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Brief Lives

Colin Wilson (1931-2013)

Vaughan Rapatahana remembers the singular English existentialist.

Colin Wilson was perhaps England’s only famous existentialist philosopher. Indeed, Robert Solomon’s 2004 book Existentialism includes Wilson as the sole British representative of existentialism. (Here I’ll pass over the many other designations of Wilson, such as mystic, occultist, criminologist, and so on, for his lasting philosophical achievements eclipse his other interests.) However Wilson attended no university, and achieved no academic qualifications, despite Iris Murdoch trying to convince him of the benefits of a university education; as he wrote in his memoir The Angry Years in 2006: “She and I took an immediate liking to one another… and when she learned that I had not been to a university, offered to get me a scholarship at Oxford, a suggestion I gratefully declined.” Indeed Wilson only went to academic institutions as an intermittent writing fellow or a guest lecturer.

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