Exploring the ‘Everyday’ in Colin Wilson’s The Black Room and The Personality Surgeon: A Phenomenological Perspective
Authors: Kumar Sanjay , Ahmad Muzaffar 
Published: August 2024

The English existentialist writer Colin Wilson explores different dimensions of human consciousness in his fictional works to understand the nature of consciousness. Wilson professes the doctrine of “affirmation” and contends that beneath the surface of everyday triviality, which generates pessimistic nihilism and ennui, there is an ever-refreshing reality to which every individual must get access so as to bring value and purpose to life. Hebelieves that this triviality is a result of the narrowness of consciousness. In this state, we take life for granted, and instead of living, we drift. This state resembles how Husserl describes consciousness in its ‘natural attitude’ —a state which is characterised by inattention and unreflectiveness. In this state, one fails to comprehend the experience at hand, thereby losing its meaning and essence. The recognition of this naïve attitude is one of the basic tenets of Wilson’s philosophy. Both Husserl and Wilson show a deep concern with the perception and the perceiver and their fate in all modes of consciousness, which are inextricably linked to human will and imagination and crucial to the evolution of consciousness. Wilson, like Husserl, rose against cultural pessimism engendered by earlier philosophies and envisaged phenomenology as a potent tool to overcome this failure and crisis. Both believe in the spiritual power of phenomenology, which provides new insights into human subjectivity and its sense of bestowing achievements. Wilson’s phenomenological pursuit is anendeavour to solve the existential meaninglessness of life. With a focus on the question of what makes up human values, Wilson’s new existentialism entails a phenomenological analysis of consciousness. His phenomenology of life devaluation is the most relevant area of study because moods of insight and optimism are less accessible than moods of everyday consciousness. Like Husserlian phenomenology, Wilson’s new existentialism lays bare the different layers of human consciousness. In his The New Existentialism,he avers that the ‘new existentialist’ “accepts man’s experience of his inner freedom as basic and irreducible” and ‘the new existentialism’ concentrates the full battery of phenomenological analysis upon the everyday sense of contingency ... it uncovers the complexities and safety devices in which freedom dissipates itself” (180). And therein lies the first step towards understanding the nature of consciousness. Husserlian phenomenology, with its implicit existentialist concerns, too begins with this recognition of the prejudiced consciousness which flattened under the triviality of everyday life characterises our ‘natural attitude’. Both Wilson and Husserl contend that ‘normal’ consciousness is partial, and it is not possible to make any sense of life from this partial mode of being. There is only a dull acceptance of how things apparently seem to us from our ‘natural standpoint’. Wilson conveys this state as the problem of ‘Robot’, which engenders an empty, meaningless and mechanical life where we act with passive intentionality and where the possibility of moving to other modes of being is reduced and thus limited.Wilson gives us a fresh and clear picture of man’s position in what Husserl calls the ‘natural standpoint’ or what he himself terms the ‘fallacy of insignificance’ —man’s inability to find meaning or significance in life. It is the everyday state of consciousness which Wilson calls the ‘Robot.’ Gnostics would call this Robot ‘Duality’, Gurdjieff calls it ‘sleep’, and Nietzsche labels it ‘Mechanical Intentions’. Heidegger would call such an existence ‘inauthentic’. It is Blake’s ‘Spectre’ —a stronghold of one’s own identity, personality, habits, etc. It is the concept of man as “an empty consciousness that passively receives data from the outside world” (Tredell Web). Robot is a human psychic condition which has become more complicated in modern culture. According to Wilson, “the Robot” is how our consciousness operates on ‘auto-pilot’, narrowing our perception so as to enable us to handle everyday life and least concerned about the need to get beyond it. He believed that “the Robot” controlled the part of our brains that, in our modern culture, has become over-used and over-developed.