The Outsider

by Colin Wilson

  It will be seen that our study has led us to formulate a number of conceptions which are indubitably religious. We have, as it were, run over the area of human life, and re-chalked the demarcation lines of religion. We have not mentioned a great many conceptions which many sincerely religious people take to be absolutely essential to religion—God and heaven and hell among them—and what we have constructed can be called the bare necessities of religion, the absolute, essential framework. This, I believe, is the framework of religion as it first existed for the human race. Continual intellectual rigour is necessary to stop these lines from getting vague. Our criterion has been this: that any ‘truth’ of religion shall be determinable subjectively. When we normally speak of the truth of an idea, we mean its correspondence with some outside fact. Truth is subjectivity’, Kierkegaard said. That is the Existentialist concept. The dog is blue.’ Is that, could it be, a religious truth? No; even if it is objectively true that the dog is blue, it is an objective truth; therefore it could not be religious truth. There is a spirit world where we all go when we die.’ That may be true, in the same sense that the dog is blue; but in that case it is a truth about the external world, and not therefore a religious truth. Religious truth cannot exist apart from intellectual rigour, apart from the individual effort to realize it. When Eckhart wrote, ‘Man cannot live without God, but God cannot live without man either. Without man, God wouldn’t know he existed’, he was speaking a subjective truth, but when the Brethren of the Free Spirit made this an excuse for complete relaxation of the will and of all moral standards, it ceased to be true as far as they were concerned. The most absolute and rigorous intellectual truth ceases to be true when there is no life to affirm it. In Boehme, a student asks: ‘Where does the soul go after death?’ and his master replies: There is no need for it to go anywhere. Heaven and Hell are universally co-extensive’; and this is apparently an attempt at an ‘objective’ statement of truth. Yet it is Boehme who warns his reader with Nietzschean vigour, in his first work: ‘If you are not a spiritual self-surmounter, let my book alone. Don’t meddle with it, but stick to your usual nonsense.’ This is the essence of religion.

  When T. E. Hulme was killed in France in 1917, he left the elements of an immense task behind him. It was a task that Nietzsche had already begun for him, philosophizing ‘with a hammer’. The first step in re-defining religion is to knock some of the fungus off the old values, and try to discern their shape as they existed for the men who made them.

  But for a hundred years or more, Outsiders have been swinging the hammer, without consciously realizing what they were doing, and slowly creating new values by implication. Forty years after Hulme’s death, we can begin to see the results of the hundred years of intellectual questioning. Hulme regarded his Speculations as a preface to Pascal’s Pensees, but it would perhaps be more accurate to regard them as the epilogue of a certain indispensible body of Outsider literature, beginning with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Under the Floorboards and including Steppenwolf, The Secret Life, Nijinsky’s Diary and Mind at the End of Its Tether.

  We might preface an analysis of the Speculations with a few words on the development of Existentialism. Hulme’s thought is not systematically set out, and the simplest way of understanding his attitude, his feeling about philosophy, is to approach him via Kierkegaard.

  When Kierkegaard expressed his revolt against Hegel in the Unscientific Postscript, he was making a philosophical stand against philosophy; but let us not get confused about the meaning of what he was doing. Some two thousand four hundred years before, Aristophanes had thrown mud at Socrates in exactly the same spirit, with the dislike of the poet for the logician. Western civilization has been too hasty in condemning Aristophanes. 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 by men who love living. The Socratic conception of history (propagated in our time by Professor Whitehead) is that civilization advances in proportion as its thinkers are interested in abstractions, in knowledge for its own sake. Aristophanes deplored the heresy and exposed Socrates to ridicule at every opportunity. For him, as for Nietzsche, knowledge is merely an instrument of living; there is no such thing as abstract knowledge; there is only useful knowledge and unprofitable blatherskite. And it is likely that if Aristophanes had ever been pressed for a definition of useful knowledge, he would have answered: Whatever enables a man to live more. So much can be gathered from the spirit of the plays.

  Kierkegaard felt the same. As an intensely living, intensely suffering individual, he was not concerned about whether man in the abstract fitted into a great Abstract Universal System; he only knew about the simple, finite, guilty and suffering creature called Søren Kierkegaard, who had to make a decision in the face of God, and who needed to feel that that decision mattered, ultimately, absolutely; not that the Universal Scheme could

  get on very well whether he decided for God or the Devil.

  In view of the gradual change in the meaning of Existentialism with Sartre and Heidegger, we should understand this: that Kierkegaard’s protest was a protest on behalf of the suffering and involved, against the abstract and impersonal. Sartre’s endless tergiversations about the pour-soi and the en-soi (in UEtre et le Neant) would have annoyed him as violently as Heidegger’s hair-splitting about Existence and Time. Kierkegaard would have preferred James Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night or Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’; and there can be no doubt that the Outsider shares his preference. Kierkegaard’s attitude is so Existential that his Christianity is a religion that regards God as the intermediary between himself and his fellow human beings, and cannot even accept their existence without first accepting the existence of God. He is an extreme case of the poet who says, ‘I will not serve’—Non Serviam—like Stephen Dedalus. I will serve nothing but God and my own soul; perish all such conceptions as knowledge and civilization and social causes and being a do-gooder.’

  It is necessary to emphasize this extremist attitude so that we can be quite clear about what constitutes the essence of religion. It does not deny knowledge and civilization and doing-good; it only denies their primacy. The attitude of Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem, who admits that he does not love God, but tells the Angel, ‘Set me down as one that loves his fellow men,’ is loathesome to it as a sentimental sophistry.

  Hulme was like Kierkegaard; religion was instinctive for him. He is a poet, and his approach to religion is a poet’s. He does not (like Plato) compare a child to a star; he compares the stars to children:

  A touch of cold in the Autumn night

  I, walked abroad

  And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

  Like a red-faced farmer.

  I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

  And round about were the wistful stars

  With white faces, like town children. 18

  His approach to religion is like G. K. Chesterton’s. Chesterton has a hero who loves London so much that he would notdream of saying, ‘A taxicab came round the corner like the wind,5 but rather, The wind came around the corner like a taxicab.19 That is the Existentialist approach. The way of Alienation (Hegel’s phrase) points outward, towards abstraction; the way of mysticism points inward, towards the concrete.

  Hulme expressed his dislike of the outward way, the romantic way, in the essay on ‘Romanticism and Classicism5:

  The Romantic, because he thinks man infinite must always be talking about the infinite.... [He] is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into eternal gases. The word Infinite is in every other line....

  Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress....20

  One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely c
onstant. It is only by tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.21

  This distinction lies at the root of all that Hulme has to say. For instance, on modern art (modern, for Hulme, meant Picasso and Gaudier-Brzeska):

  There are two kinds of art, geometrical and vital, absolutely distinct in kind from one another. These two arts are not modifications of one and the same art but pursue different aims and are created for the satisfaction of different necessities …of the mindEach of these arts springs from and corresponds to a certain general attitude towards the world…22

  Now, it must seem to the reader that what Hulme has actually done is to create a distinction between the optimistic way of viewing the world, the humanistic, and the pessimistic, and that he has called the pessimistic view ‘religious5. But this fails to do justice to the subtlety of Hulme’s thought. It can best be made clear, perhaps, by referring to Nietzsche’s development of Schopenhauer’s view of the world (Weltanschauung). Schopenhauer’s essentially Buddhistic view recognized Will as the underlying reality of the world, but considered that Will is the servant of the world of idea, illusion, in that it can only be roused to act by some purpose outside itself and in the world of idea. Man’s freedom lies in refusing to act. Nietzsche’s deeper experience of the Will, his vastations, made him reject Schopenhauer’s conclusions, without rejecting his analysis of the world as Will and the world as idea. Nietzsche’s great concept of Yea-saying gave him a notion of purpose that is seen as positive. Nietzsche, in short, was a religious mystic.

  Before quoting the key-passages in the Speculations, it may perhaps be as well here to aim at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzschean Vitalism and Hulme’s religious attitude. The rift is not as wide as it seems at first sight. Hulme was unwilling to dwell on the similarities because Nietzsche enthusiasts and Shaw enthusiasts were advocating a vitalist extremism that amounted to humanism. Now Shaw is dead, and Nietzsche hardly ever read in England, Mr. Eliot has further obscured the fundamental agreement by a campaign of literary sniping at them that has temporarily made them ‘unfashionable’ within the sphere of his critical dictatorship. Hulme’s influence on Mr. Eliot is well known, and their attacks on vitalism tend to follow the same line. Here is Mr. Eliot:

  Mr. Babbitt says: To give the first place to a higher will is only another way of declaring that life is an act of faith…’ This is quite true, but if life is an act of faith, in what is it an act of faith? The life forcers, with Mr. Bernard Shaw at their head, would say, I suppose, ‘In life itself,’ but I should not accuse Mr. Babbitt of anything so silly as that.23

  And here is Hulme:

  Biology is not theology, nor can God be defined in terms of ‘life’ or ‘progress’...24

  In the first passage, Mr. Eliot has simply misrepresented Shaw, while in the second Hulme’s statement is true, but again, does not apply to Shaw or Nietzsche. Hulme’s desire not to be thought a Nietzschean in any sense has led him to make certain inaccurate statements about the relation of his own views to Nietzsche’s; for instance, in a long section dealing with a ‘Critique of Satisfaction’, he uses a vivid simile to express his suspicion of philosophers and their ‘Systems’:

  A man might be clothed in armour so complicated and elaborate, that to the inhabitant of another planet who had never seen armour before, he might seem like some entirely impersonal and omnipotent mechanical force. But if he saw the armour running after a lady, or eating tarts in the pantry, he would realize at once that it was not a god-like or mechanical force, but an ordinary human being extraordinarily armed.25

  This is the essence of Nietzsche’s criticism of philosophers in the first section of Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Prejudices of Philosophers’. But Hulme has no wish to be thought a Nietzschean, and states:

  ... I do not want to imply any scepticism as to the possibility of a really scientific philosophy. I do not mean what Nietzsche meant when he said, ‘Do not speculate as to whether what a philosopher says is true, but ask how he came to think it true.’ This is a form of scepticism that I hold to be just fashionable rubbish. Pure philosophy ought to be, and may be, entirely objective and scientific.26

  Hulme failed to grasp, or did not wish to grasp, that Nietzsche never denied the possibility of an objective philosophy; he only denied that a non-Existential philosophy can be valid. Nietzsche and Hulme meant precisely the same thing by their criticism of philosophers. This might have been clearer to Hulme if he had known the work of Kierkegaard.

  To non-philosophical readers, all this may seem to be hair-splitting that has come a long way from our analysis of the Outsider, but let me try to get the matter straight with a few sentences. The Outsider’s problem amounts to a way of seeing the world that can be termed ‘pessimistic’ (q.v. Roquentin). I have tried to argue that this pessimism is true and valid. It therefore discounts the humanistic ideals of ‘man rising on stepping stones of dead selves to higher things, etc.’, and criticizes philosophy by saying that there is no point in the philosopher’s trying to get to know the world if he doesn’t know himself. It says flatly that the ideal ‘objective philosophy* will not be constructed by mere thinkers, but by men who combine the thinker, the poet and the man of action. The first question of philosophy is not ‘What is the Universe all about?’ but ‘What should we do with our lives?’; i.e. its aim is not a System that shall be intellectually consistent, but the salvation of the individual. Now, I assert that this formula is a religious formula, whether we find it in St. Augustine or Bernard Shaw, and an important part of my aim in this book has been to try to point this out.

  Hulme is unprecedentedly clear on the subject of the distinction between the philosopher’s view (humanism) and the religious view, and we can pick up the basis of his disagreement with Nietzsche from the opening pages of the Speculations, where he divides reality into three realms: the physical, the vital, the religious:

  Let us assume that reality is divided into three regions; separated from one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities, (i) The inorganic world, dealt with by mathematics and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology, history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values.27

  Nietzsche is at one with Augustinian theology in seeing the world as made up essentially of matter and spirit, and seeing life as the region of the interaction of the two. There is no absolute gulf. Inorganic matter is being continually transformed into organic. Hulme recognizes this in another essay on Bergson:

  The process of evolution can only be described as the gradual insertion of more and more freedom into matter. ... In the amoeba, then, you might say that impulse has manufactured a small leak through which free activity could be inserted into the world, and the process of evolution has been the gradual enlargement of this leak.28

  Here, as elsewhere, Hulme uses the term ‘evolution’ without any implied criticism. The essence of his criticism of humanism and romanticism is contained in the sentence (describing classicism): ‘You are always faithful to the conception of a limit.’ He says:

  The amount of freedom in man is much exaggerated. That we are free on certain rare occasions both my religion and the views I get from metaphysics convince me. But many acts that we habitually label free are in reality automatic.29

  There is no need to point out the similarity to Gurdjieff ‘s vitalism. There is a conception of the limit there. And Hulme summarizes:

  You could describe the facts of evolution, then, by saying that it seems as if an immense current or consciousness had traversed matter, endeavouring to organize this matter so that it could introduce freedom into it.

  But in doing this, consciousness has itself been ensnared in certain directions. Matter has captured the consciousness which was organizing it, and entrapped it into its own automatism. In the vegetable kingdom, for example, automatism and unconsciousness have become the rule. In the animals, consciousness has more success, but along the whole course of evolution, liberty
is dogged by automatism, and is, in the long run, stifled by it. One can get a picture of the course of evolution in this way: It is as if a current of consciousness flowed down into matter as into a tunnel, and, making efforts to advance on every side, digs galleries, most of which are stopped by rock which is too hard, but which in one direction at least has broken through the rock and back into life again.... The passage through matter may give to a part of the current of consciousness a certain kind of coherence which enables it to survive as a permanent entity after its passage.30

  We might compare this with Lilith’s speech at the end of Back to Methuselah, with its sentence, ‘I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy Matter to obey a living soul; but in enslaving Life’s enemy, I made him Life’s master, for that is the end of all slavery....’ And Lilith’s speech contains the Outsider’s credo: ‘I say, let them dread above all things stagnation. .. .’31

  There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism. (Mr. Eliot’s line in the Family Reunion, “And partial observation of one’s own automatism’, places him with Hulme and Gurdjieff and Bergson, in the same way that his ‘Make perfect your will’ in ‘The Rock’ emphasizes the affinity of his thought with Nietzsche as well as with Boehme and Eckhart.)