COLLECTED ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHERS

I still remember my sense of intellectual excitement when I first read The Outsider in my last year at St Andrews (my daughter Charlotte is now at Durham and was also very taken by it when she read it last year). Subsequently, Colin was the main reader for my first book Survival in 1984, and strongly recommended its publication. Later, I went to see him at his home in Cornwall where he offered visitors not only copious wine but also £5 if they could suggest another place for a bookshelf - he had some 25,000 volumes, and even his garage was full. Part of the reason for my excitement was reading Colin's critique of the French existentialists, in particular Camus and Sartre. In addition, he opened up huge new avenues (also with his second book Religion and the Rebel) to Hermann Hesse, William Blake, Dostoevsky, TE Hulme, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, AN Whitehead, Friedrich Nietzsche and many other writers, who I proceeded to read.

This book brings together 17 essays on a wide variety of philosophers. Some of these are short newspaper articles on the Oxford philosophers Sir Freddie Ayer, Sir Peter Strawson and Sir Geoffrey Warnock, with whom he has very little in common, but the other two in the series, with Sir Karl Popper and CD Broad are more engaging. Broad criticises fellow philosophers for ignoring psychical research, while Popper's view on Wilson's work is very interesting as he takes him to task for overrating self-expression, adding that artists, poets and scientists 'become great insofar as they reach out to something outside themselves.' I think this is an important point in relation to Colin's overall approach. His most basic contention is that ordinary consciousness is subnormal, and that we should make every effort to transcend and intensify it. His original book was written before publication of Maslow's work on peak experiences, which helped him flesh out this picture of a spectrum of conscious states. Since then, transpersonal psychology has considerably extended this analysis.

In his essay on Camus and the even more extensive one on Sartre, he criticises their approach to contingency (nausea) and absurdity by failing to realise the responsibility we all have with respect to our perception in terms of intentionality, as explained by Husserl (there is also an essay on him). One of the examples given by Camus is seeing a man talking and gesticulating in a phone box - this is only absurd if one does not know what the man is talking about. On a wider front, I wrote an essay in the 1970s contrasting the approach of Camus with the experience and writings of Victor Frankl in Auschwitz - he was able to realise meaning even in those circumstances. Both Camus and Sartre try to convince their readers that this passive perception of absurdity is actually how things are. Sartre even tries to construct a philosophy of freedom on top of the contention that man is a useless passion; this does not really work, as Colin shows very clearly. Sartre also denies Husserl's idea of a transcendental ego, which is arguably the very basis of freedom and corresponds to the witness consciousness of the Upanishads and mindfulness.

Nietzsche was an important influence on his thinking since he conveys an intense feeling of vitality and aliveness, especially in two key experiences of his life, which are also related to the development of his idea of will to power. In an essay on Spinoza, Colin quotes Nietzsche as saying that 'it has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of - namely, the confession of its inventor, and a sort of involuntary and subconscious autobiography.' This insight applies to Nietzsche himself and indeed to Colin as well as other philosophers discussed in this book, including Sartre and Foucault.

The clearest answer to this question is given in the final essay on Whitehead, who features in Religion and the Rebel (Colin has a much higher opinion of Whitehead than Russell). Whitehead put forward an overall system (in Process and Reality) as a basis for explaining every element of our experience, and criticises the bifurcation of nature brought about by Western philosophy. For him, the universe is not separated from the human mind and we have two modes of attention or intention, presentational immediacy and what he calls causal efficacy, which Colin interprets as meaning perception. These can come together in symbolic perception, which one finds in the poetry of Wordsworth. To lose a sense of meaning is to lose a sense of causal efficacy, and this feeling is at the basis of existential despair. In Whitehead's scheme, humans are a dynamic expression of the consequent nature of God and as such part of divine evolution in the actualisation of new possibilities.

It was good to revisit these existential themes in this collection of essays, but I felt that the overall perspective was perhaps too individual without a sense of belonging to a larger whole and indeed serving that whole with love. Although Colin makes frequent references to mystics, he does not take the step of shifting his identity from self to Self, although he does open up important new dimensions of human freedom and makes some very significant criticisms of the limitations of existentialist thought.