The Essential Colin Wilson (16 page)

In June, 1969, I told Maslow in a letter that it looked as if my book about him was going to be part of a larger book about the revolution in psychology, and asked more questions, which he answered on tape. A few days before this last batch of tapes arrived, I received a letter from his secretary telling me that he had died of a heart attack on June 8, 1970. Listening to his voice, it was hard to get used to the idea that he was dead.

I am still not certain whether this is the best way to write the book; but I can see no other. In this introduction I have tried to give a sketchy outline of the ideas that preoccupied Maslow—and myself—during the past ten years. In the first part of the book, I have tried to give a picture of the major trends in psychology from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, through the Freudian revolution, down to Maslow. Part Two deals exclusively with Maslow; it is the book I intended to write to begin with. Part Three discusses existential psychology in general, and attempts to state some general conclusions about the movement. Inevitably, this is the most personal part of the book, and may be regarded as a continuation of this introduction. The ultimate question is not one of psychology so much as of philosophy, or even religion.

Viktor Frankl talks about 'the existential vacuum', writing: 'More and more patients are crowding our clinics and consulting rooms complaining of an inner emptiness, a sense of total and ultimate meaninglessness of their lives'. I coined the term 'nothingness neurosis' to describe this state. But in discussing it, I have tried to avoid generalisations, and to remain faithful to the phenomenological—the descriptive—method. That was always Maslow's own approach.

From
Beyond the Outsider
, 1965

THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS

In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller wrote: 'Until the old world dies out utterly, the "abnormal" individual will tend more and more to become the norm. The new man will find himself only when the warfare between collectivity and the individual ceases.'

The position expressed here was the starting point of the investigation in
The Outsider
. But in some ways, it is a dangerous half truth. 'Collectivization' is as obvious and unavoidable consequence of social evolution, and individualists have always kicked against it. But from de Sade onward, most of the rebels have seen it simply as a question of 'the individual versus collective man'; consequently, most of the revolts have been explosions of violence that have ended in defeat or reaction. It is true of Miller as well as of Rimbaud, and it remains true down to the revolt of the Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Obviously there is a great deal 'wrong with society', in the sense that it is often unfair to the 'abnormal' individual; still, we have not yet reached Dostoevsky's nightmare of a society that favours mediocrity and destroys genius. Until this point arrives, the problem cannot be reduced to a matter of the individual versus collective man. The real problem is to reconcile the demands of a healthy individualism with those of a healthy society. A healthy individualism could be defined as one that is not neurotic or self-destructive. The same is true of a healthy society; it would aim at a heightening of creative vitality in all its members.

A little thought reveals the fallacy of the Rimbaud-Miller type of individualism. Obviously, a healthy society would be a society of healthy individuals. But more than this it would be a society in which the
gifted
individuals are healthy, since these gifted individuals tend to become the cultural leaders. If the gifted individuals tend to be pessimists who believe that life is futile and man a useless passion, it is not surprising if the cultural atmosphere becomes stagnant. It is a vicious circle; the rebel blames society for letting him down, and turns his back on it. And in condemning the 'sick culture', he is introducing a little more poison into its system. The next generation of rebels find that the situation is still worse, so they again throw the blame on society, and make a hero of the rebel of the older generation—who is actually largely to blame. So it goes on. The rebel is disinclined to believe either that he might play an important part in determining the cultural atmosphere of his society, or that a society's culture is important to its health. He likes to place the blame on those in power—politicians and businessmen—forgetting that these men are only doing their best to support the society he has rejected. So the spiral of degeneration continues.

It is important to recognize the close connection between a society's culture and its general health. Frederick Wilhelm III of Prussia has often been attacked for his part in promoting Hegel and condemning Schopenhauer to obscurity. In fact, he showed a profounder insight than most princes possess. Hegel's philosophy was optimistic, and he recognized the importance of social stability; Schopenhauer's was pessimistic, and his attitude to politics was wholly cynical. An 'officially approved' Schopenhauer would have been the most dangerous man in Europe. Hegel's influence was comparatively beneficial.

It follows, then, that if our own culture is 'sick', we should not throw all the blame on politicians or businessmen; the thinkers and artists of the past two hundred years are equally to blame. Some have been entirely destructive, like Schopenhauer or de Sade. Most of the others have raised problems that they have left unsolved, or only partly solved. (This list includes almost every important thinker from Coleridge onward.) A very small number have thought the problems through to the end and proposed constructive solutions. (These include Hegel, Shaw and Wells.) Such men are never popular with their 'intellectual peers', since their very existence is an implied reproach. The following generation usually condemns them as shallow, and tries to forget them.

The consequence of all this is that the thinker or artist of today finds himself in a room that contains the accumulated rubbish of two hundred years; every occupant seems to have added to the muddle. All the traditions seem to have reached a state of hopeless confusion. The novelist, for example, discovers that Flaubert, Henry James, Proust, Joyce and Robbe-Grillet have backed the novel into a cul-de-sac and overturned it in a ditch. In all likelihood, he hurries away from the mess and writes a conventional novel that might have been written a hundred years ago. The composer finds that Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg and Boulez have left music in the same situation; he then has the alternative of going a step further than Webern, or being condemned as 'unprogressive'.

But the person who finds himself in the worst situation is the philosopher. And since the aim of the present book is to suggest a basis for a new existentialism, it is important to understand how this came about.

FROM THE GREEKS TO GALILEO

The problem of the human situation is the problem of the clash between man's inner world and the alien world 'out there'. The Greeks solved the problem in a simple manner—by rejecting the world out there. They were intoxicated with the power of thought, with the beautiful certainty of logic and mathematics. But the real world is irritatingly unmathematical; it is full of violence and uncertainty. So Greek thought declared that the real world is unimportant, an illusion. Reality lies in the world of ideas. Before a carpenter can make a chair, he must have an idea of a chair; consequently, the idea must be more important than the actual chair. One can destroy the chair, and it is easy enough to make another; but if the idea were destroyed no chairs could be made. The idea is like the mould in which all real things are cast. Somewhere behind the façade of reality, according to Plato, there is a world in which these moulds are kept. This real world can be glimpsed behind the everyday world of change if one stares hard enough. The everyday world is like a fence with small cracks between each board. If you apply your eye to the crack, you will see only a narrow strip of the world on the other side. But if you ride past the fence on a bicycle, all the cracks seem to merge together, as if the fence were semi-transparent, and you can see everything that lies behind it.
But speed is essential
. And in the same way, one needs speed in a mental sense—intellectual vitality and curiosity—to see the eternal world of ideas that lies behind the changing face of the material world.

There is obviously a basic truth in this. But Greek thought threw out the baby with the bath water. Since the philosopher spends his life trying to ignore the real world and study the world on 'the other side of the fence', he will achieve final freedom in death. This is the argument with which Socrates comforts his friends on the day of his execution, and the reason he gives for not escaping while he had the chance. He does not explain why, in that case, he did not commit suicide as soon as he decided to be a philosopher.

The world-rejection of Greek thought dominated philosophy for the next two thousand years. In Europe, it happened to fit in very well with the world-rejection of Christianity. Then its weaknesses began to appear. Aristotle was regarded as the great scientist and realist, in contrast to Plato's idealism. But Aristotle, like Plato, felt rather contemptuous of the material world; he was inclined to make assertions without testing them. He declared, for example, that an object dropped from the mast of a moving ship will fall behind the mast; he also believed that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones.[1] He was aware of the theories of earlier thinkers that the earth revolves round the sun, and that it has an axial rotation, but he rejected them in favour of the idea that the earth is the centre of the universe.

The great revolution came nearly two thousand years later, with Galileo. He proved that all bodies fall at the same speed. He invented a telescope and discovered the moons of Jupiter, confirming the theory of Copernicus that the sun is the centre of our system. He rolled weights down an inclined plane and concluded that a moving body will continue to move unless something stops it. Galileo practised what Aristotle only preached—close observation of nature.

THE SOURCE OF CONFUSION – DESCARTES

Modern philosophy begins with a contemporary of Galileo, René Descartes. Descartes was a mathematician and a scientist, and he asked what he considered to be the fundamental question: What can we
know
for certain? Descartes began with the principle that one must doubt everything, then went on to ask: Can I be certain that I am sitting here in this chair? No, for it is possible that I might be dreaming. What, then, do I know for certain? I know that I exist, because I am thinking.

Descartes' principle of 'radical doubt' was accepted by all subsequent philosophers. It is the application to philosophy of Galileo's principle: 'Test everything.' But the principle had an unfortunate consequence;
it divided science from philosophy
. Science is bound to take the material world for granted; but according to Descartes, we can never be as certain of the existence of the world as we can of our own existence; the scientist studies the physical world, but the philosopher had better study the mind. Only the mind can get to the truth underlying appearances.

Descartes was carried away by enthusiasm for the scientific method, which, after two thousand years, was now revolutionizing human knowledge. Science examines the world through a magnifying glass; so Descartes naïvely proceeded to examine the human situation through a magnifying glass, trying to reduce everything to reason. Oddly enough, he did not apply his principle of doubt to his religion, and continued to regard himself as a good Catholic. So it is not surprising that his system should be confused and self-divided, with religious dogma on the one hand, and naïve rationalism on the other.

His rationalism led him to decide that animals are complicated machines without a soul. This led to a difficult problem. If animals are really clockwork, how do we know that men are not also clockwork? 'Because', Descartes replied, 'I
know
I have a soul. I think, therefore I am.' But if an animal can go through all the motions of being alive without really being alive, then is there any
need
for a soul to drive the human clockwork? Plainly not. The soul, Descartes said, lives in the brain, and can indirectly influence the body. Descartes' disciple Geulincx saw the inconsistencies in this theory, and took it to an extreme. The soul has no influence on the body at all. It is true that if you want to raise your arm, you can do so; but it is only because the soul and the body are like two clocks that have been synchronized by God. One of them shows the hour, and the other strikes. We imagine that they are connected, but this is an illusion.

Geulincx's 'improvement' of Descartes is typical of modern philosophy. A theory is self-contradictory; but instead of checking the premises, another theorist takes the contradictions to an extreme, and reduces the whole thing to absurdity—but also to consistency. If Descartes had been bold enough, he would have taken his own radical doubt to an extreme and declared that men are also machines, that consciousness is an illusion produced by the body, and that all religion is a product of ignorance. Later thinkers took these steps. Comte founded the school of positivism, that declared religion to be nonsense; Ernst Mach declared that consciousness is merely a series of sensory impressions; the leader of the Behaviourist group of psychologists, J. B. Watson, wrote '. . . no behaviourist has observed anything that he can call consciousness, sensation, imagery, perception or will'.

Yet another group of philosophers took Descartes' principle of doubt still further, and continued the work of reducing man to a machine. Locke argued that all our knowledge is derived from experience. This was the first total rejection of Plato's ideas. In the
Meno
, Socrates persuades a slave to reason out a geometrical problem, and goes on to argue that the slave already possessed the knowledge
inside
himself; it is only a question of getting it out into consciousness. All knowledge is inside us, Plato argues. Reason and imagination are the instruments of knowledge, and a man who spent his life in a dark room could, in theory, learn everything about the world outside if he used his mind properly. Locke dismissed this idea of 'innate knowledge'.