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The Guerrilla Philosopher

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The above is a patiently researched and logically organised attempt to place the ideas of Colin Wilson in a philosophical context, citing all the authorities to whom he has claimed indebtedness - Husserl, Sartre and Maslow - and pinpointing their differences of outlook.

As Wilson classes himself as an existentialist and has written a volume refuting some of the ideas of Sartre, naturally quite a bit of space is devoted to that remarkable French philosopher.  Wilson maintains that Sartre showed the individual as helpless, made impotent by the 'nausea' or the fertile realness of the phenomenal world, while Wilson's attitude is more dynamic.  

Where Sartre wanders around stunned and stupefied in a desert of freedom - fearful of the multifarious choices and challenges with which existence presents him - Wilson styles himself as an archer, quiver abrim with intentional shafts to let fly at the objects and people around.  There is also the vacuous issue of 'nothingness' or negativity.  Where Sartre believed that man should always be aware of the precarious, transitory nature of his individual existence and not escape by indulging in "bad faith" or inauthentic role-playing, Wilson takes the contrary view: that nothingness is largely an illusion, the result of low vitality, and should be cancelled out by peak experiences and meaningful involvement.

Naturally there is truth in both views.   If one is searching for a lost wallet, one's perceptions are more akin to the archer's, but if overwhelmed by the grandeur of a cataract or sunset, one is more likely to succumb to the allure of being-in-itself in order to relax and process ones impressions.

A significant point, which Tim Dalgleish underlines, is that Sartre denied the existence of the personal subconscious - a brave and necessary stance, wiping the palette clean of childhood guilts and traumas.   Man is infinitely free and recreates himself with each fresh experience.  However, Dalgleish sees Wilson's philosophy as an active contradiction, in that he allows the mind a subconscious stratum, yet also advocates  freewill.

Wilson maintains that the peak experience is the primal act of "becoming free", no matter what the aftertaste of inhibitions, guilts, envies, hurts and hates lurking in the mind.  The peak experience suffuses them with a special lustre, converting their negative qualities, conferring on the percipient a feeling of enormous strength and freedom.  Dalgleish hints that an 'essence' should logically pollute the channel of transcendence, but I think he might be erring towards the over literalistic, in the sense we all remember how, under certain circumstances, an atavistic fear or terror has slipped off our shoulders - almost evaporated like dew on sun-warmed grass. But in such subjective areas, there are no definitive answers.  Either you put your trust in the metaphors of transformation or cling to the bedrock of syntactical definition like a soft sculpture to an armature.  The point is surely whether one feels oneself to be free.

I find myself in sympathy with Dalgleish over the issue of murder, which I do not see as a "freeing act", particularly male sex murders, patently harnessed to an overmastering biological drive. Cultural parallels to such notions are found in the idea of chaos magic wherein one breaks a taboo - commits an unnatural or shocking act - in order to receive some psychic frisson or ripple of liberation.  (This is an area, incidentally, where one has to be wary, such as in identifying murder as part of a search for "greater intensity", lest confusion arise between the intensity of the mystic and that accompanying a vicious act of life-denial.)  Wilson has always condemned murderers, but from time to time he equates their deeds with acts of romantic revolt,  although he is perfectly aware that the majority of sordid batterings and shoot-outs fall a long way short of Dostoevskyian grandeur.

Tim Dalgleish expresses all these reservations and several others, including the present shaky status of Lamarckism and the epiphenomenal nature of the peak experience. My single  grumble about his monograph is that it should have been a good deal longer - I would have enjoyed some sustained quotes from Sartre, Wilson and Maslow, so that their contrasting attitudes and approaches could have stood out in sharper relief.  But 'The Guerrilla Philosopher' was planned as a thesis, an overview, and as such admirably achieves its purpose.

The Guerrilla Philospher is available from both Abraxas Booklist and Paupers Press.