“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning� wrote the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1]. Commenting on this famous line in the introduction to the 1965 collection Eagle and Earwig, Colin Wilson remarks that even suicide is a meaningful act. He mentions an “interesting book� entitled Suicide and Scandinavia by Herbert Hendin, who “says that if a man could be interviewed in mid air between the top of a skyscraper and the pavement, his feelings might be very different from those he had a moment before as he prepared to jump�. As Merleau-Ponty says there are no gestures which do not carry meaning � even the embarrassed silence at some political platitude is meaningful in that it expresses an intentional lack of interest, a rejection of what he calls ready-made formulas. Gurdjieff dismissed such artificial things as “the glamour of new slogans� � the shallow imitation of old racial, religious, academic and commercial ideas which would later be known at the end of last century as postmodernism. Like the existentialism that preceded it, the grandly titled ‘postmodern� trend was based largely on the misunderstanding of an obscure philosophical method known as phenomenology. Colin Wilson soon fitted this useful method to his ‘Outsider� credo as the sixties dawned but it would be fair to say that very few have really noticed; his summing up of an evolutionary phenomenology (‘new existentialism�) in 1966 still remains little known. In the mid sixties the academy gleefully swallowed discourse, épistémè and deconstruction and now appears to be suffering complications as if from an act of slow self-harm.
“Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning� wrote the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1]. Commenting on this famous line in the introduction to the 1965 collection Eagle and Earwig, Colin Wilson remarks that even suicide is a meaningful act. He mentions an “interesting book� entitled Suicide and Scandinavia by Herbert Hendin, who “says that if a man could be interviewed in mid air between the top of a skyscraper and the pavement, his feelings might be very different from those he had a moment before as he prepared to jump�. As Merleau-Ponty says there are no gestures which do not carry meaning � even the embarrassed silence at some political platitude is meaningful in that it expresses an intentional lack of interest, a rejection of what he calls ready-made formulas. Gurdjieff dismissed such artificial things as “the glamour of new slogans� � the shallow imitation of old racial, religious, academic and commercial ideas which would later be known at the end of last century as postmodernism. Like the existentialism that preceded it, the grandly titled ‘postmodern� trend was based largely on the misunderstanding of an obscure philosophical method known as phenomenology. Colin Wilson soon fitted this useful method to his ‘Outsider� credo as the sixties dawned but it would be fair to say that very few have really noticed; his summing up of an evolutionary phenomenology (‘new existentialism�) in 1966 still remains little known. In the mid sixties the academy gleefully swallowed discourse, épistémè and deconstruction and now appears to be suffering complications as if from an act of slow self-harm.