That is not quite true. The great majority of western literature, from Homer to Jane Austen and Trollope, takes the world in which we find outselves for granted, and asks no awkward questions. For more than two centuries now, science has declared that such questions would be pointless, for we are simply objects, like other objects, in a material universe. The modern philosophy known as logical positivism also asserts that 'meta-physical' questions are meaningless. We are here, and that's that ... . But periodically, human beings seem to experience a compulsion to know why they are here—or at least, to ask the question. It began to happen midway through the last century, with writers like Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. And the same curiosity took the form of an 'occult revival' in the last three decades of the 19th century. By 1918, that was all over, and Wittgenstein had already written the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with its insistence that it is meaningless to ask questions about a 'beyond', because there is no beyond; it is a linguistic misunderstanding. Wittgenstein was by no means happy about his own conclusion, as his tortured life—reminiscent in many ways of Tolstoy's—reveals; but logical positivists like A. J. Ayer were delighted to use his arguments to support their view that life is exactly what it seems, no more and no less.
In the 1950s and early sixties, when the positivists and 'linguistic analysts' dominated the philosophy departments of almost every major university in the world, I would never have believed that the day would come when they would be not only be discredited, but half forgotten. Now it has come, I'm not sure it's entirely a good thing—there is something of the positivist in my make-up, as may be inferred from this essay. But the change has certainly come. The new generation is interested in Tolkien, Gurdjieff, Hesse, John Cowper Powys, and in wide, far-ranging speculations about the universe and the distant past. Whether this interest will exhaust itself—as it did at the turn of the present century—depends largely on the 'spearhead', on scientists and psychologists and parapsychologists who are trying to widen the boundaries of our knowledge. Obviously, Tolkien does not belong among these. But he belongs among the great stimulators of the 'occult revival'—in fact, he is perhaps even its originator. For a man who only set out to write an 'escapist' fairy story, this is a remarkable achievement.
1 In a long essay in Poetry and Mysticism (1970).
This chapbook, edited by Robert Durand (Yes! Press) and Noel Young (Copra Press), is printed in Santa Barbara by Capra Press. This edition was especially designed by Graham and Caitlin Mackintosh. This is the twentieth title in the series, published May 1974. Two hundred numbered copies, signed by the author, were handbound.
Colin Wilson, Tree by Tolkien
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