January 08, 2020

Episode 63: Faculty X: On Colin Wilson's 'The Occult'

1 hour 19 minutes

At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult.

REFERENCES

Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History

Rick and Morty, American sitcom

Colin, Wilson, Dreaming to Some Purpose

Colin Wilson, The Outsider

Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

Making Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living?

Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian philosopher

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Emil Cioran, Franco-Romanian essayist

Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher

At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collection

Joe Frazier, American pugilist

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Edouard Schuré, [The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions](Edouard Schuré, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion

Weird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman's "The Third Table"

Thomas Merton, American monk

Gary Snyder, American poet

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