The Age of Defeat

by Colin Wilson

  But the sense of purpose is nothing without a goal. And this is where French existentialism flags. For although Sartre has maneuvered himself out of the extreme position of total nausea and life rejection, he has never learned to speak authoritatively of human purpose. He remains limited to the particularity of men and history, too cautious to pass beyond these to the notion of life itself. Camus asks: “Why do men not commit suicide?” and answers: “Because of an irrational urge to live.” But he builds no artistic edifice on that recognition; one suspects that he feels a certain mortification at being forced to use the word “irrational” and wishes it could be avoided.

  To escape these limitations, it is necessary to base existential thought on the foundations of the absurd, the irrational, the mystical. To say that men are not men, but raw, unqualifiable freedom, is to assert that the life urge can never be justified by reasons. Adversity can concentrate it to a point of ecstasy; threatened extinction can reveal it as independent of all human values. This is a reassertion of a kind of Platonic idealism; the love of life is not a love of any aspect of living, but a pure need, beyond objects. It is expressed concisely in Blake’s line, “Go, love without the help of anything on earth.” Both Sartre and Heidegger have observed that life can be lived most intensely in the face of death, but neither has recognized that the sense of death is only an extension of life, and that a sense of purpose would be a still further extension. This, I believe, is the reason for the thin and unsatisfying tone of Sartre’s views on commitment.

  Conclusion

  I would summarize my conclusions as follows:

  The fallacy of insignificance can be combated on the writer’s front by a deliberate attempt to replace worn-out religious and cultural concepts with a new existentialism. This existentialism must make the fullest use of the invaluable work of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, but its chief task is to break beyond their limitations.

  I envisage the new existentialism as a mystical revolt, based upon recognition of the irrational urge that underlies man’s conscious reason. The writer’s task is to try to make the “noise of the power house” audible.

  For this reason, I regard Blake and Shaw as seminal figures, in that both were permanently aware of the power house. Their rationalizations of it are less important (Blake’s “Jerusalem,” Shaw’s “vortex of pure intellect,” superman, and so forth). What matters is that they recognized the need to give life an additional dimension of purpose.

  The existential revolt could take place on two levels: the philosophical, and the creative. On the first level, it might produce its own textbooks of irrational philosophy to take up the problem where Sartre left it in L’Être et le Néant, Heidegger in Sein und Zeit, Camus in L’Homme Révolté. On the creative level, it would be a revolt against the unheroic premise, the attempt to create heroes who possess a vision that extends beyond the particularities of environment. This does not necessarily mean a hero who carries a copy of Man and Superman in his pocket, but it means heroes who are closer in conception to Stendhal’s Sorel, Balzac’s Rastignac, Braine’s Joe Lampton, Hopkins’ Plowart. It is even conceivable that new, realistic Fausts, Zarathustras, Ahabs might grow out of it.

  Ultimately, the hero is the man who lives constantly out of a sense of his own freedom; his commitment to the world is nourished by his inwardness, and his inwardness is constantly strengthened through being reflected back from society. Such a man would recognize all life as sacred, as all is involved in the same struggle towards expression of its freedom.

  The artist who hopes to create the existential hero will inevitably find himself in opposition to many modern trends. All philosophies of materialism promote the insignificance fallacy. Great efforts of creation are made only by men who believe in their will and the importance of effort. Marxian materialism and Freudian psychology are excuses for laziness. Shaw’s Saint Joan remarked: “Minding your own business is like minding your own body—it’s the shortest way to make yourself sick.” The same might be said of minding your own mind, or the way in which you’ve been conditioned by the economic structure of society.

  Too many aspects of modern culture provide this excuse for laziness and hypochondria. It is significant that the chief American contribution to culture in the past thirty years has been “the higher criticism.” England has contributed its Logical Positivism; and although A. J. Ayer has now retreated from his original position to the extent of admitting that Logical Positivism is only a method, not a philosophy, many of his followers still make it an excuse for a complacent, sniping kind of criticism that has no relation to creative thinking. Freudian analysis has now become so important in American life that it might be said to have replaced democracy as the basic American ideology. The result has been a steep decline in all forms of imaginative creation. (It is hard to imagine how Poe or Dostoevsky would have thrived in a society that insisted on explaining their complexes to them.)

  The first step of a new existentialism is bound to be the negative one of attacking Freudianism, Marxism, Logical Positivism, and any other “ism” that fosters the insignificance fallacy and distracts attention from the need for creative effort. As a philosophy, existentialism must emphasize the primacy of the will, the importance of the individual, the final unpredictability and freedom of even the most neurotic and conditioned human being.

  These conclusions may sound disappointingly vague after the sociological analyses of Part One, but they are necessarily so. The real work still remains to be done; these comments are only attempts to foresee its direction.

  1 In the autumn of 1958, it was reported in the Sunday newspapers that a Negro was to be hanged in one of the Southern states of America for the theft of a few dollars; his execution was to occur during the following week. Within a matter of days, there was a world-wide protest that finally secured a reprieve. In this case, the flagrant unfairness of the sentence aroused people to protest. But such encouraging responses are not frequent; most people feel that their protest would have no effect anyway. In that case, the responsibility is left in the hands of a minority who are not diffident about the importance of what they have to say.

  2 This became apparent to me when I discussed Camus’s philosophy with him in Paris, and questioned him on his distrust of all “visionary” or religious solutions. He indicated a Parisian teddy boy who was slouching past the window, and commented: “Salvation for me must be also salvation for him.”

  3 Lawrence dismisses Proust as “effete” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  A Postscript

  In the two years during which the subject of this essay has been forming in my mind, I have given a great many lectures on the hero. It soon became apparent to me that it was going to be less easy to present than I had imagined. My reaction to the unheroic premise in most modern writers was so clear and well-defined that I had supposed that my audiences would find it equally obvious. But the questions they asked soon made it plain that the concept is not as self-evident as I had hoped. A favorite question was: “Where do you hope to find your new hero?” as if I intended putting an advertisement in the Times agony column. Another reaction that I invariably met ran something like this: “Don’t you think that there are more heroes around today than you realize? The ordinary man in the street…” This objection might be followed by an example of someone’s next-door neighbor who has had fourteen operations for appendicitis but has never complained. I felt rather in the position of Doña Ana in Man and Superman:

  ANA: Tell me, where can I find the Superman?

  THE DEVIL: He is not yet created, Señora.

  THE STATUE: And probably never will be…

  ANA: Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done.

  But on one occasion, when I said something of the kind, a member of the audience commented that in that case the hero was my business, and perhaps I would do better to try to create him instead of giving lectures to explain why he had disappeared. Although this struck me immediately
as justified, I replied that my lecture could help towards the creation of the hero; as far as I was concerned, it served a very definite function: to clarify my ideas. And this still strikes me as the primary justification of a book such as this: to bring these ideas into the daylight of common acceptance. I have corresponded and talked with two of the authors of whom I have written in this book; neither of them seemed to understand what I was getting at. One of them gave an interview to a Paris newspaper in which he spoke of my interest in this subject, and commented: “But since Carlyle we know that nothing is more boring then heroism.” The same writer has suggested, in a letter to me, that the hero is a substitute for good government.

  These misunderstandings suggest to me that greater precision is required in defining the hero. The queries I have mentioned above were raised at the end of a long lecture on the hero; the writer in question had also discussed the subject with me at some length. Plainly, the image evoked for me by the word “hero” is completely different from that evoked for other people.

  There are many possible causes for this. For a generation older than my own, the word arouses memories of Nazi rallies, Mussolini’s march on Rome, and so on. Even if its associations are less definite, there is a vague impression of self-glorification, of complacency, of “Mr. Hemingway hiding behind the hair on his chest.” And yet these associations really have very little to do with the word “heroic.” Fundamentally, the heroic urge is only the desire of life to find a broader field for its powers. Nietzsche asked: “What is happiness?” and answered: “The feeling that power is growing, that resistance has been overcome.” Nowadays, the idea of growing power is associated with sadism, or acts of political aggression. The same dubious association is attached to the idea of the superman, although a superman would also have a super moral vision and would consequently be more like the conventional idea of a saint than of a sadist. This is why the Riesman-Whyte approach to the problem is inadequate. It may be invaluable for diagnosing the anti-individualist tendency that is eating away the foundations of modern society, but it fails to emphasize that the first characteristic of the inner-directed man should be a higher intellectual and moral perception. If this were not so, there would be no problem of the hero, and heroes would be two a penny.

  This question of moral and intellectual vision has never been a general problem for society; it has always been the problem of a limited number of saints, artists, thinkers. If they abandon it, there is no one to carry it forward; it is useless to look to popular religious or political movements for new values. This is one of the most ominous aspects of the modern world. The writers and thinkers are becoming increasingly other-directed, while the saints are as rare as ever (and the few men who possess saintly qualities—Schweitzer in Africa, Dolci in Sicily—have a fulltime job relieving human misery, without concerning themselves with new values). In the literary world particularly, it has come to be accepted that no new Tolstoys or Shaws can be expected, and the reviewer has put his yardstick in a cupboard and uses a six-inch ruler for his weekly batch of novels. And yet a vague, frustrated desire for the heroic remains, no matter how overlaid by current standards, and when a play like Look Back in Anger or a novel like Patrick White’s Voss portrays a man who is a little more fanatical than the average, the yardsticks are hastily produced, and the great names begin to fly. (A book critic of the Sunday Times somewhat rashly compared Voss with War and Peace.) Meanwhile, the young writer displays a weary acceptance of the idea that he can never produce anything that will rival Joyce or Proust, and concentrates on new technical devices to stimulate the interest of avant-garde critics.

  All this springs from an acceptance of the idea that we live in an age of decline. But is this true? What evidence have we that we are tireder, more exhausted, than the Elizabethans or the Victorians? What is usually regarded as evidence—the increased crime rate, the teen-age idols, and so on—is really neither here nor there. We know that the challenges we face are some of the greatest in human history, but what evidence have we that we are less competent to deal with them than the Elizabethans would have been? It seems likely that we are far more competent; the ordinary man of today has to deal with a far greater complexity than his counterpart of four hundred years ago. The poets who write about despair and exhaustion deny the reality of modern life: that the raw, brutal urge for more life struggles as violently as ever to find expression. The writers who insist that the death-wish has become a commonplace only prove that they are completely alienated from the commonplace.

  The picture we are faced with, then, is of a society which is neither more nor less decadent than in any previous age, but whose artists and writers have allowed themselves to sink into a minor role. The value of the artist lies in the fact that he asserts a sense of order, of the power of the human spirit, into the sordid conflict of our everyday lives. He sees all life as a battle between chaos and order. It is the vision of order, of conquest of the obstacles and complications of living, that inspires men with new energy and purpose. Life is inconceivable without this vision of purpose. The works of Plato, Mozart, Shaw, represent an ideal that keeps civilization moving forward: the possibility that men of the future might no longer be forced to stumble and fumble through lives of unending trivialities, but might somehow live with the gaiety and power of the Jupiter Symphony, an unbroken drive. The nineteenth century saw this vision reaching a high tide of optimism, with slogans about “culture,” “progress,” ‘‘civilization.” Unfortunately, its vision of progress was almost purely intellectual; it preferred to ignore the human realities. When the twentieth century made it obvious that nineteenth-century progress was mostly daydreaming, there was a swing to the opposite extreme, an equally undiscriminating pessimism. E. M. Forster was right when he called Ulysses “an attempt to make darkness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed.” He might have gone further and characterized the whole of modern culture as an attempt to make cynicism and despair succeed where enthusiasm and optimism had failed. With such foundations, it is hardly surprising that the culture of the midtwentieth century is a monument to the unheroic premise.

  But the fact that Victorian optimism was premature is no final argument against optimism. It is only an indication of the need for a more determined realism. Mozart’s operas can never become outdated in the same way as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, their power is deeper than the intellect. The music of Sibelius and Carl Orff will outlast the philosophies of Bertrand Russell and Professor Ayer for the same reason. The necessity of today is a revival of the sense of order; but not a purely intellectual order. When Socrates told Cebes about his recurrent dream in which he was ordered to study music, he was expressing the idea that drives modern existentialism. This order must reach beyond intellect as music does. The art and philosophy of the twentieth century must be rebuilt on foundations in which the words “purpose,” “optimism,” “idealism” are given a new meaning. And the instrument for creating these new meanings is existential philosophy.

  But what can be suggested, by way of concrete solutions?

  To begin with, it must be accepted that nothing can be done on a popular level. It is the natural impulse of the thinker to hope that his ideas can move great masses of people; the example of Karl Marx lures him like a will-o’-the-wisp. But Marx’s thinking has led to the largest other-directed state in the world, for its essence was other-direction. Inner-directed thought (which is to say, existential thought) cannot, by its nature, hope for some mass vehicle for its interpretation. If it is to gain influence, it will do so by infiltration from the higher levels downward. A thinker like Camus has recognized and accepted this.

  But the existential thinker has one consolation. He may never be a Karl Marx, but he has only to look to the examples of Joyce and Eliot to see how wide the influence of the solitary worker can be.

  This indicates plainly that any solution offered cannot be popular in the sense that Marxism has become popular. The very nature of Riesman’s
analysis makes it impossible for him to develop remedies. But this limitation is no cause for pessimism. On the contrary, when the relation of existential thought to the historical situation has been grasped, it might be a cause for optimism. (After all, Buddhism was a form of existentialism in the fifth century B.C.)

  In short, if there is to be a revolution, it will have to begin as a cultural revolution. The reason for the defeatism that underlies so much modern writing is the feeling that nothing that happens in the cultural world can have any bearing on the world of practical events. But no major thinker has ever been so modest about the claims of his subject. Plato declared that philosophy is the greatest good that was or ever will be given by the gods to mortal men, and his attitude is typically existentialist; he did not regard thought as an activity of the avant-garde. This is the sense that has been lost in the present age, the sense of the immediacy of thought, the way in which thought is meant to be an instrument by which a man learns to dominate his own life.

  Stuart Holroyd has written: “In our time, the writer who does not dare to be great cannot hope to be anything.”1 This penetrates to the heart of the problem. But unfortunately, the meaning attached to the word “great” has begun to incorporate notions of complacency and egoism. The lifelong effort of writers such as Flaubert or Yeats is forgotten; instead, one thinks of Shaw’s ironic bursts of self-praise, or the posturing of a Mussolini. There is an automatic assumption that belief in oneself is a form of self-delusion. This is the major cultural heresy of the twentieth century, the very foundation of the unheroic premise, the central cause of the cultural slump in our time. Until it is destroyed, there can be no hope for a cultural revival. It is a sign of our age that inner-direction is regarded with suspicion and a certain amount of fear and that any expression of self-belief stands in danger of ridicule. Thought becomes blurred; the inner-directed man expects to be attacked for selfishness.