The Outsider: A Case History

It is now about time we called off this whole existentialist business. It was one thing to reaffirm the claims of life against the abstract categorization, the sucking of all personal existence into great rationalist systems, that culminated in Hegel. But the Age of Reason has long since given way to the Age of Relativism. The primary disciplines of the reason—grammar, rhetoric and logic—are no longer taught in our schools; the picture is fast destroying the word; the concrete in a million forms saturates our culture, overwhelms us. It is reason, balance, measure, that are rejected today; it is the power to distinguish and to judge justly that is scorned.

The depreciation of the intellect and of reason, together with the glorification of pure Will, which is the stock-in-trade of vulgar existentialism, is a sure prescription for intellectual and literary acclaim. Nor does it seem that books which follow this formula need be written with any very great acumen, maturity or learning, to be praised to the skies by persons who should know better. Mr. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (Houghton Mifflin, $4.00), after an enormous success in England, where he received the fulsome praises of critics like Edith Sitwell, Cyril Connolly, and Philip Toynbee, has now been prominently, if somewhat more critically, received in the United States and bids fair to become the “intellectual event of the year.”

FS

About the Author

Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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It is now about time we called off this whole existentialist business. It was one thing to reaffirm the claims of life against the abstract categorization, the sucking of all personal existence into great rationalist systems, that culminated in Hegel. But the Age of Reason has long since given way to the Age of Relativism. The primary disciplines of the reason—grammar, rhetoric and logic—are no longer taught in our schools; the picture is fast destroying the word; the concrete in a million forms saturates our culture, overwhelms us. It is reason, balance, measure, that are rejected today; it is the power to distinguish and to judge justly that is scorned.

The depreciation of the intellect and of reason, together with the glorification of pure Will, which is the stock-in-trade of vulgar existentialism, is a sure prescription for intellectual and literary acclaim. Nor does it seem that books which follow this formula need be written with any very great acumen, maturity or learning, to be praised to the skies by persons who should know better. Mr. Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (Houghton Mifflin, $4.00), after an enormous success in England, where he received the fulsome praises of critics like Edith Sitwell, Cyril Connolly, and Philip Toynbee, has now been prominently, if somewhat more critically, received in the United States and bids fair to become the “intellectual event of the year.”