Beyond the Outsider

By Colin Wilson

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881847046
• ISBN13: 9780881847048
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Good follow-up to The Outsider

The only thing I disliked about this book . . . was that it seemed to end too soon! I love reading about Wilson's Outsiders and his ideas. I do believe he is a genius of sorts, although I'm not sure what exactly that means nowadays, since no one knows how to judge what is high quality anymore and Wilson surely would go unnoticed in the same room with a group of lowbrow writers who dominate the scene today. At any rate, I am of the opinion the Outsider series is one of the most important and is one of those rare reads that attempts to make sense and meaning in a mostly meaningless and illogical age. We need more writers like Wilson. This book is definitely for those who have already read the first book on The Outsider and already have an intense interest in the subject. Those who can't and won't try to relate to the themes of the first book would find this one really boring. Stick to your entertaining novels instead.

not wilson's best, but an interesting read

there is something lacking about "beyond the outsider", and i have to admit that on a gut level i was a little disappointed with the book. wilson seems a little more comfortable, a little more complacent and academic with this one, and as another reviewer commented, it is more a dry analysis than a study of man's existential condition as "the outsider" was. plus, "beyond the outsider" made me aware of something about the work of colin wilson that i had never noticed before:he never really confronts the fact of death and how it is a problem for human beings in terms of the meaning of life. this sounds ludicrous, as colin wilson has spent his career writing about the problem of contingency and the meaninglessness of human life in the 20th century, but when you really investigate his work, he never tackles the issue head on. rather, he gets lost talking about things such as 'peak experiences' and our moments 'visionary consciousness', never seeming to realize that while this kind of thing is all well and good for, say, a william blake, we mere mortals are still stuck with the slightly problematic issue of our inevitable annihilation after maybe 80 or 90 years at the most. a fundamentally optimistic philosophy such as wilson's really has no excuse unless it somehow gives an answer to this issue. we can run around having peak experiences and magnificent feelings of creative ecstasy our entire lives, but we are still going to kick the bucket. what use is it reaching the top of abraham maslow's pyramid if it is all swept away in a moment by failing to look both ways before crossing the street, or smoking too much and never quite getting around to quitting before one gets lung cancer and dies an agonizing death? wilson puts such an emphasis on the importance of the individual will as the chief determinant of how much meaning or the reverse an individual feels he or she possesses in their life, and yet the individual will means little indeed when we are headed for the morgue. the ubermensch, for all his accomplishment and 'self actualization', is going to buy the farm like everyone else. wilson claims that the work of wilhelm reich was based on a fallacy, that of the freudian sexual theory, and he is right, but one could say just as legitimately that wilson's life work is also based on a fallacy, the fallacy of avoidance! after all, isn't this the dilemma that camus, sartre, and kafka made us aware of, the relativity of all human actions in the face of death? wilson obsesses over these authors and claims to harbor the same doubts about the reality of our existence, but seems quite content to write them off as gloomy pessimists who never realized that after a jog, darn we feel good. the thinkers that wilson lambasts as not taking into account the 'absurd good news', our periods of joy and creativity in fact experienced precisely what wilson claims they were ignorant of, but they looked at things as one is supposed to in philosophy, the human cond

Last of series tries to elucidate the new existentialism.

Supposed sixth book in a series, I had no problem reading this after only reading the first book of the series, but definitely read The Outsider first. The series deals with a world that cannot accept religious approaches from a superstitious past and seeks a new meaning for mankind. My opinion was that this was not as good as The Outsider, mostly because it reads more like a dry philosophical summary and discussion than an inspired holistic analysis. It speaks somewhat of the dual nature of mankind's perception and how recognizing this allows us to take the next step with is the path to our own evolution. Provides a discussion of the development of Romantic and Existential philosophies, to show how concepts have been revealed or failed through the last hundred years or so (from when the book was written in 1965). Seems to jump around and present aspects of thought in a manner that made it read like a mental zig zag. Briefly the "immediate perception" that is the basis of scientific investigation is only half of it, the other being "meaning perception". And one way he introduces (via Huxley and Sartre) to open the western mind to the concept of meaning perception is the taking of mescalin (a drug that actually seems to confuse perceptions, as I see it, rather than awaken them, but this book was a product of the sixties). Anything that gets man to understand his role is not passive but active, then Wilson gets to a, sort of, ultimate answer that was not totally clear after one reading, except it converged upon man's design of his own evolution. The book attempts to cover only some main concepts but does so in a flurry of references and odd phrases (like describing a concept as the 'St. Neots margin' or 'old woman in a vinegar bottle'). You may have to be farmiliar with at least the more notable Romantic and Existential philosophers to really appreciate his presentation. I have enjoyed reading Colin Wilson's books.

Needs a larger audience.

I cannot believe that only one review of this book had been written before now. This book is of paramount philosophical importance. I presume that people interested in philosophy have been reading archaic works of the erroneous Rene Descarte or Hegel. This work is of present value. The Whitehead-Husserl hypothesis is as far as man has come. It synthesises the age old battle of Realism-Idealism. I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of philosophy because I have read many works from an early age, but I feel this would be a good introduction into philsophy, especially the opening two chapters. Many people may become confused if they were to start with someone such as Locke and immediately turn to Kant, as the ideas the antithesises of each other. Colin Wilson is a writer of eminent quality and should be read by readers around the globe. I feel his works are not publicised enough in the US considering the lack of reviews here.

The New Existentialism

In the sixth and last book of Wilson's "Outsider" series, Colin Wilson attacks the "doom" prophets of existentialism with a different and more accurate philosophy. He notes that the existentialism of the early 20th century is due mainly to poor thinking habits and erroneous self-pity. Wilson describes his idea of peak experiences -- times when one feels more vitally alive and interested in the world around one -- and the role of sex and danger as stimuli of some such experiences. In the appendix he recounts his experience of taking mescalin to investigate modes of consciousness and perception.