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The Outsider

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The mystical impulse in men is somehow a desire to possess the universe. In women, it's a desire to be possessed. Quotes [ edit ] No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them. What can characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, or unreality. The exploration of oneself is usually also an exploration of the world at large, of other writers, a process of comparison with oneself with others, discoveries of kinships, gradual illumination of one's own potentialities. Inspired by Wilson's dramatic entrance into the literary world ("he walked into literature like a man walks into his own house" was the account in the New York Times Book Review), Daniel Farson, then a young freelance journalist and soon to be one of Britain's first TV stars, wrote a couple of articles for the Daily Mail, not only acclaiming the prodigy ("I have just met my first genius. His name is Colin Wilson") but also announcing that he was the leading light of a new postwar generation.

The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from sinking into ourselves. As a romantic, I have always resented this: I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside of me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me. The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth. Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything." Martin Gardner produces the same feeling.The case is a good example of what Van Vogt came to call "the violent man" or the "Right Man." He is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel that he is a "somebody." He is obsessed by the question of "losing face," so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong.

The Outsider is always unhappy, but he is an agent that ensures the happiness for millions of 'Insiders'. Now he saw the problem with great clarity. If he lived here, life would be pleasant and safe. But it would also be predictable. A child could be born here, grow up here, die here, without ever experiencing the excitement of discovery. Why did Dona question him endlessly about his life in the burrow and his journey to the country of the ants? Because for her, it represented a world that was dangerous and full of fascinating possibilities. For the children of this underground city, life was a matter of repetition, of habit. And this, he suddenly realized, was the heart of the problem. Habit. Habit was a stifling, warm blanket that threatened you with suffocation and lulled the mind into a state of perpetual nagging dissatisfaction. Habit meant the inability to escape from yourself, to change and develop . . .

And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom. No art can be judged by purely aesthetic standards, although a painting or a piece of music may appear to give a purely aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic enjoyment is an intensification of the vital response, and this response forms the basis of all value judgements. The existentialist contends that all values are connected with the problems of human existence, the stature of man, the purpose of life. These values are inherent in all works of art, in addition to their aesthetic values, and are closely connected with them. Wilson followed The Outsider with six philosophical titles, which have become known as The Outsider Cycle: Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat ( The Stature of Man in the U.S., 1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), Beyond the Outsider (1965) and the summary volume Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). These were accompanied by a string of novels aimed at putting his philosophical ideas into action. As Wilson pointed out later, this struggle is essentially an evolutionary urge. From the inner point of view – as opposed to the outer, physical level – evolution is a process of living beings becoming progressively more conscious: more aware of their surroundings, of their own selves and their predicament as living beings in the world, with more autonomy and freedom to control their own actions and their environment. And so by intensifying and expanding his own consciousness, the Outsider is contributing to this process. He is effectively an agent of evolution, attempting to carry the evolutionary process further forward. His urge for self-transcendence is an individual manifestation of the evolutionary impulse to move forward to more complex and conscious life forms. As Wilson wrote in 1967, ‘Evolution has been trying [through the Outsider] to create a human being capably of travelling faster than sound. Capable, that is, of a seriousness, a mental intensity that is completely foreign to the average human animal’ (Wilson, 1978, p. 303).

Nevertheless, I believe that the term ‘Outsider’ is valid, and does identify a real phenomenon. In fact, this is one of the reasons why the book is so significant – because it was the first detailed examination of a new human type, or at least a new kind of consciousness.

Colin Wilson

The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or men who love living. The main problem for the average reader -- particularly of The Great Beast -- is that Crowley seems such an intolerable show-off that it is hard to believe anything he says.

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