The Stature of Man

The Outsider Cycle #3

by Colin Wilson

Published in the UK as The Age of Defeat.
This is a complex compendium, by the author of The Outsider, which all too often resembles a brilliant term paper. Wilson has read very widely & calls on more authors than the average reader can hope to have read in order to support his thesis. This is that the inner-directed Hero is dying out of society & literature, being replaced by the other-directed man, who is haunted by a sense of insignificance, "hell is other people", Billy Graham religions, the Organization Man--& occasional crimes of violence as a desperate compensation. This interesting problem has already been treated widely by sociologists, psychologists, philosophers & writers. Wilson's attempt to include them all makes this book rather crowded. His proposed cure, that man must try turning inward "& then turning outward again" bears a strong unacknowledged resemblance to Toynbee & there are other echoes in this book. The question of redirection is certainly a pressing & absorbing one, & is pointed up in an odd way by this book, in which a man who speaks in favor of inner-direction does so largely in terms of other people's ideas.--Kirkus (edited)

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology

185 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.

Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.

Reviews

[Paul Ataua · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is built around the thesis that the Inner directed hero, both in literature and society, is dying out and being replaced by the other-directed man. It doesn’t really convince, but as always with Colin Wilson, there are lots of references to literature and philosophy to lengthen your TBR list. Far from his best but still a good read!

[Randy Cauthen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilson connects postwar sociology about "the organization man" with the essential failing of most 20th Century literature -- that it portrays those living the values of others rather than seeking their own (in the terms of David Reisman's _The Lonely Crowd_, "other-directed" rather than "inner-directed"). Those writers who don't accept "other-directedness" as normative all too often satirize viciously without any notion of ameliorating (The Angry Young Men) or revolt spasmodically, without intellectual content (The Beats).

Wilson's solution is, essentially, a new Existentialism, a new type of hero driven by inner-directed examination of irrational experience to turn back outward, with increased life-force and mental strength, toward increased participation in the world around her.

[Jorrit Van · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading the premise of the book this immediatly intrigued me. However this was a major dissapointment.

99% of this book consists of the author referencing other books or texts and not in a meaningful way either. He rarely gets around to making any worthwile statement so it really feels like filler. You can turn to any random page in this book and you are garanteed to see texts from other books that serve very little purpose to the bigger picture.

The points the author himself does make are also very scrambled, poorly explained and often just irrational.

Honestly this is borderline plagerism with how little original work there is. I would not recommend this 'book' ( if you can call it that) to anyone.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I generally admire Wilson's serious work, this exercise in social psychology using literary evidence was not very convincing.