Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Individualism and the ‘aesthetic philosopher’
- 2 Empiricism and the Imperilled Self
- 3 Subjectivity and Imagination: From Hume to Kant via Berkeley
- 4 Metaphysics: Pater's Failed Attempt at Atheism
- 5 Sense and Sensuality: Caught between Venus and Dionysus
- 6 Pater's Copernican Revolution: The Desiring, Dying Body
- 7 Evolution and the ‘Species’: The Individual in Deep Time
- 8 The Moment and the Aesthetic Imagination
- 9 Ethics, Society and the Aesthetic Individual
- 10 Conclusion: ‘the elusive inscrutable mistakable self’
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: Individualism and the ‘aesthetic philosopher’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Individualism and the ‘aesthetic philosopher’
- 2 Empiricism and the Imperilled Self
- 3 Subjectivity and Imagination: From Hume to Kant via Berkeley
- 4 Metaphysics: Pater's Failed Attempt at Atheism
- 5 Sense and Sensuality: Caught between Venus and Dionysus
- 6 Pater's Copernican Revolution: The Desiring, Dying Body
- 7 Evolution and the ‘Species’: The Individual in Deep Time
- 8 The Moment and the Aesthetic Imagination
- 9 Ethics, Society and the Aesthetic Individual
- 10 Conclusion: ‘the elusive inscrutable mistakable self’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Art is the most intense form of Individualism …
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (142)Beyond and above all the various interests upon which the philosopher's mind was ever afloat, there was one subject always in prominence – himself.
Walter Pater, Gaston de Latour (54)The faltering centre of Walter Pater's aesthetic philosophy is his conception of the individual. The individual, and not art, is at the very heart of his aestheticism. Amid the storms that assailed subjectivity in mid-Victorian culture, Pater's aesthetic is a portrait of humanity ‘in its uncertain condition’ (R 39); an admission that we may be but ‘a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream’ (R 151), spiritually desolate and ever possessed by conflicting desires. Yet still it is animated by the quiet Romantic ambition that self-identity in the modern world may be reconceived through aesthetic experience. Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy explores Pater's individualism, both intellectual and personal, and how this individualism is formed through his attempt to redefine the scope of philosophical thought under the conditions of modernity. As it does so it asserts that Pater is the philosophical centre of aestheticism, and explores his significant interventions in the relationship between the individual and art, and ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’, as they underwent significant revision in mid to late nineteenth-century Britain.
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- Information
- Walter PaterIndividualism and Aesthetic Philosophy, pp. 1 - 23Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013