He remains so well worthy of being taken seriously as a philosopher precisely because – unlike 98.9% of other writers/philosophers - he actually does concentrate on questions of supreme importance – what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? What should we be doing about it?
Wilson is messy, inconsistent, and contradictory. So is life. And anyone who tries to deal with life will be also. Wilson is much more of a philosopher than most professors of philosophy.
Which Wilson are we talking about here???
ReplyDeleteCould easily be both, though I think I'm a more careful dresser.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that Colin Wilson is a far better philosopher than most professors, and that life is messy. One or two others contemporary to Wilson, such as Alan Watts, also fall into this camp of being better philosophers than most professors.
ReplyDeleteThis long essay though still makes the mistake of treating mystical experience as a logical inconsistency, not as a transcendent experience. It gets hung up on the same point most philosophers do (which Wilson and Watts did not do), which is that one must build up the individual ego until it is dissolved into the transcendent self. They see that as a logical failing—forgetting that logic itself fails, and that the Divine exists at the point of the paradox. In other words, logic and reason don't have anything to tell us about the mystical experience, and usually fail to "explain" it.
"... logic and reason don't have anything to tell us about the mystical experience, and usually fail to 'explain' it."
ReplyDeletePrecisely!