This Little-Known Philosophy Book Will Shock You Into Full Aliveness

If ordinary life usually seems a bit…well, ordinary…it may be because the way most human beings live their lives can be compared to an extraordinarily powerful jet airplane flying on only one engine. That’s Colin Wilson’s basic contention in The Outsider, where he outlines his fundamentally optimistic philosophy of New Existentialism.

It’s meant to contrast with the “old” existentialism of philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and others for whom the universe is a rather cold, dreary, abysmal place.

While they wrote about futility, “Being-towards-death,” the absurd, and the inevitability of suffering, it was always Colin Wilson’s contention that there is a deeper, more meaningful, and vibrant dimension to life that all human beings have access to if only they would put forth the proper effort.

I usually avoid using the words “most people,” because I don’t know “most people.” However, it’s a safe assumption that most people are nowhere even close to reaching their full potential or to living as deeply and intensely as they could be living if they tried. Most people just “coast” on one engine, never even realizing that they are much more powerful than they’ve ever imagined.

Human beings, according to Wilson, possess a “visionary capacity” that, if they could only tap into it, would allow them to say “Yes” to life, in spite of everything. He doesn’t deny the existence of suffering and the harshness of life, but in this book, he examines the lives of individuals he called “outsiders,” who were able to come closest to realizing this ultimately optimistic view of life and the universe.

Wilson exploded onto the literary scene with this book, which came out in 1956 to massive acclaim. It’s never been out of print since then, and it’s been translated into more than thirty languages. What’s more, is that he was only 24 years old when he wrote it! After publishing The Outsider, he went on to write more than 100 books, including six others which, along with The Outsider, comprise the “Outsider Cycle,” a fuller representation of the ideas first proposed here.

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

The Outsider can be thought of as a survey of some of the most profound responses to urgent questions about existence, meaning in life, and how to confront death. Wilson explores the lives of key literary and cultural figures such as Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, H.G. Wells, George Gurdjieff, and a multitude of others, discussing their effects on society, and society’s effects on them.

I just happened upon this book one time — I had never heard of it before — and thought it looked interesting, given that he references philosophers and writers I enjoyed reading, such as Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostoyevsky, etc. I had no idea that it would completely change my life forever after and would radically alter how I lived out each day of my one and only life.

It’s not immediately obvious why and how the ideas Wilson presents would be applicable to your life, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Desirable difficulty — voluntarily taking on worthy challenges — is the key to beating apathy and despair; most people’s lives aren’t what they could be because they don’t do whatever it takes to keep the mind awake. Meaningful challenges, worthy goals, grand projects, relationships are what make life worth living, and when you demand more from yourself, that’s exactly what life gives you in return.

We’ll explore the idea of the “St. Neot margin” in the Key Ideas section, but a simple way to summarize it would be to point out that the reason why people feel as though their lives lack substance and meaning is that they don’t fire up their additional engines — they don’t live with urgency, immediacy, and intensity.

When there are no demands placed on you — internal demands, things that mean something to you — that’s when apathy sets in. People think that they’d love to retire by 30 and sit on a beach for the next 70 years, but in reality, they’d be bored to tears by the second month! We have to do things — we have to create.

Wilson also refutes the idea that “nothing will matter in a trillion years, so why even do anything?” This is one of his greatest contributions to modern philosophy, in my opinion.

Sure, everyone has to die eventually, and if you live long enough you’re going to experience a ton of suffering and hardship and struggle and strife, but life is meant to be lived, and the strongest, greatest characters are claimed by those individuals who face the inevitable suffering in life and do so unafraid, completely and totally willing to say “Yes” to life, in spite of everything — in spite of death, in spite of hardship and loneliness and stress and struggle. That is the true test of life.

So maybe nothing will matter in a trillion years, but everything matters right now, and your life is waiting. Now!

And if someone tells you that nothing will matter in a trillion years, you thrust a pair of scissors through the middle of their hand and tell them, “Oh, it’s okay, none of this will matter in a trillion years.” My guess is that they won’t be too interested in discussing philosophy…

I’m half kidding, of course — don’t actually stab anyone with a pair of scissors — but the point remains. The depth of your life is much more important than its length, and there’s a kind of triumphant, powerful happiness that is available to you in each and every moment — that’s what The Outsider is all about.

The following are 9 of the Key Ideas I’d like to share with you from the book, which I believe have the power to jolt people into wakefulness and a fuller appreciate of the majesty and EXTRA-ordinariness of life.

Here we go…

NOTE: This post originally appeared (in full) on the Stairway to Wisdom, a premium newsletter and library of book breakdowns that go above and beyond the usual bland, boring book summaries. Claim your 1-month free trial here.

9 sledgehammers to the frozen sea inside us

#1: “Normally man’s mind is composed only of a consciousness of his immediate needs, which is to say that this consciousness at any moment can be defined as his awareness of his own power to satisfy those needs. He thinks in terms of what he intends to do in half an hour’s time, a day’s time, a month’s time, and no more. He never asks himself: What are the limits of my powers? In a sense, he is like a man who has a fortune in the bank, who never asks himself, How much money have I got?, but only, Have I enough for a pound of cheese, for a new tie? etc.”

This right here constitutes the core of Colin Wilson’s thinking in The Outsider: human beings are capable of a much greater depth of experience than is usually available during normal, everyday waking consciousness. That is to say, people can be so much more fully alive, so much more active and creative than they usually are when they’re just focusing on “getting and spending” and generally making it through the day.

We never ask ourselves what our true limits are, what we are ultimately capable of creating in this world, and how alive we can actually be. The quintessential “insider” for Colin Wilson is the person who has no idea about this other, deeper dimension of regular life.

Sure, they may have seen a great sunset, gazed at a night sky packed with stars, and had some intense emotional experiences, but they quickly forget that they’ve had these experiences, and they just go back to worrying about what their neighbors will think of them, whether they’ll be able to afford to go on vacation, or what’s going to be on Netflix that evening. Is that all you want? Really? There’s certainly nothing wrong with watching TV occasionally, and almost everyone has to go out and make money to survive, but reality has so much more to offer you.

The history of humanity, says Wilson, is a history of people selling themselves short. When people never ask what they’re truly capable of, how happy they can be, how fulfilled they can be, how intense their emotional experience of life can be, they never come anywhere close to experiencing the full richness of life and the universe.

You can think of it almost like the movie, The Matrix, except in this case, the underlying nature of reality is more benevolent. Colin Wilson’s philosophy is fundamentally optimistic — life is good. Neo just thinks that he’s living in the “real world,” all while completely unaware that there’s a deeper level of reality operating underneath his conscious experience at all times.

And to be clear, it’s not some magical, unrealistic state that only people on drugs have access to — it’s readily available to experience, if only we stop “settling” for our dreary, humdrum existence and start calling on the highest parts of ourselves.

#2: “The Outsider’s chief desire is to cease to be an Outsider.”

The “outsider,” according to Wilson, doesn’t wish to remain an outsider. Theirs is actually a philosophical position entailing great pain and inner struggle — it’s not like they actually want that.

They’re acutely aware that most people seem to get on just fine living their regular, everyday existence: going to work, buying groceries, watching the news, worrying that their neighbors have a more expensive car in their driveway or are able to send their children to a better school. Most people, in the outsider’s view, don’t seem to be very concerned, or even aware that they’re just living on the surface of life. The outsider, however, can’t go along with that without a fight.

The outsider has seen what others cannot, and is therefore unable to thoughtlessly merge with the larger society; knowing that there’s more to life than is generally available to waking consciousness, they can’t just live like everyone else, even though they may want to — they just can’t keep their heads down long enough.

This is because the outsider is occasionally given to momentous sparks of insight into the fundamental nature of reality, which is a lot more open and expansive than most people’s views of it. This is well illustrated by this quote from the poet William Blake:

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

#3: “Man’s moments of freedom tend to come under crisis or challenge, and when things are going well, he tends to allow his grip on life to slacken.”

It’s important to bring up again that this “expansive” state isn’t just reserved for artists and people on drugs. It’s available to all of us, but society has this sort of “deadening” effect on people, where we expend so much energy just keeping ourselves alive that we forget how amazing it is to be alive at all.

This apathy is discussed by Wilson in the context of the “St. Neot margin,” which is described as a kind of threshold that we have to cross if we want to give ourselves enough of a challenge that’s going to “keep our mind awake.”

Simply put, most people don’t challenge themselves enough, and that’s why they don’t fully enjoy being alive. The boredom and apathy that many people experience are kind of like playing a video game that you’ve already beaten. Only stretching yourself further, demanding more from yourself, will allow you to experience the highest levels of meaning and fulfillment that are possible for you.

Interestingly, this idea shows up everywhere, even in bodybuilding. In order for your muscles to grow, for example, you have to subject them to greater “stress” than they’re used to experiencing before. This means more weight, more reps, higher intensity, etc. Arnold Schwarzenegger called it the “pain period,” because it’s extremely uncomfortable to push yourself further than you’ve ever gone before — but you have to if you want your muscles to grow. It’s the same thing with Colin Wilson’s St. Neot margin.

See, people think that they want to retire when they’re 30, move to a tropical island, and sit on the beach for 15 hours a day, but this would become incredibly boring in about a month. That’s because there’s no challenge, nothing to struggle against or strive for.

#4: “Let us summarize our conclusions briefly: The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider. He wants to be ‘balanced.’ He would like to achieve a vividness of sense-perception (Lawrence, Van Gogh, Hemingway). He would also like to understand the human soul and its workings (Barbusse and Mitya Karamazov). He would like to escape triviality forever, and be ‘possessed’ by a Will to Power, to more life.

Above all, he would like to know how to express himself, because that is the means by which he can get to know himself and his unknown possibilities. Every Outsider tragedy we have studied so far has been a tragedy of self-expression.”

#5: “The Outsider’s problems will not submit to mere thought; they must be lived.”

Many of the outsiders that Colin Wilson has studied have actually failed in some way. He identified three different aspects of the fully-actualized individual, and they all have to be developed simultaneously, without letting any of them atrophy.

They are the physical body, the emotions, and the intellect. Each of them is insufficient on their own, but when actualized together, they make up the fully alive human being.

Some outsiders, like in Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, place great emphasis on the body and the emotions, giving little thought to the intellect and to the theoretical basis of their lives. The narrator of that book, by contrast, is all intellect, a “pen-pusher,” and Zorba progressively brings him out of his shell and introduces him to some of the other highest pleasures of life.

So, while The Outsider is a kind of New Existentialism, a philosophy, it can’t merely be thought about — it has to be lived. People who read a lot tend to get stuck inside their own heads, and this simply won’t do. Other people, however, give no thought to the morrow, never dwell on their experiences, and rush through life without thinking. This won’t do either! It’s a balance, constantly maintained, that will prevent stagnation in any one key area of life.

#6: “Kierkegaard felt the same. As an intensely living, intensely suffering individual, he was not concerned about whether man in the abstract fitted into a great Abstract Universal System; he only knew about the simple, finite, guilty and suffering creature called Soren Kierkegaard, who has to make a decision in the face of God, and who needed to feel that that decision mattered, ultimately, absolutely.”

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is (a little Yogi Berra joke for ya). The idea here though is that the “theory” of The Outsider is all well and good, but it’s always only meaningful in context — specifically in the context of your one and only life.

Systems and theories and all that are great, but in the end, you are the only person to whom they will be meaningful, or not. You can study all the philosophy you want, but at some point, you have to go out and live your actual life.

The thoughts and ideas of the great philosophers and thinkers may be true or false in the abstract, but they will only be meaningful to you. A cynical person might try to convince you that nothing in life means anything because we’ll all be dead for trillions of years and nothing we do will last. Jordan Peterson once said that if anyone tries to rationalize their bad or evil behavior by saying that nothing will matter in a trillion years, you should take the nearest pair of scissors and stab them through the middle of their hand. Then tell them that it’s okay because nothing will matter in a trillion years!

#7: “Looking back on them, looking at a canvas by Van Gogh, or at the manuscript letters of T.E. Lawrence, or at Nijinsky’s L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune in the British Museum, we can feel the full poignancy of the fact that these men did not understand themselves, and consequently wasted their powers. If they had known themselves as well as we can know them, their lives need not have been tragic. The Outsider’s first business is self-knowledge.”

#8: “Death, that is the most important of all ideas.”

Everything we’ve been discussing so far is made even more meaningful by virtue of the fact that someday you will die. Nothing in life would matter without death, because then there would be no tension, no incentive to go out and do anything because you would have an eternity to get it all done!

So death is the 1,000-pound elephant in the room, there to focus our attention on the fact that our time is limited, and whatever joy and meaning we will extract from life has to be experienced now, immediately. There literally is no “later.”

The novelist Chuck Palahniuk refers to this in the context of storytelling as the “gun” in the story. At some point, it has to “go off” in order to make the story interesting, or else we would lose interest — there would be no stakes.

Martha Nussbaum also discusses this in her book, The Therapy of Desire. If death didn’t exist, nothing we do would be meaningful, because it would never be endangered in any way. Without tension — Wilson’s St. Neot margin — there is no intensity.

#9: “The greatest act man is capable of is to ‘praise in spite of,’ to become aware of the worst forms of the Eternal No and to make the gigantic effort of digesting them and still finding life positive.”

Life is tough. You don’t have to go looking for misfortune, hardship, and struggle, because a lot of that shit is headed straight for you. Life can even be overwhelming for many people, and tragically, many people head straight for the exit themselves, so to speak, because they’ve concluded that their lives are not worth living.

In life, the question is always between the Eternal Yes, and the Eternal No. Is life worth living, or not? This is the question that every single individual has to answer for themselves.

When an individual chooses the Eternal Yes, they are declaring with their entire being that despite every single possible tragedy — loss of loved ones, loneliness, climatic devastation, wars, genocides, financial ruin, etc. — life is still worth living. They are stating categorically and for all time that Yes, life has ultimate value, my life has meaning, and I will go on no matter what.

This Key Idea could fill pages and pages, but I’ll give the last word here to the holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, in his excellent book, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything:

“To say yes to life is not only meaningful under all circumstances — because life itself is — but it is also possible under all circumstances. And ultimately that was the entire purpose of these three parts [of the book]: to show you that people can still — despite hardship and death (first part), despite suffering from physical or mental illness (second part) or under the fate of the concentration camp (third part) — say yes to life in spite of everything.”

Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.

All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.

A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.