by Colin Wilson
Hulme predicted the end of the present humanist epoch, an epoch that, as he pointed out, was inaugurated with the Renaissance and its discarding of the dogma of Original Sin, the absolute limiting principle. He believed that this dogma cannot be discarded without blurring all lines of clear thinking, and throwing open the doors to optimistic modes of thought. He recognized that:
A new anti-humanist ideology could not be a mere revival of medievalism. The humanist period has developed a certain honesty in science, and a certain conception of freedom of thought and action that will remain... 32
A gradual change in the intellectual climate since Hulme wrote these words vouches for his penetration.
The new anti-humanist epoch will be the consequence of the rigorous questioning of such men as Blake, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Shaw. Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians whose heads are too occupied with the world of mathematics and physics to worry about religious categories. For such men, it is only necessary to make the outlines and derivations of these categories clear and graspable. They cannot be expected to sort out all the rubbish left over from the Renaissance. That is the concern of men who are deeply enough touched by religious issues to get to work with a pick and shovel. Shaw had put his finger on the real need in the Back to Methuselah Preface:
Let the churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the common man as the Athanasian Creed. It is not that science is free from witchcraft, legends, miracles, biographic boosting of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of science are as copious as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the Law of Inverse Squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life. ... In mathematics and physics, the faith is still kept pure, and you may take the law and leave the legends without a suspicion of heresy... 33
Let us couple this with Hulme’s disclaimer of the ‘sentiment5 of religion in Speculations:
I have none of the feeling of nostalgia, the reverence for tradition, the desire to recapture the sentiment of Angelico, which seems to animate most modern defenders of religion. All that seems to me to be bosh. What is important is what nobody seems to realize—the dogmas like that of Original Sin.... That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature who can yet apprehend perfection. It is not, then, that I put up with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may possibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma.34
The understanding of the attitude behind this paragraph is, I believe, one of the most important needs of our time.
Hulme regarded his Speculations as a prolegomena to the reading of Pascal. It was my ambition, in writing this study in the Outsider, to serve as a prolegomena to an even wider field, to a field bounded by Shaw and Gurdjieff on the one hand, and on the other by an orthodox Protestant like Kierkegaard or an orthodox Catholic like Newman. In this aim, I have admittedly covered a great deal of the ground already brilliantly dealt with in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny of Man, and in various works of Berdyaev, and I must acknowledge my indebtedness to them, as also (in common with many others of my generation) to Mr. Eliot’s penetrating essays on humanism and the religious attitude. In retrospect, I feel that probably no book running to a hundred thousand words could achieve this aim. If the present book could serve as a stimulus to the re-reading of Shaw, it would have more than served its purpose. At the time of writing this, Shaw is passing through a period of undervaluation that is without parallel since Shakespeare was forgotten in the seventeenth century. Such an undervaluation of a major religious teacher would be the worst possible symptom of our age, if it were not for the increasing interest in Existentialist thinkers like Berdyaev, Kierkegaard, Camus. If Hulme’s ‘new religious age’ is to be born before our civilization destroys itself, it may require an intellectual effort of gestation that will involve the whole civilized world.
There are still many difficulties that cannot be touched on here. The problem for the ‘civilization’ is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as the headlines of last Sunday’s newspapers. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.
POSTSCRIPT TO THE OUTSIDER
The outsider first appeared eleven years ago, in 1956, and achieved a success that made one critic write: “Not since Lord Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous has an English writer met with such spontaneous and universal acclaim.” It was true, and it was hard luck on me, for reasons I shall try to explain.
I was born in 1931 into a working-class family in Leicester; my father was a boot-and-shoe operative who earned £3 a week. This meant that education was hard to come by. I realize this sounds absurd at this point in the twentieth century. But what has to be understood is that English working-class families—particularly factory workers—live in a curious state of apathy that would make Oblomov seem a demon of industry. My own family, for example, simply never bother to call in a doctor when they feel ill; they just never get around to it. One family doctor—an old Irishman, now dead and probably in Hell—killed about six of my family with sheer bumbling incompetence, and yet it never struck anyone to go to another doctor.
This explains why, although I was fairly clever at school and passed exams easily enough, I never went to a university. No one thought of suggesting it. Anyway, my family wanted me to bring home a weekly wage packet. So I left school at sixteen. (My brother left at fourteen.)
In a way, this was a good thing. Ever since I was twelve, I had been preoccupied with the question of the meaning of human existence, and whether all human values are not pure self-delusion. (No doubt this feeling was intensified by my dislike of the vague, brainless, cowlike drifting of the people around me.) My main interest was in science—particularly atomic physics—so that I was obsessed by the idea that there must be a scientific method for investigating this question of human existence. At fourteen, I discovered Shaw’s Man and Superman, and realized, with a shock, that I was not the first human being to ask the question. After that, I discovered Eliot’s Waste Land, Goethe’s Faust and Dostoevsky’s Devils in quick succession, and began to feel that I was acquiring the basic data for attacking the problem. Since no school or university in England provides courses in this problem, it is probably as well that I set out to work on my own at sixteen.
For the next eight years I worked in various jobs—mostly unskilled labor—and continued to accumulate data. I also did a good deal of writing—I kept a voluminous journal, which was several million words long by the time I was twenty-four. It was an extremely hard and discouraging business, for I knew no one whose interests overlapped with mine. I married when I was nineteen, and a wife and child added to the problems. But at least it meant that I got used to working completely and totally alone, and not expecting encouragement. Later on, reviewers and critics were outraged by what one of them called “his stupefying assurance about his own genius.” But it would have been impossible to go on working without some conviction of genius—at least, of certainty about the importance of what I was doing, and the belief that it wouldn�
��t matter if no other human being ever came to share this certainty. The feeling of alienation had to be totally accepted. Luckily, I’ve always had a fairly cheerful temperament, not much given to self-pity. So I went on working, reading and writing in my total vacuum, without contact with any other writer or thinker. I finally came to accept that I might spend all my life working in factories, and that my writing might never see print. It was hard to swallow, but I swallowed it, feeling that if Blake and Nietzsche could do without recognition, so could I.
Then a publisher to whom I sent the first few pages of The Outsider accepted it. And when I was nearly twenty-five, there came that shattering morning when I woke up and found press men banging at the door and television and radio demanding interviews. It was such a total change that it was like a bang on the head. The Outsider shot to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list in England and America, and was translated into fourteen languages within eighteen months. It so happened that a number of young writers made their appearance at this time, including John Osborne, John Braine, and my friend Bill Hopkins. The press labeled us “Angry Young Men.” In my case, nothing could have been more grotesquely inappropriate. I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne’s Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.
The tide turned very quickly. It was the highbrow press that made us successful. England has a large number of critics who delight in nothing so much as the discovery of new artistic talent. But they tend to turn very peevish if their enthusiasms are taken out of their hands and accepted by the popular press. This is what happened with the Angry Young Men. But my case was extreme. I had nothing in common with the others anyway. Osborne and Braine had a streak of self-pity that appealed to these highbrow critics, most of whom believed that the accident of a public-school education had destroyed their creativity and ruined their lives. Besides, I had written a book of ideas, and every critic in England felt that my success was monstrously unfair, in that it really belonged to himself— for a critic is, after all, a professional man of ideas.
The experience was vertiginous. After a month of the noisiest and gaudiest kind of success, in which popular reviewers compared me to Plato, Shelley, Shaw and D. H. Lawrence, the merry-go-round came suddenly to a halt, and then began to revolve in the opposite direction. My name became a kind of dirty word to serious critics, and the ones who had “discovered’ ‘ me winced when they remembered their praises. Every Christmas in England, the “posh” Sunday papers run a feature in which eminent men and women are asked their opinion of the best books of the year. Not one mentioned The Outsider, except Arthur Koestler, who went out of his way to refer to it as the “bubble of the year,” “in which a young man discovers that men of genius suffer from Weltschmerz.”
If The Outsider was an unprecedented success, my next book, Religion and the Rebel, was an unprecedented failure. The highbrow critics seized the opportunity to go back on their praise of The Outsider. And the popular press joined in like a gang of Indians invited to a massacre. Time, with its usual awe-inspiring vulgarity, ran a kind of obituary on me headed “Scrambled Egghead.”
It was then I was grateful for my ten years’ training in standing on my own feet. I had disliked the success of The Outsider.
I don t much like people anyway, so the endless succession of parties and receptions, and the hordes of new acquaintances, left me with a strong feeling of “people poisoning/’ Six months after The Outsider came out, I moved as far away from London as I could get, to a cottage in Cornwall. There I plunged into the world of religious mysticism—of Eckhart and Boehme, Pascal and Swedenborg—of which I wrote in Religion and the Rebel Success or failure didn’t matter all that much, provided one had enough money to live. The Outsider made me less money than might be expected—taxes took a lot of it, and I spent the rest pretty quickly—but I lived frugally anyway. The sheer malice of some of the attacks on me was difficult to swallow. But I felt I held a final card—my long practice in working alone, which probably meant that I could go on writing longer than my critics could go on sneering. The prospect of continuing the battle until I was ninety gave me a certain grim satisfaction. When my second book was hatchetted, I shrugged and went on working. The attacks didn’t worry me too much. I know enough of success to know that it is meaningless unless it is based on real understanding. I recognized that such understanding would probably take twenty years to grow. I was right. After ten years, it seems to be developing in countries where I would have least expected it—Japan, India, France, Spain, Arabia (the Arabs have translated seven of my books in the past year). Even in America. It may happen in England if I can live to be ninety or so.
In the past ten years, I have written 21 books, eight of them novels, and seven in my “Outsider series.” In this time, I had developed the ideas of The Outsider to create a philosophy that I sometimes refer to as “the new existentialism.” (I prefer to call it “phenomenological existentialism,” but the word worries most people.) While I felt that I had stumbled upon a particularly fruitful and exciting line of investigation, I was not certain of the general importance of these ideas—being naturally modest and lacking in self-assurance—until I came to America to lecture in 1961, and again in 1966. Their reception by audiences of American students all over the country convinced me that I had not been too conceited in suspecting that they constituted a kind of revolution in philosophy.
For anyone who is interested in following them up in detail, I recommend the six volumes of the Outsider series: The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel, The Stature of Man, The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse and Beyond the Outsider. For readers who would prefer a clear and fairly short summary, I suggest my Introduction to the New Existentialism—perhaps the best introduction to my ideas. For readers who haven’t time for any of these, I’ll attempt to sketch them in the remainder of this postscript.
The basic problem of “The Outsider” is his instinctive rejection of the everyday world, a feeling that it is somehow boring and unsatisfying, like a hypnotized man eating sawdust under the belief that it is eggs and bacon.
All major poets and philosophers have had this feeling as their starting point, the feeling, expressed by Axel, that living itself is a trivial and repetitive task, fit only for servants. This led many philosophers to reject the “real world”—Plato is an example—and to believe that there is somehow another world —of ideas, of the spirit, which is the true “home” of the poet. This is the feeling behind Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” as well as Wagner’s Tristan.
In the nineteenth century, this kind of world-rejection came to a head in poets who called themselves “romantics.” Most of them believed that the poet was never intended for “this world,” dreary and heartbreaking as it is. And yet he has certain moments when he feels curiously immortal, god-like, as if hovering above the world, untouched by its dullness. Is this feeling an illusion, like an opium dream? The romantics were obviously inclined to believe so, for large numbers of them committed suicide or died of tuberculosis.
In the twentieth century, romanticism revived under another name. It called itself “existentialism.” But its basic question was still the same. Which of the two worlds is real: that world of supreme, godlike detachment and power, or the world in which we feel victimized, helpless, “contingent”? Which is true: man’s experience of his freedom, or of slavery to his body and the world?
Existentialism was not quite so pessimistic as romanticism. Its position tended to be stoical. It is summed up in that phrase of Hemingway from The Old Man and the Sea—”A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Not very hopeful, yet asserting the “eternal spirit of the chainless mind” all the same.
I could not accept either the death-worship of the romantics, nor the stoical defeat of the existentialists. For various temperamental reasons�
��partly because I am an Englishman—I do not share the tendency to gloom and defeat that pervades so much modern literature. I felt that I had no intention of being either defeated or destroyed. On the other hand, neither have I any sympathy for that lazy and intellectually timid school of English philosophers, led by Professor Ayer, who assert that the whole problem is meaningless, and we had better accept our pathetic little limitations. The problem ought to be solvable in its own terms, not by turning away and pretending it doesn’t exist.
It seemed to me that a solution must be found. Here, my natural optimism was to my advantage. For when I read Sartre or Camus or Graham Greene, I experienced a temperamental rejection of their pessimism. I suspected that their ultimate picture might be distorted by a certain self-pity or lack of discipline—or, in the case of Greene, by a certain congenital lack of vitality. I suspected that if the problem left them defeated, it was because they had not attacked it hard enough.
I saw, even at this early stage, that it was a problem of consciousness. For what it amounts to, after all, is whether these strange moments of freedom can be recalled at will. The romantics were gloomily inclined to believe that they were some form of “grace”—or perhaps even something to do with the chemistry of the body or brain, so that the “glory and the freshness of a dream” vanish inevitably as one grows past childhood.