The New Existentialism

Ever since The Outsider was published in 1956, Colin Wilson has been working out the implications of the ideas in that extraordinary book. The present volume, first published in 1966, was the sixth of what the author calls his 'Outsider sequence' and perhaps the most important. Long out of print, The New Existentialism (previously entitled Introduction to the New Existentialism) deals with the ideas of such thinkers as Husserl and Wittgenstein and shows how they relate to the 'classic' existentialism (freedom through self-realization in a meaningless world) of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Satre. Wilson's 'new existentialism' is an attempt to show how recent developments in understanding of consciousness, of 'peak experiences'. aesthetic and mystical, and of language, can bring back meaningfulness, and provide twentieth and twenty-first century man with a relevant and satisfying philosophy.