Colin Wilson died on the
same day as Nelson Mandela. I've read a couple of appreciations of Wilson. This obituary from The Guardian provides a fair assessment. But while I agree for
the most part with these assessments, I want to add a few words of my own.
I discovered Religion and
the Outsider at a used bookshop in Berkley in 1997, when I was in the Bay Area
for a deposition. I hadn't known of Wilson, but the title and a quick perusal
convinced me to buy it. From that book (which I read not long thereafter), I
went on to read The Outsider and some of the others in that cycle. I've also
read his New Pathways in Psychology, which started as a biography of Abraham
Maslow; however, it soon morphed into a history of modern philosophy and psychology
as well as Maslow biography. I found some of this work quite intriguing. He
seemed to have a sense of how existentialism works (or might work) other than
by serving as a bleak outlook on life. Wilson developed his own theory of the
brain and how it focuses on either the near-term or the long-term. He talked
about how boredom can slip in when life has no challenge and no immediate
goals. In some ways, he anticipates Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and McGilchrist's
theory of the two brains. Wilson culled his insight from a journey that went
from a mundane car ride to a will-we-or-won't-we-make-it battle against
inclement weather. The focus was all. This experience provided him with what he
dubbed “the St. Neot margin”. In the focus and intensity the battle against the
storm, he identified an antidote to the despair that marked so much of
Continental existentialism. He seems more at home with the European thinkers
than the English heritage of Locke and Hume through to analytic philosophy.
But Wilson was an
autodidact, and this was both his strength and his weakness. He could roam into
whatever subject his inquisitive mind desired, but he lacked focus and
standards of proof to limit his conclusions. He delved into true crime, the
occult, rogue gurus, biographies of fringe figures like Gurdjieff (whom, while
fringe, is worthwhile), Jung, and contemporary magicians. He also wrote about
Shaw and penned literary criticism. He often repeated himself and seemed
undiscerning about evidence. He often concluded in favor of suspect occurrences
and practices. He explored subjects with an eye toward his fundamental insight
about human consciousness, which didn’t seem to have grown or deepened much. My
reading of later Wilson doesn't show much deepening of his initial insights.
This became the frustration of reading Wilson. Reinforcement is no doubt
worthwhile, but one suspects that he spread himself too thin in writing about
the fringe or the macabre.
Besides his insights into
human consciousness, I appreciated his deep love of books. Wilson was a school
dropout. So when he read, he read because he loved to read. Not assigned to
read Shaw, Sartre, Camus, or any other author, he read with genuine enthusiasm.
He shared this enthusiasm in his autobiography as a record of reading, The
Books in My Life. This book serves as a form of autobiography and as a
reflection on important works, such as those of Shaw, whom he admired.
