I don’t like to use heavy labels or ideologies to express myself or to describe what I’ve been reading, but sometimes it’s inevitable. Since I saw the film I Heart Huckabees in 2004, I haven’t been able to escape the word “existentialism.” It popped up again in 2006 when I read The Stranger by Camus, a French author who is referred to by that title (even though he denied that or any label). But my understanding of the subject furthered with the reading of The Outsider, a nonfiction book published in 1956 by a then-24-year-old Colin Wilson.
It’s difficult to explain the point of the book in a short space, but these quotes might help: “It is this irrelevancy of a man’s beliefs to the fate that can overtake him that supplies the most primitive ground for Existentialism, and means that a belief in some sort of providence or destiny is the essential prerequisite of all religion and most philosophy” (p. 112).
“A man becomes an Outsider when he begins to chafe under the recognition that he is not free” (p. 113).
Unfortunately, Wilson consistently turns to the idea of religion as a way out of his dilemma. He doesn’t address the concept of God, but merely the desire to have a system of beliefs by which to live. “The necessary basis for religion is the belief that freedom can be obtained” (p. 113).
“Supposing a solution does exist somewhere, undreamed of by me, inconceivable to me, can I yet hope that it might one day force itself upon me without my committing myself to a preliminary gesture of faith which (in point of fact) I cannot make? The poet finds that he can answer this question with a ‘yes’” (p. 120).
In other words, Wilson is striving to find on outlook on live that is primarily optimistic, and the best way he can do that is to allude to a religious solution. In the meantime, he addresses some of the greatest skeptical and pessimistic literature of the past 150 years, claiming that the ultimate work of modern pessimism is T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”
Wilson built the foundation of his book on both The Stranger and Sartre’s debut novel Nausea. He then runs through some real life figures like Van Gogh and Lawrence, as well as a multitude of fictional characters and the authors who created them (Hesse, Nietzsche, etc). William Blake gets special attention from Wilson, who asserts that a visionary imagination is the pinnacle of human creativity. However, Wilson never satisfactorily solves his basic problems, and in fact keeps returning to Camus and Sartre throughout the book. He returns to the Stranger for the reason that, no matter how you spin it, life often seems too unreal — and this realization tends to overpower many other philosophies.
I too will have come back to The Stranger — and The Outsider as well — in the near future.
Similar Posts:
- The Only Truly Serious Philosophical Problem (August 26, 2009)
- For Madmen Only! (November 19, 2008)
- We Must Give the Void Its Colors (September 3, 2009)
- The Emergency of Life in a Modern World (January 20, 2009)
- Le Update and Le Quote (June 30, 2008)
