The Outsider - Colin Wilson

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Chapter One: The Country of the Blind

Barbusse has suggested that it is the fact that his hero sees deeper that makes him an Outsider; at the same time, he states that he has ‘no special genius, no message to bestow’, etc., and from his history during the remainder of the book, we have no reason to doubt his word

rid ourselves of the temptation to identify the Outsider with the artist, and so to oversimplify the question: disease or insight? Many great artists have none of the characteristics of the Outsider. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats were all apparently normal and socially well-adjusted, lacking anything that could be pitched on as disease or nervous disability

The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.

What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality. Even Keats could write, in a letter to Browne just before he died: ‘I feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence.’ This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out of a perfectly clear sky.

once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. ‘He sees too deep and too much’, and what he sees is essentially chaos.

For the bourgeois, the world is fundamentally an orderly place, with a disturbing element of the irrational, the terrifying, which his preoccupation with the present usually permits him to ignore. For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly. When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois’ complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told

The last published work of H. G. Wells gives us an insight into such an awakening. Mind at the End of Its Tether seems to have been written to record some revelation: The writer finds very considerable reason for believing that within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life—and not simply human life but all self-conscious existence—has been going on since its beginning

Chapter Eight: The Outsider and the Visionary

The visionary is inevitably an Outsider

He starts from the ‘appetite for fruitful activity and a high quality of life’, the most profound and ineradicable human instinct. And before long you have him making statements like this: I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action; it is as the dirt upon my feet, no part of me

consider that Blake told Grabb Robinson that he had seen the ghost of Julius Caesar on the previous evening, and that he spent more time conversing with spirits than with human beings. This is either madness or a very strange order of sanity

Another mystic who was also a brilliant scientist and a first-rate engineer stated that he had made a complete tour of heaven and hell, not in poetic fancy, like Dante, but actually, like a Sunday afternoon bus excursion, and that he habitually held conversations with angels. Nevertheless, there are thousands of followers of Emanuel Swedenborg today who believe his books to be as sane as Newton’s Principia and as objective as the Kinsey report on sexual behaviour

Swedenborg and Blake proclaimed their insights to be real, corresponding to some real object, much as Wells made that claim for Mind at the End of Its Tether; our experience with Wells’s pamphlet should have made us cautious about pooh-poohing these claims.

In this chapter I intend to deal with two Outsiders who formulated a religious solution to their problems, and who also asserted that they had developed a certain faculty for seeing ‘visions’ as a consequence of their attempts at solution

Their temperaments were completely unlike: George Fox was primarily a man of action who needed a physical outlet for the impulses that stirred in him; Blake was at once a clear thinker and a dreamer, an obstreperous iconoclast and an otherworldly poet

Chapter Nine: Breaking the Circuit

In the vault or Axel’s castle, Sara and the young Count Axel stand clasped in one another’s arms.

It is the Earth—don’t you see—that has become illusion. Admit, Sara, we have destroyed in our strange hearts the love of life…To consent, after this, to live would only be a sacrilege against ourselves. Live? our servants will do that for us

Sara is convinced; they drink the goblet of poison together and die in ecstasy

There can be no doubt what Nietzsche’s comment on this scene would have been; Axel, like his creator, is the most extreme type of other-worlder, and other-worlders are ‘poisoners, whether they know it or not’. Yet is this quite fair?

Nietzsche himself began as an other-worlder, agreeing with Schopenhauer that ‘Life is a sorry affair’, and that the best way to spend it is in reflecting on it.

No, Axel is on the right path, even if killing himself is a poor way out

To confirm this point, we can appeal to another visionary, Thomas Traherne

It is Traherne who gives the famous description of his childhood in Centuries of Meditation, when All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful

The argument of this book has come almost its full circle. It is not my aim to propound a complete and infallible solution to ‘the Outsider’s problems’, but only to point out that traditional solutions, or attempts at solutions, do exist.

Before we turn to T. E. Hulme and his prediction of ‘the end of humanism’, there is one more modern attempt at a solution which is far too important to exclude from a study in the Outsider’s problems. This is the ‘system’ of that strange man of genius, GI Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff died comparatively recently, in 1950, at about the age of seventy

He had spent some forty years of his life teaching his ‘system’ to his pupils

did most of his teaching in Moscow and Petersburg, and later in Europe and America

Of Gurdjieff’s major exposition of his system, All and Everything, only the first part has to date been printed in England; this is over twelve hundred pages long, and it is hardly unfair to its author to say that it is almost unreadable—hardly unfair since it seems to have been a part of his aim to make sure that no dilettante could dip into it and then claim to ‘understand Gurdjieff’; his efforts to achieve this effect have made the first volume rather less comprehensible than Finnegan’s Wake

there are simpler expositions of his philosophy; there is the absorbing introduction by Kenneth Walker, Venture With Ideas, and the brilliant exposition by Gurdjieff’s chief follower, P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, which tells the story of Ouspensky’s period as Gurdjieff’s pupil; Gurdjieff played Socrates to Ouspensky’s Plato

Gurdjieff’s system can be regarded as the complete, ideal Existenzphilosophie. It is not interested in ideas for their own sake, but only in results. Therefore, the ‘system’ itself consists of various disciplines and exercises, which, at the moment, are only known to Gurdjieff’s pupils and followers

Gurdjieff’s starting-point is the completely deluded state of man; man, he claims, is so completely embalmed and enmeshed in delusions that he cannot even be considered as a living being; he can only be regarded as a machine. He has, in other words, absolutely no free-will.

he goes on to state that man can attain a degree of freedom and ‘awakening’: but the first step in attaining ‘freedom’ is to recognize that you are not free. Since we have spent some nine chapters listening to Outsiders emphasizing just this fact, this should present no difficulties

One of the most interesting points in Gurdjieff’s system, from our point of view, is his exposition of ‘three ways’, the way of the fakir, the way of the monk, the way of the yogi. For these are the three ways we established in Chapter IV: discipline over the body, the emotions, the mind. But what is most interesting is that Gurdjieff claims that his system is a fourth way which involves all the other three

In my own copy of Ouspensky’s book, I have gone through the Contents list, labelling various chapters ‘philosophical’ or ‘psychological’. The ‘philosophical’ parts may or may not be ‘true’; it is impossible to say

But there can be no doubt whatever about Gurdjieff’s astounding penetration as a psychologist; and it is here that he touches the field of this book.

Gurdjieff teaches that there are four possible states of consciousness. The first is ordinary sleep. The second is the condition in which the ordinary bourgeois spends his life, the state which is called—ironically, Gurdjieff thinks—‘waking consciousness’. The third state is called ‘self-remembering’ (which we shall define in a moment), the fourth, ‘objective consciousness’.