Review of Existential Criticism - selected book reviews by Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson. Existential criticism: selected book reviews. Edited by Colin Stanley. Paupers' Press, 2009.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of Colin Wilson's book reviews, extending over several decades and chosen as exemplars of what he termed 'existential criticism'. In other words, these are reviews that focus on the author's world-view; the philosophy of life that either they exemplify and/or propose.

I found them extremely enjoyable, and - as usual with this author - energising; cheering me, making me want to investigate the author, provoking further thoughts of my own.


However, while much better than the usual run of book reviews; the concept of existential criticism is ultimately futile - since existentialism is (or was) merely the last fruit of that Romanticism-minus-Christianity which developed in the generation following the first (and true) advent of Romantic Christianity.

Existentialism is, in essence, a continuation of the Romanticism of Byron, Shelley and (to an extent) Goethe; which was either anti-Christian or indifferent to it; and which embedded Romanticism in a master framework that was either personal (e.g. an ideology of self-expressive genius - such as Goethe or Wilson himself), sexual (Byron) and/or Leftist political (Shelley).

In sum, we now know that existentialism leads nowhere, just as un/anti-Christian Romanticism led nowhere.


[Wilson himself began as a Romantic Christian, but unfortunately abandoned this after perhaps his best book, Religion and the Rebel. In effect, he made the error of so many others of regarding Christianity as a fixed doctrine, defined by The Church (in his case, Roman Catholic) to be accepted or rejected in toto and without personal input; whereas, by contrast, he was prepared to spend decades of his best intellectual and emotional efforts working on making non-Christian (atheistic) ideologies 'work'. If he had expended just a quarter of this effort on investigating and understanding Christianity, Wilson might have been one of the greats of Romantic Christianity...]
   

The reason is, I think, that philosophical existentialism was a reaction-against the epistemological focus of mainstream philosophy; but shared with mainstream philosophy the rejection of metaphysics.  And, since the metaphysical assumptions were The Problem, then mainstream philosophy and existentialism alike led only to incoherence (and, before not-very-long; to the characteristic modern mood of demotivation, cowardice, short-termist hedonism, and despair).


Wilson himself - in practice, if not theory - pretty much abandoned existentialism from the later 1960s (from The Occult: a history, of 1971); and developed a kind of (mostly implicit) supernaturalist, abstract, consciousness-focused religion without gods... pretty much along the lines of Bernard Shaw's Creative Evolution - but including a definite belief in life after biological death. This was itself incomplete and incoherent, but a step in the right direction; and enough for Wilson to maintain his motivation and optimism.

(Perhaps Colin Wilson's mature spiritual vision is best displayed in his wonderful scifi novel series 'Spider World' - which I strongly recommend.) 

Wilson's vulnerability was, however, that his motivation and optimism depended a lot on his own work - on his books and their reception, and his faith that they would eventually be widely-recognised as significant in worldly terms. Wilson did not (I think) really have a yardstick of 'significance' that extended beyond this mortal world.

For example, I don't think CW would have acknowledged (at least, not explicitly) that a person's life may be substantially unknown and without influence both during their life and after their death; yet true and important in some eternal and divine sense. In other words, I don't think Wilson would have acknowledged an objectivity of value that extended beyond the subjectivity of alive people and their societies and cultures.  

But to return to the book under consideration: if you like Colin Wilson's better known work, you will enjoy Existential Criticism - and find it, as I did, not merely interesting but an activating and enthusing read.

Existentialism and choice

*

Colin Wilson c1956 - England's home-grown beatnik existentialist

The era of Existentialism, in the years following the 1939-45 World War, was the last time that atheists did any serious thinking about the human condition. Since then things have slipped back into shallowness, sloganeering, and sophomoric sniping.

*

My interest in existentialism goes back to a TV interview in the Men of Ideas series, in which presenter Bryan Magee spoke to the expert William Barrett - who authored Irrational Man. Or perhaps this was preceded by my finding the work of Colin Wilson - especially The Outsider.

 I grabbed onto existentialism exactly because it was 1. atheist; and 2. serious - tackling the most profound issues of life. In fact, I never much cared for any of the canonical existentialists except Nietzsche - I was (and still am) unable to get anything out of Kierkegaard), was bored and repelled by Sartre (who seemed dishonest), very interested by Heidegger but unable to plough through the turgid tedium of his prose (although I read dozens of books about him) - but nonetheless, I probably saw myself as an existentialist of some kind - gleaning bits and pieces here and there from novels, plays, poems, pictures...

*

The existentialist attitude to Christianity is hostile or bored. Nietzsche regards Christianity oxymoronically; as a powerful-powerlessness, a cancer of the will, puny yet able to bring-down civilizations and individuals - but this complex vision fell into two opposite, alternating assertions:

Christianity was merely the fairy-tale, wishful thinking of feeble-minded people who avoided confronting existential reality by escaping into daydreams;

and/or Christianity was a tyrannical, oppressive force of social authority and control, that crushed freedom and happiness.

*

But the 1950s existentialists seemed mostly to be bored by Christianity, and the assumption was that (perhaps for world historical reasons) it just didn't work anymore; therefore something new and stronger was needed.

But the existentialists were honest enough to perceive that in eliminating God, they had eliminated objectivity - and that therefore LIFE boiled down to a subjective choice - which was not regarded as The Truth, was therefore not binding on anyone else, and could not serve as a socially cohesive force.

What was the choice between?

*

The human condition falls into the good bits - happiness, insight, fulfilment, a sense of meaning and purpose...

And the bad bits where it is miserable, boring, painful, meaningless and pointless. The question was - which was real and which was the illusion?


Most existentialists chose to believe that the bad bits were underlying reality, and the good bits were temporary illusions; Colin Wilson chose to believe the opposite - which was why I found him a valuable author.

But the fact was that it was all down to choice, individual choice, subjective choice, contingent choice, impermanent choice: the whole weight of existence hinged upon this choice...

So, in the end, existentialism does tend towards despair - since sooner or later even the most pride-crazed mind (I am thinking of Nietzsche) becomes filled with terror at supporting the whole weight of existence by a mere act of impermanent, fragile choice - a choice which must be sustained at all times, through thick and thin, sickness and heath, youth and age, good times and bad...

*

"What am I doing here?" - and why Salvation is Not an answer

Colin Wilson said that Existentialism was an attempt to answer the question: "What am I doing here?"

Clearly, there is no answer to this is the mainstream ideology of The West (whatever we want to call it) because it assumes there is neither purpose nor meaning to anything; but neither is there any answer from traditional forms of Western Christianity - which focus, almost exclusively, on salvation as The Problem of life.

And for mainstream Christianity, salvation really is the problem, being terribly difficult and insecure; such that it (ideally) requires constant attention and unremitting effort. 

For a traditional Christian; we can never be sure of our salvation - and therefore a serious Christian can never get much beyond working on salvation. 

Yet when "What am I doing here?" is the question; salvation is not an answer. 

This, especially when salvation is uncertain and insecure, But even at best, salvation merely kicks the can, moves the problem along. 

Why is salvation not an answer? Because - as usually taught - salvation says that the job of this mortal life is... to be saved-from mortal life. 

In other words, we live in order to be rescued from living! What kind of 'answer' is that? 

The obvious problem is that this answer evokes the question of why we live this mortal life, if this mortal life is so fundamentally unsatisfactory that we need to be saved from it? 

Why does God bother placing us into this earthly mortal life At All; when the only point of life is to be rescued? 

Why not create us straight into the after-life?... 

Yet, even then, we will sooner-or-later want to know what is the point of the after-life. 

One who was created directly into Heaven might still (assuming he was a free agent) ask the same question of "What am I doing here?"

Answering the existentialist question therefore requires a very deep answer, if that answer is to be satisfactory. 

There is the immediate aspect of "What am I doing here?" - which demands an explanation for this mixed and mortal life on earth; and there is the deeper aspect of "What am I doing here?" - which concerns the fundamental reason for being as it applies to me, personally. 

I think I have said enough here to demonstrate why secular existentialism could never answer its foundational question; because the question arose from the unsatisfactoriness of this mortal life; yet secular existentialism excluded - by assumption - the after- and eternal-life which might, in principle, make sense of this finite and entropic mortal life. 

Secular existentialism excludes a priori any possible answer to "why?" questions.

The answer is that our personal life exists within God's creation (which has a purpose) and that we matter as individuals because God is a loving parent to us - whose primary concern is with individual persons.

Our mortal lives on this finite earth are therefore both part of the whole scheme of things and also individually significant - and the human condition has been set-up on that basis. 

So; to understanding 'why?' questions about our own mortal life, we must eventually discern an answer to "why?" God created creation. 

Life! The existential and the cosmological

Existentialism became increasingly evident in public (and, more, private) thinking through the middle twentieth century, with roots that were probably strongest in Nietzsche. It was a valuable - perhaps essential - consideration of "the human condition", of what it was like to exist. 

Yet it was partial, radically incomplete; because its assumptions were non-theistic, and "the world" was seen as unalive, and life as accidental, uncreated. 

So existentialism could not be made to work but led to pessimism and either despair or else (more commonly) the "bad faith" responses of careerism, intoxication, self-distraction...

"Cosmology" - in the sense of understanding Man's place in the cosmos - is likewise an essential consideration, and was (a few generations ago) a major subject of discourse. 

But, again, this went nowhere, and could go nowhere, because all possibility of purpose and meaning had been excluded by prior assumption: the cosmos was unalive, accidental, happening perhaps by "scientific laws" or regularities - but it had nothing to do with us, beyond providing the raw materials from which we happened to arise. 

Existentialism was mostly a matter of looking at the world from within, cosmological thinking looked at us (when it even considered human beings) from the outside  - and the two activities could not be integrated because their mode of thinking was alien to each other: the one worked from subjectivity as a given; the other took it as evident that subjectivity was something that (maybe?) went on inside people's heads, and had an effect only when it had led to action. 

After featuring in mainstream public conversation, books, media from the 1940s and into the 1980s; as the millennium approached such matters dropped out; and the age of materialism took almost complete control of Men's thoughts in the West.    

What we are supposed to do from here, is recognize the importance of such matters and that we cannot live meaningfully (that is, with a purpose that both comes from within each as an individual, and is harmonious with the purpose of "everything") unless we get such unfinished business back onto the agenda!

The old ideas were much better than anything now; but they all failed - and inevitably - because of their incompleteness - and this radical and insoluble partiality was a matter of fundamental assumptions. 

This is why we need to "start again" in a way that have never previously been necessary. And because of the actual situation we inhabit, this starting again cannot - certainly will not - be a group activity; nor can we get the answers we need from other people; and absolutely not from our actual culture. 

That's the quest and adventure; and that is something new and different in its very nature. 

We are compelled to take personal responsibility - and there are no excuses for failing to do this. 

 

Colin Wilson's existential criticism - its validity and limitations

I came across Colin Wilson's The Outsider (first published 1956) at the age of nineteen, and was astonished and delighted to find for the very first time someone grappling directly with what I found to be the main problem in life.

The Outsider set the pattern for most of Wilson's books in being constructed around multiple biographical summaries, woven about with essayistic passages of criticism, analysis and manifesto. I went on to read many others of Wilson's books of this type.

As I read, I would be in state of excitement, with a feeling of being just about to cross a threshold, achieve understanding, and transform my life for the better - but it never actually happened (indeed, overall, my life was getting worse - my character closing and coarsening).

What usually happens in these Existentialist books of Wilson's is that he will take a writer, artist, philosopher or some such person - and discuss his life and work from the perspective of their understanding of questions such as 'What is life really worth? What can be got out of life by a man with no material worries and no obligations to fulfil?' [Reference is to The Strength to Dream section on HG Wells.]

I still agree that this is among the most fundamental of questions. The revealed preference of mainstream modern people can be seen in what they actually do when in this situation of having no material worries and no obligations to fulfil: they create material worries (by their compulsion to spend so much money) and they create obligations (by keeping themselves 'busy' and boasting about it).

Material sufficiency for almost everyone has been available in The West for more than 60 years; but instead of leading to an increase in existential, spiritual, religious living - it has fuelled a shallowing and trivializing of life by entertainment, distraction and busyness - necessitating a continually increasing surplus beyond sufficiency and driving yet more material worries and obligations.

But having raised such an important question, and having decided to tackle it by a new, and more optimistic, existentialism; Wilson never really came much closer to solving it than in his second 'outsider' book - Religion and the Rebel (1957), where he considered and rejected Christianity.

Wilson had, indeed, created an insoluble puzzle for himself, as can be seen from a comment at the end of Strength To Dream when he calls-for an existential literary criticism. He describes TS Eliot's earlier attempt to create an existential criticism in After Strange Gods as a failure because Eliot refused to discuss the basis of his religious convictions and therefore made his criticisms from the basis of a 'deliberately mystifying dogmatism'.

What Wilson is therefore asking-for is an impossibility - an existential criticism which is also turned-upon-itself. Because all criticism must be from a standpoint or perspective, and if criticism cannot be allowed to proceed until that standpoint or perspective has itself been critiqued, then nothing will ever be accomplished - since no assumptions have been allowed, and any assumption must first be justified - which can only be done by calling on some other assumption/s - which is itself then open to challenge. It is an infinite regress.

This brings me to my understanding of why Wilson never got further with his existentialism than a brilliant diagnosis of the noble failure of other thinkers -- because he denied the reality of a perspective outside of human life. At the bottom line, all deep thinkers are a failure from the perspective of answering 'what is life really worth/' - because they all died.

Mortality - along with the other related problems such as suffering, limited ability, disease, decay - puts an end to all pretensions to have solved Life.

Wilson perceived this to a limited extent, in taking up GB Shaw's fascination with extended human life (eg 300 years) - but more-of-the-same does not solve anything, really - just puts it off. So long as we know we will die and our perspective acknowledges only this mortal life, then we are stuck.

The answer is, of course (as presumably TS Eliot perceived) that we should not be trying to answer the question of the meaning of life from a perspective restricted to mortal life - but from a larger perspective which encompasses mortal life.

In a nutshell, this perspective can only derive from divine revelation - or else we are back inside the infinite regress.

Mortal life can be understood, and its success evaluated, only in light of a perspective which is outside mortal life, which sees it as a whole, and judges it in terms of what lies outside of mortal life. An existential criticism which denies, as a metaphysical assumption, the reality of a wider frame for mortal life, has set itself a formally, necessarily, insoluble problem.

We may term another person's metaphysical assumptions a 'mystifying dogmatism' but that is facile; because it can always be said about any fundamental, bottom-line belief with which we disagree.

The reason that I was never able to get across the line from my excitement with Wilson's defining of the fundamental question, and exploring the possible answers, was that I too (for three decades) shared this 'anything-but-religion' assumption - and saw Christianity as an evasion, a cop-out, a false answer; rather than being the only and necessary answer.

 

Why can't anything be known with certainty?

Since philosophy took its (disastrous) turn into epistemology with Descartes, reinforced by Kant; intelligent people have become 'hung-up' on the fact that they cannot know with certainty that any-thing is absolutely true.

In its most modern form, this is a self-mistrust; the mind experiences that it is its-self too labile and unreliable to know, and stick to, any truth - even if it stumbled upon such a thing.

This mainstream belief is not quite relativism - which asserts explicitly that truth cannot be known, and doing-so falls into the Cretan Liar paradox of asserting as truth that there is no truth. No - the modern relativism is experiential; more like self-doubt, self-mistrust - based on the experienced lability of thinking; an ineradicable subjective uncertainty about the truth of any-thing (whether general or specific).

This 'existenatial doubt' is partly due to the problem of, the impossibility, of communication - as communication is conceptualised by materialistic science; since any such communication involves multiple steps (expression, transmission, reception, decoding, interpreting etc.), and at any stage there is possibility/ near-certainty of a failure of intent to match-up that which is intended with that which eventuates.

Existential doubt is also partly due to our inner knowledge of a change in capacity, as happens during development - the change from child to adult, or alert and fatigued, between healthy and ill - which encompasses our ability to know anything, and how much we can know.

But ultimately, existential doubt is correct but wrongly understood. Correct because knowing is not the primary reality of existence - and that is why the turn to epistemology was an error (because it tries to make knowing the ultimate metaphysical reality)

Existentialism tried to replace knowing with Being as the ultimate reality; but this did not work, because Being is inarticulate - it can only be discussed indirectly, by communications, so that it falls into the same problem.

The correct conception of reality is the Christian one (the Romantic Christian one, specifically; which detaches Christianity from its distorting and paradox-inducing roots in classical philosophy).

The Romantic Christian metaphysically (by assumption) roots reality in love, and understands love to be creative - hence 'dynamic'. Indeed, setting aside these abstractions; it regards created reality as the loving relations between Beings through time.

Not as knowledge, not as Beings in detached, static abstraction - but as a moving, purposive, meaning-full web of relationships.

Within such a world picture it does not make sense to want, or to mourn the absence of, detached abstract chunks of certainty expressible in words or symbols.

In public discourse, metaphysics is important - but hardly anything else is

Whenever I mention (and this happens A Lot) that is is non-optional that mainstream modern people should explicitly discover and critique their own fundamental assumptions (i.e. we need to do metaphysics); the response comes that most people just can't do this. 

It isn't true. Masses or ordinary people have done metaphysics at many times and places in human history, and this is recorded. Of course they didn't so it in the exact way that modern people would - but they did it. 

Much of this was in terms of religion and theology. It was complained, for example, that the streets of Constantinople were at one point clogged with masses of people arguing about the fundamental nature of Jesus Christ. 

But even as recently as the middle 20th century, there was a lot of public mainstream debate in journalism and books (also novels, plays, movies) concerning "existentialism" or the nature of reality -- to the point that such discussion was part of fashionable youth cults such as the Beats and Hippies. 

None of this went anywhere much, because it didn't go deep enough and got mixed-up with institutional imperatives and incentives. However, the record shows that people can and did discuss fundamental assumptions in a way that almost never happened in the past several decades - so that people have come to believe it is nigh impossible!

. 

Yet things have indeed changed, with the corruption and collapse of public and institutional discourse; which is now rotted by corruption and dishonesty to the point that it does more harm than good. 

In the past, it made some kind of sense to claim that stuff like science, education, law, economics and the like were important; but now these are important mostly for the harm they inflict and the malign brainwashing induced by participation. 

What this means is that  not only is metaphysics important, but it has become just-about the Only important thing - in public discourse. 

The rest of public discourse in 2025 is light-entertainment at best - passing the time between our birth and death-annihilation in a more-or-less pleasant or exciting fashion; but the norm is that these social domains are a cancer on human existence and Western civilization.   

It's time people stopped making excuses! Most people consume vast quantities of their finite resources and money, and their limited life-energies, on malign trivialities or futile self-aggrandisements. 

It's time more people started doing what they must do... 

"Must", at any rate, if this mortal life is not to have been a literal waste of time; leading on to a post-mortal existence in which such people have - on the basis of their own unexamined and false assumptions - chosen something much worse than this life.  

Note added: Just to clarify or emphasize - I am talking about public discourse. IN personal and private discourse there are Many things important, as well as metaphysics. What I'm saying is that the surface level of public discourse is now so corrupted and inverted, that it should not ever be regarded as Good. To get good from public discourse now, entails considering its assumptions. Otherwise it is bound to do net harm. 

The People want metaphysics! (but they don't realise it...)

It was more than 100 years ago Rudolf Steiner noted that the (German-speaking) public were no longer interested in academic philosophy in the way they had been a couple of generations earlier; the situation prevails - except when people get close to addressing metaphysical concerns about the ultimate nature of reality.

It was the 'epistemological turn' (away from metaphysics and towards epistemology - a focus on knowing, justification, logic etc) from the mid-1900s, that killed real philosophy - and thus spontaneous public interest in the subject. Since then, academic philosophers write purely for one another, the subject is free-spinning cog; its effect is subversive not constructive.

(Modern professional philosophers are often clever; but actually have nothing to be clever about. Hence the leading figures seem to project a peculiarly unjustifiable smugness, presumably based on the delusion that they are of the lineage of Socrates and Plato, rather than prime destroyers of that lineage...)

Revivals of philosophical interest are usually focused on 'middle-brow' but fundamental-problem-orientated work on the nature of the human condition - e.g. the popular existentialism of the 1950s epitomised by Colin Wilson, Robert Pirsig's writings on Quality from the 1970s, and the like (not much since Pirsig, however...); these tackling core aspects of the basis for living, meaning, purpose etc.

It seems the people want metaphysics! - even though they don't know the name, and would not like it if they did.

However they want metaphysics, although they don't realise it, because they need it - indeed they need it more than anything else; because it is unknown, unexamined and denied false-basic-assumptions about reality that have created and sustained the nihilism and despair which is at the root of modern self-hatred and covert-strategic suicide.

Romanticism and the twin snares of CG Jung

Plenty of Romantics have got caught-up and lost in the toils of one or another of the snares left by CG Jung. 

My impression is that there was a major resurgence of the Romantic impulse between about 1954 and 1979 - which was the root of Existentialism, the Beats, Hippies, Neo-Pagans and the Counterculture in general.

I think initially there was a hope, a yearning, that modernity would be overwhelmed by a resurgence of what Alan Garner called The Old Magic. (This also drew-upon Robert Graves's White Goddess - which is another kind of snare.) 

When this just didn't happen, the counter-culture was disseminated, and modernity continued; there was a re-conceptualization in terms of Jung - and this was, pretty much, the transition to the multifaceted (and highly consumer-orientated) New Age, which still continues. 

The two snares of Jung are first the reduction of magic, the supernatural and the spiritual generally; to the psychological. And secondly the reduction of spirituality to therapy. 

Jung took all kinds of spiritual phenomena and re-explained them in terms of the psychological. For example, his last book took the phenomenon of Flying Saucers, and reduced them to a modern version of the same psychological phenomena that had previously caused sightings of fairies. Jung claimed that it was not a reduction, because he posited a new kind of psyche that was in between the objective and the subjective - a kind of objective subjectivity. 

This was perhaps related to the collective unconscious - which sounded exotic at first, but ended-up being a purportedly objective place, accessible by all people in certain half-awake/ half-asleep states of mind (active imagination).  

The deeper one goes into Jung, the more his world is revealed as just another branch of modernity. The exotic glamour of the subject matter becomes revealed as mundane symbolism - like Jung's paintings of mandalas - which strike me as excruciatingly dull!

The other snare of Jung followed-on. Since Jung turned out not to be an extra depth of living - and not to transform the person spiritually; Jung's ideas became reduced to a broad definition of therapy. 

Broader than the Analytic Psychology which was its root; the promise was a that if one adopted a Jungian perspective, there would be very general improvement about how one felt. This could be less suffering, more happiness, or (as with James Hillman - Jung's most eminent successor) a greater depth of apprehension, a more profound life. 

This got progressively diluted through the materialistic 1980s onwards; and became absorbed into the self-help, counselling and 'mindfulness' themes; which were rapidly bureaucratized. 

Jung was a red herring, a blind alley for the Romantic impulse. The problem was that while he addressed the important issues - he retained the this-worldly, atheistic, non-Christian context of mainstream materialistic discourse. His analysis was therefore intrinsically incapable of addressing the problems at a sufficiently deep level to solve them. 

Meanwhile; the proper way ahead was already available - deriving from Jung's rival and competitor of the early twentieth century in Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner; and elaborated by Owen Barfield. This was in the lineage of Romantic Christianity, which had begun in the late 1700s.

Yet, I cannot really blame the Romantics from missing the right answers - since, especially in the case of Steiner, they were buried in among a great deal of wrong and irrelevant material, and a personal guru-cult; where they still (pretty much) languish. 

 

Understanding the existentialist response to reality

One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world — it has no smell. 

Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? 

Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought from a peddling shanghaier of human beings? 

How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? 

 And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager - I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint? 

After all, life is a debate - may I ask that my observations be considered? If one has to take life as it is, would it not be best to find out how things go?

From Repetition by Soren Kierkegaard, 1843

**

The above quotation is an early example of the existentialist response to Life - the sense that we find ourselves in life, without any understanding of its purpose or meaning - the unanswered question of what Life has to do with Me. 

The world seems divided into those (like me) who have experienced this response to Life - at first, usually in adolescence; and those who haven't and don't. 

(Those who experience life in this way are what Colin Wilson called Outsiders.)

The basic observation is that Men in ancient and medieval times did not experience life in this way; but that in the modern Romantic era (perhaps beginning in the late 1700s, or perhaps somewhat earlier) more-and-more Men began to experience life this way. 

Owen Barfield's idea of the development (or evolution) of human consciousness can explain this change on the basis that Men used to get their understanding of meaning and purpose from outside: their thinking was 'permeable'.

But since the modern era, and in accordance with to divine intentions that Men become more free; Man's consciousness has become (more and more) cut-off from spontaneous external knowledge of 'the human condition'.  

Men once lived in a kind of communal 'telepathy' with other men and with gods and spirits; such that a basic understanding of meaning and purpose was spontaneously 'given' - there was disagreement on the exact nature of meaning and purpose... 

Men knew 'naturally' that there was a meaning-purpose - and that Life had something directly to do with Me. 

Existentialism was then not an issue.

But now, human existence is A Problem. 

'Outsiders' recognize that there is a problem: feel it in themselves. 

Those who do Not recognize the existential problem nonetheless still suffer from cut-off-ness, and therefore (but implicitly) regard life as meaningless and pointless - as can be seen from modern Man's behaviour. 

But the un-conscious suffer without knowing why or how; and while often denying that there is any problem at all...  

The 'answer' to the existential problem comes from understanding that ancient Men were correct in regarding life as having purpose and meaning, and being relevant to every individual.

Modern Men have merely become cut-off-from that knowledge of Life - but the knowledge is still true, and is still there, awaiting discovery. 

Thus modern Man's job is to become conscious of that which was un-conscious; actively to choose to know that which ancient Men passively had forced-upon-them, by their environment. 

 

The importance of Resentment in modern materialist evil

It is Resentment that the Establishment uses to control us, and to keep us focused on the material world. 

The first (attempted) major socio-political movement to come after the massive collapse of Western Christianity in the 19th century was Nationalism; which was a movement of Resentment, originating in the lower-upper classes; the high school teachers, journalists, clerks and others clinging to the margins of the ruling elite.

For a while, some Nationalist movements could create cohesion and motivation by inculcating a belief that prosperity, power and pleasure were due to if The Enemy could be thwarted. Nationalism worked best (albeit always temporarily) when there was such an historical enemy - a perceived 'oppressor', and not very well when there wasn't.

But at a deep level Nationalism is untrue, and indeed a lie; because it is materialist - that is, its implicit claim is that if material things can be sorted-out - then life will be Good (or, at least, as Good as Life can be...).

One would have supposed that the fact that is was Not true, and that material prosperity in the absence of spiritual meaning led to despair and nihilism ought to have been recognised by 1965 at the latest - since that recognition was the currency of much public discourse across the whole of The West from the middle 50s - Existentialism, the Beat generation, the 'Angry Young Men' etc.

My understanding is that  the (evil, demonically-controlled) Establishment recognised the danger of a spiritual, ultimately Christian, rebirth; and decided to manipulate Western societies into mutual resentment; so people would be focused on the lie that 'if only' they could escape oppression (by the 'Bourgeoisie', men, white people, The English, Christian churches, 'heterosexual' married families, or whoever) then life would be... well, Good Enough.

Half a century later - we have never been less spiritual, less Christian, less Romantic - and almost everybody in The West is seething with Resentment against some group, or many groups.

To 'fix' the source of this Resentment in some material, literal fashion is, for almost everybody, the number one priority - but there are so many number one priorities that the societal quest is futile/ deceptive/ obviously-manipulative.

And if ever it was achieved in any single domain (which attainment could/ would, anyway, never be acknowledged) then such people would find themselves no further forward than The West circa 1965: a state of meaninglessness, purposelessness, superficiality - and despair, nihilism and death.

So beware making Resentment your guiding motivation - no matter how justified it may seem, no matter if it is (apparently) wholly-justified... because it is a demonic deception, the path to death and despair; and Resentment will seal you off from the true happiness of Life.


Note: We all feel Resentment, and none can truly prevent its emergence - especially in this world. But all Christians can repent what cannot be prevented - and Repentance of itself places resentment in a subordinate position in your life - and thus neutralises its ultimate evil.  

A theory of Romanticism - Yes, it's needed (but we must frame our question properly)

It was the summer of 1976 that I first read Robert M Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM), and first came-across what he described as the Classic versus Romantic division in world-views. 

The Classic was Pirsig's term for what was already termed The System (i.e. The Matrix, the Single-Global-Bureaucracy/ Mediaplex), or what I have here sometimes termed the Ahrimanic form of evil. The Romantic was the instinctive, impulsive, 

In ZAMM; Pirsig's proposed solution to the division was Quality; and I certainly gave Quality my best shot over the next years, and for a couple of decades. 

Quality did not work as a solution; and in practice was just a part of the Romantic side of the divide: inevitably Quality got overwhelmed, and over-written, by the Classic-System-Bureaucratic imperatives that were so much stronger and more persistent through the late-twentieth century onwards.  

Part of the problem was that Quality in ZAMM was tied to oneness metaphysics; (deriving from oneness). 

Another part of the problem was that Quality was pre-thinking thus non-thinking (so that as soon as one thought about Quality, Quality had gone...).

And part of the problem was that the Romantic was defined in Classic terms, such that the Romantic was made a time-less and abstracted set of defining attributes - and so, Quality was immediately captured by the Classic - where it could be enslaved (as in "Quality" management) and then killed with what the Classic mind regards as overwhelming reason (as in 2020, and by the Litmus Test imperatives generally). 

A further and decisive problem in ZAMM was the detachment of Romanticism from its Christian origins. Indeed; already from the early 19th century, and much more later, there was a turning of Romanticism against Christianity. 

But the Romantic can, and should, be seen as a phenomenon in time, in human history and in the lives of Men. 

Thus, Romanticism arose in the later 1700s and peaked over the following decades. 

Romanticism is usually described as having arisen as a reaction-against the rationalism and empiricism of the new era of science, epitomized by Newton, Descartes etc. Then; Romanticism is seen as re-emerging through the following centuries in response to new phases of increasing social organization, bureaucracy, state propaganda etc. 

For instance, there was a major resurgence of Romanticism in the 1950s (existentialism and the Beat Generation) increasing through the 1960s counter-culture; in response to the post-WW II Western social trends. 

And the Romantic phase of many individual Men, is likewise usually described as a reaction-against the pressures during adolescence to become absorbed into The System.

But Romanticism can be regarded as more than a reaction - and can instead be regarded as the emergence of something that ought-to-have-been the proper path of development - of society and of Men; something which keeps re-emerging (exactly because it was and is Man's proper destiny) but which keeps getting defeated, for various reasons.  

Thus, Romanticism is always time-related. It should therefore be seen as dynamic and developmental - a part of the life of people and peoples; and therefore we ought to resist trying to capture it in timeless and abstract definitions; which must distort and fatally weaken Romanticism, and will ensure it is again defeated. 

My ideas for saving and strengthening Romanticism - including a robust understanding of Quality, and restoring what I regard as the proper line of Man's developments - include:

1. Restoring the primarily Christian basis of Romanticism.

2. Putting Romanticism into a context of a pluralist (not oneness) metaphysics.

3. Always understanding Romanticism as 'in time', as a dynamic and developmental thing.

4. Making thinking (with increased - not diminished - consciousness, alertness, freedom - a stronger sense of the self) a focus of what is aimed-at in the Romantic experience. In other words: the archetypal Romantic 'religious experience' should be actively creative, and not passively contemplative.  

Everything is not enough... The forgotten insight of post-war radicalism

Colin Wilson recreates his summer living in a waterproof sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, researching and writing The Outsider. 

Everything is not enough is the core insight of the post 1945 radicalism beginning with the Existentialists and Beats of the 50s, the Hippies of the 60s, and the Small is Beautiful movement of the mid 70s...

There was (among some people, for some time) a clear recognition that even-if modern society had everything that people aspired-to - abundance of stuff, ideally-distributed, advanced capability... peace, prosperity, comfort and adventure... It would not be enough. It would indeed be entirely, qualitatively inadequate.

This was a spiritual, a religious insight - and the insight and its nature can be seen in Colin Wilson's first two books - The Outsider (1956) and (even better) Religion and the Rebel (1957). Another example was the widely known and influential work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, and his increasing focus on spirituality and religion in later years.

Everybody knew that everything was not enough...


This core insight was not new - since it was essentially the same insight as Romanticism, almost 150 years before - but in the post-war period the insight became widely appreciated because the problem of production had been solved, poverty had been abolished (insofar is it could be), the nature of the situation was being experienced by many people for themselves, played out in their own lives and lives around them.

In the period since, the core insight has been lost and buried. The Left was turned from a concern with poverty mutating to existentialism - over to an envy-fuelled concern with inequality, a resentment-fuelled concern with identity, and an ever-mutating sexual hedonism rationalised by inequality and identity...

The mainstream secular 'Right' (including free marketeers and libertarians) was weaned-off religion and instead focused the on status-fuelled need for ever-more stuff, but stuff of the right kind; and the pride-fuelled need for domination at home and abroad.

The really-religious acted tactically (assuming the problem would be temporary) and doubled-down on the traditional and/or legalistic aspects of their churches - asif the Romantic insight had never happened, asif the existentialist insight into the human condition of modernity wasn't real.


To a truly amazing extent, half-a-century-plus since the existential unsatisfactoriness of modernity became a solid insight in the minds of modern people - the mainstream public official world continues asif the problems were still the same. There is an unreleting focus on poverty, hazards, lack - the world is depicted asif it was the pre-industrial world...

(And, indeed, such conditions are actively 'created' in the minds of people by a combination of dishonesty and active problem creation.) 

By means of the ubiquitous mass/social media and the ubiquitous linked-bureaucracy, minds are kept firmly off the real problem - and fake priorities are substituted.

Yet normal Life is more Existentially Desolate then ever - as Thoreau said, but to a far greater extent: the mass of Men continue to lead lives of quiet desperation...  But this time (because our metaphysical assumptions absolutely exclude it) with no hope, and no possibility of hope.


All this distraction, displacement, death of soul is no accident; all this was and is being strategically implemented; all this could swiftly be overturned in the minds of millions, If Only...

Colin Wilson has died (1931-2013)

*

Colin Wilson was an important writer in my (ahem) intellectual development. Essentially, he was an existentialist philosopher who worked across a wide range of genres.

Although since I became a Christian I have not found him so useful, up till then he was someone who I would return to. I published a few essays in a home-produced little journal called Abraxas, edited from Cornwall by a certain Paul Newman (neighbour and friend to CW) , and dedicated to Wilson and his interests.

Colin Wilson wrote a LOT of books (which is necessary if you are a professional writer, want a decent income, and when you are not a bestselling writer).

The first place I came across him was his introduction to William Arkle's Geography of Consciousness (Bill Arkle had been a neighbour of mine, 'tho I didn't know him. He lived on Backwell Hill in Somerset, near where my sister kept her pony). This I read in the summer of 1978 in a copy from Edinburgh City Library.

These are some of my favourite of Wilson's books.

The Outsider, 1956
Adrift in Soho, 1961
Bernard Shaw, 1969.
Introduction to the New Existentialism, 1966
Voyage to a Beginning (autobiography), 1969
Tree by Tolkien, 1973
The Craft of the Novel, 1975
Mysteries, 1978
Lord of the Underworld (about Jung), 1984
The Essential Colin Wilson, 1985
Spider World series of Sci Fi novels, starting 1987
The Books in my Life, 1998
Dreaming to some Purpose (autobiography), 2004

*

Political correctness as pastoral idyll

*

I think I perceive the roots of political correctness in the dreams of pastoral idyll - which happens to be one of my favourite dreams; a genre to which I am intensely susceptible.

The pastoral idyll... It is in Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost and As You Like It - or before that in Robin Hood in the Greenwood; it is in the Romantics such as Wordsworth in the Lake District; it is in Emerson and Thoreau beside the slow Concord River or in a hut by Walden Pond; it is in (to name a contemporary favourite) John Hansen Mitchell's Scratch Flat - it is in real life too, especially between jobs and duties and on the best kind of holidays - time out of life.

*

What is pastoral? And what (for Heavens sake!) could it have to do with the crushing totalitarian bureaucracy of political correctness?

The short answer is: dreaming of a life free from care, a life where nothing really bad can happen, but where we are harmlessly diverted by diversity.

*

Eden on earth.

A life where we sink back into a kind of animal consciousness of the present - which (so far as we perceive) is a perpetual presence: such that although we may be mortal creatures, we are not aware of our mortality.

A wish to stop being self-conscious: to stop being human, indeed - to become part of the environment (and not an observer and manipulator of the environment).

And perhaps this is indeed how life actually was - much of the time - among simple hunter-gatherers. It is possible that this really was so.

*

Both pastoral and PC imagine a life where our environment is benign.

There are no serious harms, nothing to disturb us.

An equality of difference (like Robin Hood and his Merry Men).

Yet not boring, not static: the pastoral idyll is diverse in the diversity of nature. Seasons, the multitude of plants and animals, the changing weather, contrasts of day and night (see Thoreau's Journals).

But all is good, all is for our potential benefit (if we could but perceive them properly, as we are supposed to). All things hold lessons for us, if we can rightly perceive them.

In the pastoral idyll we are each of us gods - we create ourselves and our own world, by the spirit in which we approach it.

*

To live in an eternal present, with no past and no future, and eternity conceived as just more of the same; and death as unconscious - not something actually experienced because not part of life.

It is a trance-like, indeed dream-like state, aspired to.

*

The shared features of pastoral and PC are therefore a benign environment including a diversity of stimuli (all of which are edifying).

The difference - and it is such a huge difference as to obscure these similarities - is that pastoral is a natural environment; while for PC the environment is wholly designed.

But both aspire to a universal acceptance that avoids any need for coercion of individuals: both pastoral and PC assume that in a benign environment, conflict will be dissolved.

*

The gulf between pastoral and PC is the disillusionment which stands between the romantic era and moderns. The romantics believed that reality was good if properly approached; moderns are nihilists for whom there is no reality, and for whom good must be made not found.

Animists believe that the environment is benign, like a loving parent; but for PC the environment must be controlled to make it benign. Or rather, the perception of the environment must be controlled so that it will seem good.

At one time, for a while, nihilistic moderns believed that they could - as individual gods - self-create their own universe (the creative genius as cultural exemplar); but moderns lack this faith in their own capacities. They have found that (for whatever reason) it simply doesn't work.

And to be utterly dependent on oneself to provide meaning and purpose led to solipsistic despair.

*

(To know that one created one's own reality, and that failure meant nothingness, no form, no meaning (nausea)... this is too overwhelmingly insecure a state to be ignored. It pressed continually upon life, interfering with living. This was existentialism, and it was too horrible to contemplate.) 

*

So, since the individual seemed unable to create reality, this must be done by society.

Everyone must cooperate with everyone else in this task upon which everything depends; everyone must combine to create and maintain the illusion of purpose and meaning up to the singularity when we forget that it was a created illusion and it becomes inescapably perceived reality: as real as anything can be and with no perceived alternative.

And, to be secure and dependable, this cooperation must be managed, it must be controlled, formal, systematic, and human-proof.

*

Political correctness aspires to an idyllic state that is fully immersive and lifelong; a virtual reality which is (according to modern metaphysics) subjectively indistinguishable from real-reality - real-reality which, anyway, is assumed to be a childish illusion, like the pastoral idyll.

PC regards itself as a mature illusion, not a childish one. The idyll of political correctness is not, therefore, an adventure playground of forests and rivers; but instead a wholly-managed, totalitarian bureaucratic state that guarantees benign diversity, among which we are free to move un-self-consciously - careless of past, future and eternity.

*