Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death

Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism

Giles Whitely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781906540647
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351193771
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Languages

"Walter Pater, best known as the author of The Renaissance (1873) and as Oscar Wildes tutor and friend, was a leading figure in European aestheticism and British fin-de-siecle culture. Despite this, he has received only limited critical attention, and has tended to be read conservatively. Drawing on Paters unpublished manuscripts, Giles Whiteley challenges this view of Pater as a closeted don who spend the remainder of his life regretting the excesses of his Renaissance. Focusing on Paters reading of the German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, Whiteley argues that Paters response to both the philosophical and the ideological legacies of idealism was significantly more advanced than has been hitherto thought. Presenting a persuasive new reading of the genre of the imaginary portrait Paters most elusive form of writing the book paints a picture of Walter Pater as a truly revolutionary thinker. Pater, like Nietzsche during the same period, breaks with the dialectic as a method. Anticipating the radical critiques of ideology of post- Hegelians such as Derrida and Deleuze, Pater becomes a radical and transgressive thinker in his own right."

CHAPTER 1
The Hegelian Structure of Pater's 'Reconsidered' Aestheticism

We will never be finished with the reading or rereading of Hegel.¹

Pater’s early reputation at Oxford was founded on his expertise in German idealist philosophy, Thomas Wright claiming that Pater’s elevation to a fellowship at Brasenose in 1864 was ‘thanks chiefly [. . .] to his knowledge of German philosophy, and especially [. . .] Hegel’.² Pater had first read Hegel during the summer of 1862, his final year as an undergraduate, beginning with the Phenomenology of Spirit; indeed, Ingram Bywater claims that Pater learnt German specifically in order to read this text.³ During the same summer, Pater also read Hegel’s History of Philosophy and the Science of Logic. In April 1863, after his graduation, Pater read Hegel’s Aesthetics, and in March 1864 he returned to Hegel’s Logic in its Encyclopaedia form. And whilst we have no direct date for his studying The Philosophy of Right, a reference in ‘Coleridge’s Writings’ (AP, p. 76) suggests that he must have done so by the early summer of 1865, the probable composition date for the essay.⁴

Pater’s interest in German idealism was opportune and caught the Zeitgeist. His aesthetic project, whilst seeking to maintain distance from Hegelian ‘orthodoxy’, was generally sympathetic to certain Hegelian themes and carried out in an Oxford whose climate was becoming gradually more sympathetic to German idealism. Whilst Britain had not been accommodating to Hegel in the first half of the nineteenth century,⁵ idealism began to form a bastion in Oxford during Pater’s tenure there. By the end of Pater’s life, Oxford was generally deemed to have been Hegelianized, R. B. Haldane claiming in 1895 that ‘Oxford has been the cradle of a Hegelian movement’.⁶ Pater’s project of aestheticism then was pursued in the same climate of philosophical enquiry at Oxford which fostered the idealisms of T. H. Green, Edward Caird, and William Wallace.⁷ All three of these philosophers were, along with Pater, students of Benjamin Jowett (who himself did much to popularize Hegel in Britain),⁸ and all three, again along with Pater, were members of Oxford’s Old Mortality Society.⁹

Thus Pater’s reputation was initially founded on his comprehension of idealism and his aesthetic project ran concurrent with the philosophical movement of Oxford Hegelianism. But while the Hegelian inheritance underlying Pater’s thought has long been recognized,¹⁰ what has not yet been shown is how Pater’s mature ‘reconsidered’ aestheticism relied, not on one or other of Hegel’s philosophies or doctrines, but on itself taking on Hegel’s structure and method to such a degree that Hegelianism became structural to Pater’s aestheticism.

To repeat: the stakes of Pater’s Hegelianism cannot be deemed purely a question of influence. There is, of course, no question that Pater was influenced by Hegel, nor that Harold Bloom’s concept of the ‘anxiety of influence’ may productively be applied to Pater. Bloom himself has indeed done something similar with reference to Ruskin, arguing that whilst ‘Ruskin is ignored by name’ in Pater’s texts, ‘he hovers everywhere in them’.¹¹ But Pater’s response to Hegel is not merely to his texts, but takes the form of a total Hegelianization of his aestheticism. And it is Pater’s Hegelian structure which we will examine in this chapter, for without first appreciating the deep structural implications of Pater’s Hegelianism we will not recognize Pater’s identification of Hegel’s ‘radical dualism’ for the transgressive act it was.

Idealism and Subject–Object Identity

What do we mean when we say that Pater’s thought becomes Hegelian? We have already pointed out that we are speaking of Hegel as a name, and Hegelianism as a brand. But just what constitutes Hegelianism?

Speaking broadly, Hegel’s philosophy can be characterized as idealist. In an idealism the perceived world is considered an ens rationis, a thing of the mind. Such a basic conception of idealism, what might be called a subjective idealism, is clearly concurrent with Pater’s project right from its earliest stages. As he writes in Marius, in an autobiographical reflection on his own youthful philosophy:

Already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue all his life, something of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of his meditative power.

(ME, 1, 24)

But Hegel is an objective idealist and when we say that Pater’s aestheticism became Hegelian we mean that his subjective idealism gave way to an objective one.

In an objective idealism such as Hegel’s, the essence of material reality lies in mind or spirit (Geist). This is not to say that an objective idealism renounces the doctrine that the world is an ens rationis; it remains so. But an objective idealism holds that this ens rationis is also and at the same time an ens reale, a thing of the world. The world, constructed by the activity of the human consciousness, does not only have a subjective existence but also, insofar as this construct itself constitutes the world, an objective existence. In other words, the movement of thought which constitutes the subjective idealism, insofar as it manifests Geist, manifests the world, and thus constitutes at one and the same time an objective idealism.¹²

Objective idealism rests upon subject–object identity. This is acknowledged by Hegel in his defence of his fellow idealist and friend, Friedrich Schelling, against the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.¹³ This same logic of subject–object identity rests at the cornerstone of Pater’s aesthetic project. As he famously writes:

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.

(R, p. 125)

The condition of music is then the state in which matter (object) and form (subject) are united. It is the aim of art to obliterate the distinction between subject and object, subject and object here standing in for negatively rational moment (subject) and abstraction (object), unified in the positively rational moment (art).

Phenomenology

Hegel is aware that the subject–object identity which lies at the cornerstone of his idealism is a philosophical ‘truth’ which is not immediately apparent to the average reader, in that it appears to contradict the basic philosophical laws of identity and non-identity. Thus, in 1807, he published the Phenomenology of Spirit, the aim of which was to prove to the ordinary (non-philosophical) consciousness that ‘truth’ lay in subject–object identity, to raise the consciousness up into a position of self-consciousness and thereby to prepare it for the activity of philosophy: ‘It is this coming-to-be of Science as such or of knowledge, that is described in this Phenomenology of Spirit’ (§ 27).

This elevation (the Aufhebung as la relève) of consciousness to self-consciousness is achieved in what Immanuel Kant terms the transcendental apperception, which Hegel categorizes as ‘authentic idealism’.¹⁴ It is idealist in that in the apperception the self (as subject) is conscious of the self (as object) in the moment of self-consciousness. In the preface to the Phenomenology, Hegel puts it as follows: ‘the goal is necessarily fixed for knowledge as [. . .] the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion’ (§ 80). The ‘goal’ of knowledge is to achieve a unity of subject and object; the ‘goal’ of philosophy is thus one and the same as the ‘goal’ of art in Pater’s formulation.

However, philosophical thinking, according to Hegel, requires training. This is the theme of Bildung, or education, which is so cardinal to both Hegel’s philosophy and Pater’s aestheticism. Pater’s Marius the Epicurean itself constitutes a Bildungsroman, as indeed, it might be argued, does Hegel’s Phenomenology, which sets itself ‘the task of leading the individual from his uneducated standpoint to knowledge’ (§ 28).¹⁵

This initial reflection preliminary to philosophical enquiry is the process of phenomenology.¹⁶ Broadly defined as the study of phenomena as phenomena, of the objects of subjective perception as perceptions, rather than as things-in-themselves, phenomenology constitutes ‘a form of methodological idealism’, as Terry Eagleton notes.¹⁷ And Pater’s famous methodological preface to his Renaissance constitutes the same phenomenological reduction:

‘To see the object as in itself it really is’, has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever, and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.

(R, p. viii)

The quotation with which Pater begins this, the second paragraph of the text, is from Matthew Arnold, and, as Isobel Armstrong has argued, it is ‘Kant’s category of the aesthetic’ that lies ‘behind Arnold’s grand style’.¹⁸ Indeed, in Arnold’s formulation of an ‘object in itself’ we can hear a clear echo of Kant’s Ding-an-sich and the noumena which he opposes to phenomena (CR, A249–260, B294–315). But Pater’s movement from Arnold’s position to a form of phenomenological enquiry marks an appreciation that the Arnoldian–Kantian thing-in-itself leads to a critical and philosophical cul-de-sac. Kant’s Ding-an-sich is a fetish object as far as Hegel is concerned. As Eagleton puts it, ‘Hegel will have none of this effeminate cringing before the thing-in-itself, this timid last-minute withdrawal of thought from its full penetration of the object’.¹⁹ So too with Pater, who in moving towards knowing ‘one’s own impression as it really is’, conceives of this movement not as a renunciation of knowledge of thing-in-itself, but, in typical idealist reflection, as being constitutive of it. Note that Pater at no point dismisses Arnold’s category, his definition of criticism ‘justly’ said to be its aim. For Hegel, Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself became knowable in phenomenology: subjectively mediated experience itself constitutes the thing-in-itself. In the identity of the subject and the object, in the way that knowledge of ‘one’s impression as it really is’ precipitates knowledge of the thing-in-itself, the Paterean aesthetic method certainly appears phenomenological.

Pater’s phenomenology, even though framed as a methodological statement in the preface to the Renaissance, constitutes a transcendental rather than a hermeneutic pheno menology. As such, it is more Husserlian than Heideggerean.²⁰ Defining transcend ental phenomenology, Dermot Moran argues that, for Husserl, the essence of the eidetic reduction lies in ‘the a priori structure of object-constituting subjectivity’.²¹ The object is constituted in the pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Pater's Reading and Rereading of Hegel
• 1 The Hegelian Structure of Pater's 'Reconsidered' Aestheticism
• 2 The Philosophy of (the Impossibility of) Death
• 3 The Imaginary Portraits
• 4 Autobiography and the Writing Of Death
• Conclusion: The Ideology of Aestheticism
• Bibliography
• Index