Do the ‘Outsider’s discipline’!

On By Philip CoulthardIn Phenomenology1 Comment

In Wilson’s critically mauled second book Religion and The Rebel (a “rubbish bin” that has turned out to be full of treasure) there is an interesting aside about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s inability to stop talking and start doing – doing being “the Outsider’s discipline” (as per The Outsider itself where the concern “is essentially a living problem”). Wilson finds Wittgenstein’s ‘doing’ – giving away his fortune, working as a schoolmaster, gardener’s assistant, architect and as a leather-jacketed academic – as unsatisfactory as Robert Musil’s anti-hero Ulrich found such things in The Man Without Qualities and as dull as Wilson found his own traipse around factories and offices in his teens. Clearly, ‘doing’ is more than what we presume it to be. It needs a discipline. 

In the late fifties and early sixties Wilson found Wittgenstein’s linguistics useful but not as practical as Husserl’s phenomenology and, despite some reservations, pitted existentialism against the now disregarded school of logical positivism, a kind of Wittgenstein-lite with A. J. Ayer as its figurehead. “Logical positivism struck me as a kind of deliberate murder of everything important in philosophy”. [1] Even so, Wilson describes his own phenomenological ‘new’ existentialism’ as “Anglo-Saxon and empirical rather than ‘continental’ and metaphysical”, reminding us that a “phenomenologist might be an existentialist or a logical positivist”. He also assures us that one notable facet of his philosophy “is that it is able to unite the two major traditions of twentieth century philosophy: linguistic empiricism and phenomenological existentialism”. Certainly, his Introduction to The New Existentialism – from which the above correlations are taken – is stylistically closer to a delightfully ‘Anglo’ text like Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) than with the continental heavyweights (Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty) he is discussing. 

By the time Wilson wrote The Misfits in 1988 he had pretty much rejected Wittgenstein’s ideas as “the philosophy of a child who is afraid of the dark” but he maintained his admiration for Husserl’s method. Looking at the chaotic emotional lives of thinkers in that book we can understand why Wilson had said in 1957 that the best life for a philosopher is an uneventful one. He was speaking of A. N. Whitehead, but could have been referring to the settled domesticity he had then began to enjoy in Cornwall after the succès de scandale of The Outsider. When I visited for the first time in 2007 Wilson told me – with a chuckle – that he agreed with Thomas Mann’s assertion that the best creatives live ‘bourgeois’ or rather, orderly lives (Mann calls this “the bourgeois acceptance of life” in The Magic Mountain). So, with typically punctual satisfaction Wilson ends his second autobiography with the words “it is four o’ clock on a winter afternoon, and time to take my dogs for a walk”. 

In a passage near the end of that book Wilson sums up his aims. “I concentrated on trying to create my own version of exceptional human experience, and to enable readers to absorb that experience through the medium of imagination”. Here he is strictly speaking of his fictional output but his best non-fiction work also performs this function, and often performs it superbly. In Mysteries Wilson remarked that when reading Proust “we have a sense of excitement, a feeling that he was on the right track” with his attempts to recreate his past. I feel that Wilson’s best work was similarly on the right track and it generates the same sense of excitement, the knowledge that intentional perception can subtly transform almost anything we encounter. “Any interest” he writes “has this power or releasing vital reserves. It has to do with the amount of energy we put into perception”. [2]

This intentional perception is “the Outsider’s discipline” as Wilson precisely defined what an Outsider was as the Outsider series progressed. In the sixth volume it is finalised as a “fundamental concept […] a description of a state of consciousness definable by phenomenology” and not as the vague social type that it was presumed to be by casual readers. The state of consciousness definable by phenomenology is the opposite to the kind wryly portrayed by Sartre’s character in Nausea who is dependent on outward objects and social situations for meaning. A reader who understands Husserl’s demand to separate the intentional act from it’s object is performing the Outsider’s discipline, aiming to live on “an inner reality, independent of the present, sustained from within”. Wilson hoped that one day “we shall all be phenomenologists”, able to “use literature as a useful instrument for turning phenomenology into a living reality”. And if this sounds too fanciful, he simply warned that “under-energised thought will actually falsify the objects of perception”. [3] 

This latter observation explains his fascination with true crime, criminals being particularly susceptible to the materialist fantasy that a satisfying meaningfulness only corresponds with the pursuit of outward objects. It is also relevant to his interest in ‘the occult’ (occluded or hidden levels of perception) when he renamed the ‘phenomenological faculty’ Faculty X, the ability to energise thought in order to live “independent of the present”, to understand the reality of otherness and other times and places. Wilson assures us that this ‘faculty’ can be trained as an athlete trains the muscles for a sporting event. His own best work cross referenced with the texts he recommends is a very good start toward this discipline. 

This also matters in a broader sense because Wilson believed that phenomenology has “endowed human evolution with a conscious intention. It has revealed that man’s incorrigible craving for optimism and purpose can be justified on basic epistemological grounds”. He illustrates its practical application with an amusing story about Sartre, who roused his audiences to fever pitch by declaiming that they were free – ‘go out and claim your freedom!’ he would command. However this enthusiasm only lasted a few hours “because the audiences never knew what to do”. [4] For Wilson, like Husserl before him, the practical application of phenomenology is the discipline toward this freedom, this ‘doing’. 

Wilson admired Sartre as a historical figure but he had his philosophical reservations. Despite starting out as a strict Husserlian, Sartre’s “thought is oddly soggy at the centre”, a kind of soufflé filled with old prejudices from childhood. “Somebody recently told me that the city of Tehran is built on a quagmire: so is Sartre’s philosophy”. [5] 

So, what should have Sartre’s students done to maximise their freedom? “A convinced reader might lay down [philosophical texts] and sigh: ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ comments Wilson in Beyond The Outsider. A phenomenology based on Husserl and Whitehead can indeed solve this practical question, he answers. “What does a phenomenologist actually do?” he asks in Introduction to The New Existentialism. “He applies the phenomenological method to whatever may be his own field”, noting earlier that the disciplines and aims of the method are as varied as its practitioners. A section on practical disciplines in the latter book (p. 100) shows that the first step is to become constantly aware of the intentionality in all of our conscious acts. Truth be told, this not as dryly intellectual as it sounds, as the examples Wilson gives are: viewing a piece of political propaganda and attempting to sympathise with the side you oppose, or (Beyond The Outsider, p. 82) reading back a mean spirited message you have written as if you are the unfortunate recipient. “‘Moods’ make particularly good material for this kind of analysis” adds Wilson. “Anybody who took the trouble could compile a textbook of methods for developing such awareness”. Clearly, phenomenological disciplines are not abstractions, they are living solutions that wrestle with the problems of everyday life today. Introduction to The New Existentialism may be sixty years old this year but its relevance remains obvious to the open minded reader. 

In 1984 Wilson was asked what he felt was wrong with human beings. “Basically I say that we are trapped in the here and now, and that we have allowed ourselves to be defeated by the here and now. Or, we’ve allowed all sense of direction to be taken away from us”. As an illustration he says this is like someone going into a room for some specific reason and then immediately forgetting why once the door closes. It is the remembering – “oh, of course!” – that is important. Psychologists call these recollections peak or flow experiences – ‘exceptional human experience’. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky practiced ‘self-remembering’. Proust thoroughly analysed remembering in À la recherche du temps perdu. Heidegger lamented ‘forgetfulness of Being’ [Seinsvergessenheit] in Sein und Zeit (Wilson paraphrases it as ‘forgetfulness of existence’). Wilson’s outsider-discipline of intentional doing can make these ‘obvious’ moments more plentiful. 

The Wind by Felix Vallotton, 1910

An even more interesting insight about intentionality appears in Wilson’s Access to Inner Worlds (1983). Wilson mentions an obscure but “very remarkable book” entitled Essay on the Origin of Thought by Juri Moskvitin, sent to him “by some unknown well-wisher”. The basic thesis, he explains,  is a variation on Husserl’s insights on intentionality, but with an intriguingly creative twist. “What Moskvitin is saying is that when we ‘see’ something, we actually paint it”. The ‘painter’ is Husserl’s transcendental ego, a “creative self” to use Wilson’s term. Neither Husserl or Moskvitin are suggesting that the outside world does not exist, rather; intentionality creates the meaning of the world. To the aesthetically minded ‘painting’ the reality we see every day is a huge leap forward in understanding and using Husserl’s method of intentionality. The late David Hockney said “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure…there is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering. But I believe my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair…New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling… I do believe that painting can change the world.” And another appropriate quote: “I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair”. In other words, ‘making’, active doing neutralise despair. 

Notes. 

[1] Quoted from ‘A. J. Ayer’ in Wilson’s Collected Essays on Philosophers, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, p. 1. Originally from the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Nov. 1st, 1969. Intriguingly, Wilson asked Ayer if he believed in life after death and he answered “I don’t expect to survive my death in any sense at all”. Nineteen years later Ayer admitted – again, to the Telegraph – that he had a near death experience. His recounting of this experience is ironically enlightening if unintentionally funny: he tried to get the attention of disembodied astral intelligences in true logical positivist style by gesticulating toward his watch. Alas, “they chose to ignore me”.

[2] Wilson, Colin, ‘Science Fiction and Existentialism’ in Existentially Speaking, p. 30, Borgo Press, 1989.

[3] Wilson, Colin, ‘Existential Criticism’ in Eagle and Earwig, John Baker, 1965, p. 58; ‘Phenomenology and Literature’ in ibid. p. 98. ‘Underpowered perception’ quote from ‘Dual Value Response’ in The Bicameral Critic, Salem House, 1983, p. 101. Here, and in the above note [2] it’s worth remembering that Husserl makes similar remarks on the need for an energetic perception in the Logical Investigations (RKP, 1970, p. 582).

[4] Both quotes from ‘Existential Psychology: A Novelist’s Approach’ in The Bicameral Critic, ibid. pp. 53-54. 

[5] Wilson, Colin, ‘Arthur Koestler’ in Existentially Speaking, ibid., p. 61. Despite his harsh words, Wilson wrote an obituary for Sartre in 1980 which concluded that “this unhappy romantic-rationalist was one of the most exciting and brilliant figures in twentieth century literature”. Wilson, Colin, ‘A Sartre Obituary’ in Below the Iceberg, Borgo Press, 1998, p. 63.

Seventy years of The Outsider

On By Philip CoulthardIn Phenomenology4 Comments

A new book of essays recently celebrated 70 years of Colin Wilson’s debut – it is available here [Colin Wilson Studies # 37]. I don’t yet have a copy of this but as a show of support here are some of my own thoughts on The Outsider. 

The Outsider is three score and ten this year, a Biblical lifetime. Most amazingly, it is still in print; not bad for a book about the vagaries of consciousness by an unknown working class youth (would this kind of thing happen now? Of course not). In the public imagination Colin Wilson’s name will be for ever and always linked with this one book and its rather scandalous success which was followed by a critical turnaround and berating by the Establishment. But truth be told it’s not even his best book – it is after all only the first part of seven (the ‘Outsider Cycle’ ran from 1956 to 1966). While a close reading of The Outsider shows it contains many of his later concepts in embryonic form (for instance, the development of “a certain faculty” which “increases […] the sense of other times and other places”), a useful solution toward the problem of everyday life-failure that the book addresses would only become apparent as the series reached its conclusion. (The mysterious faculty he refers to would be thoroughly examined a little later in Wilson’s next bestseller, a wonderfully entertaining ramble through ‘occultism’ in 1971). 

“I wrote The Outsider to try to express what is wrong with us” remarked Wilson in a 2005 interview with Philosophy Now. And what is wrong with us? Our consciousness, which is forever selecting and cutting out wider meanings. For Wilson, this quirk of human perception is paradoxically responsible for both our swift evolutionary progress and for all the whining nihilism that contradicts it. He explains that the average person, “looking at himself from what Husserl called ‘the natural standpoint‘, doesn’t feel there is anything much wrong with him. But some men develop a curious inner dissatisfaction, which may amount to a vague feeling of ‘Who am I?’” This, Wilson explains, is implicit “in the ultimate ‘existential’ question” and may lead to “the possibility that ‘I’ may turn out to far more than I had assumed”. It is this “curious inner dissatisfaction” that is the concern of The Outsider rather a study in mere social awkwardness (which Wilson describes in the book as an Outsider’s “obvious abnormality, his introversion”). Another layer of the book argues that ‘Outsiders’ need to stop being ‘outside’, socially, and play their necessary role in civilisation, but this is secondary to the individual psychological analysis; the former concern is examined in the second and third volumes of the series and more thoroughly in his later books, such as New Pathways in Psychology and Order of Assassins.  

Wilson examines his Outsiders through biography and quotations from various writers, poets and thinkers to illustrate an active or ‘lived philosophy’. For this he has been criticised, in his defence he has pointed to Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers, both of whom used this method without harming their philosophical credentials. But no matter, for the keen reader Wilson’s argument is clearly expressed throughout the book. An ‘Outsider’ has a strange, rather distressing and uncertain sense of “unreality” about everyday reality, a permanently nagging dissatisfaction with the poker faced grain of the world, ‘reality’ as seen through Husserl’s ‘natural standpoint’, the viewpoint of the “normal individual” or “naive man” as Husserl had it in 1900.

The argument of The Outsider is not far from Husserl’s own, except Wilson was not aware of his philosophy until a few years later. He admitted that his discovery of the philosopher didn’t really make much of a general difference to his efforts as he’d been concerned with transforming everyday consciousness into something more meaningful since childhood. He also observed that Husserl’s ideas had already been anticipated by Blake and Nietzsche, two classic ‘Outsiders’. However, Wilson’s investigations into the genesis, development and practicalities of Husserl’s phenomenology gifted him a rigorously workable method to help solve these ‘Outsider’ problems, just as his acquaintance with Prof. Maslow’s self-actualising humanistic psychology or Sperry and Ornstein’s split-brain theory, to name only a few, would later. 

At the end of the eighth chapter Wilson comments that an Outsider believes that he – or she [1] – can establish a permanent way of seeing into themselves and solving these problems. ‘But how?” he asks. “By establishing a discipline to overcome his weakness and self-division”. Most people are – as he would explain in the third volume of the ‘Outsider’ series – what sociologists label ‘outer-directed’: “put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane”. Conversely, and with some amount of terminological irony, ‘Outsiders’ are ‘inner directed’. In The Outsider Wilson continues by quoting Kierkegaard’s famous existential parable of bored Gods creating bored humans, but he remarks that although this is indeed a penetrating commentary it isn’t a particularly useful observation. Truth be told Wilson always thought Blake more original than Kierkegaard, and his life and ideas more dynamic. “Blake’s solution was: Go and develop the visionary faculty. Good. But how?” 

The philosopher John Shand has quoted another philosopher, Prof. Stephen Clarke: “Wilson does have some interesting ideas about attention, inattention and boredom. Indeed I don’t know any other philosopher who has had more to say about that very philosophical disease.” This disease or perceptual vicious circle is well summarised in a line from Ezra Pound’s Canto XV: “inchoate error, boredom born out of boredom” (it’s no coincidence that Pound is here railing against the “british weeklies” that would praise, damn and ignore Wilson later). Shand explains that the “key to Wilson’s thought is that we are led to nihilism by a fundamental philosophical mistake. That mistake is not to examine our minds, consciousness, first before we judge what the world is like”. When asked by The Times, again in 2005, what advice he would like to pass on, he answered “never give up. It cannot be said too often”. The suicides, tragedies and mental collapses documented and examined in The Outsider illustrate why developing this mental tenacity is important. Shand comments that “Wilson’s life indicates what can be done through taking one’s consciousness in-hand and through self-discipline refuse to sink into torpid despair at the vicissitudes of life. [He] has worked for fifty years without the handy financial and ego-enhancing props of regular academia, and survived the turbulence and vagaries of fashion”. Shand also admires Wilson’s formidable drive, “getting up every day at six and writing daily for hours productively in most literary genres”, noting how intertwined his philosophy is with his life. “‘You want to know about my ideas and I’ll tell you about my life,’ he says”. Wilson was as much of an Outsider as anyone he wrote about. 

“The Outsider’s first business is self-knowledge” explains Wilson early in his book. However, this is not merely a literary pursuit: “the point I wish to make here is the fact that the ‘way’ [i.e. ‘the method’] is not a matter for words, but a matter for action”. This self-knowledge “must be lived”. An Outsider needs to “find a course of action in which he is most himself” and “change only his relation to his ‘inner-self’”, or “true ‘I’”, the latter term being an interesting one, as it was used by Husserl twenty years before in his final book. Significantly, Husserl also explains there that his phenomenological philosophy can offer “a completely different sort of waking life” consisting of a transformation of consciousness “which breaks through the normality of straightforward living”. This was also the claim of another Outsider, Gurdjieff. Similarly Wilson points out that once ‘outsider-consciousness’ begins to ferment “the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place”. And indeed, it isn’t.

Wilson’s book is full of extraordinary people doing unusual and occasionally absurd things, but he does not regard these as mere eccentricities: “of course, people who are incorrigible self-dramatisers, like the young Nietzsche, are only trying to get themselves ‘outside’ the situation, and see themselves in the situation objectively”. A perfect illustration of the first discipline in Husserl’s phenomenology, the famous epoché or ‘standing outside’, then. As noted earlier Wilson rejected the common interpretation of an ‘Outsider’ as a mere misfit and the notion of this problem being only a social one is questioned in the first sentence of the book (“At first sight…”). This becomes more apparent as the ‘Outsider’ series progresses. “As a social type, the ‘outsider’ may be vague; as a description of a state of consciousness definable by phenomenology, it is precise” [Beyond The Outsider, p. 163]. This subtle distinction is so often misunderstood that I have to repeat it: ‘Outsiders’ – or ‘outsiders’ by 1965 – wish to get themselves outside their everyday situation, to see it objectively. This is the intent of whatever “course of action” they choose to live out, be it Blake etching his Illuminated Books through the night, Nietzsche dropping out of academia to seclude himself in cheap rented rooms or the famous Lawrence of Arabia deciding to become ‘John Hume Ross’ for a few weeks. 

Twenty years after his first book was published Wilson recognised what, despite the furore, it was all really about: it was “the realisation that I had at last settled down to the serious business of living”. Looking back even further, in 2001, he cheerfully admits that his outlook is “now more pragmatically optimistic” than it was in 1956. The “serious business of living” is the living philosophy (the ‘new existentialism’) sketched out in The Outsider, developed through the series that followed and examined thoroughly in his best later works, non-fiction and fiction. “The philosopher starts from the sense that there is a lot of illusion about the world, and that his task is to probe to the reality” wrote Wilson in an essay about Tolkien. Existential and phenomenological philosophy are of course intertwined with the ‘reality’ that we face everyday, and the latter, in particular, offers pragmatic solutions on how we can change it, at least – at first – on an individual level. Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’ offers a coherent living philosophy for the ordinary reader, and the book of that name (1966) features disciplines and exercises based on the phenomenological method which can be utilised by “anyone who goes to enough trouble”. [2] Therefore, is it “not illogical to suppose” asks Wilson in The Outsider “that a development of the same faculty [of selecting, i.e. Husserl’s epoché] might lead the practical-minded European to see things where he saw nothing before”? Even though he clearly analysed it in two etched pamphlets on religion circa 1788, Blake seemed to posses this faculty instinctively, but as far as Wilson was concerned it was essential that some of us develop it in the daylight of ordinary consciousness. “It is necessary for at least a few men to develop a new type of consciousness, to develop it slowly, painfully, instinctively” he writes near the end of the book. “Would not such a man be a complete Outsider?”

[1] See Outline of the Female Outsider, volume one in the ‘Abraxas Collectors Series’, St. Austell, 1994. Some female Outsiders: Emily Brontë, George Sand, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie Bashkirtsheff, Dora Carrington, Isadora Duncan, Virginia Woolf, Phillipa Burrell… This would have been a very interesting second volume complementary to The Outsider, had it been completed (circa 1991). 

[2] In fact, this is a line from the previous (sixth) volume of the series, Beyond The Outsider (Arthur Barker, 1965, p. 82) explaining Husserl’s epoché. The slightly withering tone of ‘go on then, do it yourself’ never fails to amuse me. 

The relativism that liquefies all things

On By Philip CoulthardIn Phenomenology1 Comment

In the first volume of his Philosophy, an early (1932) work of the nascent Existentialist movement, Karl Jaspers argues “I do not become myself by smashing what is universal”. Weary of what he paradoxically describes as a “universal relativism” – the idea that anything and everything is valid from a viewpoint “which I can take, abandon and change” – he wryly explains that we can be at home in any standpoint “without standing for any”. The result of this ‘freedom’, he clarifies, is that we lose our genuine sense of self.

The novelist Robert Musil also noticed this rather self-indulgent psychological paradox around about this time when he described “the general obsession with turning every viewpoint into a standpoint and regarding every standpoint as a viewpoint”. Today this is known as ‘standpoint theory’. With roots in second-wave feminism, Foucault and Farnon, this ideology has stridently assured itself that it can realise full self-actualisation by smashing anything ‘universal’. It is therefore almost uncanny to read Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities – from which the above quote is taken – and be told that “reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans”. With deadly accuracy, he described this “storm of aimless struggles” as merely “playacting”, a “splendid new gesture” or “vital pose” which “offers that moment of self-realisation”. Imagine, he writes, “what it is to have a heavy world weighing on tongues, hands and eyes […] and inside nothing but an unstable, shifting mist […] what a joy it must be whenever someone brings out a slogan in which one thinks one can recognise oneself”. Gurdjieff described this empty-headed banner waving as the “glamour of new slogans”. Like Musil and Jaspers, Gurdjieff was reacting to the chaos of a century ago. But again his words are are prescient. “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”. These periods of “mass madness” he says, often coincide with “geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character”.

In A Criminal History of Mankind (1984) Colin Wilson defines relativism as the essence of the criminal mentality, presenting an abundance of ruined lives as examples. “You can’t say it’s wrong to kill. Only individual standards make it right or wrong” confided the murderer Melvin Rees. This, of course, is the logical conclusion of treating every viewpoint as a standpoint and vice-versa. But as Wilson observes, permitting free expression of such negative emotions is “the emotional counterpart of physical incontintence” with the result that the “inner being turns into a kind of swamp or sewage farm”. Aware of this baleful putrefaction of our objectivity, Jaspers describes it in a queasy but accurate phrase that sounds like a line from Arthur Machen’s The Novel of the White Powder – “the relativism that liquefies all things”.

Karl Jaspers

Jaspers first came to attention in 1923 with his bulky tome General Psychopathology. Regarded as a significant landmark by Wilson in The New Existentialism (p. 108), it must be one of the first books to attempt to understand the criminal mind using the new techniques of phenomenology as developed by Jaspers’ contemporary Edmund Husserl circa 1900 (in Criminal History Wilson describes Husserl’s phenomenology as “the most important philosophical insight of the twentieth century”). Section V § 3 (b) of Jaspers book tantalisingly references studies on the “psychology of women poisoners” and “homesick girls who committed crimes”, and the first chapter, ‘Subjective Phenomena of Morbid Psychic Life (Phenomenology’)’ clearly shows the influence of the older thinker.

A 1955 Epilogue introduced the English translation of Jaspers’ three volume Philosophy. He recalls that the “philosophy I sought at universities in 1901 disappointed me” but “Husserl impressed me most, comparatively speaking, although his phenomenological method did not strike me as a philosophical procedure”. At first he took it – as Husserl himself originally did – as a name for descriptive psychology, and it is this ‘static’ phenomenology that Jaspers uses to power the argument of his Psychopathology. Jaspers also confided that when he met Husserl in 1913 “I told him I still failed to understand what phenomenology really was”. Characteristically, Husserl replied that understanding was a “difficult matter” but reminded Jaspers that he was already using the method perfectly anyway. “Just keep it up” was his sage advice. But looking back, Jaspers remembered that he had long rejected – in no uncertain terms – the later phenomenology that Husserl was developing when they met.

However, in The New Existentialism Wilson informs us that “Husserl’s aim is basically identical with that of Jaspers” in that he wants to create a flexible, lived philosophy. “Jaspers wants us to grasp knowledge as a living process, and the human relation to it as dynamic” (Wilson makes similar remarks about Sartre and Heidegger in his paper ‘The Mescalin Experience’, noting that due to its phenomenological roots, existential philosophy is active, ‘kinetic’, rather than static). One particular method that Jaspers had at his disposal to demonstrate this action was biography; simply describing the lives of philosophers illustrates an active philosophy beautifully (“Socrates’ father was a stonemason, his mother a midwife” begins the first chapter of the first volume of Jaspers’ breezily readable The Great Philosophers, 1957). Wilson used this method often, from The Outsider on – my personal favourite example from that book is of the young Nietzsche throwing himself into a corner of his sofa and devouring a second hand volume of Schopenhauer. He acknowledged this particular debt to Jaspers early in his career [1] and later, in the ’90’s. In The New Existentialism he comments that the point of the three volumes of Jaspers’ Philosophy and the many volumes of The Great Philosophers is “to encourage the human mind to grasp its place in the great forward movement of the spirit”. Similarly Wilson’s The Outsider outlines the need for a lived philosophy in the fourth chapter.

Yet Wilson brands Jaspers “a failure” in The New Existentialism. In the sense that he meant it – of not really passing on vital results to philosophical successors, he is correct (Jaspers is little read today, even in philosophy departments). Then again, despite his obvious interest, Wilson describes the entire original ‘old’ (sic.) existential movement a failure a mere six pages later. But he insists that this is due to Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus abandoning the important central insight of Husserl’s phenomenology which Wilson paraphrased as ‘perception is intentional’. Husserl’s advice to just keep up these disciplines even if Jaspers rejected them professionally was very honest and practical. Just keep it up could be a motto for Wilson’s own ‘new’ or ‘phenomenological existentialism’. “One of the reasons that the ‘old existentialism’ found itself immobilised was that it tried so hard to compromise with academic philosophy” observes Wilson, offering Jaspers as an example. Conversely Wilson’s The New Existentialism is written for “the ordinary intelligent reader”.

An important insight Wilson made in 1965 is that using the methods of the new existentialism – which are clearly described in the book of that title – involves the eventual recognition that that the truth is ‘within’ (subjective, as Kierkegaard observed) but it is not relative (Beyond The Outsider, p. 165). Heidegger defines the phenomenological method in Being and Time [§ 7] as one which does not subscribe to a single dogmatic standpoint. His teacher Husserl cheerfully waved away relativism in the introduction (Prolegomena) to the Logical Investigations, describing it as “a bare faced and (one might almost say) ‘cheeky’ scepticism” before patiently demolishing the arguments for relativism (‘psychologism’) piece by piece. “The essential core of this objection lies in the self-evident conflict between relativism and the inner evidence of immediately intuited existence” [Husserl, ibid. § 36]. In other words, relativism cannot accurately describe our inner states or existence, and taken further this relativistic attitude distorts everything. “The relativity of truth entails the relativity of cosmic existence” [ibid]. This attitude of universal relativism was espoused by Lovecraft in The Call of Cthulhu, with its famous opening line about the human mind being unable to correlate all its contents (a sentence which would have made Husserl grimace). In Order of Assassins (1972) Wilson postulated that had Lovecraft lived a little later, he could have included the ‘relativistic’ crimes of the serial killing age (“You can’t say it’s right or wrong to kill…”) in his panoply of unfolding horrors (“New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines” is one unintentionally funny line from the tale). Truth be told, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is a better illustration of “the relativism that liquefies all things” than anything by his master Machen.

Refuting this kind of shallow relativist view, explains Husserl, requires “the leverage of certain self-evident, universally valid convictions” [ibid. § 35]. From the start to the end of his career Wilson never gave up his conviction that we are living in the midst of an unseen perceptual revolution, holding a firm belief in an imminent evolutionary leap aided by intellectual investigations. This position, he admits in Beyond The Outsider (p. 181), is ‘strange and uncomfortable” unless our mental faculties are powerful – “the kind of power that can be given only by a deep conviction”. In previous religious ages these convictions were widely if naively held. Now the quest for the ‘transcendental ego’ gives us a conviction toward the possibility of ‘mystical’ experiences without ritual or yogic embellishments. Husserl referred to these layered powers as “hidden achievements” and our job – as phenomenologists – is to uncover and use them. Wilson sees the hidden achievements of this ego as evolutionary, a drive toward complexity.

The ‘transcendental” phenomenology that Jaspers rejected was detailed in Husserl’s Ideas, published the year they met. The second chapter of the third part is titled ‘Universal Structures of Pure Consciousness’ and begins by describing this ‘structure’ or “realm of transcendental consciousness”, a primal region of absolute being in which relative mental states are merely dependant (and therefore not ‘universal’). As quoted in Herbert Spiegelberg’s The Phenomenological Movement (p. 160) and Wilson’s The New Existentialism (p. 62), Husserl later alluded to this mental space as the universalist domain of the transcendental ego and the ‘keepers of the key to the ultimate sources of being’ with reference to Goethe’s Faust. It sounds abstract and almost mystical – and let’s face it, exciting, which is perhaps the point – but Husserl is essentially describing a practicality, a ‘normal’ consciousness shorn of relativist prejudices – via his famous epoché – which leads to the mental state he describes as the ‘transcendental ego’. This is not a mystical ineffability but rather the beginning of clear philosophical thinking and it is analogous to Wilson’s observation that we recognise that the truth is within but is not relative. Husserl often reminded us that this phenomenological change starts with a change in attitude – Wilson’s ‘recognition’ (this word also forms an important insight at the very end of his 1997 book about the Sphinx).

Wilson’s slim 1980 monograph on the bicameral brain, Frankenstein’s Castle, describes this ‘switch’ from another angle. Referencing a theory of Howard Miller, an American doctor intrigued by hypnosis, Husserl’s transcendental ego is described by Wilson as a confused ‘normal’ ego. “This conclusion left me slightly stunned” he admits. “It was not quite what I had been expecting. We have become so conditioned to thinking of the ‘intellectual ego’ as a villain that I found my explanation disturbing. Surely, the correct answer should be: the transcendental ego – some ‘higher self’ that presides over consciousness?” This appeared to be Wilson’s position throughout the latter stages of his Outsider Cycle (1956 – ‘66), in books such as The Occult, 1971, and for quite a while after. Even so, in the sixth chapter of Beyond The Outsider – a fascinating book on ‘evolutionary intentionality’, a process tied in with Husserl’s concept of the transcendental ego – we read that uncovering this process merely involves bringing it to consciousness (“it had already taken place”). In his Cartesian Meditations [§ 15] Husserl notes that we are “at all times a Transcendental Ego” but we only know that we are via the change of attitude. This phenomenological uncovering “is the act of going in search of the awareness long before it has reached the surface” says Wilson. The literary example that he gives is from Shaw’s Back to Methuselah; the maiden remarks to Strephon that “it is the realisation of it when it has actually happened” – ‘it’ being evolution, maturity. A theme that runs through Wilson’s work is that these happy discoveries appear to happen spontaneously without much control. Therefore Wilson thinks it is difficult to imagine exactly what type of creature ‘phenomenological man’ could be if he could completely uncover his intentional evolutionary structure and make these faculties a normal part of his consciousness (he later surmised that the results would likely be unpredictable but immense). The title of a later Wilson essay ‘Husserl and Evolution’ makes reference to this, as does his explanation that discovering Husserl’s “nonrelative philosophy” only made him aware of a process he had already been using. A recognition as much as a discovery. 

Wilson describes Husserl’s phenomenology as an investigation into meaning. Therefore the starting point for this uncovering, explains Wilson, is a sense of meaninglessness, the classically existential type expressed in the opening sentence of his second autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose. Jaspers notes in the third volume of Philosophy that the following states are contrary to meaning: “dissolution, death, lawlessness, crime, insanity, suicide, indifference, haphazardness” and last but not least, “absurdity”. All these dark themes are grappled with in Wilson’s writings and perhaps the key word here is ‘indifference’. Wilson’s notion of the ‘indifference threshold’ – our ‘normal’ state of consciousness where discomfort (or far worse) can stimulate us into happiness whereas comfort or even luxury bores us or makes us miserable – is vividly illustrated in his A Criminal History of Mankind. Like his book on the Sphinx, Criminal History has as its subtext the growing dominance of the careful but anxious left cerebral hemisphere over the ancient, pleasantly intuitive certainties of the right. This lopsided change was already observed in Beyond The Outsider with reference to Whitehead’s philosophy, but the paradox of the indifference threshold was best summed up in a line from Wilson’s book on the psychologist Maslow: that consciousness without crisis tends to become negative – a kind of psychic festering.

Jaspers argued that we know ourselves only in ‘boundary-situations’ – Foucault would later label these ‘limit-experiences’ – such as “death, suffering, guilt, the sudden violent accident” (The New Existentialism, p. 23; the concept is fully explored in the second volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy). But these – especially the last, haphazard example – surely are the same states, more or less, that he later regards as meaningless. Similarly both Heidegger and Gurdjieff thought that a grim realisation of impending death would ‘wake us up’ from our mechanised slumber – Dr. Johnson even had a cheerful quip about it – but Wilson sees this insight as poor phenomenology. Husserl wished to analyse mental states independent of the object or situation they were observing – technically, separating the noesis (perceptual acts) from the noema (content, or objects of intention). Wilson makes the interesting observation regarding this analysis by imagining what Husserl would have said about William Blake’s poetic philosophy in his 1965 essay ‘Phenomenology and Literature’, suggesting that we pursue the matter further by consulting the relevant texts. Apart from the fact that reading Blake makes one immediately aware what Wilson meant by the poet’s anticipation of phenomenology, Husserl thought [Ideas § 49] that the ideal phenomenological epoché would lead to nothing less than an “Annihilation of the World”, a psychic apocalypse which still leaves transcendental consciousness untouched. This is way beyond Foucault’s ‘limit-experiences’ but well within Blake’s imagination. A rare 1995 document containing marginalia from Wilson’s own copy of Introduction to The New Existentialism contains insights of a similar nature, questioning the ‘fake’ conscious mind and ruminating on the possibility that birth and death may be ‘intentional’ anyway (on the last page of his copy, Wilson had underlined his sentence “death may be a disguised form of suicide”). Further clues toward understanding this fascinating idea can be found in Wilson’s Afterlife and his biography of Rudolf Steiner, both from 1985.

Husserl’s thought experiment about the ‘annihilation of the world’ illustrates how far reality depends on perception. Accurate perception for Husserl, like Blake before him, depends on its intensity [see Logical Investigations, V § 19] or how accurately the perceptual arrow hits the object. When it does, it is “meant” [ibid. V § 21] and not partial or relative. Husserl goes on to say that this intwined ‘meant’ perception involving the act and content is correlative, a view which opposes Lovecraft’s bleak cosmic interpretation in the opening lines his Cthulhu story. Introducing his theory of ‘Faculty X’ (aka the ‘phenomenological faculty’) in The Occult Wilson remarks that we can only mean things when this Faculty is operative or as Husserl would say, we are in the phenomenological attitude. Wilson’s choice of Proust’s moment of insight in Swann’s Way as a perfect example of a faculty which reveals the reality of other times and places was insightful as Proust describes it wonderfully. It was “indisputable evidence [of] it’s reality […] in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished”. It was, he recalls, a “neutral glow” – pure consciousness, identical to the universalist mental realm which Husserl delineated in Ideas.

Wilson informs us in The New Existentialism that the practical way toward this phenomenological universalism involves becoming constantly aware of the intentionality in all our conscious acts, hardly an impossible task. Here (p. 101) and in the previous ‘Outsider’ volume, Beyond The Outsider (p. 82) he insists that this can be done by anyone who goes to enough trouble. ‘Just keep it up’, as Husserl once said. Maslow explained that his patients had frequent ‘peak experiences’ the more they discussed them. Similarly Wilson noticed that “most people have insights to this effect [i.e. regarding ‘intentionality’] at least once a week”. We must, says Wilson, investigate these and give them philosophical weight (which of course, is exactly what he did). “One we see this clearly” he comments in The New Existentialism, “it becomes astonishing that anyone bothers to argue about it”. For anyone who can be bothered to take these disciplines seriously, that sentence is wryly amusing.

Wilson’s Order of Assassins ends with a thought about what happens when we are deprived of these larger meanings: we turn to sloganeering messiahs and führers and eventually turn bitter and violent. Against the rather helpless feeling that society has about such problems – and at the moment, it’s more of a rather drab, generalised sense of stasis or treading water – Wilson ended Criminal History by remarking that “all the major transformations in society have started with the few who know better”. And in the last paragraph of his Beyond The Occult he states that this will remain so until we stop merely marking time.

Notes.

[1] “Jaspers is a better existentialist than Heidegger, for at least he keeps his attention focussed on men like Van Gogh, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky“. Colin Wilson, Religion and The Rebel, Gollancz, 1957, p. 298.

Works used:

Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time, Harper Collins, 1962

Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, Springer, 2012

Husserl, Edmund: Ideas (book one) Marcus Nijhoff, 1983

Husserl, Edmund: Logical Investigations (2 volumes), RKP, 1970

Jaspers, Karl: General Psychopathology, Manchester University Press, 1972

Jaspers, Karl: The Great Philosophers, Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1962

Jaspers, Karl: Philosophy (3 volumes), University of Chicago Press, 1969-‘71

Lovecraft, H. P.: The Haunter of the Dark, Panther, 1970

Machen, Arthur: Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, Volume 2, Panther, 1975

Musil, Robert: The Man Without Qualities, (2 volumes) Picador, 1995

Ouspensky, P. D.: In Search of the Miraculous, RKP, 1950

Proust, Marcel: Swann’s Way, Vintage 1992

Spiegelberg, Herbert: The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (2 volumes), Marcus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1976

Wilson, Colin: A Criminal History of Mankind, Mercury Books, 2005 (updated edition)

Wilson, Colin: Afterlife, Caxton, 2000 (updated edition)

Wilson, Colin: Author’s Emendations to Introduction to The New Existentialism, Maurice Bassett, 1995

Wilson, Colin: Beyond The Occult, Corgi, 1989

Wilson, Colin: Beyond The Outsider, Arthur Barker, 1965

Wilson, Colin: Existentially Speaking, Borgo Press, 1989

Wilson, Colin: From Atlantis to the Sphinx, Virgin, 1997

Wilson, Colin: New Pathways in Psychology, Gollancz, 1972

Wilson, Colin: Order of Assassins, Hart-Davis, 1972

Wilson, Colin, Religion and The Rebel, Gollancz, 1957.

Wilson, Colin: Rudolf Steiner: The Man and his Vision, Aquarian, 1985

Wilson, Colin: The New Existentialism, Wildwood House, 1980

Wilson, Colin: The Occult, Panther, 1978

From noise to knowing

On By Philip CoulthardIn Colin Wilson, Music, Music press, Phenomenology, Sandy Robertson, Sounds magazine2 Comments

In Memoriam, Sandy Robertson. Rock journalist and fervent Wilson supporter who died this month. 

Back in the early Eighties my teenage self was an avid reader of Sounds, one of the UK’s weekly music papers. More than anything I liked it because it aligned with the eclecticism of my own developing music tastes – they were as happy reviewing Motörhead as they were Zoviet France – but another fascination buried in its pages was the occasional nod to something rather more profound. 

A few years before, the NME had infamously lost a portion of it’s circulation by applying semiotics and deconstruction to its analysis of that week’s indie trend [1]. Sounds was rather more honest about it’s literary interests: Lovecraftian horror and cryptic but knowledgeable allusions to those literary precursors of pre-rock excess, William Burroughs and Aleister Crowley. Both had of course appeared in the Sgt. Pepper crowd collage in 1967, but a decade later they were begining to find a new set of devotees in the burgeoning punk and industrial music scenes. 

Glaswegians Alex Fergusson and Sandy Robertson came to London right at this moment. Apparently one of the first things they did was to go to a Colin Wilson lecture; afterwards the man himself showed them how to dowse with a pendulum while Nic Roeg skulked around in the background! Alex became the guitarist of experimental punks Alternative TV – look closely at the pic sleeve of their first 7″, there’s a Colin Wilson book placed under the telly – and Sandy brought identical obsessions (Wilson, Crowley, Burroughs, Kim Fowley!) from his fanzine White Stuff to Sounds. Stylistically somewhere between his role model Nick Kent and ‘hip young gunslingers’ like Jon Savage, Sandy offered rock info with added intellect and literary references, designed to illuminate or possibly corrupt adolescent minds. 

I was far too young to be taking all this detail in yet, but Sandy was still writing for Sounds until the mid-Eighties. Alas, I just missed his three page interview with Wilson in early 1983 (this was later included in my book The Lurker at the Indifference Threshold, with his permission). But he referenced Wilson often: in a review of the reissued masterpiece Forever Changes, in a chart of ‘misunderstood geniuses’, in a piece on Lovecraft and Mythos spin-offs, in an essay about the Manson/rock connection, in an aside using Shaw’s description of music as the ‘brandy of the damned’…it was all there in the ink stained pages of Sounds, amongst the cheap looking ads for the latest noisy platter from Discharge or GBH. 

Soon enough I began to read some of these writers – I found Burroughs and Crowley impenetrable at first, but I got Wilson immediately. Later in the decade I bought Sandy’s amusing Crowley Scrapbook (with an introduction by Wilson) and would see his name alongside Wilson and Burroughs in the likes of Rapid Eye, Simon Dwyer’s ’90’s ‘occulture’ periodical. I’d spot him in the audience of Throbbing Gristle’s grainy Heathen Earth VHS. I’d hear his voice talking to Genesis P-Orridge on a grotty sounding Alternative TV audience recording (“I managed to mention Colin Wilson”!). I’d see him recommending Wilson books in the zeroxed back pages of the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue when it was collected in book form in 2000 (punk was ‘cultural history’ by then).  Occasionally I’d see a letter from him in Mojo magazine and I’d wonder what he was doing these days…

Turns out, he was a dog walker for Michael Gambon! 

The internet made people easier to contact. Sandy was delighted that his writing had led to my interest in such things. In person, he was as friendly as he was knowledgeable – and he was very knowledgeable indeed. The messages and chats we had over the past decade and a half were what friendship is all about. 

Inevitably, he had some fantastic stories to tell. From Jagger to Zappa to Malcolm McLaren, Throbbing Gristle and Wild Man Fischer, from Hubert Selby Jnr. to Ken Russell, he interviewed or hung out with many a legend (true to form, Lou Reed was a miserable sod). He discussed Colin Wilson with Blue Öyster Cult svengali Sandy Pearlman and with Mark E. Smith of The Fall (the latter mentioning Ritual In The Dark on the song Deer Park around this time). On one hand he took the piss out of Venom for their non-existent occult credentials (“Chronos changes the subject by trying to look up the waitress’ skirt; after all, it’s what he does best”) yet spoke of the kabbalstic correspondences with renaissance muso Bill Nelson and discussed Kenneth Grant’s Nightside of Eden with David Tibet of Current 93. It was all great fun. 

As a kind of homage – truth be told I just wanted something with the word ‘phenomenology’ in it – I stole the title of Sandy’s 1981 book on Meat Loaf for this site (again, he was delighted). A Meat Loaf obsessed schoolfriend had shown me Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman and the Phenomenology of Excess back then but the references in it to Wilson’s The New Existentialism – there’s quite a few – went several miles over my head. Truth be told, if they registered at all they must have been totally subliminal. 

Flash forward some years to the end of the Eighties and I borrowed The New Existentialism from the library. I loved it. Now it’s my favourite Wilson book of them all – it changed my perception in a very profound way, just as the originator of the phenomenological method, Edmund Husserl – the driving force of Wilson’s book – would have wanted. 

None of this would have happened if Sandy Robertson hadn’t told me where to look in the first place. Like Wilson himself, I was so pleased to have told him this in person. I’ll miss him. I miss them both. 

Note: 

[1] Notably, Paul Morley and Ian Penman were the main post structuralist culprits at the NME. The latter has become a genuinely readable sage; the former, a nice chap, obviously (he’s great on telly). But his writing continues to stretch my credulity. It was over for me when he described someone – I can’t remember who, exactly – “as miserable as Colin Wilson” (!) 

Fourth International CW Conference July 7th!

On By Philip CoulthardIn Anthony Peake, Cathi Unsworth, Chris Nelson, Colin Stanley, Colin Wilson, Criminology, Darren Coffield, David J. Moore, David Power, Existential Literary Criticism, Existentialism, Fiction, Gary Lachman, Lindsay Siviter, Matthew Conlam, Music, Occult, Paupers' Press, PhenomenologyLeave a comment

The Fourth Colin Wilson Conference will be held this year at Wilson’s old London haunt, Soho, on July 7th, between 9:30am and 17:00pm. For the few remaining places please contact Colin Stanley at stan2727uk@aol.com. Papers include Gary Lachman on Colin Wilson’s ‘Double Brain’, Matthew Conlam on Wilson, his nemesis A. J. Ayer and “the Soul of British Philosophy”, David Moore on The Mind Parasites and other ‘mind viruses’, Lindsay Siviter on the notorious Dr. Crippen, David Power on how Existential Literary Criticism saved CW from Pierre Boulez (!), Anthony Peake on Wilson, J. B. Priestley and the enigmas of time-consciousness, Cathi Unsworth on Bella in the Wych Elm, and Darren Coffield on the legendary Soho drinking den The Colony Room. Finally Chris Nelson asks – as Wilson himself did – are we all multiple personalities?

To whet your appetite, here are some hand-picked Wilson quotes about the chosen subjects…

”The implications are clearly staggering. The person you call ‘you’ lives in the left side of your brain. And a few centimetres away there is another person, a completely independent identity” (from Frankenstein’s Castle, 1980, subtitled The Double Brain: Door to Wisdom).

”To my own slightly prejudiced eye, it often seems that he is at his best as a critic of other people’s ideas rather than as an originator” (Wilson on A. J. Ayer, 1968, reprinted in Collected Essays on Philosophers, 2016).

”I have occasionally been asked by the uninitiated whether I actually ‘saw’ them, or felt that they had a definite shape. The answer is no. My sensations can best be envisaged if you imagine how it feels when you are hot and tired, and everything seems to be going wrong” (from “that important document known as The Mind Parasites by Professor Gilbert Austin”).

”Crippen was certainly one of the most dangerous criminals of his century” (criminologist William Le Queux, quoted in Wilson and Pitman’s pioneering Encyclopaedia of Murder, 1961).

”The ‘modernists’ argue that all important artworks are ahead of their time, and that Schoenberg, Webern, and Boulez will be one day as acceptable in the concert hall as Bach is today” (from Brandy of the Damned, 1964).

”To me, these considerations suggest that these two paradoxical concepts – time and the mind – are closely connected. Our bodies exist in the realm of one-way time, but our minds do not” (from ‘Time in Disarray’ in The Book of Time, 1980).

”In small, lonely communities, superstition itself can create a kind of ‘magical ether’ that may increase the effectiveness of the spells” (on the Lower Quinton ‘witchcraft murders’ from The Occult, 1971).

”Huysmans is right: alcohol has its own important role in the life of the mind, like poetry and music” (from A Book of Booze, 1974).

”It seems like this body of mine is not really ‘mine’ at all; it can be taken over by squatters. This is a flat contradiction of the materialist view – expounded in our time by Wittgenstein and Ryle – that ‘I’ am the sum of my bodily and mental states” (on multiple personalities, from Mysteries, 1978).

The percentual share, or: quality over quantity

On By Philip CoulthardIn A. N. Whitehead, Colin Wilson, Criminology, Edmund Husserl, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Robert MusilLeave a comment

“We who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do” wrote Robert Musil in his masterpiece The Man Without Qualities, a novel which Colin Wilson regarded – correctly – as superior to Proust and Joyce. “It has a tough, intellectual, unemotional quality that I find profoundly satisfying” he once commented. “Regrettably, such qualities are not in wide demand”. 

These ‘qualities’ (and their lack) are the theme of this very large book. Wilson notes that even in its unfinished state, it is longer than War and Peace. Aside from this little-read ‘standard edition’ of over eleven hundred pages, a deluxe version was issued for English readers in 1995 offering a total of 1774 pages. Wilson’s review of the latter version in the fanzine Abraxas helped me make my choice. It’s possibly the most rewarding £40 I ever spent on a piece of fiction. 

Musil trained as a mathematician, engineer and behavioural psychologist, and it is likely that the latter knowledge gives the novel its bitingly satirical, contemporary edge (“reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans”: a century on, change “would be” to “have been”). Cheerfully referred to as ‘nudging’ by today’s governments, behaviourism is a robotic fallacy, and the lacklustre state of 21st century culture proves it. Musil’s novel is a relevant warning in this sense as the plot largely revolves around the bureaucratic red tape tying up a planned celebration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – just before the Great War exploded such pretensions. Time and time again, striking parallels to our present problems fly off almost every page. “Regrettably, a great many people nowadays feel antagonistic toward a great many other people”. “We let others talk themselves into the most one-sided exaggerations: that’s idealism”. “There’s no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general culture-medium”. 

“It can’t go on like this” he writes on the next page. 

An abundance of such insights make the book remarkably contemporary almost a century on, rather like Dostoyevsky’s equally relevant The Devils. Yet re-read that quote about “a human something” again, and it’s obvious that it was Musil’s analysis of the ‘partial mind’ (“no longer a whole man confronting a whole world”) which made Wilson so appreciative (“his attitude towards politics is ironical”, Wilson comments). Musil’s line that “happiness can do wonders for a man’s latent possibilities” is a wonderful motto for Wilson’s own philosophy, and he recalls examples of these latencies manifesting in perception. He lists the striking perceptions of the bright colours of an outdoor market, the asphalt on the road, “the noise that broke apart for a few seconds to let out one specific sound”, Viennese architecture, restaurant tables that look alike but are all “so incredibly individual”… “It was the sort of feeling of which one is hardly ever fully aware, though it permeates everything”. Later (Chap. 122) Musil offers a more technical description of these latent possibilities: “it is with the invisible connections which our minds and feelings unconsciously arrange for us in such a way that we are left to feel we are fully in change of our affairs”. Bridging the gap between near and far (“a kind of foreshortening of the mind’s perspective”) is the trick, he writes. “Happiness, after all, depends for the most part not on one’s ability to resolve contradictions but on making them disappear, the way the gaps between trees disappear when we look down a long avenue of them”. 

According to a Sartre biography [1] Musil was influenced by Franz Brentano, a theologican-turned-philosopher who handed down his insights into the intentionality of consciousness to his pupil Edmund Husserl, the ‘inventor’ of phenomenology (like Musil, he began as a mathematician). Readers of Wilson will be familiar with this useful philosophical method thanks to the later volumes of his Outsider series, most notably Introduction to The New Existentialism from 1966. Despite the occasional comment I’ve read that Wilson didn’t understand or distorted Husserl’s method, a close reading of Husserl’s main texts disproves this notion. [2] If anything, Wilson got the gist of Husserl better than either Sartre or Derrida, who both started as budding phenomenologists. Sartre was too glum to take on the loaded responsibilities that phenomenology demands and Derrida could have saved everybody a headache if he’d simply said that something negating its opposite is just a product of intentionality (selectivity). Wilson stated that phenomenology was essentially a common-sense attitude; after all, Husserl insisted that we put all of our self-indulgent prejudices ‘away’ before we even think of using his method. His pupil Heidegger bluntly defined phenomenology thus: “it is opposed to those pseudo-questions which parade themselves as ‘problems’, often for generations at a time”. Wilson’s exciting argument for an ‘evolutionary phenomenology’, Beyond The Outsider, documents some of these ‘problems’ in a chapter recounting the frustratingly uneven history of modern philosophy; Musil’s novel overflows with witty barbs against these pseudo-questions. 

Following Brentano’s observation of an intentional or active consciousnesses, Husserl insisted that the greater the energy (intentionality), the greater the perception, sometimes alluding to the image of an an arrow hitting a target (later appropriated by Wilson – “perception is intentional”). Musil was onto the same thing when a character in his novel insists we try to notice “the part our personality plays in directing our perceptions”. Feeling, desire and intellect, he writes, “strikes and sticks like an arrow”. 

At the end of the first section of The New Existentialism, Wilson states that the phenomenological method offers a radical break from the cycle of our actions determining our assumptions and vice-versa, a bind he later called ‘the paradox of freedom’ (after Sartre, perhaps). Brilliantly concise, Wilson’s book remains one of the best introductions to Husserl’s concepts, transforming the forbiddingly complex into the practical and workable. Development and use of the phenomenological faculty (‘Faculty X‘) he insists, can begin to solve the paradox which tormented Outsiders like T. E. Lawrence who craved a world “not filtered through or made typical by thought”. This practical discipline is “simply a matter of ceasing to accept one’s impulses at their surface value”, realising that consciousness is active, a “distorting medium” rather like the generalised culture field which Musil’s ‘human somethings’ swim around in. 

Wilson comments that the change in consciousness produced by phenomenological analysis is less drastic than “useless” drugs, but it is permanent and susceptible to analysis. This is true: anyone practicing the disciplines from the book will be aware that the change is subtle but permanent. Wilson often reminded us that he was not offering an instantaneous cure. “You can’t become a new human being overnight” as Musil remarks. 

“We wildly overestimate the present” exclaims the titular ‘man without qualities’ Ulrich. An archetypal ‘Outsider’ who has found little satisfaction in his idealistic projects, Wilson describes him as a character adrift in a society that has no use for his talents (asked what he would do if he ruled the world for a day, he languidly replies “I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality”). Walking with his cousin through a narrow snowy valley, they muse over this problem of the present, the here and now (“as if we’d been put in a basket and the lid of the present had fallen on it”). We make too much of this rather stifling ‘present’, he says. Wilson would doubtless agree: he reminds us that Sartre is always appealing to the present as his standard of reality. Attempting to free himself from this claustrophobic ‘now’ Musil imagines the valley as it must have been thousands of years ago. Unfortunately his mental time travel “is displaced by so much here and now, so much Present”. He cautiously explains that he does not wish to find an explanation or name for this strangely exhilarating state of freedom. This is a mistake. 

As Wilson explains in The New Existentialism, we shall never understand these subtle changes in consciousness “until we create the heavy machinery of language and concepts to map these new areas”. The accurate description of inner mental states is but one technique of phenomenology. “What all this makes clear is that a ‘new existentialism’ must begin with the rather pedestrian task of pushing it’s a scaffolding of language into these new realms”. Nietzsche defined originality as noticing something that has no name “even if it is right in front of everyone’s eyes”; original thinkers are “are mostly also the name-givers”, he says. Wilson’s use of Husserl (the ‘phenomenological faculty’) was the origin of his provisional term ‘Faculty X’, the ability to remind ourselves of the reality of other times and other places, the very experience than Musil is trying to describe. There is nothing mystical about this Faculty (“an ordinary potentiality of consciousness”) although the two are often mistaken. In The Occult Wilson remarks that Faculty X is as much a creative (i.e. poetic) faculty as an ‘occult’ one [3] and is also connected with evolution. “In every epoch of history mankind develops some definite faculty and this faculty plays an important role in evolution” remarked Rudolf Steiner, another unorthodox thinker influenced by Brentano. Philosophically connected with Husserl’s and Heidegger’s examinations into the enigmas of time-consciousness, Wilson recalled that the idea came to him on a snowy day in 1966. 

Husserl thought of the phenomenologist as an explorer “carefully describing what is presented along his unbeaten paths”. He cannily points out that all that is seen and noted in this state never loses its value – as Wilson remarks, these insights are permanent – and that all this is part of a long but rewarding journey toward freedom (Wilson interpreted Husserl’s concept of the transcendental ego as an evolutionary “drive to complexification”). Again, this confirms Wilson’s statement that the phenomenological method is certain, even if it is slow moving. When Musil pondered how to bridge the gap between near and far, he could perhaps have paid some attention to Husserl’s researches. The novel features a chapter in which Ulrich “chats […] in the jargon of the frontier between the superrational and the subrational” and sarcastically lampoons “the transcendent ego” and “the realm of being rather than the realm of phenomena or appearances”. Discussions of this near-far problem occur often in Husserl’s work, in Heidegger’s Being and Time and in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (which Wilson recommends as a handbook for his new existentialism). “Translated into the ghastly jargon of our times” writes Musil later in the novel, “we could call this faculty we all lack to such a frightening degree nowadays ‘the percentual share’ of an individual’s experiences and actions”. In dream, myth, poetry and childhood “it’s apparently a hundred percent, in our waking life not even half as much”. Wilson also spoke of consciousness in similar fiscal terms (“a tax on consciousness”; “five percent ‘you’ and ninety-five percent robot”). In an essay on ‘Husserl and Evolution’ he names this hidden poetic state ‘Childhood Realism’ – a richer intuitive content of ‘primal perception’ which lies under our everyday prejudices – while reminding us that Husserl’s “ponderous” first book of philosophy arrived the same year as Chesterton’s in 1900. Chesterton observed that we say the earth is round and even though it’s true, we don’t mean it. Wilson was adamant that we could say things and mean them when the Faculty is operative. “Husserl’s phenomenology” he says, “is an investigation of meaning”. Husserl ponders the fluctuations of meaning and the precise naming of such states in the first Investigation of the Logical Investigations, 1900. 

During their walk through the valley Ulrich informs his cousin that even the earth isn’t what it is pretending to be at the moment; this pleasant little snow dappled valley was once a glacier. “Today it is acting the good middle-class mother feeding her children. Back then the world was frigid and icy, like a spiteful girl. Several thousand years before that it luxuriated in hot fern forests, sultry swamps, and demonic beasts”. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche imagined Lovecraftian ‘cyclopean’ energies savagely beating a path through such glacial wastelands, eventually forming the “gentler civilsation” which we humans live in. “Such levels of thought are of course not to be taken literally, as if superimposed on each other like layers of soil” writes Musil, helpfully (he also speaks here of levels of consciousness, a concept later elaborated by Wilson). But these geological images are apt because Husserl described the descending and ever-ascending structure of intentional consciousness as ‘sedimented’. Similarly Wilson referred to ‘a ladder of selves’ and to compacted ‘layers of willed intentions’, those carefully – perhaps clumsily – learned processes which become habitual then automatic or ‘mechanical’ (sic). Husserl was just as concerned with breaking this automated apathy as Wilson’s favourite mystic Gurdjieff. As of course was Wilson himself. 

Wilson’s alter-ego Gerard Sorme notes in his diary – published as Wilson’s novel Man Without a Shadow – that there are forces lying below the surface of consciousness that are “fully cognisant of everything that goes on” and that these forces “inject meaning into the world”. Without these, We are mostly completely unaware of such hidden ‘forces’ (layers of intentions). Sorme writes that the world is meaningless without them, “like the scenery stored in an empty theatre”. In his essay on Husserl and evolution Wilson remarks that the aim of phenomenology is to poke holes in this stage scenery of everyday consciousness (Wilson’s alter-ego reminds himself that he needs to develop a “new faculty” to do just that, later in his diary). The non-fiction twin to Sorme’s diary, Origins of the Sexual Impluse, also analyses this problem (“the strange arithmetic of these illusions”) and it’s solution through awareness of the ‘form imposing faculty’ of intentionality. In Origins Wilson points to the criminal character of Moosbrugger from Musil’s novel as an illustration of these strong forces breaking through into society without the necessary safety measures demanded by phenomenological analysis, or put more bluntly, without any intelligence. This theme is also exhaustively documented in Wilson’s true crime books. “The barred window and the bolted door were himself” realises Moosbrugger, sitting in his cramped cell. In his psychological study of murder, Order of Assassins, Wilson describes our ‘normal’ state of habitually narrow consciousness as “a kind of self created prison”, an image also used in The Outsider (Chap. 6). In purely practical terms this is a vicious circle which phenomenological disciplines can help break. As noted, at the end of the first section of The New Existentialism, Wilson points out that we grasp our lives according to what Husserl called the ‘natural standpoint’, a kind of lazy taking for granted. Therefore the human condition is determined by how we live and act. “But our actions are determined by our assumptions about their possibly of success” writes Wilson. “And our assumptions about their possibility of success are determined by our idea of the ‘human condition’ (as we grasp it according to the natural standpoint)”. [4] Historically speaking, this impasse has been broken by works of art, science and philosophy. 

The sense of ‘nothing for us to do’, as Musil put it, was the life-question with which Wilson concerned himself, helped along by the practicalities of existentialism and the rigours of phenomenology. “What does a phenomenologist actually do?” he asks in The New Existentialism. “He applies the phenomenological method to whatever may be his own field”. Merleau-Ponty applied it to embodiment, after Husserl’s later work; Roman Ingarden applied it to art. Wilson applied it to something we all know: the everyday problem of ‘life-failure’. “A convinced reader might lay down [volumes by Bergson and Shaw] and sigh: ‘But what am I supposed to do?’ An existentialism based on Whitehead and Husserl is able to answer this question”. Husserl asked: ‘how does consciousness select some things and not others?’ and Wilson stressed that this ‘how’ “can be observed by anyone who goes to enough trouble”. [5] No more difficult that learning a language and just as permanent, these psychic changes are tied in with his notion of ‘layers of willed intentions’, a sedimented process of slow and difficult learning becoming habitual and then silently ‘automatic’ or robotic (learning to drive is a particular good example). Like the ‘work’ of Gurdjieff, Husserl’s phenomenology aims to uncover these so-called automatic functions as buried intentions, active forces which we mistakenly believe are passive, inert. 

More radically, Wilson suggested that those who become particularly skilled in phenomenological analysis will be able to dredge up these deep ‘occult’ layers and reactivate them. “The law of man’s evolutionary being must be uncovered and brought to consciousness by the same methods that uncovered the laws of the planets”. [6] However, Wilson maintained that such deep motive powers – described cryptically by Husserl as ‘the hidden achievements of the transcendental ego’ and ‘the keepers of the key to the ultimate sources of being’ – should only concern us once we posses a fully functioning consciousness, thanks to the practicalities of phenomenological technique. Foundation work, as he had it. Husserl himself was of the same opinion; phenomenology was for him a “beginning philosophy”. Similarly, Gurdjieff stressed that we have a clear, non-robotic consciousness before attempting to connect to the ‘higher centres’ (essentially, what Husserl meant by the transcendental ego). 

Whether one chooses to do these things is of course up to the individual – “anyone who goes to enough trouble”. That sentence, more than anything, sums up this whole philosophy. I can only speak from my own use of the methods of the new existentialism: they work, and their effects are indeed remarkably self-transforming. 

[1] Hayman, Ronald, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986, p. 95. 

[2] For instance, in the Logical Investigations (RKP, 1970), p. 582, Husserl discusses how greater perceptual energy generates deeper comprehension; on pp. 253, 344 and 385 he mentions the “hit”, or “the target of our intention”, the “aim” of perception – an analogy used many times therein and elsewhere (a “dart” in Ideas ll, Kluwer, 1989, p. 252). Likewise the notion of perception seizing hold of objectivity as a ‘grip’ or enveloping it as a ‘ray’ is examined extensively (eg Ideas [Nijhoff, 1982], p. 293; this idea was already present in the Investigations, ibid. p. 542). Husserl often digs into the “structure of consciousness” (Ideas ll, p. 238) and examines the “sediments” or layers of consciousness (ibid. p. 234). Levels of consciousness are investigated in Ideas (ibid. p. 247). All of these concepts are put to full use in Wilson’s new existentialism: the terminology may vary but the debt is obvious. 

[3] Wilson, Colin, The Occult, Granada, 1978, p. 123. Also: telepathy is likely a primitive ‘meaning perception’ and what we refer to as mystical experience is a temporary reversal of Prof. Whitehead’s two modes of perception (of which meaning perception is one). Wilson, Colin, Beyond The Outsider, Arthur Barker, 1965, pp. 89, 148. Wilson’s later thoughts on split-brain theory are relevant here. 

[4] Wilson, Colin, Introduction to The New Existentialism, Hutchinson, 1966, p. 92. See also p. 66 – “‘perception’ is at least fifty per cent assumption”; p. 91, “But the question of how far life itself is a success or a defeat depends on these assumptions”; p. 173, ‘We are all insane; the difference between Napoleon and a madman who believes he is Napoleon is difference in degree, not in kind; both are acting on a limited set of assumptions”. An investigation into phenomenological neutrality and ‘assumption’ appears in Husserl’s Ideas, ibid. p. 257 (he stresses the universality of the phenomenological method). On p. 259 he defines assuming as ‘supposing’, those kind of presuppositions (a “merely-thinking-of”, the lazy perception of the natural standpoint) which his method aims to rigorously question. 

[5] Wilson. Beyond The Outsider, ibid. pp. 160/1 and p. 82. 

[6] ibid. p. 165. I am reminded not only of occultist Austin Osman Spare’s ‘formulae of atavistic resurgence’ which allegedly involves reactivating ancient ‘karmas’ via aesthetics, but also of Rudolf Steiner’s theosophical descriptions of germinal human states via planetary metaphors such as ‘Old Saturn’ (apparently the origin of human sensuousness) etc. Also Gurdjieff’s cosmology/psychology. See Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous (RKP, 1950), Kenneth Grant’s ‘Typhonian Trilogies’ and his Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare (various publishers), and Steiner’s lectures, available online. 

Third CW Conference 1st – 3rd Sept.

On By Philip CoulthardIn Colin Stanley, Colin Wilson, Colin Wilson Audio, Colin Wilson Collection, David J. Moore, Existential Literary Criticism, Existentialism, Gary Lachman, Music, Occult, Paupers' Press, PhenomenologyLeave a comment

The third International Colin Wilson Conference will be held in Nottingham, UK, from the 1st to the 3rd of this September. 70 places available at £70 for all three days, £30 for one day and £20 for the Sunday. Email stan2727uk@aol.com for more details. There’s more detailed information on the previous two events here.

Beyond the confusions of the intellect

On By Philip CoulthardIn Colin Wilson, Edmund Husserl, Existentialism, Gurdjieff, Occult, Phenomenology, Robert MusilLeave a comment

NOTE: The Third Colin Wilson Conference will be happening this September (1st – 3rd) in Nottingham, UK. More details here.

“It is the fallacy of all intellectuals to believe that the intellect can grasp life” wrote Colin Wilson in 1966. A century before, the young Nietzsche had realised that happiness and freedom lie beyond “the confusions of the intellect” when he took shelter in a shepherd’s hut. “The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable feeling of well-being and zest”. Similarly, Proust’s epiphany in Swann’s Way happens on a dreary winters day. “The past” he broods as he comes indoors from the cold, is “beyond the reach of the intellect”. A few sips of warm tea and some morsels of cake later he recalls a childhood episode with piercing clarity; he has suddenly ceased to feel mediocre, accidental (“contingent” depending on the translation) or mortal. This feeling of “all-powerful joy”, he ruminates, brought with it “no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of it’s felicity, it’s reality”. Proust called these moments of well-being moments bienheureux – “quite simply, a surge of strength and power” comments Wilson. He goes on to say that Proust would have demurred at this interpretation as he thought of himself as an invalid and hypochondriac. Conversely, Nietzsche sought this powerful feeling despite his own worse ill-health (Wilson’s 1972 essay Dual Value Response examines the latter dichotomy in some detail). In 1986 Wilson defined existentialism – as it is commonly understood – as “the notion that reality extends beyond our power to grasp it”. Against this he offered a ‘new’ existentialism, based on the phenomenological methods of the philosopher Husserl. The key text, Introduction to The New Existentialism (1966) explains how Husserl’s ideas deny the contingency that existentialism stressed, despite predating and influencing that philosophical school. Both Heidegger and Sartre began as keen ‘phenomenologists’, the former studying it first hand from Husserl. Wilson correctly points out that both soon moved away from Husserl’s most practical insight, that of intentionality, or the study of active perception, in order to compromise with professional philosophy (and with dogmatic political ideology, Heidegger veering far right and Sartre far left). 

The intellect finds it hard to grasp the moments which Nietzsche and Proust experienced as it relies on the shorthand of symbols and language, puzzles which Wilson examines in the last few volumes of the Outsider series. But these – indeed, most of his books – also analyse a much more serious and immediate problem: the seemingly random fluctuations of consciousness. “If the flame of consciousness is low” he writes in The New Existentialism, “a symbol has no power to evoke reality, and intellect is helpless”. That the intellect is a “false guide” is no cause for pessimism, he comments, as pessimism itself arises from from the delusions of passive, limited consciousness. “Human beings need a centre of security from which to make forays into the outer-chaos”, he continues. But these protective walls can quickly feel like a padded cell or prison; too much security becomes boredom which leads to a loss of vitality, a feeling of being trapped in the present. This atmosphere is described in the first part of Goethe’s Faust, in Goncharov’s Oblomov and in Sartre’s fiction. “Man uses his intellect to prevent his experience from escaping him” comments Wilson. “But the essence of the experience escapes, all the same”. Existence philosophy (‘old’ existentialism, as Wilson labels it) failed because it stuck to examining everything through this narrow lens of limited consciousness. Adding insult to injury, it declaimed these limitations in the formal jargon of the academy (“the difficulties encountered in a text by Jaspers, Heidegger or Sartre are the difficulties that the author feels to be necessary to an academically respectable philosophy”). But the point of Existenzphilosophie was that it dealt with direct living problems over generalised abstractions, a realistic attitude which Wilson attempted to revive with his vigorous ‘new’ or phenomenological existentialism, aimed at the general rather than specialist reader. “It deals with the most immediate problem we can experience, with our actual living response to everyday existence”. It could be argued that Wilson’s background as a self-taught working man gives his writings a directness and liveliness which is generally missing in the theorists he is examining. It also offers accessibility to a non-academic audience, a point he addresses early in his book. I can vouch for that, as The New Existentialism is the most useful text I’ve read for dealing with the seemingly random fluctuations of meaning which come and go on a daily basis. Simply put, the phenomenological idea of intentionality suggests that we subliminally select our meanings according to our temperament. Nietzsche intuitively grasped this process when he said that there are no facts, only interpretations, but Husserl went further, demonstrating that our interpretations cloud these ‘facts’ or truths. Understand these distortions and we will begin to think with more clarity. 

If this principle of intentionality is understood, life gradually becomes subtly different. “Once we see this clearly, it becomes astonishing that anybody bothers to argue about it” reads one of the most penetrating lines in Wilson’s book. About what? About the observable principle that intentionally limited consciousness – what we glibly call ‘ordinary consciousness’ – is a scaled down version of the real thing, a truncated view of life. This is not wooly mysticism – Wilson had already offloaded mystical literature to the status of a “primitive phenomenology” in the previous Outsider volume. As he says, it has more to do with our direct response to everyday existence. If consciousness selects it’s facts and objects of perception, why would anyone choose a selection which ‘proves’ that they are merely at the mercy of outward things, without any inner freedom? The obvious answer is: laziness. But as Husserl stated in 1900, an energetic perception grasps more ‘reality’ than a merely token recognition, an observation previously made by the poet Blake with his devilish aphorism ‘energy is eternal delight’. This optimistic sense of lived possibility runs through all Wilson’s writing. “Can one live a philosophy without negating either the life or the philosophy?” he asked in the opening pages of The Outsider. Yes: as he later explained in Beyond the Outsider, the workings of intentionality “can be observed by anyone who goes to enough trouble”. Effort is the starting point; this could merely be the effort to understand what Husserl meant. The New Existentialism even has a section of practical disciplines. “The first practical disciple for the existential philosopher is to learn to become constantly aware of the intentionality of all his conscious acts”. Recognition is another key factor. 

Husserl himself insisted that phenomenology is not merely “vocational” or academic but involves creating a new attitude [Einstellung] towards lived experience. Wilson put it succinctly in a later essay on his ‘new’ existentialism in 1986: “Husserl’s recognition of the intentionality of consciousness is a recognition that our attitudes govern our perceptions”. Wilson’s writings are packed with illustrations of this in action. Examples are drawn from from literature or philosophy – Proust and Nietzsche, above – or from religion and mysticism, psychology, personal anecdote, even criminal cases. He would often quote the philosopher Whitehead, who had insisted we examine ‘experience drunk and experience sober’ – Wilson wrote a book on alcohol – ‘experience normal and experience abnormal’ and so on. This is the existentialist position (Wilson also wrote an essay about Whitehead as an existentialist). It is what Husserl meant when he said that the study of intentionality is not vocational but is completely involved in life as a whole. “We can even go on calmly speaking in the way we must as natural human beings” writes Husserl in the sixty-fourth section of Ideas, “for as phenomenologists we are not supposed to stop being natural human beings”. 

Wilson thought Husserl’s method “brilliant and original” but felt that he never really got beyond it (“he spent his life on the threshold of philosophy, laying the ‘foundations’”). What was required of his own use of this method was to align it with the everyday experience of the average reader, and to tackle the serious problem of fluctuating meaning. Wilson was adamant that intentionality was much more exciting and dynamic than ‘reference to an object’ or an ‘intelligent effort of interpretation’ as phenomenologists soberly put it. 

Husserl speaks of intention as a “ray” or “grip” while pondering how to regenerate the confusions of “intellectual content” into something distinctive and understandable [Ideas § 123]. Wilson points out in Dual Value Response that if Nietzsche had lived to his sixty-eighth year and read Husserl’s text he would have found a direct method for grasping his pure experience, without intellectual confusions. Not only that, says Wilson; had Nietzsche known about separating his intention from the object – which Husserl explains in great detail between sections 87 and 127 of Ideas – we would have been spared his unnecessary obsessions with the likes of “that egotistic roughneck” Cesare Borgia. With this concept in mind Wilson spoke of a faculty which can firmly hold a “grip on reality” in The Strength to Dream and of intentionality as an “inner meaning” or “grip on life” in Origins of the Sexual Impulse. “Husserl’s phenomenology, then, is an investigation into meaning” he says in Beyond the Outsider. These last few volumes of the Outsider series are where Wilson delves deepest into phenomenology, all of it summarised in the 181 pages of The New Existentialism. Here, the ideas of the Outsider series are presented in “a simple and non-technical language for the ordinary intelligent reader” and Wilson presupposes no previous knowledge of the series, nor the existentialism or phenomenology it deals with. One delightful aspect of the book is it’s tone: it manages to explain ‘continental’ philosophy with the breeziness of an Anglo empiricist. “A phenomenologist might be an existentialist or a logical positivist or a neo-Hegelian” he writes, ending the first part of the book (“little more than a clearing of the ground”). But it is already much more than that. The first part remains one of the most cogent explanations of the phenomenological method ever written, and one of the main reasons for such dynamic clarity is that Wilson was a self-motivated thinker, a product of factory floors and belching chimneys rather than dreaming spires and ivory towers. Nietzsche himself said that good writers attempt to make their ideas clearly understood rather than cypher them to “knowing and over-acute readers” of the over analytical, dryly intellectual kind. “The legitimate is simple, as all greatness is simple, open to anyone’s understanding” wrote the novelist Robert Musil in his masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. “Homer was simple, Christ was simple. The truly great minds always come down to simple basics”. If Nietzsche had written a novel, it would doubtless read like Musil’s (despite one character describing him as a “mental case”!)

The intellect can only take us so far in these matters as it is still only a part of lived experience, entwined with our values and our response to life. The phenomenological methods on which the new existentialism is based do not promise instantaneous results or a quick fix solution. “You can’t become a new human being overnight” as Musil observed. Rather, it is closer to the religious idea that a) what we observe is not the totality of reality and b) more subtle aspects of this reality can be slowly comprehended over the span of adult life via careful observation. However, the method is free of the kind of sectarian prejudices (“the weaknesses of every individual” as Blake had it in All Religions Are One) that inevitably sink religions and their cultish offshoots.

In a social sense it is important to remember that Wilson equates early lack of struggle with the attitudes toward meaning that Husserl describes. For instance, Sartre and Beckett were brought up comfortably middle class whereas Shaw and Wells – and Wilson himself – were working class. The tone or atmosphere of the new existentialism is therefore closer to the latter writers than the former, based as it is on the ordinary lived experience of difficulty, the hard won knowledge that effort brings reward.

But perhaps the reason I personally find Wilson to be a trustworthy guide in many intellectual matters is due to a shared attitude – what the psychologist Maslow called ‘the need to know’, the opposite of intellectual timidity or logical dogmatism – rather than the specific fact that we both emerged from the same rung of society (correctly, Wilson never liked being bricked in as just a ‘working class writer’ with his fellow Angry Young Men). Most likely, it was this open attitude rather the bare facts of Wilson’s background which created his uneasy relationship with the intelligentsia of the time. 

Maslow remarks that “examination of psychologically healthy people shows pretty clearly that they are positively attracted to the mysterious, the unknown, to the puzzling and the unexplained”, the kind of amusing or disturbing oddities collected by Madame Blavatsky or Charles Fort or indeed in Wilson’s own, rather more literate and philosophical occult studies. Maslow observed that psychologically unhealthy subjects tend to feel threatened by the ambiguous and unfamiliar, preferring the “unenriched familiarity” of normal or naive perception as Husserl described it (Wilson had it as “forced familiarity” in his Wilhelm Reich biography). Sartre’s writings contain many examples of this easily upset perception, notably the descriptions in Nausea of trees which frightened him and lamp-posts which embarrass him (“I would have liked them to exist less strongly, in a drier, more abstract way”). As Nietzsche said, we begin to distrust clever people when they embarrass too easily. Sartre’s request is admirably ‘phenomenological’, but one which misunderstands Husserl’s assertion of an active perception. True to form, he felt more comfortable with dialectical materialism. 

One of the practical phenomenological disciples given in The New Existentialism involves patiently listening to political opinion from the party you vote against without reacting – a challenge indeed to the hardened dogmatists of both left and right today. Wilson’s A Criminal History of Mankind (1985) overflows with illustrations of this “spiritual arthritis” at work in societies and individuals throughout history. Such rigid dogma can easily become a catastrophic, anti-creative force, reactive rather than intentional. Wilson’s favourite mystic Gurdjieff was obsessed with overcoming this ‘mechanical’ fault, stressing that genuine knowledge is only allotted to those who actively seek it via struggle or effort. This information, he says, can be best collected during the fall of cultures, “when the masses lose their reason and begin to destroy everything” – periods of philistinism often accompanied by “geological cataclysms, climatic changes”. An enormous surplus of this ‘knowledge’ lies unclaimed as the majority never even collect their rationed share (Gurdjieff insisted that knowledge was ‘material’, like food). It’s certainly a good parable for Wilson’s analysis of meaning, which can be grabbed or grasped in larger quantities by those who have attempted to develop their ‘organ’ of intentionality (“a kind of hand” as Wilson describes it). This can only be done on an individual level; no one else can do it for you. Gurdjieff also insisted that the only possible mystical initiation is self-initiation. As Wilson suggested, the mystical doctrines of ancient sects are but a precursor to Husserl’s revolution in thought. 

Wilson sometimes said that this question of intentionality was a matter of life and death, a seemingly large and dramatic claim for an abstract philosophy born of logic (Husserl began as a mathematician). But in a certain sense it is true: those capable of developing a hold or grip on reality will be far less susceptible to debilitating conditions such as depression. Drawn from a passage near the end of The New Existentialism, the plot of Wilson’s 1967 satire The Mind Parasites outlines a global plague of anhedonia circa – ahem – now. The narrator describes the book (essentially an assemblage of fictional documents) as “a work of history, not of philosophy” but is still of the opinion that the word phenomenology is “perhaps the most important single word in the vocabulary of the human race”. Satire or no, it is likely that Wilson wrote that line with his tongue only partly in his cheek. 

In the long run Wilson’s one man war against life-failure and the ‘age of defeat’ will become more and more relevant to hardened individualists bored by living in a rather suffocating world modeled on he philosophical fallacies of behaviourism, a system which maintains the lifeless state of the “man-machine” that Gurdjieff regarded with horror. “Husserl suggested” writes Wilson in The New Existentialism “that as man loses all the false ideas about himself and the world through scientific [i.e. phenomenological] analysis, and as he comes to recognise that he himself is responsible for so much that he assumed to be ‘objective’, he will come to recognise his true self, presiding over perception and all other acts of living. This idea seems common-sensible enough, and our intuitions about ourselves seem to support it”. A few examples of this shift happening are given later in the book via the experiences of William James, Arthur Koestler and René Daumal. “The ‘self’ that has been experiencing various fears and humiliations has been evoked by a narrow range of experience”, but the self that has overcome this “is contemptuous of this triviality”. This the change of attitude (suspension of prejudices) which Husserl stressed. By true self or ‘transcendental ego’ he meant a state shorn of fallacies from which genuine thought could begin. But Sartre, and later Derrida (“Sartre redivivus” – Wilson) misunderstood it as a survival of religious idealism, thanks to too much dogmatic intellectualism and not enough common-sense intuition. 

The key, as Husserl said, is to become aware of the workings of intentionality as a living method, rather than just another theory in the annals of philosophical history. “In recent times the longing for a fully alive philosophy has led to many a renaissance” he states in the lecture Cartesian Meditations [§ 2]. This living philosophy is based on the “radicalness of self-responsibility”, and on a necessity to “make that radicalness true for the first time by enhancing it to the last degree”. This “new beginning”, he says, is “each for himself and in himself” [§ 3]. In Beyond The Outsider Wilson remarks that Kierkegaard’s ‘truth is subjectivity’ can really only be illuminated by Husserl’s method. Rather than interpret this as ‘beauty being in the eye of the beholder’ it should be understood as a paradoxical instruction meaning that truth is within (“in himself”) but is not relative. Wilson later comments that Kierkegaard’s statement “seems to justify the view that there are as many ‘truths’ as there are individuals, and all are equally valid”, which is the default position of the present era. [1] Musil sardonically wrote of “the general obsession with turning every viewpoint into a standpoint and regarding every standpoint as a viewpoint”, a barb as relevant as it was a century ago. Wilson goes on to say that it would be more accurate to say that ‘truth is evolutionary intentionality’ (a concept explained at length in Beyond The Outsider). In effect this means that the further we move away from local or subjective prejudices – Blake’s ‘weaknesses’ – the closer we get to a truly unique individuality (the transcendental ego, a self shorn of such relativist baggage). As previously noted, our deeper intuitions about ourselves certainly support this view. 

The evolutionary paradox which Wilson analyses in titles such as Beyond The Outsider, The Occult and A Criminal History is of a lopsided human creature dominant in intellect and it’s ever refined details but surprisingly weak in grasping larger, overall meanings. As his philosophy aimed to correct this disability, it is unsurprising that he came into conflict with professional intellectuals as much as he was welcomed by ordinary readers. After all, as The New Existentialism explains, that was his intention all along. 

[1] “If we instinctively acknowledge human greatness as a value – that is, if we agree that Jesus is in some way preferable to Judas Iscariot, that Beethoven is a more valuable human being than Al Capone – then we are subscribing to he basic human vision of freedom”. Wilson, Colin, Introduction to The New Existentialism, Hutchinson, 1966, pp. 162/3. This is analogous to Wilson’s comment on Nietzsche’s unnecessary celebration of the Borgias (“a great deal of misleading stuff”). Wilson, Colin, ‘Dual Value Response’, 1972. Collected in The Bicameral Critic, Salem House, 1985, p. 108.

Pseudoreality doesn’t need to prevail 

On By Philip CoulthardIn PhenomenologyLeave a comment

Savage faculties?

“There was a personality who lived in the later period of Mexican civilisation and was connected with the utterly decadent, pseudo-magical Mystery cults of Mexico; with an intense thirst for knowledge he studied everything with close and meticulous exactitude”. With typical sobriety Rudolf Steiner described this dark scene to a hushed lecture hall in 1924, all the while rejecting the fashionable interest in such ancient lore by remarking that although this mysterious individual “knew that Quetzalcoatl was a Divine Being who could take hold of man in his circulating blood, in the working of his breath”, the ‘knowledge’ he possessed was automatic and unconscious, the opposite of the intentional wisdom that we develop by individual effort. Continuing his fantastic narrative, Steiner remarks that this perverse soul later incarnated into the body of the occultist known as ‘Eliphas Levi’ and offers the penetrating comment that if you read Levi’s books “you will find evidence of great wisdom spread out as it were over something extremely primitive”.

Of the nineteenth century occult revival which Levi was a figurehead, Steiner commented that it’s practitioners attempted to “convince themselves, one might say, artificially […] to accept the existence of a super-sensible world”. The word ‘artificial’ was pejoratively used by Steiner’s esoteric contemporaries Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to describe a fake world of automated or robotic perceptions, similar to the contingent state of humanity outlined by Heidegger and the existentialists that followed. One occult practitioner at this time believed himself to be Levi’s reincarnation, and seemingly possessed the same instinctive abilities as Steiner’s Mexican adept. Describing Aleister Crowley’s lumbering psychic constitution, Colin Wilson notes that “instinctive, animal faculties” were his compass, an insight given extra weight in Crowley’s memoir where he speaks of a “subconscious physical memory” connected to his motor functions (“my limbs poses a consciousness of their own that is infallible” he writes of his mountaineering skills). This faculty, he says, has led him over all manner of territories and is only thrown off balance by the interference of his conscious mind (“I have several other savage faculties” he writes in his Confessions; “in particular, I can smell snow and water”). Regarding his magical and mystical abilities, he cheerfully boasts that he “picked up the technical tricks of the trade almost by instinct”. 

It’s likely that Steiner differentiated between ‘involuntary’ and intentional perception due to his interest in the ideas of Franz Brentano, a philosopher who had stated that perception is always about something (“reference to an object”). In his Steiner biography (1985) Wilson comments that this idea of active perception is exactly what the young Steiner wanted to hear (Steiner was still enthusing about Brentano later in his career). By the time Brentano’s pupil Edmund Husserl wrote the Logical Investigations in 1900 this aboutness had developed into the vigorous “directed aiming” of intentionality, the core concept of Husserl’s phenomenology and later, of Wilson’s new existentialism. Our attentive thought, writes Husserl [VI § 38] “aims at a thing, and it hits it’s mark, or does not hit it” according to the strength of the intention. “In our metaphor an act of hitting the mark corresponds to that of aiming” [ibid. V § 13]. Husserl states that without such intentionality, the ‘shot’ is simply missed; the greater the energy, the more total the perception. In this energetically intentional act, says Husserl, “we live, as it were, principally”; in the subordinate and partial acts, we live only partially [ibid. § 19]. With reference to this variable of perception Wilson would quote Yeats’ line about completing the partial mind and note Blake’s “remarkable anticipation of phenomenology” as a possible corrective. For Blake’s fiery aphorism that energy is eternal delight is in essence the argument that Husserl makes here for the “greatest energy […] displayed by the act-character which comprehends and subsumes all partial acts”. Elsewhere [ibid. § 15 b] Husserl carefully separates intentions from sensations (“tactual, gustatory, olfactory”) so when Crowley tells us that he can smell snow and water despite his “olfactory sense [being] far below the average”, the “savage faculty” he is describing is an instinct, not an intention. 

Life in the culture-medium 

Husserl tells us that intention aims at its object as if it were “desirous” of it [ibid. VI § 20], something Blake clearly understood. In Blake’s mythology, the core human value is the ‘Poetic Genius’, the origin of inspiration and “the first principle” with “all the others merely derivative” – the ‘others’ being the naturalistic pantheism of antiquity. Husserl’s ironic name for partial perception is the natural attitude, a state where “we take [things] for granted […] without even thinking about it” [Ideas § 77]; the fallacy of passive consciousness, as Wilson has it in The New Existentialism. Blake thought of the Poetic Genius as a faculty – “the true faculty of knowing” and “the faculty that experiences”, in other words a phenomenological and existential faculty (“scientific common sense” which would hardly be “out of place in a Secular Society pamphlet” comments Wilson in The Outsider). True to his anticipation of this philosophical stance, Blake notes that this pure inspiration is too often distorted when transmitted through individual “weaknesses“ – Husserl would have said ‘prejudices’ – via philosophical sects and closed religions. Husserl states [Ideas II § 59] that a faculty is “not an empty ability but a positive potentiality” in the “stream of lived experience”. Similarly, Husserl’s pupil Heidegger asserts that the “question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself” [Being and Time § 12]. “The understanding of oneself which leads along this way we call ‘existentiell’”. Wilson made the distinction between pantheistic ‘occult faculties’ and this existential/intentional or phenomenological faculty in his book The Occult, where the latter is known as ‘Faculty X’. Proust’s famous moment of ‘time regained’ in Swann’s Way is often used as an example of this Faculty in action, and Proust later explains that it happens rarely because our faculties lie dormant due to habit. “A slight burst of energy, for a single day, would be sufficient to change these habits for good” he writes. Like Blake, Wilson thinks this Faculty is common to poets. “What is poetry?” he asks in Poetry and Mysticism. “It is a contradiction of the everyday life-world”, Heidegger’s trivial ‘everydayness’. Another lumbering modernist novel – Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which Wilson rated higher than Proust’s – examined this existential dilemma of a diminished life. “There’s no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general culture-medium”. 

The Personality Surgeon

Compared to those who “work in the medium of life itself” says Musil, “mere literature” is only an illustration of living, a point also made by Wilson in the fourth chapter of The Outsider; certain existential problems cannot be solved by writing about them, as they must be lived. The ‘culture-medium’, then, can be understood as Husserl’s ‘life-world’, the surrounding ‘given’ world which he thoroughly analysed in his final book The Crisis of European Sciences. “Culture creates personality and is at the same time the product and the result of personality” said Gurdjieff, making a distinction between ‘personality’ (social self-awareness of and in response to other people) and ‘essence’ (what is ‘yours’, your unique individuality). Personality is false, he tells us, because it is created by “involuntary imitation” of the “intentional influences of other people”. Husserl likened intentionality to a “universal medium” in Ideas [§ 85], “disregarding its enigmatic forms and levels”, that is. Wilson later had it as a “distorting medium” or “distorting power”. The great gift of phenomenology and existentialism, he says, is to show that the distorting medium is the human personality – “which knows itself as an active participant in the world, in relations with other people” – not the senses. This “fine network of relations” warps our interpretations of reality. The active mind is “continuously selecting, filtering, interpreting, colouring – and sometimes distorting and misinforming” our experience, he writes. Musil understood this when he pointed out that we do not notice “the part our personality plays in directing our perceptions” just as we don’t notice the silent revolutions of the earth.

In the ‘visionary’ chapter of The Outsider Wilson comments that the poet Rimbaud knew that our inner being (Blake’s Poetic Genius) orders what we see. Later he transformed Rimbaud’s ‘systematic derangement of the senses’ into a kind of motto for phenomenology – ‘the systematic derangement of human prejudice’. Through this ‘derangement’ we can reach the inner being, which Husserl named the Transcendental Ego. Husserl describes intentionality as an attentional “Ego-ray” striking an object (“it is the target”) as the Ego “does and undergoes, is free”. This “ray of attention presents itself as emanating from the pure Ego and terminating in that which is objective”. The pure Ego or “free being” is consciousness shorn of presuppositions and prejudices which lives in these free acts, actions which he calls spontaneous doing [Ideas § 92]. Gurdjieff told Ouspensky that individual evolution is ‘doing’ and doing cannot just ‘happen’ – it is dependent upon powers and possibilities which never develop by themselves (i.e. non-mechanically). In other words, intentions, Husserl’s faculty that is a positive potentiality. Wilson grapples with this “evolutionary intentionality” in Beyond The Outsider (1965).

We are made of habits, prejudices and earth 

“Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated” writes Heidegger in Being and Time [§ 27]. Wilson’s mechanical metaphor for this passing of willed intentions to habits which just ‘happen’ is called ‘the robot’, who is “actually composed of compacted layer upon layer of willed intentions”. Seemingly mechanical actions like driving or typing are learned slowly and perhaps with difficultly, but eventually they become automatic or rather automated and we no longer need to concentrate on the mechanical drudge, which is passed to the robot or sedimented into a metaphorical geology of older, former willed intentions. We are made of “habits, prejudices and earth” says Walter in The Man Without Qualities. Husserl considered this problem of sedimentation (“traditionalization”) in the Crisis. He asks if this process is not tied up with presupposition and “the problem of the instincts”, and likens it to a reliable, useful machine, “a machine everyone can learn to operate correctly without in the least understanding the inner possibility and necessity” of it’s accomplishments [§ 9 h]. Musil sardonically deals with this theme in his novel, blaming Galileo for “a veritable orgy and conflagration of matter-of-factness”. Wilson noted Musil’s debt to Nietzsche, who had gone even further in this argument by declaring the philosophers Hobbes, Locke and Hume proponents of “English-mechanistic world-stupidification”. Their ‘associationism’ was succinctly explained by Wilson: that ‘you’ are just what happens to you; as in Gurdjieff’s idea of ‘personality’, we are just a bundle of sensations with no core. Although Wilson was aware of Hume’s anticipatory influence on Husserl, he agreed with Husserl’s opinion that this philosophy was guilty of taking “immediate insights […] as given truths”. This was merely “naive, uncritical, everyday experience […] a mere assumption, no more than a common prejudice” (Prolegomena, Logical Investigations). A thought experiment later in the book [V § 9] imagines a “being” as this “mere complex of sensations” who can only speak of ‘bodies’ or ‘inanimate things’ and is incapable of emotion. This he says, would be due to a hypothetical flaw in the interpretive ability of this being, it’s intentionality.

In the beginning is the Deed – Husserl, quoting Faust  

Wilson thought that Husserl began as something of a poet or mystic – his enthusiastic referencing of Goethe’s Faust would seem to suggest so, and his statement that ‘normal’ consciousness “leaves our deepest cognitive cravings unsatisfied” [ibid. § 44] would have delighted a poet and mystic like Blake. The symbol for robotic consciousness in Blake’s mythos is the ‘Spectre’, likened to “a machine which has lost its controls and is running wild” by the Blake scholar S. Foster Damon (‘Damon Reade’ In Wilson’s novel The Glass Cage). According to the final chapter of Wilson’s The New Existentialism it is the “limited everyday self” – limited because it is lazy and materialistic (it desires little beyond “security and material rewards”). At its worst, this limitation is illustrated by the cases in Wilson’s true crime books; a softer focus variant can be found in the embarrassments catalogued in his compilation of scandals from 1986 (“the ‘scandal personality’ is basically a confidence trickster who tricks himself”). In The Outsider the Spectre is “static consciousness […] the personality, the habits, the identity” which “mistakes [it’s] own stagnation for the world’s” – everything appears “solid, unchangeable, stagnant, unreal”. As Blake says, expect poison from the standing water. Gurdjieff’s notion of false personality, Husserl’s “naive man” or Wilson’s bourgeois ‘Insiders’ who think they are their own prisons; these are all the ‘Spectre’. This prison is our immediate, limited field of vision through which we consequently devalue the world, like, comments Wilson in The New Existentialism, the condemned character in Sartre’s tale The Wall. “If we could grasp this with genuine insight, we would instantly become aware of the extent to which consciousness is intentional; it would be the first and most important step in the direction of a creative phenomenological attitude to our own existence”. Blake would have agreed with the word creative when speaking of perception. He used the mythological symbol of the ‘mundane egg’ for the distorting medium of intentionality which ‘surrounds’ us (“Enlarg’d into dimension & deform’d into indefinite space”) and depicted it’s sedimentation with images of the hardening crust of matter. “Like all Nature, it is a projection of man” comments Foster Damon. Similarly, Steiner imagined the evolution from instinctive to self-aware consciousness as akin to the cooling and hardening of the crust of the earth over flowing molten magma. “When the human being develops faculties that stand in a relationship to nature, he is not free” he comments. Husserl similarly remarks that such ‘robotic’ traits are “dependent on nature” and equally unfree. The instincts, he says, are the “lowest psychic layer”, “a lower layer of all spiritual existence” and “the world of the mechanical, the world of lifeless conformity to laws” [Ideas II § 61]. Likewise, Gurdjieff thought living through instincts and sensations as the lowest form of human awareness, a state which can only produce imitative art, literal-minded religious ritual and rote knowledge. 

One must be so careful these days – T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land 

Perhaps this is the “primitive” effect which Steiner sensed in the works of Levi, a kind of aesthetic handicap or creative limitation, what Blake sarcastically meant by derivative pantheism and Husserl by natural or naive man. Wilson states that the direct method of phenomenology makes old mystical practices unnecessary and that this faculty has more in common with the freshly creative insights of poets – this is why Faculty X is not an ‘occult’ faculty. Crowley was not a good poet. His first biographer accurately pointed out that his verse lacks the numinous quality of genuine inspiration (“the dominating effect is one of insincerity”). Wilson thought his poems antiquated, “soft”, stuffed full of “overcoloured adjectives” and found more interest In the philosophical implications of the creed Thelema (one root meaning of the word is intention) and magick (defined by Crowley in the book of that name as any “intentional act”). Even so, Crowley’s school-boyish personality still looms uncomfortably over his magical writings. He had an “ego like a raging tooth” says Wilson, quoting Shaw. Had he started with a sombre tome like Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), he may have been taken more seriously from the beginning, writes Wilson. Ironically enough, a passage from Steiner’s book explains why he wasn’t. “Immature youths without any moral imagination like to look upon the instincts of their half developed natures as the full substance of humanity, and reject all moral ideas which they have not themselves originated, in order that they may “live themselves out” without restriction. But it goes without saying that a theory which holds for a fully developed man does not hold for half-developed boys”. 

It was only a few years later when the young Crowley began self-publishing tracts on the joys of rejecting morality and living without restriction, often presented as artificial ‘found manuscripts’ beginning with the lewd prank White Stains and grandiosely culminating in a series of alleged ‘holy books’, supposedly dictated from an alien source (despite one carefully spelling out the name of a mistress in acrostic). Acolytes believe that these codexes can be properly comprehended by cabalistic exegesis but Crowley himself said that this process works equally well on nursery rhymes, advertisements, or anything. It is fitting then that the Crowley revival was strongest during the postmodern era with all of it’s deconstructive leveling and simulated artificiality. In his memoir Crowley describes a mentality where black is white and vice-versa: this “faculty” uses “criticism of the most destructive kind”. His ultimate goal was a state of cosmic indifference, and one passage of scripture tells us to make no difference between anything as this generates “hurt”. He comments that once difference is obliterated, we will develop a post-rational faculty which does not depend on the “hieroglyphic representations” of letters and numbers. But he also takes this instruction as a “charge to destroy the faculty of discriminating between illusions” which unfortunately sounds exactly like the intentionality which magick is supposed to be. He etymologically traces that word in the book of that name [Ch. 8] and comes to remarkably similar conclusions about magic and writing to those of Jacques Derrida in the second part of Of Grammatology – a text which informs us that Husserl’s suspension of prejudices “is perhaps not possible” due to ‘différance’, the inbuilt ambiguity of language.

Unsurprisingly, Wilson wrote off Derrida’s philosophy as a “kind of defeatism” and bracketed him and his poststructural comrades – Foucault, Barthes, Althusser – alongside fake messiahs like Crowley and David Koresh. Crowley preemptively denied the inevitable charge of antinomianism in the seventeenth chapter of his memoir, but it drove his thought as much as it drives Foucault’s anti-authoritarianism. “There is no such thing as history. The facts, even if they were available, are too numerous to grasp. A selection must be made, and this can only be one-sided, because the selector is enclosed in the same network of time and space as his subject”. Not Foucault on the épistémè, but a footnote from Crowley’s memoir, complaining about his school exams. Foucault’s The Order of Things begins it’s anti-phenomenological argument with a reproduction of Las Menias by Velasquez; viewing this painting in Madrid Crowley comments on “the absurdity of trying to ascribe an order to things”, despite his previous analysis of the ordering ‘selector’ (intentional Ego) in the same book. Crowley was as serious as Blake regarding the individual search for the ‘Genius’ but he himself appeared to be in the grip of something else.

The Sun’s Light, when he unfolds it / Depends on the Organ which beholds it – William Blake, ‘What is Man’ from The Gates of Paradise 

“What man first listened to as the voice of God, to that he now listens as an independent power in his own mind which he calls conscience” writes Steiner in The Philosophy of Freedom, anticipating Julian Jaynes’ theories of the bicameral mind and the evolution of consciousness. Crowley was notably deaf to this voice, preferring to heed the advice of his garrulous subconscious. Of his childhood fixation, the Biblical number 666, Steiner said that this represents not a solar force of liberation, but a baleful possibility of “human disintegration, a universal cult of the I and of egoism” – that is to say, a cult of Gurdjieff’s ever-distracted ‘pseudo-I’, the opposite of the intentional Ego. In his cabalistic dictionary Crowley indexes his own nom de plume under this number alongside סורת [Sorath] which Steiner describes as “the adversary of the sun”, a materialistic current which places “spiritual power […] in the service of the lower “I”-principle”, i.e. the instincts and sensations. “This state in which the personality becomes one with the all-embracing spirit of life, must not be confused with an absorption in the “All-Spirit” that annihilates the personality” (Steiner uses ‘personality’ for individuality here). “No such annihilation takes place”. The only ‘annihilation’ worth seeking then is the one which Derrida thought impossible, Husserl’s suspension of the natural attitude in Ideas [§ 49: Absolute Consciousness as the Residuum After the Annihilation of the World]. Crowley’s genuine search for a “new faculty […] by the use of which I could appreciate truth directly” led him to the rather nihilistic conclusion that future humanity “will possess no consciousness of the purpose of it’s own existence”, rather like Steiner’s own gloomy picture of ‘involuntary’ ancient perception. The difference between the intentional ‘I’ and the reactive, blank self is why Blake thought pantheism derivative, why Gurdjieff warned against sinking back to instinct, why Husserl thought the natural attitude passive and why Wilson made a discrepancy between occult faculties and Faculty X. Near the end of The Occult Wilson argues that we can climb to new levels through “a gentle, cumulative effort; no frenzied leap is required”. Steiner said that our ordinary perception can lead us further into the ‘super-sensible world’ with more accuracy than any artificial occult pretensions – ‘rejected knowledge’ – so long as we elaborate these intuitions “with the aid of the intellect” (intuition aided by intellect was Wilson’s definition of philosophy). New influences will develop “in the sphere of the present-day conscious mind” even though such impulses are currently in their infancy.

In times like these, giving in to your instincts is just one more disaster – Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 

The trouble with instinct, writes Wilson in Frankenstein’s Castle, is that it is powerful but short sighted. The logical faculties which Jaynes believed were shunted to the left hemisphere of the brain were an evolutionary necessity, not a blunder. “That simple combination of instinct and robot can be a disaster” as they are both too easily prone to defeat. “This is why we need the left-brain ego: to overrule the instinct and the robot”. Libertines like De Sade preach total freedom and the rejection of civilisation but this is laughably naive. “For better or worse, man has developed this obsessive, left brain ego with it’s passion for order. There is no going back”. In his book on the strange wonders of the pyramids and the Sphinx (1996) Wilson argues that it was necessary to pull ourselves out of this pleasant but passive state of communal awareness and into something more dynamic and individual. The controlling ego is the left brain ego, but it is “trapped in its narrow conceptual consciousness, overawed by the enormous mechanisms of the brain and body […] it sits in the corner, studying the feelings and sensations of the body, and waiting to be told what to do” (Frankenstein’s Castle). So the ego is a ‘confused Transcendental Ego’, passively sitting in the cinema seat like a spectator, not knowing that it is the projectionist. Wilson admits that this realisation left him a little shaken – surely the answer lies in an omnipotent Self, presiding over consciousness, as mysticism suggests? 

It does, but Husserl himself thought that we could only reach that ‘Self’ or Transcendental Ego through the ‘normal’ ego [cf: Ideas § 33]. Steiner’s descriptions of the evolution of consciousness tell of involuntary impulses becoming instincts and slowly transforming into individual choices. Wisdom was once given to tribes or clans – which Musil names a “pseudoself, a loose fitting group soul” – but now new faculties can only be generated by committed individuals. Wilson points out that the existential dilemma of his Outsiders – alienation, neurosis, and lack of direction – are a misunderstanding of the potentialities and possibilities that are to be found in everyday life. “What I had grasped intuitively, and what slowly formed into an intellectual conviction, was that misery and alienation are not laid upon us by fate” he writes, contradicting ancient wisdom. “They are due to the failure of the ego to accept its role as the controller of consciousness”. The ironic alternative would be that we will not be able to dispense with outside stimuli like crises and disasters, for as Wilson notes, consciousness without crisis tends to become negative. This is especially true if our “mental life is a series of sensations and ideas aroused by [our] immediate experience” – the philosophical position of Hobbes, Locke and Hume which Nietzsche and Husserl rejected. Steiner warned against the possibility of a cult of diminished human ego in thrall to nothing but sensations and instincts, and even posited a future global collapse brought about by this narcissistic ego. Fittingly, he chose the associationist Hobbes’ nihilistic phrase ‘war of all against all’ to describe it. 

Nasty, brutish and online 

“It may seem harmless to think only automatic thoughts” remarks Steiner. But true to his intuitive understanding of the distorting power of intentionality he offers a glimpse of a future where humanity becomes what they behold, to paraphrase Blake. “These materialistic thoughts will then bring forth a terrible race of automatic beings […] endowed with great power of intellect and understanding and will enclose the earth in a kind of net or spiders web”, which thinks Steiner, will resemble the caduceus of Mercury. “All modern unreal thoughts will become endowed with being” he says. Husserl’s thought experiment about a ‘being’ devoid of intentionality, a “mere complex of sensations”, could be a clue. The plot of Wilson’s horror parody The Mind Parasites revolves around Lovecraft’s Mythos, phenomenology and a plague of anhedonia beginning in the 1800’s, although it is set in the present day. This satire was drawn from a passage in The New Existentialism discussing Blake’s Spectre and the intentional limiting of consciousness. Steiner’s lectures typically hint at dark forces entering into the human subconscious during the nineteenth century, when “materialistic impulses [were] instilled into humanity”. Steiner calls these impulses “spirits of hindrance” – phenomenologically speaking, they are our sense of contingency, itself due to our self-limiting of consciousness. Expressing this in science-fiction terms, Wilson describes this limitation as “some mysterious agency, that wishes to hold men back”, a mind parasite; “active in the feeling, will and mind impulses of human beings” since the middle of the nineteenth century, according to Steiner. These impulses “spin a web of illusion over human beings and into human brains” [and] “throw people’s views into confusion, turning their concepts and ideas inside out”. Thanks to these illusions, the atmosphere of the present is “impregnated with the will to misunderstand to such an extent that one’s words are immediately interpreted as something different from what they actually mean to convey”. A massive upsurge in materialistic “subtlety of conception, acumen and critical faculties” during the nineteenth century, then, was an anticipatory cause of today’s very confused ego. 

It is amusing to read that in this 1917 lecture, Steiner was complaining how pointless is was to still be thinking as it were still 1913, with the hindsight of the war, for this is the topic of Musil’s novel. Written in the thirties but set in 1913 – the year that Husserl published his phenomenological handbook, Ideas – it’s philosophical digressions unfold within the management of a political campaign celebrating the doomed Austro-Hungarian Empire. Musil’s satire on the culture world with it’s gestures and poses is timely (“reason and progress in the Western world would be displaced by racial theories and street slogans”) but even this “playacting” is an attempt to escape the past, however naive. What would you do if you could rule the world for a day? goes one conversation. “I suppose I would have no choice but to abolish reality” comes the answer. This is explained as a rejection of the here and now (“so much Present”), a craving for “a new concept of life” which grasps it directly, what Wilson meant by Faculty X, the awareness of the reality of other times and places. This Faculty cannot be activated without understanding the intentional ordering of consciousness. “The mind stands for order” says the man without qualities himself, Ulrich. He is speaking to his old General, and he asks if him you attempt to escape from “drab repetitiveness into the darkest recesses of your being, where the uncontrolled impulses live”, what do you find? “Stimuli and strings of reflexes, entrenched habits and skills, reiteration, fixation, imprints, series, monotony! That’s the same as uniforms, barracks, and regulations” he argues. Wilson compared intentionality to a barking sergeant-major, smartening up the recruits (impressions and sensations) for inspection by the conscious mind. This ordering function should protect our energy and vitality, but too much security of this kind soon curdles into the boredom and resentment which produces relativism. “It is a sign of Goethe’s astonishing genius that he managed to express this disillusionment in Faust before the scientific century was really under way” comments Wilson in The New Existentialism (Steiner also thought Goethe had preempted modern thought with Faust).

From the superficial, however, one is led into the depths – Husserl, The Origin of Geometry

“We can now see why Faust’s solution to this problem was the wrong one” he continues. “He tried to go backwards, to sink to a more instinctive level. Clearly, this is no solution. The solution is to repair the sense of purpose through a deepening of consciousness – which can be achieved by phenomenological analysis” (the practical discipline he champions at the beginning of the second part of the book). An essay he wrote on Husserl and evolution likens this process to poking a hole in stage scenery, the kind of artificial construct which Blake imagined as a mundane egg or shell. It is the ‘direct solution’ he later celebrated (cf: ‘In Search of Faculty X’ in Mysteries) and the reason why he held Proust in higher regard than Crowley and magic. His ‘evolutionary phenomenology’ challenges our presumptions about ourselves as passive beings and the conceptions we hold about the interior forces we have at our disposal, the layered strata of intentions. The aim is to become the ultimately free individual “who lives an inner reality, independent of the present, sustained from within”. Outsiders like Blake or Nietzsche are perfect examples; penniless or invalided, but indomitable. This is implicit in Husserl’s transforming of the ego to the Ego via his phenomenological method. New faculties can only be generated by a vigorous optimism and in the clear light of ‘normal’ consciousness – this is the theme of Wilson’s philosophy. Steiner understood this intuitively, even if, as Wilson thought, his imagination often got the better of him. 

But perhaps Musil put it most succinctly in The Man Without Qualities: “happiness can do wonders for a man’s latent possibilities”. 

Note: Rudolf Steiner’s lectures are archived here.
Also: numbers [§ -] refer to relevant passages in the phenomenological texts.

Howard F. Dossor – an appreciation

On By Philip CoulthardIn Phenomenology1 Comment

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.