A new look at Alan Watts

Alan Watts

Alan Watts was a big influend on Robert Anton Wilson, so yesterday I read an article about him published this year, "On Knowing Who He Was," by Christopher Harding.  

Here's how the article begins:

"On 16 November 1973, Joan Watts received a phone call that began in the worst possible way: ‘Are you sitting down?’ Her father, the English writer and philosopher Alan Watts, had died during the previous night, as a storm lashed his home in Marin County, California. His heart had failed at the age of just 58. Watts’s third wife, Mary Jane Yates King or ‘Jano’, blamed his experiments with breathing techniques intended to achieve samadhi, or absorptive contemplation: he had left his body, she thought, without knowing how to come back. Joan took a different view. Her father had become lost in work and alcohol. He had finally ‘had enough’, she concluded, and had ‘checked out’."

The article does not avoid discussing Watts' flaws but explains why he was an interesting thinker. 

I ran across the piece from a new Ted Gioia Substack newsletter, "The 25 Best Online Articles of 2024." I will probably read the article on MAD magazine Ted recommends. The Spotify article looks interesting, too, but Ted summarized it in another recent newsletter.