The Essential Colin Wilson (20 page)

I have said that the next step consists in a phenomenological analysis of consciousness. We have no language to describe these important innerstates.

In the remainder of this book, I shall attempt to make a beginning upon a systematic phenomenology of consciousness. It should be possible to at least lay down the broad outlines of such a 'new science'.

Let us begin with a consideration of the word 'values'. What is a value? It is a kind of 'rate of exchange'. If I say that a certain object is not worth what the shopkeeper is asking for it, I mean that I am not willing to exchange money for it. If I say that a certain task is 'not worth the effort', I mean that I am not willing to exchange
vital energy
for the result it will obtain.

Everything that I experience causes a rise or fall in the immediate level of my vital energy. Eating when I am hungry, drinking when I am thirsty, causes a rise in the level of my vitality. A 'value' is that physical response of pleasure and vitality that I experience as I swallow food. So we might also say that
a value is a response
. This response determines what we consider 'worth doing'.

Religion and philosophy, of course, aim at absolute values. But we might also note that human beings in general aim at absolute values. Our life is an attempt to discard false values. A child enjoys cream cakes; but he discovers that too many of them make him sick; he therefore learns eventually not to over-indulge in cream cakes. The 'immediate' response to cream cakes is replaced by a more reasoned response that sees further.

But our value systems are not internally consistent; neither do they have to be. We adopt temporary systems of values according to the task in hand. A parent loves a child, but if the child needs correction, he places the love temporarily in abeyance and takes up the rod. He is actually practising what Husserl calls 'bracketing'. The same thing happens if I decide that I must finish a certain task in hand, even though there are other things I would prefer to do. I deliberately 'bracket out' my response (i.e., values) to the things I would prefer to do, and concentrate on the task that must be finished.

We are therefore capable of altering our immediate responses—and values—in favour of some more embracing value system. To some extent, therefore, every moment of our conscious lives depends upon the value systems we adopt.

Since the most ordinary act of living depends upon the handling of such complex 'values', it is obviously important that our over-all, basic values should be very clear indeed, to prevent confusion. But here we immediately encounter the great problem. A value is a response, an immediate warm flow of vitality and optimism. But since our consciousness is so limited, it is precisely our 'ultimate' values that are
not
responses. A saint like Ramakrishna may be able to establish immediate vital contact with his deepest values; but most of us have to work on in the dark.

All this talk about values makes the problem sound somewhat abstract, when it is anything but. It is purely practical. Our lives are enveloped in moods, in the ebb and flow of energy. The human beings we refer to as 'great' have seized the sense of purpose that comes with the moods of optimism, and tried to live by it. The problem is an absurd one. It is like the sequence in the Charlie Chaplin film where the tramp meets a man who is kind and generous to him when drunk, and rude and violent when sober. Which is the 'real' man? Or is the question unanswerable, as Pirandello seems to imply in various plays that deal with the same kind of subject? The question may sound 'meaningless' to an empiricist philosopher, but it is of vital importance to every human being who is more than half alive. Human beings experience life as a series of moods. (These 'moods' are actually intentional value-judgements.) Each 'mood' seems to offer them a different piece of advice on the question of how to live. In ages of faith, man possessed religious belief to act as a compass to steer him through his moods, but in an age of humanism, he is at the mercy of the 'moods'. Each mood seems to reveal the 'reality' of the world; in moods of extreme pessimism, life is a cheat, a swindler, and man's optimism is sheer gullibility; in moods of optimism, the pessimism seems to have been the outcome of feebleness and poor-spiritedness. Our usual state of mind is somewhere between the two; we plod on passively, avoiding great risks, hoping for the best. Obviously, we require an
objective
standard, so that we are no longer ships that change our course with every wind.

In saying this, I have stated the central aim of the 'new existentialism'. We immediately become aware of the complexity of the problem. A relativist would dismiss it by saying: How can you decide that the world is one thing or the other? But this is premature defeatism. One might say, in the case of Charlie Chaplin's drunk, that it is meaningless to ask which is his 'true' character: that drink simply reveals another aspect of his character. But any competent psychologist would set out to analyse the man's character in terms of basic impulses and their frustration, and would emerge eventually with an answer that would be somewhere near to the 'objective truth'. At least, it would be nearer than the defeatist idea that there's no such thing.

So when attempting to assess the degree of objective justification for the optimistic and pessimistic attitudes to human existence, we have to be prepared for a fairly complicated task. But once we pose the question of what constitutes human values, the problem ceases to look so formidable. We have taken a step as decisive as the realization that the sun is the fixed point in our planetary system. The shifting sands cease to shift. An apparently insoluble task suddenly begins to yield to our effort.

The new existentialism consists of a phenomenological examination of consciousness, with the emphasis upon the problem of what constitutes human values
. And since moods of optimism and insight are less accessible than moods of depression and life-devaluation, the phenomenology of life-devaluation constitutes the most valuable field of study.

THE ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE

Before I consider this problem in more detail, I must enlarge a point made in the previous chapter.

The analysis of consciousness is only half the task. The other half consists in the analysis of language. In this field, Wittgenstein was the great forerunner.

It was Wittgenstein who pointed out that we tend to treat language as a unity as if the language of Shakespeare, Hegel, Beatrix Potter and Freud all belonged somewhere on the same scale. Wittgenstein recognized that this apparent unity is actually a conglomerate of a number of different language systems (or 'games', as he preferred to call them), each with different sets of 'rules'. Different 'games' may have as little in common as football has with poker or cowboys and Indians. He used the simile of the cabin of a locomotive, full of different types of lever; some have to be pulled, others pushed, others wound in a circle, others worked back and forth . . . and so on. Words have just as many functions. Only in the simplest and most primitive language games does a word correspond simply to an object.

Wittgenstein's intention was apparently negative; he wished to show that most philosophy is a misunderstanding of language. But the deeper aim has much in common with Husserl's; he aimed at doing
foundation work
on which it would be possible to build a philosophy. In fact, his aim is obviously complementary to Husserl's; one was interested in a phenomenology of perception, the other of language.

It may be that, in terms of priorities, the phenomenology of language is more important than the phenomenology of perceptions and values. This would certainly be so if the 'new existentialism' aimed at being only a description of the 'human condition' in a general sense—for the scientist must begin by making sure that his measuring instruments are accurate. But since the 'new existentialism' concentrates upon a phenomenalogical account of perceptive-consciousness and value-consciousness, it has inbuilt safeguards in its active and permanent preoccupation with language.

Nevertheless, the point should be made here that a phenomenology of language is as vital to the development of a new existentialism as the phenomenology of values. The new existentialism is not all psychology.

Not the least important feature of the 'new existentialism' is that it is able to unite the two major traditions of twentieth century philosophy: linguistic empiricism and phenomenological existentialism.

From
The Occult
, 1971

There is a passage in the Introduction to P. D. Ouspensky's
New Model of the Universe
that never fails to move and excite me:

It is the year 1906 or 1907. The editorial office of the Moscow daily paper
The Morning
. I have just received the foreign papers, and I have to write an article on the forthcoming Hague Conference. French, German, English, Italian papers. Phrases, phrases, sympathetic, critical, ironical, blatant, pompous, lying and, worst of all, utterly automatic, phrases which have been used a thousand times and will be used again on entirely different, perhaps contradictory, occasions. I have to make a survey of all these words and opinions, pretending to take them seriously, and then, just as seriously, to write something on my own account. But what can I say? It is all so tedious. Diplomats and all kinds of statesmen will gather together and talk, papers will approve or disapprove, sympathize or not sympathize. Then everything will be as it was, or even worse.

It is still early, I say to myself; perhaps something will come into my head later.

Pushing aside the papers, I open a drawer in my desk. The whole desk is crammed with books with strange titles,
The Occult World
,
Life after Death
,
Atlantis and Lemuria
,
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie
,
Le Temple de Satan
,
The Sincere Narrations of a Pilgrim
, and the like. These books and I have been inseparable for a whole month, and the world of the Hague Conference and leading articles becomes more and more vague and unreal to me.

I open one of the books at random, feeling that my article will not be written today. Well, it can go to the devil. Humanity will lose nothing if there is one article less on the Hague Conference . . .

When I first read this passage, my own circumstances gave it an added relevance. I was twenty years old, and I had been married for a year. My wife and our son were living in Earls Court, London, our fourth home in a year, and our half-insane landlady was the fourth—and worst—of a series. I was on the dole, and I found this almost as nervously wearing as the various factory jobs I had worked at since I was married. London seemed not merely alien, but somehow unreal. So I understood Ouspensky's feeling of nausea at the prospect of writing on the Hague Conference, and also that craving for
another world
of deeper meaning, represented by books on the occult. There is a passage in Louis-Ferdinand Céline that describes the world as rotten with lies, rotten to the point of collapse and disintegration. I had only to look at the advertisements in the London tube, or the headlines of the daily paper to see that it was obviously true. Lies, stupidity, weakness and mediocrity—a civilization without ideals.

That was why I read Ouspensky, and all the other books on magic and mysticism that I could find in the local libraries: not only because they were an escape from the world of factories and neurotic landladies, but because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality,
an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness
than the kind I seemed to share with eight million other Londoners.

But if, at that time, I had been asked whether I literally believed in magic, I would have answered No: that it was a poetic fiction, a symbol of the world that
ought
to exist, but didn't. In short, wishful thinking. In the first sentence
of Ritual Magic
, E. M. Butler writes, 'The fundamental aim of all magic is to impose the human will on nature, on man and the supersensual world in order to master them.' And if that was, a fair definition of magic, then I agreed with John Symonds, the biographer of Aleister Crowley, who said, 'The only trouble with magic is that it doesn't work.' Magic, I felt, was no more than a first crude attempt at science, and it had now been superseded by science.

If I still accepted that view, I would not be writing this book. It now seems to me that the exact reverse is true. Magic was not the 'science' of the past. It is the science of the future. I believe that the human mind has reached a point in evolution where it is about to develop new powers—powers that would once have been considered magical. Indeed, it has always possessed greater powers than we now realize: of telepathy, premonition of danger, second sight, thaumaturgy (the power to heal); but these were part of its instinctive, animal inheritance. For the past thousand years or so, humankind has been busy developing another kind of power related to the intellect, and the result is Western civilization. His unconscious powers have not atrophied; but they have 'gone underground'. Now the wheel has come the full circle; intellect has reached certain limits, and it cannot advance beyond them until it recovers some of the lost powers. Anyone who has read modern philosophy will understand what I mean; it has become narrow, rigid, logical; and it attempts to make up for lack of broader intuitions with a microscopic attention to detail. It has cut itself off from its source.

And what is, in fact, the source of philosophy—or, for that matter, of any knowledge? It is fundamentally the need for power. You have only to watch the face of a baby who has just learned how to open a door by turning the handle, to understand what knowledge is
for
. In the twentieth century, power has become a suspect word, because it has become associated with the idea of power over other people. But that is its least important application. One of the fundamental myths of magic concerns the magician who seeks political power; he receives a number of warnings, and if he persists, he is destroyed. Political power strengthens the ego; magical power rises from the subconscious, from the non-personal urge. Ouspensky describes the beginning of his 'search for the miraculous':