The Age of Defeat (Outsider Cycle)

This is a complex compendium, by the author of The Outsider, which all too often resembles a brilliant term paper. Wilson has read very widely and calls on more authors than the average reader can hope to have read in order to support his thesis. This is that the inner-directed Hero is dying out of society and literature, being replaced by the other-directed man, who is haunted by a sense of insignificance, "hell is other people", Billy Graham religions, the Organization Man--and occasional crimes of violence as a desperate compensation. This interesting problem has already been treated widely by sociologists, psychologists, philosophers and writers. Wilson's attempt to include them all makes this book rather crowded. His proposed cure, that man must try turning inward "and then turning outward again" bears a strong unacknowledged resemblance to Toynbee and there are other echoes in this book. The question of redirection is certainly a pressing and absorbing one, and is pointed up in an odd way by this book, in which a man who speaks in favor of inner-direction does so largely in terms of other people's ideas. In The Age of Defeat, the third volume of the Outsider Cycle, Colin Wilson introduces his New Existentialism as the basis for the revolution in thought that we need to bring about; a revolt against insignificance and ordinariness. The New Existentialism is a practical and strong-willed philosophy that will renew the concept of Man as hero. It emphasises the extraordinary in us.The Age of Defeat examines the loss of the hero in Western culture and the implications of that loss for humanity. When it was written in the middle of the 20th century, it was the idea of the hero that was endangered. Today it is Man, his identity and his masculinity, who is verging on extinction. The concept of Man is one of the most ambiguous and puzzling in our culture. It might be a good moment to remember what to be a Man used to imply.