Existentialism, Consciousness, and the Occult: A Nine Week Online Course

Throughout the summer, from June 21 to August 16, I'll be giving an online course in the intersection of existentialism, consciousness, and the occult as presented in the work of Colin Wilson for the Kosmos Institute. Each Sunday I'll give a talk on Wilson's work, starting with his first book, The Outsider, which celebrates it's 70th anniversary of publication this May. We'll follow Wilson as he analysizes the problems and challenges facing his 'outsiders', and how this led to his phenomenological insights into consciousness, and from there to his encounter with the occult, the subject of his 1971 'comeback' bestseller, The Occult. We'll read selections from Wilson's large body of work, some of my own writings, and look at figures like Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger, as well as Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and others. Each talk will be followed by a Q &A session. There's no grading and no tests, just a deep dive into one of the most important philosophies of consciousness in contemporary times.

Stay the course

Here's an excerpt from my biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot. It gives an overview of Wilson's "new existentialism" and is included in the readings for the course.

As Introduction to the New Existentialism is itself a summary of Wilson’s Outsider Cycle, it would be tedious and unnecessary to summarise it here. Yet Wilson believed that if he had contributed anything to twentieth century thought, it was contained in this short, lucid work, and so some of its central ideas must be examined. That Wilson believed it was crucial to capture the essence of the Outsider cycle in a single work tells us how important it was for him to get his message across. One key question that Wilson is eager to make clear is exactly why the “old existentialism” hit a cul-de-sac. This was, he argues, because of a misunderstanding of Husserl’s philosophy.

As we’ve seen, existentialism, at least in the form associated with Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, had its roots in Husserl’s phenomenology. This we can say provided a method for answering the kinds of questions about meaning and purpose that Kierkegaard had asked, and which got the existential ball rolling. But although Husserl, unlike Whitehead, spawned a great many later philosophers – Whitehead’s ideas became influential in religious studies and gave birth to what is known as “process theology,” which limited his philosophical influence – according to Wilson, practically none of the phenomenologists who followed Husserl grasped one of his most important insights. This is what he called the “transcendental ego,” the “I” behind the everyday “I,” which is responsible for “intending” the world we see from “the natural standpoint.” For Husserl consciousness is intentional, and it is the transcendental ego that intends it.

Edmund Husserl, a man of good intentions

Heidegger, Husserl’s student, shifted his attention from consciousness to “the question of being.” In philosophical terms we can say he moved from epistemology – the study of how we know things – to ontology, the study of the nature of being, what it means to “be,” or to say that something “is.” (We can say that Heidegger wanted to get down to is-ness.) Heidegger’s method remained phenomenological – that is, descriptive – and as we’ve seen his work, dense and difficult as it is, is often illuminated by sudden patches of insight, when, in Wilson’s terms, the “indifference threshold” is lowered and we seem to see beyond the “natural standpoint” and catch a glimpse of “being” without  the usual distortions we subject it to. Wilson disagrees with Heidegger’s pessimistic conclusions, but he finds much of importance in his musings on language and poetry, and his determination to avoid the “triviality of everydayness,” the stifling world of personal relations and social gossip. By secluding himself in his chalet in Todtnauberg, Heidegger took his own step outside, and Wilson recognised that.

Wilson’s real philosophical bête noire is Sartre to whom, we’ve seen, he had a relationship based on “admiration and exasperation.”[i] Wilson admires Sartre because in his writing he is “trying to get somewhere,” he is “thinking to a purpose, with a sense of urgency.”[ii] Ideas are alive for him, as they are for Wilson. That is, Sartre uses his mind to try to understand experience in all its complexity, instead of ignoring it, as most of us do. (Wilson had the same admiration for H. G. Wells and this is what made him, for Wilson, an existentialist too.) Sartre’s powers of analysis and impatience with “bad faith” are bracing; reading Sartre, one often has a sense of a philosophical crowbar being shoved under the dense, resistant material of the obvious. What Wilson finds unacceptable are Sartre’s conclusions which, he believes, he arrives at because of some fundamental errors in reasoning.

My existence precedes my essence

Wilson’s long argument with Sartre – reminiscent of Nietzsche’s long disagreements with Schopenhauer and Wagner – began with The Outsider and reached its clearest expression in the long essay “Anti-Sartre,” which began as a review of a biographical study of Sartre and ended as a fifty page treatise.[iii] Sartre was one of the “most exciting and brilliant figures in twentieth century literature,” but in many ways, for Wilson, he got it wrong.[iv]

Where Sartre got it most wrong was, according to Wilson, in abandoning Husserl’s notion of the transcendental ego, which he did in an early book, The Transcendence of the Ego, published in 1936, the same year as Sartre’s bad mescaline trip. Although it is not immediately apparent from his work – which is difficult, often badly written and as appetizing as dry toast – Husserl was something of a mystic. He spoke of phenomenology as a way of getting to “the keepers of the keys of being,” the source of experience that Goethe, in Faust, called “the Mothers.” Wilson explored this aspect of Husserl’s philosophy in a late essay, “Phenomenology as Mystical Discipline,” in which he quotes the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s remark that if rightly understood, the intentionality that Husserl says is responsible for our “seeing” a world should be recognized as a “creative vision.”[v]

Doctor Steiner, I presume?

This emphasises the creative aspect of intentionality – something Wilson discussed in the context of Van Gogh’s paintings -and it has much in common with the ideas of thinkers not generally included in the history of phenomenology or philosophy, such as Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield. In Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897), Steiner wrote that “Man is not there [in existence] in order to form for himself a picture of the finished world” – the Cartesian passive idea about consciousness. “Nay, he himself cooperates in bringing that world into existence.” Goethe, who greatly influenced Steiner, believed in what he called “active seeing,” a way of perceiving phenomena in which the “truth” of things was revealed “at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality…a synthesis of world and mind.”[vi]

Don't wait: participate

In Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield, building on Goethe and Steiner, argues that the world we see is a product of the evolution of consciousness, and that as consciousness changes, so does the world. For Barfield, Steiner, and Goethe, our consciousness participates with the world; it is not closed off from it in an air-tight compartment, as Descartes would have it.[vii] At some level we are not normally aware of, our minds “represent” the world, give it the forms and shapes that we see – Barfield calls the process “figuration” – and without this “representing,” there would be no “world” for us to perceive.

Like Husserl, Goethe, Steiner, and Barfield are not saying “it’s all in the mind.” There is a “real” world “out there,” but it does not come into being  (for us at least) until we “interact” with it with our minds, just as the “reality” of a book is inert until we read it. This, in fact, is how Husserl, Goethe, Barfield,  Steiner, and Wilson see consciousness’s relation to the world: we do not passively reflect an already complete external world, we “read” it. And, as we all know, we can read either well or badly, with full attention or distracted. That is, with intent or not. When we read the world badly, bored and distracted, it appears dull and meaningless. When we read it well it is mystical.[viii]

Sartre, however, would have none of this. He rejected Husserl’s transcendental ego because it smacked too much of nineteenth century idealism, religion, and mysticism. Sartre was an atheist and a rationalist. Consciousness is intentional, Sartre agrees, but there is no transcendental ego “intending” it. Intentionality, for Sartre, simply means “directed.” But even this is too much for Sartre; it suggests an agent behind consciousness: being “directed” suggests a “director.” For Sartre, consciousness is drawn to its objects as iron filings are drawn to a magnet. It has no choice in the matter, just as the metal a magnet attracts can’t resist the attraction, or move with it more swiftly. For Sartre, consciousness is pulled by objects, as the moon pulls the tides. Where Husserl has an archer (the transcendental ego) shooting his arrow (intentionality) at a target, for Sartre we must imagine a target that pulls the arrow toward it – and an arrow that somehow gets into the bow on its own. This is a result of Sartre’s determination to maintain the Cartesian passive ego, contemplating a world outside itself with which it has nothing to do. It is this determination, Wilson argues, that vitiates his position.

Moon over mind

Having abandoned intentionality – or at least an “intender” in consciousness – Sartre is then free to develop the kind of vision of the world associated with his philosophy: that of a consciousness confronting an alien, often hostile world, and desperately trying to “fill itself up” in order to avoid experiencing its emptiness, which is how Sartre understands freedom.[ix] It is a world based on the notion of man’s “contingency,” the realisation that there is no necessity for his existence, that, as Heidegger said, he is “thrown into the world” with no Rough Guide telling him why he is there and what he should do now that he is. Again, the passive fallacy. Wilson points out that the reason Huxley and Sartre had such different experiences on mescaline is that while Huxley spent a lifetime developing a sense of trust toward existence - one can chart this process through Huxley’s work -  Sartre had a fundamentally suspicious attitude toward it – again, a product of the Cartesian passive ego, confronting an ambiguous world. (In more than one place Wilson points out that no writer presents the world as so covered in filth and squalor as does Sartre.)

That which is nauseous produces nausea

Under mescaline, the world became threatening for Sartre because, to a great degree, he already felt threatened by it. Sartre understandably despised the shallow people – salauds, “bastards” in English – who believed that their existence was somehow necessary and who reduced the world to their own petty occupations; this was his general argument against the bourgeoisie. The kind of “intending” Sartre recognized was a kind of falsification of the world, a distortion of it in order to avoid recognising the fundamental fact of existence’s sheer arbitrariness. What the world was “really” like for Sartre is the picture he paints of it in Nausea: meaningless, disconnected, and threatening, much as it appeared during his mescaline trip. This, Sartre argued, is the truth of the world, and those who cannot face it cover it up with falsifications (“bad faith”) in order to live.

But, Wilson says, here Sartre is making a fundamental mistake. The kind of world Nausea presents is one in which consciousness has given up its task of “intending.” Consciousness then feels threatened because it has abandoned its responsibility of directing its attention at reality and has become completely passive before it, as its intended meal does before a snake. Sartre believes that “nausea” is a more true experience of the world, but this is like saying the truth of a book becomes most clear to us when we read it exceptionally badly, with our attention limp and dull, until it is, in effect, meaningless because we do make the effort to grasp (“prehend,” Whitehead would say) its meaning. “Nausea” does not reveal the truth about life; it is life with one of its central ingredients – our intentionality – missing. (As mentioned earlier it also lacks Whitehead’s “meaning perception,” which is a close cousin of intentionality.)

And as Sartre’s hero’s consciousness becomes more passive, more “insignificant,” the reality of things presses in on him more closely, until he is frightened by the root of a tree or a door knob. Their sheer existence is threatening. Sartre’s attitude toward reality is already one of suspicion and doubt; as his hero’s consciousness becomes more passive, the sheer “is-ness” of things overwhelms him. Huxley, whose attitude toward the world was one of trust, was delighted by the same is-ness that frightened Sartre. Although Wilson did not enjoy his mescaline experience, his attitude toward the world is more along Huxley’s lines than Sartre’s.

Je suis un etranger ici

Wilson points out that with his talk of the “absurd,” Camus makes the same mistake. Camus says that our experience of the world is like seeing someone gesticulating in a phone booth (an image less and less apt for our age). We can see his hands gesturing and his mouth moving, but we can’t hear what he is saying. This, Camus says, is a good picture of life’s absurdity: it is a dumb show. But again, Camus’ image is one in which an important element of experience has been subtracted. The person may look absurd, but I know that he is talking to someone on the telephone, even if I can’t hear him. In order to see him as absurd, I have to deliberately ignore what I know to be reality. (We can turn the sound down on our television and ad lib what the people on it are saying, but this doesn’t mean that with the sound up they aren’t making sense.)

But Camus and Sartre want to say that somehow, this knowledge is inadmissible. Wilson often quotes Camus’s line from The Myth Of Sisyphus in which he gives another example of the “absurd”: “Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm…But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”[x] 

The ‘why’ that Camus speaks of here is the same ‘why’ that Sartre’s hero experiences when he “wakes up” and finds himself in Indochina, and has no idea why he is there. But this is no revelation of the “absurdity” or “nausea” of reality; merely the result of a passive attitude to consciousness and to life. We remember that the protagonist of Camus’ The Stranger sleepwalks through life and only wakes up when he is confronted with the fact of his imminent execution. If, as remarked in the previous chapter, the surest way to become neurotic is to accept, with Samuel Beckett, that “there is nothing to be done,” then it seems that this is exactly what Sartre and Camus are suggesting. If phenomenology is an attempt to philosophise without presuppositions – this was Husserl’s initial aim – then we can see that Sartre and Camus are not good phenomenologists, since they allow their own presuppositions about reality – its “absurdity” – to colour what they see. What Sartre’s “nausea” and Camus’ “absurd” reveal is not the truth about reality, but the limits of everyday consciousness. But since they have restricted themselves to these limits, they can see no way to go beyond them.

Starry, starry night

Wilson’s response to this philosophy of paralysis is to insist on the active, intentional character of consciousness. As we’ve seen, it is responsible for the world we perceive. We may not know why we exist or what we are supposed to do now that we are here, but it is incorrect and a kind of philosophical sleight of hand to gaze at the world blankly as if we had nothing to do with it. Our consciousness is involved with it at the deepest levels – levels, to be sure, that we are not immediately aware of, but which it is the task of phenomenology to uncover. To stare at the world and say it is meaningless ignores the fact that the world we are staring at depends on our consciousness; again, it is the crime of which the detective suspects everyone but himself. And if our consciousness changes, so does the world. If we perceive it with greater intentionality, it responds. This is the lesson of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

We might say it is all relative, that between the way Sartre perceives the world and the way Van Gogh did – or Huxley did on mescaline – there is no way to decide which is more “true.” But again, this misses the point. Van Gogh’s canvas vibrates with life because when he painted it he was seeing the world with more intentionality, more of the “creative vision” which is the essence of Husserl’s philosophy. He was “reading” it more intently, thereby “prehending” more of its meaning. Sartre’s hero is afraid of a doorknob because he is barely intending; he is reading the world very badly, and inferring all sorts of threatening things about it that exist only in his mind. To say that the difference between more intentionality and less is relative is illogical. It is like saying there is no real, objective difference between reading a book poorly and reading it well. If I read a book well I understand it. If I read it poorly I do not. There is nothing relative about that.

It is the same difference as between the worm’s and the bird’s-eye view. A worm may perceive much detail in the part of reality it can perceive, but it is a much smaller patch than what the bird takes in, just as we can gather a lot of information about brushstrokes and pigments by putting our face up against a painting, but to get the real picture, we need to step back. Since the bird’s-eye view shows us more, it is more true – or at least it has a much greater chance of being true, since compared to it, the worm’s-eye view is severely limited.[xi]

A black room of one's own

Introduction to the New Existentialism attacks the “passive fallacy” in the many forms it takes, in science, psychology, and philosophy; we have looked at some of these already in our discussion of Beyond the Outsider. At its heart is the same question that Wilson addresses in The Black Room: how to meet the “challenge of no challenge,” how to maintain a high level of purposive consciousness without the aid of an external stimulus. One approach to this is through an understanding of “mystical experiences,” through states of consciousness that are not “ordinary,” but are neither “transcendental” in the sense of supernatural or religious; we have already looked at some of these in Maslow’s “peak experiences.” One of the drawbacks of the old existentialism is that it accepted our ordinary, everyday consciousness, the “natural standpoint,” as a static given, as consciousness per se. Because it refused any kind of religious or supernatural reality – we must live, Camus said, “without appeal” -  it argued that all our values must be rooted in this everyday consciousness. (Hence Camus’ refusal to accept any answer that his teddy boy couldn’t understand.)

But these values, the old existentialism argues, are relative. In jettisoning religion or any ideal world, we are left with no objective standard by which we can judge values as better or worse. We are free, but we have no purpose, aside from personal or social, utilitarian ones, to give our freedom meaning. There is no direction to our freedom; we can do as we like, it all amounts to the same thing. Sartre tried to fill in this blank with leftist politics – an expression of his hatred of the salauds and bourgeoisie -  Camus with a kind of stoic morality, handicapped by his womanising. But in a meaningless universe, such options are mere stopgaps and are ultimately arbitrary. Heidegger came closer to an answer with his insistence on living “authentically.” But this depended on the grim wakeup call of a constant awareness of one’s “finitude” – an alarm clock he shared with Gurdjieff -   punctuated by occasional glimpses of “being” garnered through poetry. For Wilson this is unnecessarily pessimistic.

Yet phenomenology has shown that the form of consciousness that the old existentialism bases itself on is only one of many, and that it presents us with a highly edited picture of reality for good evolutionary reasons (we remember the blinkered horse). Our everyday consciousness is, as William James argued, very narrow; as Wilson says, it is a liar. It gives us a severely limited picture then asks us to believe it is the “truth,” while denying it has anything to do with what it is showing us. (It is not really a liar; it is we who too readily accept what it shows us without questioning it.) Accepting this limited picture of reality abets the passive fallacy and leads old existentialists like Sartre and Camus to conclude gloomily that the best we can hope for is to stoically endure life’s meaninglessness, doing our best to treat each other humanely while we are here. (This is, by and large, the same conclusion that science comes to.)

Alfred North Whitehead: things are in process

Yet “peak experiences,” aesthetic experiences, poetry, natural beauty, sex, mystical experiences all suggest a reality of much greater meaning, while Husserl’s and Whitehead’s analysis of consciousness tell us that this meaning is real, not “subjective.” Such experiences also tell us that the limits of everyday consciousness are not fixed, and that freedom has an inherent direction, a purposiveness, in its pursuit of evolutionary intentionality, the new dimension of the mind and inner experience, Wells “proper business,” Teilhard de Chardin’s “complexification.” This purpose is not supernatural, but it is “outside,” “external” to everyday consciousness, and so can be used as an objective standard by which to gauge our actions. It answers the problem of relativity. We can ask about our choices and actions: are they in accord with our evolutionary urge or not?

Put simply: the boundaries of the mind can be extended in order to encompass a permanent awareness of our evolutionary purpose. The best way to do this, Wilson suggests, is through understanding the mechanisms of consciousness itself. Through this we can understand the exact way in which our doors of perception open and close, rather than trying to break them down or pick their locks through drugs or other stimuli. Wilson suggests that a fruitful way of approaching this is through an analysis of the “great mystery of human boredom,” the tendency of consciousness to “lock” into place or, to mix metaphors, to congeal into a think mass; to, that is, be subject to the “indifference threshold.”[xii] And the most boring thing available to Wilson was the black room.

William James: here comes his 19th nervous breakdown

What the black room does is to make unavoidable the question that drove Tolstoy’s “madman” insane: “Who am I?” For within its pitch-black silence there is nothing to distract you from yourself, from your consciousness. As Wilson points out, several of his Outsiders found themselves confronting this question, and most did not fare well. It sent H. G. Wells in his last days into utter despair, and gave William James a nervous breakdown. Usually we are distracted from this question by the necessities of everyday life, the day-to-day routine that Camus described. The black room does away with these. An instinctive, sub-conscious vital purpose remains; but, as Wilson points out, it is precisely the more intelligent among us who are cut off from this – intelligence questions, instinct does not - and they suffer the effects of the black room sooner than more “instinctive” types.

But as Wilson has argued – convincingly, I believe – there is a deeper purpose available to us; it is what we experience in moments of “affirmation consciousness,” “absurd good news,” what he calls evolutionary intentionality. But, as we’ve seen, we, or the force behind evolution – and the difference between the two may be more apparent than real - has declared this for the most part “off limits,” at least for the time being. The answer to the black room is to find a way to gain access to this purpose, which we have purposefully denied ourselves. This denial, however, once useful and necessary has become counter-productive. We know this deeper purpose becomes available when facing a crisis. But the black room does away with these too. In the black room we must find it ourselves.

Abraham Maslow: take a peak

What the black room does is to show us the limitations of consciousness in high-relief. But these limitations, Wilson argues, are really habits we have developed because of their evolutionary benefit. They are not fixed but variable and the time has come to vary them. We have seen that some of us are already champing at the bit: Wilson’s Outsiders, Maslow’s self-actualisers, those who hunger for “complexification.” Wilson refers to Teilhard de Chardin’s belief that there is an absolute break between man and the lower animals, just as there is a break between living creatures and a stone. If a stone’s freedom can be symbolised by a line, and an animal’s by a square, man, who is most free, should then be a cube. But Wilson points out that man – we – are not quite there yet. We are less dependent on our environment than an animal but not yet completely free of it. We can enter the noösphere – with any luck I, writing this book and you reading it are there - but we can’t stay there very long. We are drawn back to the buoying waters of the physical world, to the “triviality of everydayness.” As Wells said, we are amphibians who want to leave the sea for dry land, but haven’t yet transformed our flippers into legs, and so we “swim distressfully” in a medium we wish to abandon and no longer feel at home in.

If we were “fully human,”  a “creature of the mind,” as Wells says, we would be able to stay in the black room indefinitely because we would be able to remain in the noösphere as long as we liked. Ideas, the “challenges of the mental world,” would be enough to keep our vitality high. Boredom would not ensue, our consciousness would not congeal, and we would be aware of what William James perceived in a moment of “mystical consciousness”: “increasing ranges of distant fact.” Our Faculty X would be in good working order and we would, like Proust, Hesse, and Toynbee, be able to move freely through time. This is why Wilson says it is a mistake to think of a “superman.” Man in the proper sense does not yet exist. “We are not strong enough,” Wilson writes. “The world itself is a gigantic ‘dark room’ that proves that we are too dependent on physical stimuli.”[xiii]

Here for eternity, or X?

Man, homo sapiens in the real sense may not yet exist, but we have glimpses of what he or she will be like when he does. They come when the “indifference threshold” is lowered, or obliterated entirely. We remember Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, who would “prefer to stand on a narrow ledge for all eternity, surrounded by darkness and tempest, rather than die at once.”[xiv] Darkness and tempest in this case serve the same purpose as the black room. As Wilson writes “The fear of death has raised his consciousness of freedom to a point where he becomes aware of the absolute value of his existence.” Raskolnikov’s “indifference threshold has been completely destroyed; consequently, the thought of sensory deprivation ceases to trouble him.” (And we remember that although fictional, Raskolnikov’s affirmation is based on Dostoyenskys’ own, in front of a firing squad.) As Wilson concludes: “sensory deprivation, the indifference threshold, and states of ‘mystical perception,’ are directly connected.”[xv] What we need is a method, a way of turning our flippers into legs so we can stand upright and walk out of the sea onto the land. A way, that is, of consciously lowering our indifference threshold, without dependence on crisis, the thought of our death, or drugs. But recognising the problem clearly is halfway toward a solution. Wilson’s phenomenological analysis of consciousness has, I believe, done that.

[i] Sartre, Graham Greene, and Samuel Beckett seem to be writers with whom Wilson most takes argument. As the three in different ways express extremely pessimistic visions of life, this is not surprising.

[ii] Wilson Existential Criticism (2009). This comment was made in an essay on Jorge Luis Borges, whose work Wilson enjoyed – he dedicated The Philosopher’s Stone to him and The God of the Labyrinth borrows themes from one of Borges’ stories – but who he believed was ultimately a kind of “gentle dilettante,” a writer not ”trying to get somewhere.”

[iii] Wilson Below the Iceberg (1998) pp. 15-64.

[iv] Ibid. p. 63.

[v] Paul Ricoeur , Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) quoted in Wilson Superconsciousness (2009) p. 172. Wilson develops this theme in his essay “Phenomenology as Mystical Discipline,” which can be found at https://philosophynow.org/issues/56/Phenomenology_as_a_Mystical_Discipline In 2015 I taught an online course for the California Institute of Integral Studies based on Wilson’s analysis of Husserl.

[vi] Quoted in Erich Heller The Disinherited Mind ( New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Cudahy, 1957) p. 31.

[vii] For more on “participatory consciousness,” see A Secret History of Consciousness.

[viii] One of Wilson’s favorite examples of intentionality is looking at a watch to see the time. When we are in a rush, we can look at the watch but fail to “grasp” the time. We haven’t “taken it in” and  minute later we need to look at it again. If all consciousness did was reflect what it observed, this wouldn’t happen. No mirror needs to be attentive in order to reflect what is before it, nor can it “try” to reflect properly after failing to.

[ix] Wilson likes to tell the story of when, after giving  an impassioned lecture about freedom, Sartre  was approached by some inspired students who asked him what they should do with their freedom. His answer, “Do what you like,” deflated them.  Sartre, too, had no idea what to do with his freedom and he experienced it as a burden. His attempt to give his freedom some direction by adopting radical politics  was not successful. His major work on uniting existentialism and Marxism, Critique of Dialectical Reason is evidence of this. HIn his last days he embraced Maoism and urged students to revolution.

[x] Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin Books, 2000) p.19.

[xi] P.D. Ouspensky made the same point in his classic work Tertium Organum (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1981) p. 128 . ”It seems to us that we see something and understand something. But in actual fact we have but a very dim sense of all that is happening around us, just as a snail has a dim sense of the sunlight, the rain, the darkness.” To say that the snail’s perception of the sunlight, the rain, the darkness is, “relatively speaking,” the equivalent of the gardener’s standing over him is simply muddled thinking.

[xii] Wilson Introduction to the New Existentialism p. 115.

[xiii] Ibid. pp. 124-25.

[xiv] Ibid. p. 129.

[xv] Ibid.