The Outsider

I like this book. I've enjoyed Colin Wilson, who MUST be the most prodigious researcher ever in the history of the human race, for years. I never read this book. I'm glad I did, as it gave a name to things I've felt all my life, even as a kid. The question is, does one have to be an existentialist to also be an outsider? I think there are persons damaged by family alcoholism, drugs, poverty, and other conditions of humanity who are outsiders but not necessarily existentialists. It seems improbable that the loner must also be a thinker, an examiner of the soul. So it would bear thinking about that there are intrinsic factors that lead one to existentialism, other than just being an outsider. Nevertheless, this book is an excellent study, and broadened my perspectives about existentialism while reviewing some of the finest writers and thinkers in my experience. Would definitely recommend. In fact it ought to be on school curricula. It could prevent a few crimes, by showing those who are loners that they are not really alone, that they do have a purpose and a way.

This book is a handbook to the gifted mind gone sour. If you are of average intelligence and ability, you will not understand this book. If you are of exceptional quality and suffer from living in the unexceptional world, this book will read like a long lost diary written by your soul. The one star reviews are simply 90%'ers that happened upon this book by accident. Pay them no mind. They are the source of your angst after all, why allow them to destroy another beautiful thing with their banality? I especially recommend this book for parents of gifted teenagers. Unfortunately the content is not suitable for younger children, but for older teenagers that can handle mature subjects (sexuality and murder) this book may be perfect. If your teenager is already jaded by the prison planet this may open their eyes to the path out of depression.

Very good, but one should read Sara Bakewell’s comments on him in her At the Existentialist Cafe.

The number of stars one might give this book probably correlates with how likely one IS one - (an Outsider). I'm not sure that the exposition is helpful to one who so suffers, but it helps one understand the position in context of its various expressions. It also could make a nice prelude to a study of Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration - which offers succor to the situation. Neither seems to address the merely quantitative (statistical rarity) factor in the isolation of the odd; both take the qualitative tack - which is, after all, the part that matters.

I can be pompous and tiresome in some parts but has some interest. He finds people to be outsiders without much explanation such as Henry James. He spends much time on Hemmingway as an outsider but I disagree. There is food for thought in this book but remember it was written a long time ago by a young man..james e vigiletti

Wilson's first book, written as a young man in 1956, was a survey of the New Existentialism. Written just ahead of the revolutionary period of the 1960s, it perfectly sums up how sensitive and intelligent people often feel trying to cope with the modern world. Some quotes: "This is the sense of unreality, that can strike out a perfectly clear day. Good health and strong nerves can make it unlikely; but that may be only because the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn't look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. And once a man has seen it, the world can never afterwards be quite the same straightforward place. Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. `He sees too deep and too much,' and what he sees is essentially chaos." "His case, in fact, is that he is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn't know it is sick. Certain Outsiders we shall consider later would go even further and declare that it is human nature that is sick, and the Outsider is the man who faces that unpleasant fact."

This isn’t an easy read but it has value in that all of us today have some Outsider in us , due to the alienating influences of the modern Internet, which per Wilson’s model has imbalanced us all towards the intellectual at the expense of the emotional and physical. integrating these three areas of consciousness is critical for mental health in the Information Age.

I read a lot - pretty much a book or two a week. Having read every "top-100-books-list" there is, whenever someone tells me "this book changed my life" or "I read the most fantastic book" I tend to get it. This book by Colin WIlson just sucks the life out of you. What a boring slog through the mire of "Alas, alas". He invokes writers that really did justice to the disenfranchised person, like Dostoevsky, Kafka and early Hemingway - but his collecting other's thoughts doesn't turn into anything other than that. You'd be better off reading all of the author's he quotes. Not to mention that society's biggest problem in the past 80 years has been this belief that we are all outsiders, when the fact is we mostly just have our collective heads up our rumps contemplating how much "we feel" compared to others. The softer life gets for people the more they complain that they're outsiders when the very term 'outsider' should mean a few, not the majority. The easier life has become the more you have folks clamoring to be heard, to be a part of the fabric of mankind. But they don't want to actually participate because they might get their feelings hurt. They might actually have to think, to realize that they are not an outsider.

The Outsider was Colin Wilson’s first nonfiction book. It is essentially about alienation experienced by great writers and artists, though it is also about much more, and covers psychology, philosophy, and captures the history of times, which now seems long ago. Best of all, though, is Wilson’s prose which fires along, igniting its readers with insight after insight into the creative mind and existential philosophy. The Outsider is a great book and was highly acclaimed at the time when first published and still reads remarkably well today, almost 70 years later, though it will no doubt have its critics. Wilson’s follow up, Religion and the Rebel, is also a wonderful and insightful text, though unlike the Outsider, was slated by the critics on publication in such a manner that Wilson never fully recovered. After the completion of his ‘Outsider Cycle’, Wilson moved onto other subjects, such as the Occult and Criminology, producing some outstanding works in these areas, too, but none, in my view, as remarkably as The Outsider. I hope you find my review helpful.

昔、これが中村訳で世に出た時は、ドキドキして読んだものです。内容も鮮烈でした。しかし、時がたち、まあ私も年取ったためでもありましょうか、新鮮さは失われていました。しかし、これから哲学を学びたいと思われている若い人たちは、このような解決の道もあることを知ってほしい。

Der Untertitel dieses Buches lautet: Die klassische Studie von Entfremdung, Kreativität und dem modernen Geist. Der Inhalt dieses Buches ist sehr inspirierend und appelliert an den kreativen, schöpferischen Geist in uns. Der Begriff "Outsider" wird als roter Faden in dem Buch genutzt, weil die vorgestellten literarischen, fiktiven sowie auch die realen Persönlichkeiten alle nach Idealen streben und das Leben nicht einfach nur als banal hinnehmen wollen. Interessant ist auch die Unterteilung der Persönlichkeiten in kreative Köpfe, emotionale Persönlichkeiten und Menschen die ihre Kreativität physisch ausdrücken. (Bsp: Nijinski) Die bedeutendsten Begriffe in diesem Buch sind einmal self-realization und dann noch peak-experience, weil in den Augen von Colin Wilson das die Erfahrungen im Leben sind nach denen wir suchen. (Selbstverwirklichung und Gipfelerfahrungen)

Excellent read - no doubt if you're reading these reviews and have got as far down as mine you know what to expect with the book. All's I'll say is that as well as Wilson's thesis - describing the Outsiders - the book is a nice study in comparative literature and contains some lovely, easy to read biographies of Van Gogh, Nietszche, Dostoevsky, Blake and the others.

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