[Paleopsych] NYT: (Colin Wilson) Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge

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Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/books/17wils.html

[Sarah had his Outsider. We never read it and got rid of it. Later, I bought a 
used copy, intending this time to read it. Never did. Got rid of it again. 
Bought it again a third time. Got rid of it, too. I have read a couple of books 
by him, one on the occult, which did not convince me. Maybe I'll turn back to 
him. Unlikely. Don't know why. I respect him more than I read him. Have read a 
few essays also and enjoyed them. Don't remember what they said, though. Quite 
a fascinating character, though, as this article will show.]

    By BRAD SPURGEON

    GORRAN HAVEN, Britain - Any intellectual who divides opinion as much
    as Colin Wilson has for almost 50 years must be onto something, even
    if it is only whether humans should be pessimistic or optimistic.

    Mr. Wilson, who turned 74 in June and whose autobiography, "Dreaming
    to Some Purpose," recently appeared in paperback from Arrow, describes
    in the first chapter how he made his own choice. The son of
    working-class parents from Leicester - his father was in the boot and
    shoe trade - he was forced to quit school and go to work at 16, even
    though his ambition was to become "Einstein's successor." After a
    stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a laboratory assistant, but
    he was still in despair and decided to kill himself.

    On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an insight: there
    were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager and the
    other a thinking man, his real self.

    The idiot, he realized, would kill them both.

    "In that moment," he wrote, "I glimpsed the marvelous, immense
    richness of reality, extending to distant horizons."

    Achieving such moments of optimistic insight has been his goal and
    subject matter ever since, through more than 100 books, from his first
    success, "The Outsider," published in 1956, when he was declared a
    major existentialist thinker at 24, to the autobiography.

    In an interview last month at his home of nearly 50 years on the
    Cornish coast, Mr. Wilson was as optimistic as ever, even though his
    autobiography and his life's work have come under strong attack in
    some quarters.

    "What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a
    completely new foundation," he said, sitting in his living room along
    with a parrot, two dogs and part of his collection of 30,000 books and
    as many records. "Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as
    rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you
    happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was
    to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all
    kinds of errors to creep into their work."

    He includes in that category writers like Hemingway and philosophers
    like Sartre. In books on sex, crime, psychology and the occult, and in
    more than a dozen novels, Mr. Wilson has explored how pessimism can
    rob ordinary people of their powers.

    "If you asked me what is the basis of all my work," he said, "it's the
    feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings. Human
    beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. Our powers
    appear to be taken away from us by something."

    The critics, particularly in Britain, have alternately called him a
    genius and a fool. His autobiography, published in hardcover last
    year, has received mixed reviews. Though lauded by some, the attacks
    on it and Mr. Wilson have been as virulent as those he provoked in the
    1950's after he became a popular culture name with the publication of
    "The Outsider."

    That book dealt with alienation in thinkers, artists and men of action
    like T. E. Lawrence, van Gogh, Camus and Nietzsche, and caught the
    mood of the age. Critics, including Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee,
    hailed Mr. Wilson as a British version of the French existentialists.

    His fans ranged from Muammar el-Qaddafi to Groucho Marx, who asked his
    British publisher to send a copy of his own autobiography to three
    people in Britain: Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham and Colin
    Wilson.

    "The Outsider" was translated into dozens of languages and sold
    millions of copies. It has never been out of print.

    The Times of London called Mr. Wilson and John Osborne - another young
    working-class man, whose play "Look Back in Anger" opened about the
    same time "The Outsider" was published - "angry young men." That name
    was passed on to others of their generation, including Kingsley Amis,
    Alan Sillitoe and even Doris Lessing.

    But fame brought its own problems for Wilson. His sometimes tumultuous
    early personal life became fodder for gossip columnists. He was still
    married to his first wife while living with his future second wife,
    Joy. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, urged him to leave the spotlight,
    and he and Joy moved to Cornwall.

    But the publicity had done its damage. His second book, "Religion and
    the Rebel," was panned and his career looked dead.

    Mr. Wilson said the episode had actually saved him as a writer,
    however. "Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and
    creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of," he said. "So I
    was relieved to get out of London."

    He said his books were probably heading for condemnation in Britain
    anyway. "I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't
    interested in ideas," he said. "The English, I'm afraid, are totally
    brainless. If you're a writer of ideas like Sartre or Foucault or
    Derrida, then the general French public know your name, whereas here
    in England, their equivalent in the world of philosophy wouldn't be
    known."

    He never lost belief in the importance of his work in trying to find
    out how to harness human beings' full powers and wipe out gloom.

    "Sartre's 'man is a useless passion,' and Camus's feeling that life is
    absurd, and so on, basically meant that philosophy itself had turned
    really pretty dark," he said. "I could see that there was a basic
    fallacy in Sartre and Camus and all of these existentialists,
    Heidegger and so on. The basic fallacy lay in their failure to
    understand the actual foundation of the problem."

    That foundation, he said, is that human perception is intentional; the
    pessimists themselves paint their world black.

    Mr. Wilson has spent much of his life researching how to achieve those
    moments of well-being that bring insight, what the American
    psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences."

    Those moments can come only through effort, concentration or focus,
    and refusing to lose one's vital energies through pessimism.

    "What it means basically is that you're able to focus until you
    suddenly experience that sense that everything is good," Mr. Wilson
    said. "We go around leaking energy in the same way that someone who
    has slashed their wrists would go around leaking blood.

    "Once you can actually get over that and recognize that this is not
    necessary, suddenly you begin to see the possibility of achieving a
    state of mind, a kind of steady focus, which means that you see things
    as extremely good." If harnessed by everyone, this could lead to the
    next step in human evolution, a kind of Superman.

    "The problem with human beings so far is that they are met with so
    many setbacks that they are quite easily defeatable, particularly in
    the modern age when they've got too separated from their roots," he
    said.

    Over the last year, he has been forced to test his own powers in this
    area. "When I was pretty sure that the autobiography was going to be a
    great success, and when it, on the contrary, got viciously attacked,"
    Mr. Wilson said, "well, I know I'm not wrong. Obviously the times are
    out of joint."

    Though "Dreaming to Some Purpose" was warmly received in The
    Independent on Sunday and The Spectator and was praised by the
    novelist Philip Pullman, the autobiography - and Mr. Wilson - received
    a barrage of negative profiles and reviews in The Sunday Times and The
    Observer. These made fun of the book's more eccentric parts, like his
    avowed fetish for women's panties.

    As a measure of the passions that Mr. Wilson provokes, Robert Meadley,
    an essayist, wrote "The Odyssey of a Dogged Optimist" (Savoy, 2004), a
    188-page book defending him.

    "If you think a man's a fool and his books are a waste of time, how
    long does it take to say so?" Mr. Meadley wrote, questioning the space
    the newspapers gave to the attacks.

    Part of Mr. Meadley's conclusion is that the British intellectual
    establishment still felt threatened by Mr. Wilson, a self-educated
    outsider from the working class.

    "One of my main problems as far as the public is concerned is that
    I've always been interested in too many things," Mr. Wilson said, "and
    if they can't typecast you as a writer on this or that, then I'm
    afraid you tend not to be understood at all."