Editors Note: Eugene makes his debut on Evolutionary Landscapes an existential shout. Not familiar with Colin Wilson myself, I’m pleased to have an inspirational introduction to the meaning of an Outsider – that wrestling between our finite existence and the possibility of a spiritual infinite. Eugene is the co-founder of AltStates.Net and blogger at Dreams of Translucence. Be sure to also follow him on Twitter.
Eugene Pustoshkin
I am an Outsider. I spent most of my time alone, in solitude of a dusty room, around books that I despise for their intellectual emptiness yet at moments read with a fierce passion of hoping to stumble upon a life-changing existential answer, the Answer. As Nietzsche appropriately put it, it is not closeness between human beings that I escaped from; it is distance, eternal distance between man and man that drove me into loneliness. Despite being blessed by transpersonal transfigurations I am still an embodiment of an Outsider, for I wasn’t able to do just one thing: escape my existentiality, turn away from my being-in-the-world as a finite sparkle of lonesome existence. This is a transcend-but-include matter, it seems. Shimmering on the edge between the personal and the transpersonal doesn’t relieve from the wasteland, for we are to give what’s Caesar’s to Caesar and what’s God’s to God. The infinitely transpersonal consciousness takes care of itself while the finite existential quest stubbornly persists in the process of self-discovery: self-annihilation.
Do I fear death? In the multitude of my existence there is that which fears death-dissolution, but it fears what already de facto happened, stubbornly, out of developmental inertia, karma, and existential neurosis. I am full of the opposites, of discrete elements, of continuous perturbations, of many men and women inside me, my bodily matter, of many images inhabiting the space of being and neural signatures haunting the labyrinths of the brain. I am aware of my prison. (Let’s leave the question of who is I am to a different context. Here we are to be deadly serious in our finitude.)
Colin Wilson at the time he became famous at the age of 24 for his cult-classic The Outsider.
Colin Wilson admitted that during his prolific career as a philosopher and author he wrote and re-wrote just one book. All the one hundred and five dozen or so books are iterations of the same book, the Book that he first wrote in his twenties and titled The Outsider (1956). It is this Book with a thousand faces I want to review, for I want to speak of existential leadership. We are so eager to step out of our personal shoes into the transpersonal—in our fear of facing the abyss, the terror of insignificance—that by pursuing ego inflations and deflations of various sorts we forget of the truly unsung heroes and leaders of humanity who danced the existential rope at the cutting edge. (I usually mention Vasily Nalimov as one of such unsung heroes.)
Today, the one who leads at the cutting edge has to be an existential leader, has to demonstrate first and foremost his or her existential maturity. Such a maturity exceeds dry intellectual efforts, linear rationalizations of “how it should be” which to an existentialist may appear as absurd in their detachment from the messy world’s pragmatics. Existential leadership is on the intersection between the outward and the inward. As Ken Wilber noted, the real frontier is in the interiors. Wilber, incidentally, is a man who proved his profound familiarity with existentiality (the rawness of being—not conceptual philosophy) through his autobiographical works such as Grace and Grit and “Odyssey: A Personal Inquiry into Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology.” This is one of the reasons why he influences probably more people in all areas of human society than most his critics have dreamt of in their philosophy.
The entire history of his self-seclusion and self-exile (and then returning to the marketplace) proves to me that genealogically Wilber is, first and foremost, an Outsider; and he might be one of those rare Outsiders who actually found an answer to the existential question in his lifebody, lived experience, written into his works with blood. (Nietzsche, again: “Of all writings I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.”) Is it other Outsiders whom he influences the most? I don’t know, but it was the existential sincerity, coherence, alignment with depth of Wilber’s works that persuaded me personally, not hype, promises and marketing of social movements that one often encounters around. There may be nothing particularly wrong with the latter; the point is it just completely misses what matters most for an Outsider.
What is The Outsider?
The Outsider is a non-fiction book by Colin Wilson first published in 1956.
Through the works and lives of various artists – including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent Van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky and G. I. Gurdjieff – Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society’s effect on him.
Pop culture, populist views and trends, mass marketing in western societies appeals to the “herd instinct,” the Status Quo, the bourgeois and those who feel they need to fit in with the latest trend, fashion and widget of societal norm. Those who do not “fit in” tend to be viewed as “outsiders” and are prone to being labeled as outcast or untouchables.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” – Jiddu Krishnamurti. (from Wikipedia entry The Outsider (Colin Wilson))
As Marilyn Ferguson points out in her 1981 foreword to the book:
The trajectory of Outsider consciousness led naturally to the rising interest in Eastern philosophy, the human potential movement, and the proliferation of techniques designed to help individuals transcend a sense of alienation from self and society.
Wilson summarizes the problems of that alienation:
The Outsider wants to cease to be an Outsider.
He wants to be integrated as a human being, achieving a fusion between mind and heart.
He seeks vivid sense perception.
He wants to understand the soul and its workings.
He wants to get beyond the trivial.
He wants to express himself so he can better understand himself. He sees a way out via intensity, extremes of experience. . . .To an observer the way of the Outsider may appear excessive, difficult, even reckless. Wilson shows us, by example after example, why the Outsider cannot accept society as it is, why he “sees too much and too deep.”
Outsiders seek to heal divisions: between conscious and unconscious, intellect and intuition, mind and body, self and society, spirit and sensuality. “The Outsider’s chief desire is to be unified. He is selfish as a man with a lifelong raging toothache would be selfish.”
Refusing to resolve life’s difficulties by withdrawal or denial, Outsiders seek transcendence through headlong involvement. They believe with Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf that “the way to innocence leads . . . ever deeper into human life. Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have at the last to take the whole world into your soul, cost what it may.”
The Outsider’s intensity is expressed in Goethe’s poem, “The Holy Longing,” with its image of the butterfly drawn to, and transformed by, the flame:
And so long as you haven’t experienced
this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
How can I not mention the beginning of Parmeneides’ mystical poem in connection to this longing?
The mares that carry me as far as longing can reach
rode on, once they had come and fetched me
onto the legendary road of the divinity
that carries the man who knows
through the vast and dark unknown…
(quoted from Peter and Maria Kingsley’s “As Far As Longing Can Reach”)
Marilyn Ferguson concludes her foreword:
For a hundred years or more, Wilson said, Outsiders have been slowly creating new values by implication. “The real issue is not whether two and two make four or whether two and two make five, but whether life advances by men who love words or by men who love living.”
A thoughtful reading of The Outsider gives us a profound sense of our collective modern struggle: how to restore the timeless and visionary in a culture that has prided itself on divorcing reason from feeling. Understanding the historic roots of this struggle gives us a deeper understanding of the Outsider in ourselves.
Those who think that existential angst and longing belong strictly to the ending of the personal realm are too confident to draw a boundary. It is not a human personality that awakens to its own existence, it is Being, non-personal Consciousness that over and over again wakes up to its initial horror and longing to be: here is the universe in the void, what am I, as sentience, to make of it, alone? It is sentience’s sensing, as Edward Munch formulated, an infinite scream passing through nature. So let’s feel reverence towards the continuous agony of matter and join its primordial scream with all our lungs, all our spirit, all our Being:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
This is supposed to be the end of the essay. But any time I meet existential accounts the lack of consummation and “Hollywood positivity” drives me nuts. I don’t want to be asked as a Fellini’s character: “What are you cooking up for us? Another film on hopelessness?”
Oh no, this is not the end of the story, this is a part of it. In the beginning of this work I mentioned being aware of my prison. Yes, 
the prison—when Sri Aurobindo was physically imprisoned in India for his revolutionary activities and struggle for India’s independence, he experienced an opening of that which is beyond any confinements:
I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell but it was not the tree, I knew it was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me His shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door and again I saw Vasudeva. It was Narayana who was guarding and standing sentry over me. Or I lay on the coarse blankets that were given me for a couch and felt the arms of Sri Krishna around me, the arms of my Friend and Lover.
I really enjoyed this, Eugene. Often, all of the variations of my essays and articles feel like a constant revisiting (and revision) of a singular text; an infinite text, perhaps, but a text that is my life. I recently read in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that the brain is constantly editing memories in the instant it remembers them. Our memories, then are never the same. Proust himself, apparently, was an obsessive editor. He constantly re-wrote sentences, even when the manuscript had been sent off to print. Apparently our memories work like this, too. Our whole life we are working on a text that is re-creating and transcending, sometimes rediscovering itself. A really good way to look at a life’s work.
That being said, I know little of Colin Wilson besides your initial introduction here, and a little of what you’ve told me before. I’m definitely intrigued and will look for the Outsider next time I’m in the bookstore (or on Amazon).
Despite knowing little of Wilson’s Outsider, I can say the spirit of an Outsider dwells within me and has been many a muse for my writing; the outliers who return to society with knowledge from the fringe, wild and unknown (and sometimes, invisible worlds). They stand apart and seem to return to us with a knowledge of something more. I like the comprehensive inclusion of existentialists like Camus, who are not outright mystics but certainly convey a mystical sentiment about this life. Wrestling as finite beings in this world while running against the status quo, we step outside the ruts of our “reality tunnel” (another Wilson!) and occasionally are graced with a sudden illumination, or perhaps an imagination with large enough wings to take us into that Other self that is infinite and not located in the waking conscious state. The being that makes up our dreams, Carl Jung’s Self, and the Alchemical Stone.
Really great job here in wrestling between this strange unity of opposites we appear to be: finite and yet infinite. How do we bring these two together? In what mode of being are the two reconciled and seen to be in harmony? Can we know?
-Jer
Good to see more people disovering Colin’s work.
His Outsider had a huge impact and gained him approval from the literary and intellectual establishment in England. It was an incredible acheivement especially given the difficult circumstances in which it was written.
Very much worth reading.
Worth noting is that when we went on to write ‘The Occult’ he was dropped like a hot potato. Apparently this was not a subject that was proper for serious investigation.
Colin did write some dreadful stuff on Crowley and some dicey novels, but he has a keen intellect and has been unfairly neglected.
The Outsider is a real tour de force.
Love it~
I feel in love with Colin Wilson when I was 17 years old.
Reading the Outsider changed my life, and also felt like balm on my soul at a time of deep existential angst and transformation in my own life. He put words to many things I didn’t have words for then…
Thanks for the reminder.
Hugs,
Vanessa
Thank you for this readers’ response. I really appreciate that my essay has some resonance.
Jeremy, thanks for this Proust fact. I didn’t know. The title of the book you mention is intriguing too.
By the way…
Today I finished reading Eric van Lastbader’s novel BLACK BLADE, a thriller that centralizes its narrative around erotica, subtle states of consciousness and psi phenomena, all that chi jazz. Eric Van Lastbader has been a friend of Robert Ludlum and is now appointed by his family as a successor-writer of the Jason Bourne novels (you probably know the brilliant film adaptation of Ludlum’s original novels with Matt Damon starring . . . I also recommend the older adaptation).
Apparently, as Albert Klamt (who recommended van Lastbader to me) pointed out a few hours ago, van Lastbader is very familiar with Colin Wilson, his corpus of work and the concept of an Outsider: http://ericvanlustbader.com/thriller/content/essay.asp
This is no surprise because in BLACK BLADE I witnessed how excellently he describes existential phenomenology of psyche, psychic phenomena, and sexual tension. These are all favorite topics of Colin Wilson too. Here is what Eric van Lustbader writes:
“The common thread running through my two favorite genres was “the outsider.” The protagonists in both thrillers and fantasies are misfits, those people who because of their special skills are outside the mainstream of society. In both genres, the protagonists struggle mightily both to control their gifts and the terrible forms of loneliness they must endure.
And, too, there is a larger, even more fascinating problem that both genres address: the struggle of “the outsider” to find oneself and to come to terms with who one is.”
He continues,
“Of course, I had help with this. The seminal moment in my outsider epiphany was when I picked up a book appropriately titled The Outsider, a nonfiction treatise on the alienation of modern man, written by a brilliant English writer by the name of Colin Wilson. Soon thereafter, I read his astonishing A Casebook of Murder, a horrifying and mesmerizing compendium of the world’s most macabre murder cases. Then I discovered that he was a novelist as well: The Black Room, Lingard and Necessary Doubt.
What drew me to Wilson’s subject matter was exactly what drew me to thrillers and fantasy: I wanted to read about people who were outsiders, who felt themselves to be at the borders of society – both those ike me, who live a moral life, as well as the terrifying others, at the extreme fringes of “otherness,” who consider themselves to be beyond the law.
Though I had been writing in one form or another virtually since the moment I had learned to spell, once I understood the truth of who I was, there was no getting around it. It was time to create the novels of outsiders that were firing inside me.”
This is a treasure.
This is an excellent introduction to Colin Wilson narrated by the author himself! I listened to this audiobook a few years ago, and it influenced me just as the KOSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS CDs with that comprehensive Ken Wilber interview (which I listened during that period too).
I like your essay Eugene – altho I do not know Colin Wilson (but I am not surprised that Vanessa does!!). However “The Outsider” as an archetype I know well (and her cousin the Contrarian :-). With my framings around the roles of the human hive, I might consider now that the Outsider is necessary to the survival of the human hive, because they are the “Diversity Generators (DG)” by another name. Without Outsiders/ DG we would not have the discoveries that the Conformity Enforcers (CE) would never make on their own. Do you think that Outsiders/DG’s have seasons of contribution – where what they have been seeing/experiencing is finally considered of value when the CE’s have tried everything else and finally step into the Outsider’s territory? And when the outside becomes inside, will a new outside be instantly born, where the Outsiders will once again follow the impulse to a yet farther Outside?
Marilyn, I think you provide an essential 3rd-person systems view on the social function of Outsiders. It might be that Outsiders/DGs have seasons of contribution, indeed. In fact, they might be not just diversity but also novelty generators. It is also important to pay close attention to the 1st-person view of an Outsider himself or herself: that being an Outsider means a quest for passion in life, for inhabiting meaning while being on the cutting edge of individual beings. As such, from within this individual system, there is not much concern regarding generating diversity, the language here is that of intensity and flow and passions and melancholy and existential battles. These battles can be fought only in the first person as well as in the second person (dialogue). It would be lovely if we could elaborate on the importance of Outsiders and find ways to assist them on their quest. Please let me know if you have any additional thoughts and elaborations of your perspective. As a self-reflective Outsider, I find these dialogues very helpful.
As an Outsider myself, I’d imagine that “help” from a community for an Outsider might be tentatively, cautiously taken. But it would be wonderful to have support for such Outsiders, at least to see them as an indigenous culture might see a shaman – an important contributor to society, though he or she might even physically dwell on the outskirts of a village.
Marilyn, I’m not familiar with the language (DG, CE) – is this from a theoretical framework? I still like the point they make. Outsider seems to introduce novelty into a conservative system and allow for new songs to break the mold and bring the whole system into alternative harmonies. Seems like I gravitate towards song-metaphors when discussing evolution, but that is probably because I often associate it with communication, language between cells, between species, and perhaps even mystical language as “the music of the spheres.”
Great conversation folks!
This also leads me to thinking about intra- and interpersonal phenomenological spaces of cities. Intrapersonal phenomenological spaces of cities is, as I would call it, the inner texture of my first-person experience of living there and going through various states of being and meaning. Interpersonal phenomenological spaces of cities appear to me more like dynamically flowing fields of collectively shared meanings and impressions of a city. One of my mentors in St. Petersburg Dr. Dmitry Spivak, a culturologist and philologist and researcher of the linguistics of altered states of consciousness (he’s a big friend of Stan Grof, Charles T. Tart, and other transpersonal psychologists), has authored a fundamental research called METAPHYSICS OF ST. PETERSBURG, where he basically studies how various cultural lineages (Finnish, French, Swedish, German, Dutch, etc.) appear through the city landscape and affect one’s consciousness. I haven’t found much information on this work in English, but I found a nice article by Spivak on humility which I hadn’t read before: http://www.midline.net/nfp/PDFs/Spivak.pdf
Here is some English abstract for one of the Russian volumes of METAPHYSICS OF ST. PETERSBURG: http://www.setbook.org/books/230785.html
Here is the English abstract to the introductory volume: http://www.panrus.com/books/details.php?bookID=10244
Nicely done, Eugene. I like how you pulled disparate perspectives into a cohesive whole in this essay (much as Wilson does in his work!). I think your question about how to support outsiders is intriguing. I wonder how we can approach this, given that outsiders seem to require a certain amount of isolation and indeed alienation from the currents of society in order to fulfill their role. If we were to formalize an “outsider process,” for example, it might no longer break the stranglehold of the status quo. I am reminded of Susan Cain’s work on introversion (“Quiet: The Power of Introverts”) and her assertion that, culturally and individually, we should be encouraging more time apart from others – and in particular introspective, imaginal and creative time – and attenuate the participatory impulse so prevalent in modern society. She argues that creating more space and encouragement for introversion will be essential for the enduring success of human civilization. So perhaps this is one concrete way we can support and assist outsiders, both interpersonally and institutionally. My own approach to this has been to encourage mystical practice, meditation, time alone in Nature, etc. in my own writing and teaching. I’ve always intuited this to be essential (despite dogged discouragement to do so from my home, educational and work environments). Now am I beginning to understand the many reasons why thoughtful alone time is so important.
Here is a TED talk of Susan Cain’s that you might enjoy: http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html
Thanks for your voicing of the power of introverts. One of my mentors Margaret Wheatley has just announced (aftr 18-20 years of activisim around self-organizing systems, communities of practise, women’s leadership, even Y2K community) that she is withdrawing from the world to reflect in quiet about what wants to happen next (if anything). She considers this a necessary, practical and valuable action (as non-action). I agree and see it as an act of valuing reflexiveness and ones own phenomelogy. It is the Outsider’s journey to the Inside of smaller self for Highest Self. In the design of cities (thanks Eugene for recognizing the importance of this), I think it is a usually overlooked need to create time/space nodes where such quietness is practised. Be Still. Be Moved. Repeat (A mantra given me a year ago by an anonymous conference colleague.) I value it every time I walk by – and it is the stillness that I crave the most.
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Eugene, beyond the many discussions we had already on fb: The outsider in 21st century is capable to refer to, to shape and make use of hybrid realties of all kind. Cross-over communication in all realms of culture and society. No longer only expressing existential edges from 1st person.
He and she refer – at least in a basic understanding- to the points Don Beck has summarized for any new paradigm. Living in Germany I see within last 10 years that EVERY single aspect of ts necessary. They need to be connected just in time And the genius of any given culture and their archetypal ways of timing it all will bring up all this in unique ways. Peter Watson has written this big book THE GERMAN GENIUS. Where he douments and decribes in lots of detail for last 250 years how all this came together in Germany then. Heres to the aspects Don Beck suggests:
Consider this possible check-list:
Any new paradigm will need to be an open system rather than a closed state since conditions constantly change.
Any new paradigm must be consistent with current research into the deepest functions within the human brain.
Any new paradigm must subsume all previous paradigms as being legitimate for different times and circumstances.
Any new paradigm must be able to penetrate all areas of human life – biology, psychology, spirituality etc.
Any new paradigm must accommodate the full texture of human cultural differences as they evolve over time.
Any new paradigm must contain an effective mix of political and economic models calibrated to stages of emergence.
Any new paradigm should be able to anticipate different realities, future visions and contain its own sunset clause.
Any new paradigm must address multiple bottom-lines on issues regarding standards of living and the quality of life.
Any new paradigm should contain the DNA-like codes to reveal its assumptions in a clear, understandable manner.
Any new paradigm should be equally relevant to individuals, organizational groupings, and to society-at-large
Best,
Albert
Hi Jeremy:
“Marilyn, I’m not familiar with the language (DG, CE) – is this from a theoretical framework? ”
Its from Spiral Dynamics Integral.
One word to your notion that the outsider needs support. He/she does not need care. The outsider is pushing boundaries at his/her own risk. And is alwayay already connected and connecting.with society and culture in many ways. .Thriller writer Eric van Lustbader- I am a fan of his series in the 80`s, Eugene mentioned him- referred to this particular work of Wilson too.,. HImself a major in sociology EVL made clear in an interview that he always enjoyed and participated in social echange and communication. The unique experience of any outsider is the strength of solitude. Like the soul punching power of a warrior. I consider myself as outsider too exactly in this sense.
The power of framework which is described in Spiral Dynamics Integral- which of course needs never ending new research of evolutionary processes- the spiral itself is no noun…but a verb which summarizes the whirlwinds of thousands of processes- is not yet realized by most people engaging in spirituality and mysticism. There is no simple linear way from any degree of realisation to the many dimensions of change.
Marilyn Hamilton has given a great presentation at 2010 Integral Theory Conference about criteria of meshowrking processes. (A term used by De Landa too however is specifically used in SDi) The outsiders role has many facettes for me. he can integrate in given moments of transitions more than any singular functional process. He/she adds punching power, radical subjectivity and a nonstoppable momentum to the dynamics of the spiral.
Jean Houston has communicated in great notes over the last years interiors of this. For example in. DECODING THE DAIMON. I am very happy she will publish her new book THE WIZARD OF US.
In my eyes Martin Luther was an outsider too in German history. Nobody less than Prof. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker – I had the pleasure to meet him twice in my life personally. described the primal punching power of Luther for initiation of Germany modern era. Will add the quote from the 1983 book DIE WAHRNEHMUNG DER NEUZEIT below.
All the best, lets take mighty risks and celebrate boldness, Great dreams need crazyness and developed reason together.
Albert
Even though an outsider doesn’t need care, he or she would (or at least could) benefit from carefully crafted support. No matter how strong the individualism is, the outsider’s actions happen within a communicative field. The society as a whole and communities in particular could encourage outsiders when they explore particular realms by offering care for their basic and other needs in the areas which are not of specific interest to an outsider’s impulse towards pioneering. This is not a care that disempowers, it is an empowerment from the We space. In such Western countries as Germany or USA that support individualism, this might not be such an issue but in other countries (such as Russia) outsiders have often been put to an unnecessary mortal danger, and their discoveries were not appropriated by society. The more advanced an outsider is, I sense, the more the notion of solitude expands to embrace those kinds of solitudes that can be practiced amidst social masses. What if a conscious collective implements an intentional strategy to support outsiders even if those outsiders themselves wouldn’t be aware of it?
I love Eric van Lustbader’s style. It is good to mention him more often. He now writes sequels to the famous Jason Bourne (THE BOURNE IDENTITY, THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, etc.) series. He was a close friend to its original author Robert Ludlum. Lustbader demonstrates his experiential knowledge of subtle energies in his thrillers.
There is also an interesting fact about Martin Luther and his outsider path: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20041025/luther.html
“German archaeologists have discovered the birthplace of the Protestant Reformation — a stone toilet on which the constipated Martin Luther wrote the Ninety-Five Theses that launched the creation of Europe’s Protestant churches.
Scholars had always known that the 16th-century religious leader suffered from acute constipation and spent hours in contemplation on the toilet seat.”
This scheisse stuff is so German!
Addendum, about Martin Luther. Translated into English by myself. Excerpted from the book DIE WAHRNEHMUNG DER NEUZEIT. Where Prof. Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker is drawing in rough lines the emergence of modern Germany in the realms of life conditions, science, philosophy, arts and poltics. Its about percpetion and the capability of the soul . You can google some basics of his work. Unfortunately nearly nothing is translated into English. He was giant in my eyes. Early in 1970 he wrote the foreword to Gopi Krishnas work THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF RELIGION AND GENIUS. This was bold and nobody of his colleagues at Max Planck Institute for Natural Sciences in Starnbreg/Munich understood it.
Heres to the excerpt:
The intellectual Germany of the modern era began with the Reformation. In the Latin countries was the breakthrough of reality, which we call the beginning of modern times, in the plains of politics, art, science, in Germany at the level of religion. When a person embodies the fate that Germany has become for the world, it is Martin Luther.
This man, like emerged from the depths of yet unformed earth, for the faith runaway monk, unpoliitical mover of the world circuit breakers of the church, wanted to clean it, the destroyer of form and great poet of most subtle sensation and terrible brutality, Master of the dialectic and from depths no dialectic can reach, in daily conversation with God and the devil, the man portrayed as Germany before and after him none.
He is the Germany, without whom life would be pale in Europe . But with him the living is impossible. The intellectual Germany is not a state but a movement whose hope it is, to overcome the world and oneself. Where is this movement headed to?
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker – Die Wahrnehmung der Neuzeit, 1983
Heres to a formal academic paper of Howard Bloom. Elaborating on those diversity generators mentioned by Marilyn Hamilton.
“A great deal of work has been done since 1980 on complex adaptive systems–biological and electronic learning machines. Most of this scholarship has taken mathematical form. However, it is possible to sum up a complex adaptive system’s quintet of key elements entirely without equations. These elements are (1) conformity enforcers, (2) diversity generators, (3) utility sorters, (4) resource shifters, and (5) intergroup tournaments.”
http://howardbloom.net/Beyond_The_Supercomputer.htm
Albert
HI Eugene, I just stumbled upon your sentence:
“This scheisse stuff is so German!”
Lol…you seem to be not the only one. Journalist Michael Lewis- a clever and witty guy- wrote in SEpt 2011 for Vanity Fair: Its the economy, Stupid.
For the sake of fun for all I have posted it at FB. In my notes section. More comments welcome at any time.
Albert
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109