Beyond the Outsider was published by Arthur Barker in 1965, completing the six-book “Outsider Cycle” that Wilson had begun with The Outsider in 1956. The intervening volumes — Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat, The Strength to Dream, and Origins of the Sexual Impulse — had examined the Outsider’s condition from religious, sociological, literary, and psychological perspectives. Beyond the Outsider synthesizes these investigations and proposes Wilson’s own philosophical system: the “new existentialism.”
Wilson’s argument is that the existentialists — particularly Sartre and Heidegger — correctly identified the central problem of modern philosophy (the relationship between consciousness and meaning) but reached the wrong conclusion. Sartre’s nausea, Heidegger’s anxiety, Camus’s absurdity are not inevitable consequences of honest perception but symptoms of a particular failure: the failure to recognize that consciousness is not passive (a mirror reflecting a meaningless world) but active and intentional (a searchlight that creates meaning through the act of attending).
The “new existentialism” proposes that meaning is not discovered in the external world but generated by consciousness through concentrated attention — what Husserl called intentionality and what Wilson, drawing on Maslow’s “peak experiences,” calls Faculty X. The Outsider’s crisis is not that the world is meaningless but that the Outsider’s consciousness is operating at too low an intensity to perceive the meaning that is there.
Collecting Beyond the Outsider
First edition (Arthur Barker, London, 1965): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good/very good: $20–$60