Colin Wilson, the robot and peak experiences

A couple weeks ago I chatted with you about Colin Wilson – I didn’t know if you’d heard of him. Lately I’ve been reading some of his work – of which there is a ton, on subjects ranging from philosophy to crime to the occult and paranormal. (In fact it is always interesting to me how I “discover” new authors and new works either by chance or by following a string from one that I like to one I’ve never heard of; this is how I’ve come upon some of my biggest influences. Take Frisch, for example – my introduction to him came when I happened upon a movie adaptation of one of his novels on TV one evening.) In the case of Wilson, somewhere along the way I found part of an essay he wrote on a favorite author of his (and mine) – Musil (and here it is.) That was a couple years ago, but I kept him in the back of my mind and recently decided to do a little reading up.

You can get a lot of stuff on Wilson at this site. Now in his mid 70s, he is still industriously churning out books, and as far as I can tell, still on the fringes of British literary circles, which I assume is just fine with him. But (so the story goes) in the mid 1950s, he went from being a self-educated Midlands lad, sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath and doing research in the British Library to literary celebrity overnight with the publication of his book The Outsider. Reading it right now, I can only think it must have been some world in which an eclectic, non-dumbed-down exploration of existentialism could make a writer famous. I cannot conceive of it now. But you can read plenty about it via the link above in other places; to put it briefly, he was cast by the press as one of the “Angry Young Men” of that moment. Of which he wasn’t. The backlash against them and him inevitably came (as it always must in Britain), and he took to the hills, so to speak, and back to work.

Maybe it’s no surprise that he remains utterly convinced of his own brilliance to this day, and of the lasting worth of his “New Existentialism” as a way of living, as laid out in his six-book Outsider cycle. Far be it from me to try and boil him down to a sentence or two, but here goes: he levels his attack upon Sartrean-style existentialism, and upon the whole pretext of much modern philosophy and culture, which is the assumption that life is basically meaningless. He refuses to believe this – regards it as psychologically sick, in fact - which is probably what infuriates so many in the intellectual set, and why I am attracted to reading him. There’s much more – his oeuvre is far too diverse and idiosyncratic to pigeonhole, which also makes him difficult to estimate. He entertains – apparently, even subscribes - to some of the more out-there notions having to do with prehistoric alien visitors and the whereabouts of Atlantis (I wonder about his thoughts on Hyperborea!); he has fixated on crime and criminology to the point that it seems like a bit of an obsession, and neither here nor there, he is open in his autobiography about his fetish for wearing women’s underwear. Well, to each his own.

I started reading Wilson not at the most obvious place – The Outsider, the book that made him suddenly, if momentarily famous – but with a book he wrote in the early 1970s entitled New Pathways in Psychology. It’s an unusual book, focusing on the work of the psychologist Abraham Maslow; you probably know him from his hierarchy of needs.

It seems that Maslow and Wilson carried on a correspondence, and it’s relatively easy to see how their interests and views on the psyche converge (more on that in a second). The first third of the book is an analysis of philosophy and early psychology, from Hume (whose skepticism Wilson is intensely skeptical of) through Freud and his contemporary followers like Jung and Adler, all of whom eventually made crucial breaks from “that Viennese quack” (copyright Vladimir Nabokov). The second part is a biography of Maslow himself, and the third section surveys some of the (then-contemporary) psychological theories inspired by or compatible with Maslowian psychology, especially Frankl (Man’s Search For Meaning).

Wilson’s interpretation of Maslowian psychology (and all psychology, for that matter) is interesting, first because it comes from an iconoclast and very literary one at that. Like much of his other work, this book is shot through with literary and historical examples, which makes it an accessible read to a bookish type like me. It is also clear how Maslow’s and Wilson’s respective tracks could make a common ground between them. I won’t spoil The Outsider for you, except to say that it stems from Wilson’s interest in a common, if not identical feeling of “world-failure” among artists and thinkers from the 19^th century Romantics to 20^th century Existentialists, and the consequent loss of life’s meaning they felt (without old, bourgeois standards or religious certainty to fall back on – they rejected those). The very top of Maslow’s pyramid, you may remember, is “self-actualization,” which is the plane of creativity and inspiration and self-possession. The discovery of a higher, objective meaning! The fleeting, fiery moments of ecstatic glory (often amidst terror or crisis) that Romantic poets rhapsodized about, or the experiences of strange, indescribable meaningfulness felt by Sartre and Camus’s existential heroes – those have the characteristics of Maslowian “peak experiences,” according to Wilson.

Only they did not have the psychological understanding to know that at all. They were left to understand it as “inspiration” or “the muse” or something else entirely random. One of Wilson's points in The Outsider is that these outsider figures - such as Dostoevsky, Hesse, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Nijinsky - saw more and saw more deeply than the rest of the world, but after that, had a hard time answering the question "How to live?" No wonder they grew despondent when the ecstatic feeling passed, suffered tremendous mood swings chasing down “experience”, and often died young. You would too.

The other thing I can see is that it presages by some decades the positive psychology movement, which is now ensconced in the academy and in popular thought, as well as Czikszentmihalyi’s “flow” theories, which are related and which also have a lot of currency today.

A few assertions to be drawn from Maslow and Wilson, summarized as best as I can:

- The whole discipline of psychology post-Freud went out of whack because it concentrated only on bringing the pathologically mentally sick back to “normal,” instead of understanding the mind-ways of the most mentally healthy, fulfilled and resilient. (a firmly Maslowian point.) There was and is a need for study of the happiest, those whose mental economies are booming, so that we might understand what was going on and how others could be brought up to that higher level.

- “Peak experiences” can be cultivated and created at will (or close to it), and learning how to do this is the next important step for mentally healthy human beings to make. Will – the sustained effort of will – is vitally important. As is attention. As is attitude.

- We human beings are at our happiest and closest to “peaking” when our “mental pressure” is up, when we are pushed and/or pushing ourselves to our capacities, whether by external crisis or by deliberate acts of will. That is why we “lose ourselves” in times of incredible stress, and discover abilities and strengths we didn’t know we had. It is necessary to keep that mental pressure up, by force of will and attention (if our external surroundings don’t pressurize us enough.)

- Mental and physical health are tied together, and the ribbon is perhaps attitude. Wilson refers several times to Frankl’s famous story about a fellow prisoner in the concentration camps, who dreamed he would be released on a March 30^th, and grew increasingly excited, till the day came and passed, and he died of despair the next day. Likewise, the more physically exhausted and unhealthy a person is (that’s day-to-day existence for a great many people in this world), the less likely it is they can summon up the will and the energy needed to induce those “peak experiences.”

As someone interested – no, I’d now say obsessed – with creativity, the muse, and figuring out how to live a life of relative, sustained happiness and creative work, I find this stuff compelling. I’ve read a lot of the popular literature on positive psychology and “flow” and it generally all fits together. What I get from Maslow is usually what I also get (in a more pop-psych form, perhaps) from today’s positive psychologists. On a totally different tack, I’ve thought about this, and the soldier friend you talked about – how it could be just as applicable to those in much more dangerous places than I ever go, maybe more so. Wilson draws upon William James, noting that one of his essays is on the subject “The Moral Equivalent of War”: “he can get no further than to say that we must find intellectual and spiritual activities to bring out the warlike virtues of courage and bravery in us.” But who needs the “intellectual” and “spiritual” in that sentence? There is plenty of the real thing, which functions just as well if that is what you choose.

The thing about all this “peak” and “flow” – the arguably amoral thing – is that a person can legitimately find “flow” robbing a bank or sacking an enemy town or just existing on that edge I suppose you must live on in a war zone, as much as he can painting a painting or writing a sonnet or just washing the dishes, zen-master-like. (Czikszentmihalyi does make the point in one of his books that true “flow” experiences go towards some redeeming purpose…but why should they, other than for moral reasons?) If this is indeed a feature of the human psyche, that such mentally satisfying experiences need not always be altruistic or even good in nature (and I think it is true) then it seems a little harder to be terribly idealistic about peace – or at least, about collectively intellectualizing our way towards peace. As much as we would like that to be possible.

So via email I’ve sent you a file with passages I’ve copied out of NPIP (it’s my customary way of taking notes). There’s a ton of other stuff in there that is just as interesting, but that I missed.

For instance, here is Wilson talking about what he called “the robot”:

“…I elaborated this theory of the automatic pilot, speaking of it as ‘the robot.’ I wrote: ‘I am writing this on an electric typewriter. When I learned to type, I had to do it painfully and with much nervous wear and tear. But at a certain stage, a miracle occurred, and this complicated operation was ‘learned’ by a useful robot whom I conceal in my subconscious mind. Now I only have to think about what I want to say: my robot secretary does the typing. He is really very useful. He also drives the car for me, speaks French (not very well), and occasionally gives lectures in American universities.

He has one enormous disadvantage. If I discover a new symphony that moves me deeply, or a poem or a painting, this bloody robot promptly insists on getting in on the act. And when I listen to this symphony for the third time, he begins to anticipate every note. He begins to listen to it automatically, and I lose all the pleasure.”

Later:

“The robot is necessary. Without him, the wear and tear of everyday life would exhaust us within minutes. But he also acts as a filter that cuts out the freshness, the newness, of everyday life….in developing the robot, we have solved one enormous problem – and created another. But there is, after all, no reason why we should not solve that too: modify the robot until he admits the necessary amount of ‘newness’, while still taking over the menial tasks.”

The key, it seems, is to gain control of this robot, to not let it run amuck in our lives. This is “mindfulness,” in other words, and that concept is thousands of years old. Yet most people let their robot run most or all of their lives, and that is the source of much unhappiness. The part about “modifying the robot” points at nothing less than psychological evolution, which is in fact an assumption that Wilson (and Maslow) would make – that the human psyche is capable of evolving and improving through time, learning and effort. That we have not even come close to maximizing its potential. The whole point of this psychological outlook, and of this “existentialism” is that there is a way to do so; as Wilson quotes Huxley on Freud, it’s something to the extent of, if the psyche has a basement, must it not also have an attic?

Here's a little Colin Wilson on peak experiences, on Youtube: