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Obituary

Colin Wilson (1931-2013)

Vaughan Rapatahana pays tribute to the positive-minded existentialist.

The passing of Colin Henry Wilson (June 26, 1931 – December 5, 2013) leaves a large rent in the fabric of authentic (meaning fully committed and lifelong intransigent) existentialist philosophy, a pretty spartan tartan at the best of times. As the Guardian obituary of 9th December 2013 lamented: “He was Britain’s first, and so far last, homegrown existentialist star.” Wilson was also a compelling harbinger of multifarious previously unheard-of authors, and an ever enthusiastic and immensely readable proselytizer of myriad divergent leftfield ideas. He was however first and foremost a philosopher, and he maintained that “I consider my life work that of a philosopher, and my purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism.” The existentialist work The Outsider (1956) was his first and indeed his most famous book, and even if Wilson didn’t give full details as to how the positive existential state-of-mind he promoted was to be achieved, his ‘New Existentialism’ remains a lodestone in an increasingly bleak world peopled by the Dauphins of fundamentalist religions and the fundamentally anti-fundamentalist acolytes of Dawkins.

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