The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in history, literature, education, political science, Asian studies, and related subjects.

Among them is the book The Outsider by Colin Wilson.

Published in 1956, The Outsider analyzes works by Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus and Sartre to explores the philosophy of the Outsider.

Wilson also examines the writings of H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and George Gurdjieff.

For Wilson, the theme linking these writers is alienation from society.

The TU Library collection also includes books by many of these authors and other research about social alienation.

The US philosopher Sidney Hook wrote about Wilson’s book:

There was a time when to convict a thinker of absurdity was to place him under an intellectual obligation to rise to the argument or change his position. At the very least, it put him in the shadow of impropriety. Today he can escape the obligation and get out from under the shadow by calmly making a philosophy of his predicament.

Existentialism as a philosophy of the absurd is the 20th century’s gift to literary men and critics who are terribly excited by ideas but resent the discipline ncessary to analyze them.

Mr. Colin Wilson is caught up in this excitement about existentialist profundity. One can plead for him the extenuations of youth and a desultory philosophical education. What is truly astonishing is that he has infected with his enthusiasm for the dramatic and the murky some English critics from whom one had expected more intellectual sophistication.

Who is the “outsider”? He is a composite character drawn from the plays, novels, essays, and letters of a varied assortment of literary men ranging from very minor talents like Henri Barbusse and Harley Granville-Barker to giants like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Between the extremes of this spectrum we find H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence, Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Kierkegaard, Nijinsky, James, and Blake. The features of the “outsider” are not clearly drawn: they vary somewhat with the moods of his creator.

It is safe to say, however, that the “outsider” is the man who feels he does not belong, who refuses to accept human life and society on any basis which makes it possible for him to find fulfilment in love, work, and friendship. He is the man for whom life or existence or the cosmos “has no meaning,” or if it has, a trivial, absurd, or grotesque meaning. He is the man for whom nothing matters but death.

This description of the “outsider” is incomplete, for nowhere does Mr. Wilson describe his beliefs and attitudes systematically. He does not even contrast him carefully with the “insider.” He illustrates rather than explicates these beliefs and attitudes by snippets of quotation from the men mentioned. The “outsider” has a great hunger to know himself deeply and to express himself truly, and at the same time to escape from himself.

Above all he seeks to save himself by some extreme action or, like Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger, by an extreme failure of action. In all his variations, according to Mr. Wilson, the “outsider” is the very model of the metaphysical man who has seen through the appearances of everyday life and who scorns the humanist and rationalist because of their desire to make the world, if not a kinder place, a less evil one in which to live.

The “outsider” does not have to be conventionally religious, but in one fashion or another he has grasped with St. Augustine and T. E. Hulme the central truth and importance of “dogmas like that of Original Sin.”

At no point in the book does Mr. Wilson ever clarify the problems over which his existentialist heroes agonize; nor does he ever face the challenge, which arises just as soon as we. try to come to grips with their assertions, that the problems are not really genuine.

They can’t be answered not because they are difficult but because the terms in which they are put permit of no answer. Existence is not something of which we can significantly say, as we do of a human being, that it lacks or possesses meaning.

If life is absurd because one can find no meaning in experience, what are the conditions, actual or imaginable, in which one could find meaning? What would life have to be like in order for us to declare that it is not absurd? If the world we lived in were still declared “absurd” or “meaningless” no matter what kind of world it was (or even if we didn’t live in one at all!) these terms would themselves be meaningless because they had no intelligible opposite. The whole problem would dissolve like early morning vapors in the sun.

Or consider the view that man is a stranger or alien in the world. On the conventional religious view one can understand roughly what is meant by this. Man’s soul, which is separable from his body, is either a fragmented part of the world-soul and must return to the One from which it descended, or, cast into the natural world, its supernatural end is reunion with God, its creator.

But if an individual surrenders this view, and, like most of Mr. Wilson’s characters, repudiates the dogmas of immortality and resurrection, what home can he possibly conceive man to have other than the natural world of which he is a part, to be sure a distinctive part, but as dependent upon other existing things as the animals and stones in the field?

For purposes of philosophical analysis, it is sufficient to show that Mr. Wilson’s “outsiders” and he himself talk nonsense or make inconsistent or self-refuting assumptions. But to stop at that is not very satisfying. We should inquire what makes them talk that way, why they feel that their talk is important, what the actual problems are, if any, that beset them, what they are trying to say about them, and above all what they really want. Nonsense may be important as a diagnostic aid in discovering obscure needs and aspirations.

Unfortunately the last thing in the world Mr. Wilson’s “outsiders” can tell us is what they really want. They feel aggrieved at the very notion that they are expected to be able to tell us. They are very eloquent about what they detest and don’t want. Some of the things ” they detest—philistinism, mediocrity, hypocrisy, injustice—we, who do not consider ourselves “outsiders,” detest too. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)