that it’s “hidden power” will guide him to these Goddesses. “Then to the deep!” says Mephistopheles. Wilson remarks that the ‘hidden achievements’ of the true ‘I’ and the search for the ‘keepers of the key’ of being are part of Husserl’s feeling that the phenomenological quest would give us the possibility of occult (hidden) experience without recourse to standard yogic or ritual disciplines, two ways that Gurdjieff rejected as partial methods to enlightenment [6]. 

Despite these frustrations – Husserl was working during a chaotic period of European history – Wilson is adamant that Husserl’s method was startlingly brilliant and original and he is correct in saying that Nietzsche would have benefited from it, had he not died in 1900 when the first volume of the Logical Investigations appeared. Husserl’s method quickly sharpened Wilson’s creative ideas into a tool – an adjustable spanner that could both dismantle and assemble or simply knock someone unconscious. Despite his slight criticism Wilson placed Husserl’s method in a central position in his own philosophy of ‘new existentialism’. His real scorn was aimed at overtly academic post-Husserlian thinkers who quickly backed out of the phenomenological journey – Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and avowed anti-phenomenologists like Foucault who “explained how important it was to break off from the phenomenological tradition, I remember his phrase, he ‘emancipated himself from the grips of the transcendental subject’”. Familiarly with his life makes it clear that his statement was little more than a narcissistic pose [7]. The frustrating thing about the existentialism and postmodernism that grew out of or reacted to Husserl’s method is not so much that most of it was such a lifeless, tedious academic bore, it is the fact that virtually all of it fails to grasp what Husserl actually said about this ‘transcendental subject’. The mystifying sight of philosophers-cum-messiahs continuing to frantically pace around the exit that Husserl had already pointed towards is something that Wilson found exasperating, bewildering and not a little bemusing. ‘There is a very clearly marked exit” he wrote at the end of The New Existentialism. Anybody with the strength of insight to break the hypnotic spell of the natural attitude and find the exit is free from the castle. 

[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, RKP, 1967, p. xix 

[2] Colin Wilson, ‘Beyond The Outsider’ in Declaration, MacGibbon and Kee, 1957, p. 36

[3] Colin Wilson ‘The Question of Identity’ in The Outsider, Gollancz, 1956, p. 147. Edmund Husserl, ‘Philosophy as Mankind’s Self Reflection’ in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 338 

[4] Husserl quoted in Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement, first volume, Marcus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1976, p. 203. “The transcendental ego in us is nothing more than the mundane ego; phenomenological reflection is in no way a literal division of consciousness. It is just a reminder that, in the final moment, I am a being that is not completely absorbed into any objectification, thereby preserving my freedom and responsibility”.  Klaus Held, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenological Method’ in The New Husserl, Indiana University Press, 2003, p. 29. In the same sense Wilson has pointed out that religion tends to speak of two ‘worlds’ rather than weaker and stronger (or nearer and further) perceptions of the same world.

[5] The Beast Inside, originally serialised then published as La Bête humaine in 1890. The Zola quote is from the Penguin edition, 1982, p. 7. One of Zola’s warring railway workers, Jacques Lantier, is based upon the French murderer Eusebius Pieydagnelle; see Colin Wilson, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Panther, 1966, p. 176. Wilson recalls his reading of Zola’s novel when he was twenty in The Books in My Life, Hampton Roads, 1998, p. 246. Like today’s left-right political zealots, Zola was obsessed with hereditary. 

[6] Colin Wilson, Introduction to the New Existentialism, Hutchinson, 1966, p. 62. Wilson was referring to Spiegelberg, ibid. p. 160. Spiegelberg comments that Merleau-Ponty helped introduce these ideas via access to Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. For Goethe see Faust Part Two, Penguin, 1967, pp. 15 and 78. 

[7] Jurgen Habermas quoted in James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault, Harper-Collins, 1993, p. 338. Bafflingly, Foucault thought phenomenology “passive rather than active” (ibid. p. 141) and in a footnote Miller comments that in the original French texts Foucault refers to the life-world as le vécu – ‘the lived’ or ‘lived experience’. The latter phrase is now a tiresome glamorous slogan amongst many in the circular anti-arguments of identity politics and has more in common with Zola’s grim obsession with hereditary than with Husserl‘s philosophy of freedom. Wilson correctly described Miller’s book as one of the best philosophical biographies ever written (Wilson, Below The Iceberg, Borgo Press, 1998, p. 85). Like the life of that other pampered bourgeois turned shaven-headed fake messiah Aleister Crowley, it is a sordid story of ever-diminishing returns, though not as fascinating or exciting.

Gurdjieff once “made something altogether impossible” when attempting to pronounce the title of Ouspensky’s early masterpiece Tertium Organum and remarked that if his pupil had understood everything he had written in it, he would reverse roles and beg Ouspensky to teach him. “But” he said “you do not understand either what you read or what you write. You do not even understand what the word ‘understand’ means”. Like most of Gurdjieff’s recorded utterances this is a penetrating insight. And while Colin Wilson held Gurdjieff in extremely high regard he also offered his own valuable critique, dismantling Gurdjieff’s stern description of ‘mechanical’ man via the more subtle analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology.

Wilson was in no doubt of Gurdjieff’s strange and enigmatic genius. In his exhaustive history of occultism (1971) Gurdjieff is described as the greatest magician encountered in that large book, with the likes of Blavatsky and Crowley relegated to status of “talented eccentrics”. Certainly, Ouspensky’s indispensable account of Gurdjieff’s ideas, In Search of the Miraculous, is notable for its sober, precise tone. Gurdjieff’s direct statements are free of the hectoring irrationalism of The Secret Doctrine (“And we ask the materialists: Have you ever seen Ether, or your Atoms, or, again, your FORCE?”) or the tiresome egocentricity of Crowley (“The grotesque barber Alliette, the obscurely perverse Wirth, the poseur-fumiste Peladan, dawn to the verbose ignorance of such Autolycus-quacks as Raffalovitch and Ouspensky”). Reading Ouspensky’s book after overdosing on ‘classic’ occult literature is like opening a window in a stuffy, overheated room. Wilson commended the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead for his expressive precision – such as describing Latin as a tightly packed suitcase and English as luggage with its contents strewn around the room – and rightly celebrated Ouspensky for the same reason.

Gurdjieff not only tops Wilson’s list of occultists. His system is described as “the complete, ideal Existenzphilosophie” in Wilson’s own existential salvo The Outsider, which is not bad considering that Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Sartre are also discussed. And in a short biographical study of Gurdjieff (1980) Wilson describes his system as “the greatest single-handed attempt in the history of human thought to make us aware of the potential of human consciousness”. The phrase ‘single-handed’ could perhaps refer to Gurdjieff’s rather mysterious origins and the unique presentation of his ideas, while the use of the word ‘potential’ recalls Wilson’s connection with Maslow’s humanistic psychology. In fact, Wilson basically regards Gurdjieff as a highly original psychologist: after all, the Work deals in self-actualisation. But like all the other thinkers he analysed both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky are treated as part of larger philosophical picture. So despite his high praise Wilson came to believe that they both based their ideas on unnecessarily pessimistic foundations – i.e. that man is a machine, a somewhat reductionist metaphor which has stunted philosophical endeavour since Descartes first used it. Looking back on this ‘age of machinery’ in his book on Maslow, Wilson remarked that it has taken almost three centuries for psychology to assert that human beings posses a mind and a will. 

This overt use of the human-as-machine metaphor can be corrupting. Ouspensky’s question and answer sessions, posthumously documented in The Fourth Way, are nowhere near as exhilarating as In Search of the Miraculous or for that matter, his pre-Gurdjieff works. Books such as Tertium Organum, A New Model of the Universe, the novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and the two amusing short stories collected in Talks with a Devil show that Ouspensky was a romantic wanderer of the Hermann Hesse type (read, for instance, his poetic thoughts on the ‘fashions of nature’ in the first chapter of A New Model of the Universe). Perhaps, as Wilson suggested in his study of Ouspensky (1993), meeting ‘G’ was not necessarily a good thing for a such a temperament. Never a member of any Gurdjieff group, Wilson could honestly describe his friendly relations with several devotees and observe that they hadn’t quite found what they were seeking, despite sitting at the feet of both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. 

Gurdjieff’s starting point is that we are mechanical. We are sleeping automatons like one of those semi-aware simulacrums in Philip K. Dick’s science fiction stories. In The Outsider Wilson remarks that Gurdjieff’s idea “seems to be no more than the blackest pessimism” but goes on to describe the startlingly original methods to wake up from of this – the system, the Work or the Fourth Way. As previously noted there is no better introduction to it than Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, where as Wilson notes, he is Plato to Gurdjieff’s Socrates. But as he later observed this over-stressing of mechanicalness is no way to start: he thinks that Ouspensky would have been better off meeting someone like Rudolf Steiner. Like Husserl and Freud Steiner was once a pupil of Franz Brentano, a key influence on Husserl’s development of phenomenology, first as a descriptive psychology then as the drastic Erste Philosophie of the later years. Brentano’s stamp can also be felt in Steiner’s early book The Philosophy of Freedom. Both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky could almost be as paternally dogmatic as Freud in over-stressing the helplessly mechanical nature of humanity. Gurdjieff’s assertion that it is better to scrub floors consciously rather than write books mechanically is satirically spot-on but would we really wish to replace the finest things in our rich cultural heritage with some neatly polished floors?

Knowledge of Husserl’s method of intentional consciousness would have doubtless freed Ouspensky from his formal dogmatism (his lectures reminded one pupil of his own cheerless Presbyterian childhood in Scotland). Yet ironically enough, Ouspensky had almost grasped this principle of intentionality in his own books. Tertium Organum has a different heading on every right hand page, so in the section entitled ‘What is Materiality?’ he writes that “we segregate a small number of facts into a definite group” – Husserl’s selective perception, but probably arrived at via Ouspensky’s reading of Nietzsche (“there are no facts, only interpretations”). Later (‘The World of Causes and the All’) he states that what we take for ‘the world’ is “merely our incorrect perception” of a larger, total world. Husserl himself would have easily understood what was meant by this “wondrous” larger world. For Wilson this recognition of a larger, more wonderful ‘world’ – rather, a broader perception than our usual narrow everyday beam – is the driving force behind true poetry and is the foundation of all mystical experiences. 

Near the end of his life Ouspensky essentially renounced Gurdjieff’s system and suggested that his pupils find their own methods.

Wilson is correct to elevate Gurdjieff above all other occultists, but quite frankly it’s hardly stiff completion. Gurdjieff’s biographer James Webb once defined revived occultism as ‘rejected knowledge’. It is obvious that Gurdjieff’s ideas stand apart from this usual rehash of formulae found in occult literature. Wilson’s earlier description of the Work as “the ideal, complete” existential philosophy is given weight by the stark language used throughout Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s dialogues. “Man In himself is not one, he is not ‘I’, he is ‘we’, or to speak more correctly, he is ‘they’”, “the actual situation of humanity”, “contemporary culture requires automatons” – and so on. However, with his post-Outsider discovery of Husserl’s method this allusion would be modified. 

In The Unknowable Gurdjieff, Margaret Anderson describes her reaction to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. “I read on and on – discovering, indeed, ‘nothingness’”, and enthusiastically quotes Gurdjieff’s own distaste for philosophy. But further on we read her comment on Gurdjieff’s methods. “To SEE is passive. To LOOK is active”, a phenomenological statement if there ever was one. Anderson’s thoughts on Sartre’s magnum opus aren’t too far from Wilson’s own, but when she paraphrases Gurdjieff’s attitude towards this active looking, there is a notable difference. “Live a life of friction. Let yourself be disturbed as much as possible, but observe”. Wilson analysed many people living frictional lives, observing and disturbing themselves (and others) but none really found the answer they were expecting. This paradox is illustrated in the case-histories of the Outsider books and in the true-crime volumes. “The whole history of humanity is ‘the history of crime’” wrote Ouspensky in his study of eternal recurrence. Wilson once wrote a vast history of crime (1985) but he was more optimistic than Ouspensky, understanding crime as a defect of perception, the price we pay for narrow, rational vision. Therefore ‘active looking’, what Husserl called intentionality, is the key. Frictional living or disturbing ourselves are as unnecessary as the fakir’s bed of nails or the monk’s hair shirt, both rejected as partial ‘ways’ by Gurdjieff. According to him, the ‘Fourth Way’ reaches all sides of our being simultaneously. This simultaneous perception runs through Ouspensky’s own early works and is also analysed with typical thoroughness by Husserl. 

In The Occult Wilson critiques the idea that Gurdjieff was ‘unknowable’ or that his system is beyond human comprehension. “There are even vital matters upon which he was relatively ignorant”: the most important being Husserl’s discovery of the workings of intentionality. “As I go through conscious, everyday life, I am unaware of the amount of deliberate work I am putting into ‘living’”. This deliberate work is intentional, through we usually mistake it as passive or mechanical. Wilson thinks Gurdjieff grasped the latter point but not quite the former. Husserl’s importance lies in the fact that he cleared the philosophical ground of all the useless clutter and debris that had been accumulating since Descartes had first erroneously suggested that humans are machines. In his own analysis of intentional consciousness and it’s role in evolution (Beyond The Outsider, 1965) Wilson uses Husserl’s phenomenological method to dismantle man-machine philosophy. He insists that what we understand as ‘mechanisms’ are willed intentions which were originally learned, slowly or clumsily, but which soon become habitual due to repetitive effort. These habits have become ‘mechanical’ but they are not mechanisms as they were brought into being by an intentional process. Basic ‘mechanical’ (sic) or ‘robotic’ skills like driving or typing could be on the uppermost layers, but like archeological strata deeper intentions descend back to our prehistory, phenomenologically speaking. Wilson’s books such as Origins of the Sexual Impulse and The Occult are essentially attempts to describe these descending layers, via case-histories (the ‘lived philosophy’ of The Outsider et al). In making his ‘robot’ layers of compacted intentions Wilson avoids the usual literal-minded technological metaphors of the behaviourist (significantly, J. B. Watson was baffled or possibly offended at a reading by Gurdjieff). The subtle difference between the terms mechanical and robotic can be understood by recalling Wilson’s interest in the cybernetic theories of Dr. David Foster in the early seventies. In his Gurdjieff study a decade later Wilson says that Gurdjieff would have happily used a computer rather than machine metaphor had he lived closer to our time. A programme suggests a programmer; a ‘controlling consciousness’ i.e. Husserl’s transcendental ego. As Husserl tirelessly reminded us, this state marks the beginning and not the culmination of the phenomenological ‘first philosophy’. A mere starting point and not a blissful end-goal.

According to Wilson mechanisms, so-called, are willed intentions which have become automated (‘habits’) so stressing our mechanicalness is therefore unnecessarily over-dramatic, and worse, untrue. Despite the brilliant originality which excited Ouspensky so much, the Work is tainted by a basic and needless misconception, one that Husserl set out to destroy at the same time that Ouspensky was searching jungles and deserts for anything miraculous. Husserl also attacked the positivism which Ouspensky mocked in Tertium Organum and in Talks With a Devil (where the devil himself states that he is a positivist). “Positivism” says Husserl in his final, uncompleted book, “decapitates philosophy”. But Husserl strove for exacting description of things. ”Generally speaking” starts Ouspensky, “everything said in words regarding the world of causes is likely to seem absurd, and is in reality it’s mutilation” – a very strong word, also used by Husserl in the Sixth Investigation of the Logical Investigations [§ 29]. “The truth is impossible to express” continues Ouspensky, “it is possible only to give a hint at it…” Describing “mutilated” or partial intuitions, Husserl states that a true or adequate perception depends on the grasp we have on the object (“grasps it more and more vividly and fully” he says). This grasp requires a more complex act than our usual passive perception where an object is merely ‘there’ in, Husserl says, “it’s unenriched familiarity”. What Husserl is saying is not far from Ouspensky’s own arguments, but making statements like ‘truth is impossible to express’ or that humans are sleeping automatons is something he would have regarded as philosophically irresponsible. As Wilson says, we cannot be making such overarching statements until we have a fully functioning consciousness, Husserl’s starting point, the transcendental ego. 

As Wilson comments, Ouspensky essentially ‘knew’ this. A section in Tertium Organum with the misleading heading ‘Body, Soul, Spirit’ bears this out. “in saying ‘I’, a man means […] that which is in a given moment is in the focus of his consciousness” – in other words our ‘focus’ is what Husserl meant by intentionality, what we choose to focus on. But such important values “usually refer not at all to every side of his being simultaneously, but merely to some small and insignificant facet, which at a given moment holds the focus of consciousness and subjects to itself all the rest, until it in turn is forced out by another equally insignificant facet”. These differing ‘I’s’ in Gurdjieff’s sense are the same as Husserl’s intentions towards objects or situations as perceived in time-consciousness (another of Ouspensky’s obsessions – “which at a given moment…”). The key word is ‘holds’ – intentional consciousness grasps or handles perceptions in a tactile sense. Tertium Organum, A New Model of the Universe and In Search of the Miraculous are replete with these ‘phenomenological’ insights. The first chapter of New Model compares these different ‘I’s’ to a Tower of Babel, an image also used by Wilson to describe the post-Kant, pre-Husserl philosophical mess. 

Anybody who has attempted to read part one of Gurdjieff’s unfinished trilogy All and Everything will see a stylistic parallel with Heidegger’s Being and Time (another unfinished book: only the first part was completed). Gurdjieff’s huge tome even has its own separate indexical guide (1971) to help neophytes with the bizarre terminology. Such neologisms – “Being-as-having-been” (Heidegger), “Required-intensity-of-ableness” (Gurdjieff) – aren’t that different from the passage of Sartre that Margaret Anderson derisively quoted in her book (“a being-which-is-not-what-it-is” etc). Wilson himself makes use of simpler neologisms occasionally – ‘close-upness’, ‘upside-downness’ – and has often pointed out another similarity between Gurdjieff and Heidegger. Both suggested that the best way to wake from sleep or forgetfulness would be to become intensely aware of our own death – “useful” thinks Wilson, “but not very helpful”. Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene both toyed with imminent death and it hardly changed them. Despite the big game hunting and the Russian roulette they remained in what Husserl would call the natural standpoint or naive attitude; Gurdjieff’s ‘mechanicalness’, dependent on outer stimuli and situations. Husserl would suggest moving out of this into phenomenological consciousness and Gurdjieff and Ouspensky would recommend practising  ‘self-remembering’. Both involve a careful standing apart from our usual attitudes: Ouspensky had already spoke about standing outside ourselves when he was writing about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Wilson noted that the young Nietzsche was constantly attempting to capture this state through his own self-dramatisation. His term ‘Outsider’ means someone who stands outside regular perceptive attitudes, not a mere eccentric. 

Near the end of chapter nine in Miraculous, Gurdjieff tells Ouspensky that without sufficient preparation ‘ecstatic’ experiences are useless. “Only very seldom does it happen that a mind which has been better prepared succeeds in grasping and remembering something of what was felt and understood at the moment of ecstasy”.  Even so, he says, this is usually translated back into distorted three-dimensional consciousness via everyday language and ordinary concepts. Ouspensky’s early books are essential for understanding this dimensional consciousness although Wilson would probably describe these as layers rather than dimensions. For Ouspensky existence on one dimension or plane is the ‘blandest’ whereas on the fourth (or beyond) an infinitely richer simultaneous perception is achieved. This is the same spirit as Husserl’s ingenuous overturning of Descartes’ idea of the cogito as a flat plane mirror merely reflecting reality. 

An intentional consciousness will indeed be better prepared at ‘grasping’ these moments: Wilson’s writings are full of creative people who did. Husserl means the same thing when he insists that a firmly intentional grasp requires a more complex action than passively normal or naive conscious acts. “Generally the greatest energy will be displayed by the act-character which comprehends and subsumes all partial acts in it’s unity – whether it be particular act-intention like joy, or a form of unity that pervades all parts of the whole act” [1]. Blake said that energy is eternal delight and Wilson remarks that his devilish statement “anticipates the method of phenomenology, and the realisation that the ‘filter’ [i.e. an unconscious will that selects, like the ‘spectre’ In Blake] becomes more ruthless as the mind grows tired”. Alfred North Whitehead thought the same. An energetic optimism is needed to drive ‘real perception’ and despite Ouspensky’s obvious debt to Nietzsche, this joyful wisdom is mostly absent from his book of lectures, The Fourth Way. 

“Our energy” said Gurdjieff to Ouspensky “in one or another direction which suddenly increases and afterwards just as suddenly weakens; our moods which ‘become better’ or ‘become worse’ without any visible reason; our feelings, our desires, our intentions, our decisions – all from time to time pass through periods of ascent or descent, become stronger or weaker”. For Gurdjieff this is part of a cosmic law which he suggests was part of ancient knowledge. His thoughts on moods are similar to those of Heidegger in Being and Time [V § 29] but Wilson has criticised this by describing ‘moods’ as intentional value judgements (because, like Gurdjieff’s conflicting ‘I’s’, each mood “seems to offer [us] a different piece of advice on the question of how to live”). Gurdjieff describes our intentions becoming stronger or weaker but the simple solution to this problem would be to follow Husserl and strengthen the intention. As for ‘laws’, Wilson said of the phenomenological method that “in attempting to discover laws it is not unlikely that we shall discover that we are the makers of the laws”. Phenomenologically speaking we cannot comment on any ‘cosmic laws’ until we have a stable consciousness.  

Armed with Husserl’s method the problem of multiple, conflicting ‘I’s’ can be clearly understood as simply different viewpoints of the same object or situation. In Tertium Organum (‘Personal Emotions’) Ouspensky writes that the “constant shifting of emotions, each of which calls itself I and strives to establish power over man, is the chief obstacle to the establishment of a constant I”. Correct, but none of these selective viewpoints are trying to “establish power over man” like Cthulhu did with Randolph Carter; they are merely different viewpoints which can be controlled with careful phenomenological practice. To understand what we do strive for, read on for a Husserl quote from Ideas [§ 96] below. 

The first practical discipline of Wilson’s new existentialism, influenced by Husserl’s techniques, is to become aware of the intentionality in all conscious acts. Constant awareness and meditation (in the philosophical rather than yogic sense) on this strengthens the ability to grasp experience. There is no need for ‘shocks’, no need to live ‘frictionally’ or to disturb ourselves. Practised use of this ‘phenomenological faculty’ certainly changes daily experience in a subtle manner. It soon becomes difficult to accept that we are passive victims of life – how can we be if we ‘intend’ or build the structure of our own life-world? This is the first responsibility.

Wilson was more concerned with this ‘everyday’ practicality rather than with the overwhelming ecstasies of Proust, William James and all the poets and mystics he wrote about. Discussing Gurdjieff in The Outsider he focuses on ‘self-remembering’, with the further state of ‘objective consciousness’ put aside for the time being. As Gurdjieff more or less said to Ouspensky, mystical ecstatics are fine, but if we cannot grasp them they flow though our fingers like fine sand. The trick is to learn to grasp, to hold. But neither this nor the constant awareness of the intentional nature of perception that precedes it can be put into operation under a negative ‘victim’ mentality, the kind that Wilson labelled the age of defeat. As this unfortunately describes our own time more thoroughly than the post-war years Wilson was writing in, developing the phenomenological faculty is a challenge which only very serious outsiders will accept. As previously noted, Wilson’s term ‘Outsider’ refers to someone practising these phenomenological disciplines rather than any regular misfit. Outsiders are outside of what Husserl called the natural standpoint, not outside of society. “At first glance, the Outsider is a social problem” begins Wilson’s debut. But as the book and its series progress, this first glance is proven incorrect. The real problem is with consciousness itself, not it’s outward manifestations. 

One example of intentionality in action Wilson gives in the ‘practical disciplines’ section of The New Existentialism (at the beginning of the second part) is “reading the political news in various newspapers, or listening to speeches by members of opposed political parties”. Any “intelligent person practices an intellectual kind of phenomenology as a matter of course” he commented in 1966. This is already becoming a rare skill in the 21st century thanks to the new media. “There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilisations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture” said Gurdjieff to Ouspensky a century ago. “Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity in the matter of knowledge”. The age of defeat is the information age, after all. “Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilisations”. Gurdjieff was obviously referring to valuable ‘esoteric’ knowledge back then and he was indeed correct as the occult revival (theosophy and it’s variants) preceded the gigantic events which provide a backdrop to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s working relationship: the Bolshevik Revolution and the First World War. However, this type of apocalyptic warning is now everywhere in the “very great quantity” of information itself – these words about the fall of cultures and civilisations could have appeared in any recent broadsheet. “Phrases, phrases, sympathetic, critical, ironical, blatant, pompous, lying and, worst of all, utterly automatic, phrases which have been used a thousand times before and will be used again on entirely different, perhaps contradictory, occasions” – this is Ouspensky remembering his days as a journalist circa 1906. Nothing has changed apart from the speedier method of delivery. Gurdjieff himself would very probably say that the outward form has changed, but not the ‘essence’. 

A more realistic appraisal of our predicament is found in the last few words from Wilson’s occult trilogy – that is, as long as we accept our mental stagnation as ‘normal’ we will continue to mark time, as far as our evolution goes. This is obviously less scintillating than the atmosphere of apocalyptic doom ‘n gloom that vies for attention on our screens, but nevertheless it is far more accurate. 

Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that there cannot be any “compulsory” mechanical evolution. “Evolution is the result of conscious struggle”, the power of ‘doing’ and this doing or willing “cannot be the result of things which ‘happen’”. In Wilson’s phenomenological existentialism things do not just ‘happen’ as we innocently presume because phenomenology is the study of how (not ‘why’) things appear in our consciousness [2]. “In that case” writes Wilson, “some phenomenologist of the future will have difficulty in making [infants] understand that reading is ‘intentional’, not something that just ‘happens’ when the eye falls on written language”. In our own time we forget just how intentional, prejudiced and selective our perceptual lives are and view ourselves as victims of things which happen to us, passively. “We think of reality as a bully” says Wilson. But Brentano and Husserl reversed this: “it is our minds that are the bullies” (Wilson’s satirical horror novel The Mind Parasites plays on this irony). So claiming to be a ‘victim’ of reality makes no real philosophical sense. Performing the phenomenological operation is the equivalent of swimming against a current, or going against evolution, if evolution means entropy, that is. Obviously, it didn’t for Gurdjieff, Ouspensky or Wilson. 

“Nature does not need this evolution; it does not want it and struggles against it” says Gurdjieff. This evolution is the development of possibilities “which never develop by themselves, that is, mechanically” – therefore these evolutionary possibilities are intentional. “There is, and there can be, no other kind of evolution whatever”. In Beyond the Outsider Wilson refers to an ‘intentional evolutionary structure’ which is doubtless influenced by Gurdjieff’s pronouncements as much as Husserl’s methods (and those of that other philosopher-turned-mathematician, Whitehead). Husserl, In the first book of Ideas [§ 96] describes you, the phenomenologist, as an explorer of these new structures. “But one thing we may and must strive for: that at each step we faithfully describe what we, from our point of view and after the most serious study, actually see”. This is what we strive for – control over differing perceptive angles or ‘I’s’ (Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’) into “a life of universal self-responsibility, and correlatively, to shape oneself into the true ‘I’ , the free autonomous ‘I’” [3]. 

“Experiencing” says Husserl “in general, living as an ego (thinking, valuing, acting) – I am necessarily an ‘I’ that has it’s ‘thou,’ it’s ‘we,’ it’s ‘you’ – the ‘I’ or the personal pronouns. And equally necessarily, I am and we are, in the community of egos, correlates of everything to which we address ourselves as existing in the world” [4]. Ouspensky sounded uncharacteristically Lovecraftian when he said that these conflicting ‘I-viewpoints’ strive to establish power over man but Lovecraft himself introduced his most celebrated Mythos tale with the baleful statement that the most merciful thing in the world is the mind’s inability to correlate all it’s contents. However without this correlative aptitude we will never be able to explore these new relational structures. In his letters, Lovecraft referred to himself as a “rational indifferentist”. He was living below what Wilson called the indifference threshold (the latter word used in many Mythos tales, of course). Wilson’s threshold is also known as ‘the law of entropy in prehension’ – prehension being Whitehead’s ‘eating’ of experience, not too far a step from Husserl’s grasping of the same (in his cosmology, Gurdjieff insisted that sleeping humans are ‘food for the moon’). Under the indifference threshold we are only moved to action – and then, ironically, to optimism – by crisis or other negative situations. Wilson was adamant that it is the force or intention of the action and not the crisis or external event that triggers the optimism. As a self proclaimed indifferentist Lovecraft claimed to be neither optimist or pessimist, but it is obvious from reading his tales that he lived mostly under the indifference threshold like the narrator of Sartre’s Nausea, bewildered in a world of alien objects. Of course, Sartre himself famously said he had never felt so free as when he was living the ‘frictional’ life during the Second World War In Occupied France. 

We are in the position of those future infants who do not realise that reading was originally a slowly learned intentional activity. Like them, we think that things just ‘happen’, unaware of the complex layers of intentional effort which brought reading (for instance) into being. These are the possibilities “which never develop by themselves” – our intentional evolutionary structure. If we cease to think of these as mechanisms and instead understand them as programmable intentions, then the possibilities are endless, but this ‘understanding’ must be the kind that Gurdjieff was hinting at when he mispronounced Tertium Organum. In his novel Ivan Osokin Ouspensky writes “I want you to understand that when I speak about knowing, I do not mean the sort of knowing which, in reality, is only supposition.” Nietzsche claimed that neither science nor philosophy have been free of presuppositions. “He was right”, remarked Wilson, “this is inevitably so before Husserl”. Starting his work proper with the Logical Investigations, published in the year of Nietzsche”s passing, Husserl prepares the reader for his first Investigation with a section [§ 7] on the principle of freedom from presuppositions which “only seeks to express the strict exclusion of all statements not permitting of a comprehensive phenomenological realisation”. Phenomenology attempts to describe our inner states minus any subjective distortions. By the time of his final work The Crisis of European Sciences Husserl discusses [§ 69] the idea of the ‘disinterested observer’ who views the “outer surface of the spiritual world, which first becomes visible to him, and only gradually do the intentional depths open themselves up”. Without this self-observation, Wilson thinks, we will be continuously – philosophically speaking – mistaking parts of ourselves for an alien or intruder, alienated and ‘victimised’ by reality [5]. 

So Wilson thinks that the knowledge or understanding that Gurdjieff and Ouspensky spoke of is indeed possible to attain via intellectual means – for as he says in Beyond the Outsider, once properly understood, Husserl’s phenomenological intentionality will be ‘lived by’ and not merely speculative. This is a practical, immediate aim, free of the tinge of religious pessimism that runs through Gurdjieff’s cosmology and Ouspensky’s ‘Calvinistic’ interpretation. Now, this is in no way to discredit any of their achievements as there is no doubt whatsoever that Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s central ideas tower over almost everything from the occult revival, in terms of originality and intellectual possibilities. And the potentialities they discuss are in truth more exciting than the dour post-Husserl existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre and more useful than the trend of anti-intentional postmodernism that followed. “Let us give them their due” says Beelzebub to his grandson; “during recent centuries [humans] have really mostly artistically mechanised themselves to see nothing real”. And of course Gurdjieff and Ouspensky’s influence on Colin Wilson’s own new existentialist philosophy is notable, despite his later criticisms. If anything, Wilson genuinely added to the usefulness of the Work when he brought in Husserl’s phenomenological analysis. “As long as we remain passive” Gurdjieff said in the third part of All and Everything, “we shall have in the course of our further existence to submit slavishly to every caprice of all sorts of blind events”. But, if we strive to understand our ‘I’ – “you who have cognised this – should not be greatly, as it is said, ‘disheartened’ and should not fall into the so-called ‘pessimism’ prevalent everywhere in the abnormal life of people […] even for you, everything is not yet lost”.

*The ‘glamour of new slogans’ – Ouspensky, Miraculous, p. 60

[1] Husserl on the “function of attention in complex acts”. Logical Investigations vol. II,, Investigation V § 19 (RKP, 1970, p. 582) 

[2] “According to the scientific method, ‘Why?’ often demands an unnecessary amount of theorising, but ‘How?’ can be observed by anyone who goes to enough trouble”. Colin Wilson, Beyond The Outsider, Carroll & Graf, 1991, p. 82. And: “the ‘how’ of the appearance the surrounding world” – Husserl on the ‘new method’ of descriptive science. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 330

[3] ibid. p. 338

[4] ibid. p. 335

[5] See ‘The Problem of Vision’ section in the third chapter of Wilson’s Origins of the Sexual Impulse. 

The notes [§ -] reference relevant sections in the books mentioned. 

Also used: 

Anderson, Margaret – The Unknowable Gurdjieff (RKP, 1962) 

Blavatsky, H. P. – The Secret Doctrine (Theosophical Pub. House, 1938) 

Crowley, Aleister – The Book of Thoth (Kashmarin Press, 1969) 

Heidegger, Martin – Being and Time (Blackwell 2004) 

Husserl, Edmund – Ideas, First Book (Martinus Niijhoff, 1983)

Gurdjieff, G. I. – All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, (RKP 1956);

Gurdjieff, G. I. – Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am’ (Triangle Editions, 1975) 

Lovecraft, H. P. – ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ in The Haunter of the Dark and other tales (Panther, 1970)

Lovecraft, H. P. – Selected Letters vol. III (Arkham House, 1971)

Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science (Cambridge University Press, 2001) 

[no author] – Guide & Index to Gurdjieff’s All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (Traditional Studies Press, 1971) 

Ouspensky, P. D. – Tertium Organum (RKP, 1957)

Ouspensky, P. D. – A New Model of the Universe (RKP, 1953)

Ouspensky, P. D. – In Search of the Miraculous (RKP, 1950)

Ouspensky, P. D. – The Fourth Way (RKP, 1972)

Ouspensky, P. D. – The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin (Penguin, 1971)

Ouspensky, P. D. – Talks with a Devil (Arkana, 1988)

Spiegelberg, H. – The Phenomenological Movement (Martinus Niijhoff,, 1976) 

Walker, Kenneth – Venture with Ideas (Spearman, 1973)

Webb, James – The Occult Establishment (Open Court, 1988) 

Wilson, Colin – The ‘Outsider Series’ (7 volumes), The Mind Parasites, The Occult, The War Against Sleep, A Criminal History of Mankind, Rudolf Steiner: The Man and his Vision, Beyond the Occult, ‘Husserl and Evolution’ in Existentially Speaking, The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky (cf Wilson’s bibliography here) 

The projected documentary on the life and work of Colin Wilson has achieved it’s financial goal via a combination of a crowdfunding campaign and from a very generous benefactor. The film will go ahead this year. This very interesting development deserves some reflection on Wilson’s main ideas and their relevance to today. 

“Human beings of the 21st century will be born into a forbidding world: a civilisation that is immense, aloof, heartless, and highly mechanised” wrote Colin Wilson in 1970, a fairly accurate prediction now that we’re living in it. The ‘attention economy’ is one description of this era and as one of Wilson’s primary concerns was with the fluctuations of attention in consciousness, it’s worthwhile looking into his arguments for strengthening our grip on reality. 

Nietzsche made the distinction between freedom from and freedom for. The first is negative and passive; the idea that if we throw off our chains we will be ‘free’. This was satirised by Dostoyevsky in The Devils (“We shall reduce everything to one common denominator. Full equality”) and Nietzsche dismissed it in Zarathustra (i.e. ‘On The Tarantulas’ in the second part). Wilson demonstrated it’s faults by acknowledging the ‘romantic’ origin of last century’s crime explosion and all it’s unpleasant excesses when he said that Rousseau’s “muddied anti-authoritarianism [has] created a reservoir of resentment” which is now a commonly held attitude. But Nietzsche knew that freedom is a creative act – his ironic line about throwing away values by casting off chains and Zarathustra’s question  ‘free for what?’ appears in the section ‘On the Way of the Creator’. This question was analysed via the lives of creative people in Wilson’s first book The Outsider, a meditation on identity and values. That and Wilson’s subsequent writings are concerned with the puzzle of ‘freedom’. Discussing Dostoyevsky in The Outsider Wilson remarks that “freedom is the greatest burden of all”.  We want it more than anything but when we get it, it bores us quickly. What goes wrong? Wilson thinks a quirk in perception is the problem – we have developed a strong ability to focus on minor details which has weakened our understanding of any larger patterns of meaning. Negative values (freedom from) dominate over positive (freedom for). Like Nietzsche Wilson was concerned with a re-evaluation of our values, from negative to positive. This fairly straightforward insight powers most of his output.

He cheerfully admitted that this ‘single obsessional idea’ held his large body of work together, despite the seemingly diffuse subjects he covered. Essentially a philosopher, he wrote fiction and literary criticism as well as criminology, psychology, ‘occultism’, biographies and autobiographies, and one-off examinations on everything from alcohol to astronomy. Once a common tactic in the era of ‘men of letters’ this has now fallen into disrepute in an era of academic specialisation (back in 1970 Wilson thought there would be a “discouraging amount” of this in the 21st century and unfortunately he was right). Therefore this specialisation itself is something of a handicap when it comes to understanding what Wilson actually did. Readers who specialise in one thing only – say, Jung or Jack the Ripper – will only know one or two of Wilson’s books and make the presumption that he was trying to be an expert on one or too many things. Unable to see the larger pattern of his work (which he called ‘an existential jigsaw puzzle’) they usually dismiss him as unacademic for refusing to concentrate on one subject only. Ironically enough this is the very thing that Wilson was concerned with as a philosopher, how consciousness can sharply focus on details at the expense of broader meanings. Science would be impossible without this attention to detail but the drawback with this attitude is that it makes judgements on the ‘meaninglessness’ of everything appear more plausible. Two mathematicians turned philosophers, A. N. Whitehead and Edmund Husserl, were also concerned with this tricky problem, and Wilson pays back the debt by making their ideas central to his own investigations. 

Wilson became first known as Britain’s only home grown existentialist and this a fair description. In terms of his public image in English speaking countries he is generally known for the successes of his first book The Outsider (1956) and The Occult (1971) when he was welcomed back into the fold by the same critics who dismissed the sequels to his debut. But this regular interpretation obscures a few things. Firstly, The Outsider was only one part of a seven volume series which took ten years to complete. The seventh volume, Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966) summarises all six previous titles and is both the starting point for understanding Wilson’s own philosophy (in part two of the book) and a superb primer for Husserl and his method in part one. New readers should really start with this slim volume and then tackle The Outsider and the other five books (the first has never been out of print, the rest are currently undergoing a reissue programme). Secondly, The Occult was Wilson’s first commissioned book. So for the first fifteen years of his career he essentially wrote what he wanted; 1956 to 1971 is perhaps the purest expression of his interests in both his non-fiction and the novels. This is not in any way to denigrate the work after 1971 – far from it – but afterwards it becomes more necessary to sort major from minor works as Wilson’s productivity increased. Despite that, the ‘central obsession’ never flagged until Wilson ceased to write around 2011 due to a crippling stroke (he died in 2013). 

Part one of The New Existentialism (as it’s usually referred to) remains a brilliantly concise introduction to the method of phenomenology. Wilson had noted in 1966 that such a thing was non-existent as far as the non-academic reader was concerned, and the situation has hardly improved in the past half-century. As one commentator on existentialism has noted, Husserl’s difficult method is easier to betray than to follow, and Wilson illustrates this problem by including a brief history of the phenomenological movement in the first part of his book. Considering that The New Existentialism was originally only 188 pages long, it’s quite an achievement. A new introduction to the reprint of 2018 notes that Wilson revisited and re-wrote quite a lot of it which was unusual for him. It’s also pointed out that the book enables the reader to put these ‘phenomenological’ methods into practice immediately – which it does – and indeed the second part even suggests some practical disciples for everyday use. 

Husserl himself wrote (or rather lectured) a few introductions to his method, most notably the Cartesian Meditations in the late 1920’s. But as Wilson said in his own book none are useful to the beginner, despite Husserl’s keenness to stress that phenomenology is the most useful method in all philosophy. “If the right attitude has been won, and made secure by practice, above all, however, if one has acquired the courage to obey the clear eidetic data with a with a radical lack of prejudice so as to be unencumbered by all current and learned theories, then firm results are directly produced…” (Husserl, Ideas I § 87). “The first practical necessity for the existential philosopher is to become conscious of the intentionality of all his conscious acts” (Wilson, The New Existentialism, part two, chapter one). Wilson says elsewhere that the gift of existentialism and the phenomenological method that preceded it was in it’s recognition that it is not the ‘senses’ that distort reality – as previous philosophers had thought – but in it’s insight that the ‘distorting medium’ is active human intentionality. Wilson offers a wonderful metaphor for intentionality in his book. Descartes’ cogito is like a detective questioning a room of suspects, weighing up the evidence and trying to get to the truth by doubting everybody and their excuses that they are innocent. But Husserl has pointed out that there is something that Descartes didn’t doubt – his own innocence. “Husserl has suggested a new and disturbing possibility. Suppose the detective himself is the murderer?” Nietzsche claimed that there never has been a science free of suppositions and that all philosophy is really just the autobiography of philosophers themselves. Wilson thinks this is a fair criticism, but only when aimed at the immediate period before Husserl ‘invented’ his phenomenological method (i.e before 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death and the publication of the first volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations). “It was Husserl who pointed out this simple mistake that had kept philosophy at a standstill for two hundred years” –  and Wilson wrote a brilliantly informative and amusing chapter on this ‘strange story of modern philosophy’ in the preceding Outsider volume in 1965. Descartes had said that the only thing which we can be certain of is our consciousness – ‘cogito ergo sum’ – and that philosophy should primarily study consciousness, but this is the very thing he neglected to do! It took a few centuries for Husserl to point out that consciousness is not a flat, passive reflection but an active distorter of reality. Wilson summarised this insight with his maxim ‘perception is intentional’. Becoming aware of these intentional distortions is the first practical discipline of Wilson’s new existentialist philosophy, the basis of his life’s work, whatever the subject. Quite frankly, it’s not that difficult – no more than learning a foreign language or appreciating the history of painting. For the politically engaged, one example Wilson gives is of not reacting during a party political broadcast of the party you oppose – and we could do with more of that these days. This ‘bracketing out’ of unconscious prejudices was described by Husserl as the phenomenological reduction (epochē or suspension). 

Sartre’s existential classic Nausea is an attempt to perform this ‘operation’ as Husserl called it. Phenomenologists aim to describe phenomena without emotional prejudices or distortions – Husserl’s ‘right attitude’, a ‘radical lack of prejudice’ – but Sartre, who started out as a Husserlian, doesn’t quite get there. His description of taking a seat on a tram, for instance, sounds like something out of the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft – ‘I am in the midst of Things, which cannot be given names. Alone, wordless, defenceless, they surround me, under me, behind me, above me”. Sartre’s operations are always tinged with malevolence or pessimism, and Wilson analyses this fault in the fourth instalment of his Outsider series, a study of literature and the imagination (or rather, “a study of the inaccuracies of the imagination”). 

Husserl’s pupil Heidegger had access to his tutor’s notes on time-consciousness and Wilson says that Heidegger’s main contribution was to analyse the impact of time and of human relations in the distorting medium. The neo-Kantian Fichte had already said that to be free is nothing but to become free is heavenly and Wilson points out that this is important because it involves an active time dimension (becoming, not just ‘being’) in freedom. Philosophy is an active and not static business, it is – as Wilson points out in the Outsider books – lived or ‘lived by’, not merely speculative. Throughout the series of 1956 -‘66 Wilson developed this philosophy of intentional consciousness or ‘phenomenological existentialism’ although he shortened it to ‘new’ existentialism to distinguish it from that of Heidegger or Sartre (ironically enough he was actually going back to Husserl’s original method which they both abandoned fairly quickly). Sartre once fondly remembered that he had never felt so free as when he was in the Resistance and could have been shot at any time – Nietzsche’s ‘freedom from’, again –  so therefore commitment to action was freedom. Heidegger said that we only truly know ourselves in the face of death (when “ones potentiality-for-Being becomes authentic and wholly transparent”). But as Wilson points out, Gurdjieff – who is more like Heidegger than he first appears – essentially said the same thing as a semi-serious joke. Hemingway acted out this type of adventure, but ended up a drunk and then a suicide. Wilson names this the ‘paradox of freedom’ and it is the obsession that runs through his works. Consciousness without crisis, he says, tends to become negative (significantly, the latter term was introduced into common language via the Gurdjieff ‘work’). So does this mean, as Sartre and Hemingway think, that we should seek out danger? No – “Husserl’s discovery of ‘intentionality’ meant that the danger and hardship are not essential; they only trigger the mechanism”. By separating the object (the danger or crisis situation) from it’s intention in the reduction, it can be seen that it is a vital upsurge of energy that keeps us ‘free’ or ‘awake’ in these circumstances, not the dangerous circumstances themselves. Blake and Nietzsche said that ‘antediluvian’ or ‘cyclopean’ energies power our concepts, but their poetic inspirations were free of the the kind of emotional distortions later found in Lovecraft or Sartre. Wilson noted that underpowered perception will indeed distort the object it ‘intends’ towards; Husserl meant the same thing when he said that ‘pure perception’ requires a more complicated act than our usual passive state. “If I carry out the [transcendental] reduction for myself, I am not a human ego” he wrote in a draft for the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. 

This is a step towards creative ‘freedom for’, or at least a move away from it’s resentment driven opposite. We should be able to do this in any situation, especially in pleasant surroundings, but mostly this is not so. We are usually bored by that. Wilson calls this the ‘indifference threshold’, an odd handicap in which we are motivated by crisis rather than comfort. This, thinks Wilson, is a legacy of our evolution – as Wells said, most creatures have been ‘up against it’ since the dawn of time, humans included. Against this he made the intriguing alternative suggestion of an ‘evolutionary intentionality’ in his Beyond the Outsider (1965). Ideally we should no longer need danger to make us alert to meanings as meaning is ‘out there’, independent of our moods and prejudices. The ‘mechanism’ that is triggered is intention which Wilson has compared to a ‘kind of hand’ or pseudopodium. Husserl’s point was that we actively grasp reality rather than passively consume it as a spectator (significantly, Sartre was an influence on situationism and ‘the society of the spectacle’, nowadays, the attention economy). We must, Wilson stresses throughout his work, train or flex this intentional organ in order to actively become free. 

Wilson worked on his phenomenological ‘new’ existentialism thoroughly and mostly uninterrupted for the first decade or so of his career, and an interviewer once pointed out in 1993 that even some of his critics hedgingly admired his resilience in weathering endless attacks which were intended to derail it. After The Outsider he was pilloried and then virtually ignored (in his homeland, mostly) until the early seventies when he was gradually forgotten as the boy wonder of the ‘50’s and slowly became something of a sage on subjects such crime and the paranormal (the 1993 article began by saying that he rarely appeared on television or radio unless the subject was murder). However Wilson remained a philosopher and such subjects were grist for his existential and phenomenological enquires; his interest in crime and mysticism long predate even his first book. In a study of Rasputin (1964) he writes that “the distorting power” of intentionality “can be much better studied through the psychology of sex or religion, since the mind’s strongest forces are here in question”. These ‘forces’ are the antediluvian or cyclopean energies of Blake and Nietzsche and are discussed in The New Existentialism. Add to that the “fine network of human relations” (personal or social, embedded in the distorting medium) as analysed by Heidegger and the continuity of Wilson’s post-Outsider, pre-Occult method can be clearly or subliminally felt in the many studies he made of the dark sides of human nature. The Occult is a history of hermeticism – and it’s a brilliant one at that – but it’s really a continuation of The New Existentialism from five years before (discussing the cabbala, Wilson writes that there is “a fundamental error in the way human being grasp the world. We think of the mind as a helpless imponderable in a world of solid matter, a mere passive observer”). Written In Blood (1989) can be read as history of forensics but it ends on a philosophical note as he cheerfully admits that even this “grimly practical field” is a intellectual endeavour, the eradication of crime by intellect (a phenomenologist could say ‘the destruction of ambiguity by intention’). At the end of that book he again takes on Rousseau’s half truth “which can be far more dangerous than an outright lie. Freedom is a quality of consciousness…” 

Wilson’s writings could perhaps be seen as being more accessible from The Occult onwards as they’re not so densely packed with philosophical detail, but they are all part of the same quest. It’s only the lack of awareness of his central philosophy that makes his work appear haphazard (patronising journalists wanting to avoid discussing his phenomenology “at all costs” didn’t help much either). Understand the phenomenological method that underpins it and Wilson’s aims are clear (this website attempts to draw attention to it). 

Reading his work these days may be a matter of taste or expediency. Beginners could start with the compendium The Ultimate Colin Wilson which contains excerpts from many of his major works. There’s his autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose and Gary Lachman’s study Beyond The Robot. For the philosophically minded, there’s The New Existentialism and the Outsider sequence that preceded it; for mystics, the ‘Occult trilogy’; for hardened crime aficionados probably any of the crime books. At the deeper end are the ‘Colin Wilson Studies’ series from Nottingham’s Paupers’ Press. None of this contradicts the fact that Wilson is a pleasurable read to many readers (myself included) who have simply enjoyed a few of his books – I’ve encountered a lot of people from all walks of life who have – but putting him into historical context requires standing back and seeing the larger picture. Not for nothing did he call his efforts an existential jigsaw puzzle – Husserl’s third phenomenological investigation tackles ‘the theory of wholes and parts’ (“the remotest of these parts are no further from the whole than the nearest”). 

With the publication of The Occult in 1971 Wilson discussed a concept he called ‘Faculty X’, an awareness of the reality of other times and other places (he had previously examined how ‘otherness’ is filtered out by what Husserl called the natural standpoint – our ‘normal’, naive or passive consciousness). One of the most famous examples he gives of it in action is via Proust from his novel Swann’s Way when he recalls his childhood as a reality rather than a slightly faded memory. Certainly Husserl himself would have enjoyed Proust’s description regarding “this unremembered state, which brought with it no logical proof but the indisputable evidence, of it’s felicity, it’s reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished”. Originally the ‘phenomenological faculty’ but rejected by Wilson as rather a clumsy mouthful [1] it became ‘faculty x’ circa 1967 and then Faculty X soon after. As it bridges the phenomenology of Wilson’s new existentialism to his interest in hermetic thought, it’s apt that it appeared in it’s finished form in a history of occultism (I have written about the connections between the two in more detail here). Faculty X is the sense of the reality of other times and other places; Proust could talk about his childhood and actually mean it. Husserl concerned himself with meaning with his first investigation of his Logical Investigations. His follower Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said that we are ‘condemned to meaning’ perhaps as a retort against his colleague Sartre who famously remarked that we are condemned to freedom. (Wilson called Merleau-Ponty “an existentialist stoic”). 

Faculty X is the ‘phenomenological faculty’ because it makes us clearly aware that the far is as real as the near (Husserl’s ‘remotest and nearest’, and his theories on internal time consciousness). Wilson insists that Faculty X is the key to all poetic and mystical experiences and a solution to the paradox of freedom. As a concept it is a concentrated form of Wilson’s ‘new’ existentialist philosophy and he obsessed over it in most of his books, even before it had a name. A novel from 1969, The Philosopher’s Stone, was devoted to it and it appears in nascent form throughout The Outsider – Wilson remarks that Blake “developed a certain faculty”, and Blake himself engraved some delightfully gnomic thoughts about “this faculty” circa 1788. Despite being drawn from the rigours of phenomenology Faculty X is fundamentally a visionary faculty. Rudolf Steiner, who was once the subject of a short but penetrating Wilson biography (1985) was taught by Husserl’s master Franz Brentano. Pay close attention to his words and the influence can be felt. “We have to take this step, this turning of one’s own active thinking into an organ of touch for the soul, so that we may feel ourselves thinking in the same way that we walk, grasp or touch; so that we know we are living in a real being, not just in ordinary thinking which merely creates images, but in a reality, in the soul’s organ of touch which we ourselves have become”. This is Husserl’s ‘grip’, Wilson’s ‘kind of hand’ feeling around reality. Here is Steiner again. “The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force”. According to Steiner faculties have to be willed into existence by creative effort, rather like Wilson’s layers of willed intentions (which he says, we mistakenly think of as ‘mechanisms’ because they have become automated habits, a kind of ‘robot’). Steiner’s notions on evolution of faculties are similar to Wilson’s in The Occult. “Evolution consists in one faculty being acquired at the expense of another, and thus as the epochs took their course, the faculty which man once possessed of understanding the spiritual world became less and less. Our clear reasoning and cognitional faculties, our present logical thinking which we regard as the most important feature of modern culture — these did not exist in those early times. They had to be developed by man in the epoch to which we now belong, at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness. Clairvoyant consciousness will have to be cultivated again in the future evolution of mankind, but in a different way. It has to be added to the purely physical consciousness that is bound up with the faculty of intellectual logic”. This is not too far from Wilson’s definition of philosophy – ‘intuition aided by intellect’. In fact it’s not that far from the philosophy of Whitehead, a critic of the ‘bifurcation of nature’. [2] 

The problem of life-devaluation has not gone away since Wilson’s time: in fact, it has seemingly become more acceptable. Steiner thought our era would involve a severe imbalance in consciousness, an obsession with what Blake called ‘number weight and measure’, the literalist and unimaginative obsession with statistics and data that drives the attention economy. We all know it well. 

“Time is the currency of human existence” wrote Wilson in 1970. And every single moment wasted in anti-intentional robotic action is completely destroyed as surely as if you burned your own money. Any genuine individualist will have already calculated the priceless value of their attention at the dawn of this century. 

[1] In the 1965 essay ‘Phenomenology and Literature’, collected in Eagle and Earwig (originally published by John Baker in the same year, now reissued) 

[2] Thoroughly explained in Wilson’s early books and in some excellent later essays. Like Wilson, Steiner is likely to be misunderstood unless we see the basic historical link with Brentano. Wilson states Steiner cannot be understood unless a reader starts with an early book – the aptly titled Philosophy of Freedom – and one of his last, an autobiography.