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  3 

Wilson Harris and Human Alienation  
Duane Edwards 

 

Duane Edwards is a 3
rd

 year student at the University of Guyana reading for a degree 

in Sociology. He is the President of the University of Guyana Students Society 

(UGSS). Taking Hegel's circular epistemology as his starting point in the analysis of 

Caribbean experience, Edwards is convinced that the psyche of the West Indian 

people has been short-circuited forcing them to develop legal, political and 

economic systems with the symbolic inputs of European exploitation. Therefore, 

rather than deliberately correcting the history of exploitation in the region, the 

Caribbean has perpetuated a colonial historical reality in disguised form. Edwards 

claims that the writings of Wilson Harris are pregnant with incipient ontologies, 

epistemologies and ethics that are uniquely West Indian and that can be used as the 

bases of a uniquely Caribbean and West Indian Civilization. He also agrees with 

Harris that the West Indian people are on a civilization building mission and should 

be more occupied with that project than with being second and third rate imitators of 

the projects of others.               

                                .   

Alienation and the Modern World 

Few living in the 21st century would deny that human 
alienation is a defining feature of our age. It can be plausibly argued 
that no other people have been beset by loneliness, dread, 
abandonment, despair, and alienation to the same degree as the 
modern, 21st century subject. Pre-modern humans had their God, 
their natural environment, kings and queens, tribal chiefs, cultural 
practices, and most importantly, family and fellow community 
members. But for the modern subject God is in many ways dead (as 
echoed by Nietzsche), the natural environment is slowly being 
destroyed, kings and queens have been dethroned, tribal chiefs have 
been decimated, cultures have been denigrated, families have been 
broken apart and fellow members of society (neighbours 
particularly) are far away even when they are geographically 
proximate. 

 
But what is alienation and why is it such a dominant theme 

in modern social, political, and philosophical thought? Moreover, 
why is it useful conceptually in describing contemporary society? 
The first question is very important, and sets the stage for this essay. 
“The fact to which the term alienation refers are objectively, different 
kinds of dissociation, breaks or ruptures between human beings and 



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their objects, whether the latter be other persons, or the natural 
world, or their own creation in art, science and society; and 
subjectively, the corresponding states of disequilibrium, disturbance, 
strangeness and anxiety” (Heinemann 9). For the sociologist, this 
dissociation results from the decline of the limited local community 
characterized by close interpersonal relationships, extended family 
structures and group ethics. For Marxists, alienation is caused by 
private property and a division of labour which fosters atomism and 
individualism. For others, this rupture results from the modern 
subject‟s adjustment to a machine age and a technologically 
dominated world. While the aforementioned views associate 
alienation with shifts in the external environment, many 
philosophers instead attribute it to the finite and isolated character 
of man's existence as a stranger in the world. 

 
Why is Alienation such a Dominant Theme? 

 
To understand why alienation is such a dominant theme in 

modern philosophy and society, a comparison of pre-modern and 
modern societies must be made. Previously, human beings lived in 
societies that held complex beliefs about God; often God was viewed 
as an ever-caring father at the apex of communal life. In addition to 
the belief in God, there was a deep connection with nature as well as 
meaningful bonds with community members but most importantly, 
a direct command over the means of subsistence. Modern mass 
societies, on the other hand, are increasingly atomistic and 
individualistic. The belief in God, in spite of its spiritual and psychic 
value, is seen as proof of a weak and unscientific mind, with nature 
reified and exploited in a quest for material wealth and power. 
Fellow human beings are viewed instrumentally (they are taken as 
mere means to an end), and therefore one‟s commonality with others 
is protected and regulated by the codices of a hegemonic, 
systematizing legal system. This basic comparison highlights the 
reality that humans have become increasingly alone contemporarily, 
and it is this existential aloneness that haunts them, filling them with 
despair, abandonment, and detachment.  

 
Harris on the Alienation from Nature 

 
Wilson Harris deals with many topics in his writings, 

including alienation. His appreciation and response to the crisis of 
the modern era has many similarities with other 20th century 
philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, artists and writers. It 



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cannot be denied however, that Harris‟ scope and conceptualizing 
offers us something radically new. One type of alienation Harris 
addresses in his writings is alienation from nature. For Harris, 
rainforests are the lungs of the world and the landscapes and 
riverscapes which have been perceived as passive, as furniture even, 
or as areas to be „manipulated,' possess life themselves and are “like 
an open book and the alphabet…it takes some time to really grasp 
what this alphabet is, and what the book of the living landscape is” 
(Harris, 'Selected Essays' 40). The language of the rain forest‟s 
interior is a language of silence. This silence which represents for 
modern subjects a “void in civilization” is, for Harris, filled with 
music that requires “an inner attunement of ear and eye to sounding 
waters and painted skies, painted earth.” Our inability to attune our 
ears to the inner music of silence emanating from the landscapes, 
riverscapes and oceanscapes represents our alienation from nature. 
This alienation points to a broader „illiteracy of the imagination‟ and 
an inability to read “reality differently from slavish alignment to 
literal frame or code”, that is, to instead read “by way of indirections 
that diverge from formula or code...” (Harris, 'Jonestown' 204) 
 
It is instructive to quote Harris at length here on his concept of 
„silent music‟: 
 

When I speak of silent music, I am intent on repudiating a 
dumbness or passivity with which we subconsciously or 
unconsciously robe the living world. Living landscapes have 
their own pulse and arterial topography and sinew which 
differ from ours but are real – however far-flung in variable 
form and content – as the human animal's. I am content on 
implying that the vibrancy or pathos in the veined tapestry of 
a broken leaf addresses arisen consciousness through linked 
eye and ear in a shared anatomy that has its roots in all 
creatures and in everything. (Harris, 'Selected Essays' 44) 

 
The fact that we are not attuned to the „silent music‟ and 

language of the living landscape reflects our alienation and 
estrangement from nature. This alienation which in of itself might 
not appear of concern to those who have grown accustomed to 
viewing the world as human-centered, is nevertheless symptomatic 
of a more profound problem with humanity – a problem which will 
be discussed more clearly later on. Harris was also concerned with 
our failure to listen and attune ourselves to the cry of nature, which if 
taken seriously, would result in far more eruptions necessitating our 



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listening ears. Who would doubt that the many violent hurricanes, 
floods, tsunamis, signs of global warming, food and water crises are 
anything but nature crying out in a violent language? Harris however 
was not simply a mere romantic by decrying man's alienation from 
nature; unlike Rousseau, Harris' ideal man is not a man of the past. 
Moreover, the destruction of nature and our alienation from it is tied 
in part to technological developments. It would be absurd to wholly 
sacrifice these developments simply for the sake of preserving nature 
in its „pristine‟ form. Harris was aware of the unspeakable human 
benefits derived from utilizing and transforming the resources of the 
natural world. What he called for instead was the “„re-sensitizing of 
technology‟ to the life of the planet” (Harris, 'Selected Essays' 44).  

 
Social and Political Alienation 

 
Hegel's philosophy of man, made clear in his 

Phenomenology of Spirit, helps in some ways to frame discussions of 
„alienation‟. His phenomenology begins with consciousness in 
relation to its object. For Hegel, consciousness is always intentional 
– it is always consciousness of something. This something is the 
object of consciousness. Consciousness then tries to overcome the 
distinction between itself and its object. This unifying task is 
achieved in the “law-making operations of the 'understanding' in 
which the objective law it is dealing with are patently subjective 
creations” (Kainz 25). It is this same dialectical method that Hegel 
employs in his Philosophy of Right. He begins in civil society, the 
sphere of universal egoism, where man is threatened by other men 
who are pursuing their own needs and desires. This threat is 
overcome by the law-making and unifying operations of the state 
which represents the final and objective expression of the ethical 
idea, man in his highest form. But this highest expression of his 
ethical self represents for man, the individual, an alienation from his 
fellow man and from himself because the only relation he has with 
others is a juridical relation, a relation held together by civil codices 
and regulations. Being the highest expression of the ethical self, the 
state (a patently subjective creation) assumes a life separate from, 
but absolutely paramount to individuals, families, communities and 
other social groupings to the extent that “if the particular will [the 
will of the individual or a social group] is explicitly at variance with 
the Universal [the state], it assumes a way of looking at things and a 
volition which are capricious and fortuitous and comes in opposition 
to the principle of rightness. This is wrong…” (Kainz 64). Right and 



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7 

wrong, according to Hegel, are concepts only attributable to the 
state. 
 

Just as nature represents for Hegel an alienation from the 
„creative mind,‟ the all-powerful state for Harris, with its political 
and legal trappings, represents an alienation for the creative minds 
who are members of the state. Therefore, according to Harris “in the 
death of politics… may gestate a seed of revisionary, epic theatre 
rooted in complex changes in human and animal nature...” (Harris, 
'Jonestown' 8). Just as one‟s alienation from nature is both 
symptomatic of, and portends alienation from, fellow human-beings, 
one‟s alienation from one‟s fellow human beings reaches its highest 
expression in the state, and is hence symptomatic of alienation from 
one‟s self. Unlike Hegel, Harris possesses an anarchist aversion to 
systems, structures and the reification of human thought and life. As 
a thinker with an affinity to the existentialist movement, Harris 
shares many similarities with Heidegger and Jaspers. Just as Jaspers 
pays much attention to abnormal and schizophrenic personalities in 
general, Harris‟ central concern is the exploration of the disrupted 
psyche of the West Indian man (Davis 49). Just as Jaspers “attempts 
to penetrate the reality of possible world-views, and to understand 
their emergence from certain psychological types from forces which 
he calls „ideas‟'' (Heinemann 59), Harris was also in search of those 
cross-cultural vectors that link cultures – links found in the cross-
cultural imagination, for example.  

 
For Marx and Marxists, the economic expression of this 

alienation is revealed in the fact that under capitalism, man is 
reduced to a commodity – his relation with others is also a 
commodity relation. Even the expression 'market yourself' stripped 
of any metaphorical undertones, is equivalent to saying „alienate 
yourself‟. Human beings as makers of commodities become in the 
process of production a commodity to the extent that it is only one‟s 
labour capacities that are valued in bourgeois societies. “Everything 
is inverted”, remarks Heinemann, “what should be a reality, the 
choice [freedom] of the individual, becomes a mere possibility and 
what should be a possibility [the commodification of man] parades 
as a reality” (61). Marx‟s solution to the commodification of 
humanity is the socialization of the means of production, achieved by 
a proletarian revolution. The proletarian class representing the 
highest expression of exploitation is the only class in Marx's view 
that can bring about a classless society. Harris appreciated the plight 
of the working class, the “helplessness of the animal of fate destined 



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to labour in the promotion of privileges, but never to be accepted as 
equal participants in sorrow, or joy, or ecstasy of flesh and blood.” 
Unlike Marx however, Harris doubted the ability of the working class 
to bring about the redemption of humanity. He asks:  

 
How can the rich save the poor...the poor the rich, the thief 
the saint, the saint the thief, the judge the judged, the judged 
the judge unless they discard contentment, or a self-righteous 
creed [communism], self-righteous parasitism [capitalism], 
and build dimensions of self-confessional, self-judgmental art, 
that take them into recesses and spaces that may pull them 
into and beyond themselves. 

 
It is not that Harris failed to appreciate the capacity of the oppressed 
to initiate and facilitate projects of redemption, but whenever such 
people coalesce and become fixated into a class-in-itself and a class-
for-itself mentality, what Paget Henry refers to as „ontic closures‟, 
they create other sorts of problems. A failure to recognize this may 
keep us locked into a deadly cycle of violence. 
 
Harris’ Solution to the Problem of Alienation 

 
It might be helpful here to reiterate that for Harris, 

alienation is in part the comfort and simplicity we embrace which 
undermines our impulses for freedom. For Harris and many other 
existentialists, freedom usually comes with too much responsibility; 
individuals readily prefer a simple, mundane, inauthentic, alienated 
existence as an escape from the responsibility engendered by 
freedom. Humans often prefer symmetry and simplicity rather than 
a tragic fate. To watch a suffering neighbour for example and to stay 
silent is far easier than speaking out in his/her defence. To place the 
burden and responsibility of one‟s neighbour's situation on anything 
or anyone other than myself is of course, much more comforting. In 
surrendering our responsibilities consciously or unconsciously, we 
also surrender our freedom and our humanity, becoming in the 
process alienated and reified. One is therefore comfortable insofar as 
one lives in blessed ignorance, separate from the suffering of others. 

 
The Harrisian solution to alienation encourages us to embrace 

an ethics of freedom and responsibility: 
 

 In an extremely important sense all of Harris' fiction and his 
criticism since the closing years of the 1970's is an implicit 



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challenge to each and all of his contemporaries, readers and 
writers alike, to shake off those crippling parochialisms, and 
to join him in exploring the increasingly indispensable cross-
cultural imperatives of his new revolutionary, re-creative, 
global, vision.” (Hamlet, 207) 

 
Harris' ethics of freedom and responsibility has some similarities 
with Sartre and Levinas. For all three thinkers, freedom does not 
necessarily take on the passive meaning of „absence of restraints‟, but 
rather, freedom is active and can only be properly experienced in 
resisting oppression and systems which perpetuate dehumanization. 
Thus freedom is not the vulgar, „everydayness‟ of being able to go to 
the supermarket and choose between two brands of goods. Freedom 
becomes real and meaningful in extreme situations. Man is freedom, 
but man can only experience himself as such by acting in extreme 
situations. It is only then that man becomes known to himself. 

 
To understand Harris' ethics of freedom and his response to 

the problem of alienation, it is helpful to describe his metaphysics. In 
his Caliban's Reason, Paget Henry does a wonderful job of 
elucidating and making explicit Harris' ontology of consciousness. 
He begins by highlighting Harris' notion of consciousness. This 
consciousness should not be confused with Descartes‟ cogito which is 
used as the starting point of modern analytic philosophy. In Harris' 
own words, “when I speak of the unconscious [universal 
consciousness] I'm not only speaking of the human unconscious but 
of the unconscious that resides in objects, in trees, in rivers. I am 
suggesting that there is a psyche, a mysterious entity that links us to 
the unconscious in nature” (quoted in Henry 95). This universal 
consciousness exists in relation to the particular manifestations of 
self, society and nature, three spheres of existence with their own 
laws and quantum codes. Although self, society and nature exist on 
their own quantum layers and possess their own logic, the Harrisian 
“consciousness holds the key to their unity, interpenetration and 
transcendence” (Henry 96). The infinity and the boundlessness of 
this consciousness place it beyond the grasp of the human intellect 
which can only access it by means of the traces and images which it 
leaves behind in its interaction with the ego, society and nature on 
their respective quantum planes.  

 
Harris' philosophy of the interaction of consciousness and 

the ego is similar to Sartre's categories of „being‟ and „nothingness‟. 
„Nothingness‟ in its interaction with „being‟ negates it; similarly, 



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Harris' consciousness is involved in a kind of affirmation/negation 
interaction with the ego. The ego is an intentional structure; it is 
therefore constantly engaged in the creative construction of edifices 
that become so absolute that it tends to separate itself from the 
ground of reality upon which it was constructed. Some concrete 
examples of such ego-establishment on the quantum planes of self, 
society and nature might provide a further elucidation of Harris' 
philosophy.  

 
The policeman who tortured a 15 year old boy in Guyana by 

setting fire to the boy‟s genitals, all under the pretext of fulfilling a 
„police duty‟ places his partial reality, his alienated self (as a 
policeman), above his humanity. The state, the modern bureaucracy 
and capitalist systems which promote absolute rationalization and 
depersonalization are all manifestations of the collective ego 
establishing itself and building stone walls around its own existence, 
all while basking in the illusion that its very partial reality is the only 
reality. Technological progress which ignores the fragility and 
vulnerability of nature (which it exploits for raw resources) is an 
example of ego projection. The ego in all three cases “cut off from the 
guidance and symbolic inputs of the universal consciousness by its 
tendencies to ontic closures...imprisons itself in partial and limiting 
appropriations of reality” (Henry 121). But before the ego can 
become totally rigidified in the atomic person, the oppressive state, 
or in insensitive technological progress, consciousness asserts itself 
and brings about a void by dismantling the edifices of the ego, 
opening up the ego to new possibilities out of which it can again 
proceed with its creative activity. Harris' entire metaphysics can be 
summed up in the anarchist phrase „destruam et Aedificabo‟, or 
destroy and rebuild; the more absolute the establishment, the more 
necessary its disestablishment. 

 
As stated earlier, the above summary of Harris' ontology of 

consciousness is central to understanding his ethics. The Harrisian 
ethics is one that embraces freedom, responsibility and cross-
culturality. For Harris, freedom is not associated with licentiousness 
and moral perversity. Rather, such perversity “is a measure of 
alienation [which] we embrace within the gravity of freedom” 
(Harris, 'Jonestown' 166). Freedom means to resist with the radical 
and uncompromising imagination all ontic closures, and to open 
oneself to the infinite possibilities of the Harrisian unconscious. 
Such ontic closures manifest themselves in a life of everydayness, 
where one disregards others, or a life that is detached and 



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unresponsive to manifestations of oppression and discrimination. 
This is a life in which the individual ego brackets itself from the rest 
of humanity and becomes morally complacent to the extent that one 
becomes naturally blind, naturally deaf, and naturally numb to the 
misfortunes of others. In his own words, “one lives in blessed 
ignorance of what the other suffers.” 

 
This ontic closure can also manifest itself in history as a 

prison - this is particularly relevant to the Caribbean. Centuries after 
the soi disant (so-called) abolition of slavery and decades after 
masquerade independence, Caribbean people are still subject to 
slave institutions, slave politics and slave economics. One comedic 
manifestation of this tautology of history lies in “winner-take-all” 
politics in Guyana where the ascension to power of one party seems 
to be associated with the victory of one race over another. This is 
comedic in the sense that the “freedom” and “independence” which 
should have been taken as the opportunities to completely abolish 
slave institutions established by Europeans are now used as the 
means to perpetuate those institutions. This is tragic in the sense 
that the perpetuation of these institutions results in lost lives, 
poverty, powerlessness, marginalization and further exploitation. 
Failing to draw upon the resources of the cross-cultural imagination, 
we become trapped in history, haunted by the apparitions of the 
dead-in-the-living. “An innermost change in all institutions has to be 
paid for the gift of freedom...” (Harris, 'Jonestown' 177) or else man 
himself becomes the price that has to be paid for the irredeemable, 
unchanging institutions. In other words, either it is institutions 
which change to accord with the humanity of man or man changes to 
accord with the inhumanity and insensitivity of unchanging 
institutions. The following remark by Desmond Hamlet 
demonstrates Harris' insistence on the need to draw from the 
resources of the imagination to combat the structuralization of our 
being.  

 
In all his fiction and his criticisms since Da Silva‟s cultivated 
wilderness, Harris skilfully analyzes the complexities and 
rather urgent imperatives of the cross-cultural imagination, 
pleading...for a new sensitivity to, and a new awareness of, the 
crucial necessity for students and practitioners of the creative 
imagination to convert rooted deprivations into complex 
parables of freedom and truth (207). 

 



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For Harris, freedom and responsibility are two sides of the 
same coin. To be free is to be responsible, and vice versa. The first 
phase of responsibility is self-confession and self-judgment. Self-
confession entails coming to terms with and being true to oneself. 
The converse of self-confession is self-deception. Self-deception is 
another characteristic of an inauthentic and alienated being. Sartre 
defines it as consciousness directing its negation inwards rather than 
outwards (Sartre 242). It has already been demonstrated how the 
Harrisian unconscious relates to the ego. In this relation, what the 
Harrisian unconscious affirms inwardly, that is, its infinite 
possibility, it also affirms outwardly by negating any absolute 
structuralization of its being. It is by this process that a person lives 
genuinely and in good faith. Self-deception, on the other hand, 
entails affirming ones humanity inwardly, but negating it in one‟s 
words and action. We can again refer to the example of the torture of 
the 15 year old boy by the police. For that particular policeman, his 
police work which philosophically represents one of his possibilities 
as a human being becomes for him his only reality outside of which 
he does not exist. Because of this self-deception, it is easy for him to 
commit any amount of atrocities to another human being since he is 
merely engaged in “effective” police work. Another example is race. 
We give to our skin colour and hair texture a particular set of 
meanings from an infinite possibility of different meanings. By so 
doing we become trapped into being Africans, Indians, Amerindians, 
etc., to the extent that these ontic closures become the totality of our 
being. By living in this self-deception it becomes easy to live in utter 
isolation, detached from the problems of the 'other'. 
 

It is this self-deception that Harris confronts in all of his 
writings. For him Guyana is poor, but graver than its economic 
poverty are the poverty of being, the poverty of morality, and the 
poverty of the cross-cultural imagination. The poverty of the cross-
cultural imagination manifests itself in the fact that 45 years after 
independence, after Africans, Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, 
Amerindians all fought for independence, Guyanese have failed 
miserably in developing that particular cross-cultural ethic which 
boldly and revolutionarily declares that 'an injustice against one is an 
injustice against all'. In the place of self-deception, Harris implores 
us to engage in the profound art of self-confession and self-
judgment; thus in lieu of alienation, we must embrace freedom with 
all its responsibility and gravity. 

 
 



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Works Cited 

 

Davis, Viola J. The Creative Use of Schizophrenia in Caribbean Writing. 

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Hamlet, Desmond. “Sustaining the Vision Wilson Harris and the 

Uncompromising Imagination”. Wilson Harris The Uncompromising 

Imagination. Ed. Hene Maes-Jelinek. Dangaroo Press, 1991. 

 

Harris, Wilson. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis 

of the Imagination London: Routledge. 

 

---. Jonestown, London: Faber and Faber. 

 

Heinemann, F. H. Existentialism and the Modern Predicament. London: 

Adam and Charles Black, 1958. 

 

Henry, Paget. Caliban's Reason. London: Routledge. 

 

Kainz, Howard P. G.W.F. Hegel: Philosophical System. Ohio: Ohio 

University Press, 1998. 

 

Kaufmann, Walter. Existentialism From Dostoevsky To Sartre. New York: 

The World Publishing Company, 1968. 

 

Knox, T. M. Hegel's Philosophy of Right. London: Oxford University Press, 

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Lowith, Karl. Max Weber and Karl Marx. London: George Allen and 

Unwin, 1986. 

 


