The Ontological War

On one of the groups I’m on someone asked about Colin Wilson and his book The Outsider.

To understand Colin Wilson a person first has to understand the two kinds of alienation, which are worlds apart. In “World A” all of us normal, healthy, well-adjusted people look at those who are maladjusted, neurotic, and worse and say that they are alienated. But in “World B” a few people there say that it is actually all of us well-adjusted people who are alienated, and that we are not just alienated but profoundly alienated. They believe this because they realize that we have become so alienated that we are not even aware that we are alienated.

Here are four miscellaneous observations about these two worlds and their members:

+ In The Outsider Wilson describes “World A” and the life in it quite well:

The basic problem of “The Outsider” is his instinctive rejection of the everyday world, a feeling that it is somehow boring and unsatisfying, like a hypnotized man eating sawdust under the belief that it is eggs and bacon.

All major poets and philosophers have had this feeling as their starting point, the feeling … that living itself is a trivial and repetitive task, fit only for servants. This led many philosophers to reject the “real world”–Plato is an example–and to believe that there is somehow another world–of ideas, of the spirit, which is the true “home” of the poet. This is the feeling behind Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale” as well as Wagner’s Tristan. (PB p. 293)

+ In The Divided Self Laing quotes one of his patients who had made a strong statement about his wife, whom he sensed to be a well-adjusted member of World A:

He described her laughter, her anger, her sadness, with “clinical” precision, even going so far as to refer to her as “it”, a practice that was rather chilling in its effect. “It then started to laugh.” She was an “it” because everything she did was a predictable, determined response. He would, for instance, tell her (it) an ordinary funny joke and when she (it) laughed this indicated her (its) entirely “conditioned”, robot-like nature, which he saw indeed in much the same terms as certain psychiatric theories would use to account for all human actions. (PB p. 49; HC p 51)

+ In World A the number 1 strategy, by far, for curing “alienations” and “maladjustments” of all kinds is in fact more alienation: adding on more and more and more layers of it until people become so alienated that they push completely out of their minds who they are and what was causing their original problems.

+ Wilson has his mystical side, as has been noted Laing “went mystic,” and William James had a strong interest in mysticism. It is true that many mystical people are dingy, but what these three men and other World B people who think like them are concerned with is perhaps best explained by Evelyn Underhill’s definition of mysticism: “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.” (Practical Mysticism, HC & PB p. 3) World A people think all of this mystical stuff is hocus-pocus nonsense, of course, because they continuously fool themselves into thinking that their world is reality. But to World B folks, a lot of World A people are like the yahoos who were standing on shore, drinking beer, picking their noses, and yelling to Columbus as he was setting sail for the new world: “You are going to fall off the edge of the world!” “The sea monsters are going to get you!” “Ha, ha, ha.”

Kind regards,

Scott