Wildean Individualism as Aesthetic Proto-Personalism

The ascendency of the individual in philosophical thought was not an isolated occurance in modernist thinkers across Europe in the 19th and 20th century. Painting in broad strokes, philosophical trends such as egoism, individualism, and eventually personalism cropped up as a response to the strictures of soceity and the state which deemphasized the priority of the person or the individual in social, ethical and ideological structures. [1] Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is not unique in this regard. Throughout the course of his own life and writing, Wilde constructs the concept of his own individualism, the ideal human aesthetic orientation as well as the preferred social arrangement which would catalyze the cultivation of the Wildean individualist. While egoism, individualism and personalism all have their own subtle nuances in this regard, the developmental links between the three distinct philosophical stances are of significant import to a proper delineation of their philosophical stakes, and the practical implications of their phenomenology. [2] The goal of this analysis is to interrogate the development of Wildean individualism in dialogue with the subsequent development of personalism in both Continental philosophy by reading Wilde's work against that of Emmanual Mounier (1905-1950) specifically.

Mounier was a leading French figure in personalism during the first half of the 20th century. Personalism—just as individualism—was not an isolated philosophical incident. At the same time as Mounier and his influence Charles Péguy (1873-1914) were writing in France, a school of personalist thought was taking roots in Boston, Massachusetts through the inspiriation of Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910). This American school of thought became known as Boston Personalism which would serve as an important intellectual catalyst for the social thought and work of prominent 20th century figures such as Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. To see how strains of thought focusing on the the philosophical primacy of the individual would catalyze significant social and political movements, it seems highly beneficial to attempt an analysis of Wildean individualism which could restore and highlight the significance of Wilde's voice and insight in this philosophical response to modernism.

Individualism can be seen as preceding personalism in that, philosophical individualists were responding to influence mechanistic determinism and positivism in the modern conception of the ethical person. Mounier writes,

Individualism is a system of morals, feelings, ideas and instituations in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defence. [...] Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and undirected; turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoism should not encroach upon one another, or to their betterment as a purely profitmaking association [...] [3]

Personalists, by and large, were responding to an individualism which did not take its critique of modernism far enough vis-à-vis individualism's reconfiguring of the ethical goals of society to free the individual. This analysis will attempt to show how Wildean individualism, especially in its development toward the end of Wilde's life, anticipated the personalist critiques of individualism and in so doing, prefigure the holistic, organic image of the individual which serves as the bedrock of personalist thought. By elevating Wilde to a position which prefigures personalist philosophy, there is an opportunity to open doors which reconsider Wilde's aestheticism and social commentary and his applicability to contemporary ethical dialogue.

Because Wilde's philosophical thought is slippery at best when explicated through his fictional repetoire, this analysis will focus primarily on the social and ethical essays in which the reader can presume the voice of the real Wilde is speaking (that is, with little or no mask): particularly The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), and De Profundis (1897) . A cursory look will be given to the social dialogues published in Intentions —mainly, The Critic as Artist (1891) , and The Decay of Lying (1891) . The first and primary undertaking of this analysis, is to reconfigure the Wildean individual as a holistic personal unity, rather than a mechnistically bifurcated self and will searching simply for autonomous self-determination. To lay the groundwork, this essay will begin a prelimary discursis on the distinction between person of individualism and the person of personalism. Following discussion of this distinction, it becomes possible to put Wilde and Mounier into dialogue, by closely investigating the similarities in each of their thought as it relates to a definition of the person and the self. Ultimately, having laid the ground work of a personalist interpretation of Wilde's phenomenology, it is Wilde's aestheticism that lies at the heart of his unique and progressive conceptualization of the person.

The Individual

Wilde's interrogation of the concept of the individual, and more particularly the "individualist," spans through his works in explicit ways as well as through subtle literary tropes. This analysis focuses primarily on his investigation of his intentional explication of the individual and the individualist alike.

To penetrate into Wildean individualism and put it in dialogue with trends in personalism it is necessary to briefly flesh out the distinction between these particular frames of thought with regard to their anthropological and ethical dimension. These philosophical schools, as they bear relation to the prominency of the individual in philosophical methodology dating back to Cartesian thought up through 19th and 20th century egoism, place their greatest conceptual stakes precisely upon their definition of the person. In both individualism and personalism, a precise understanding of what constitutes the self determines how the will exists in relationship to the person and society. This introduction to Wilde's personalism will open first by delineating the conceptual differences used in this analysis between traditional individualism and personalism; that is, from a phenomenological standpoint, individualism is premised on the disintegration of the self and will in order to promote the ideal of an autonomous, self-determining person free from the strictures of society. The personalist perspective, on the other hand, understands the person as an organic and unifed whole engaged in an interative process of self-actualization and dynamic inter-relationality with the exterior world. To introduce this subject, the analysis will briefly unpack Wilde's criticism of materialist individualism in The Soul of Man and his suggestion of a more nuanced view of the Wildean individual using Christ as a model. By the end of this introduction to Wilde's individualism there will be three particularly striking conceptual theses worth comparing to the work of French personalist Mounier.

In his article "Individualism and Personalism" in Ethical Perspectives, Roland Breeur precisely distinguishes between the way that individualism and personalism treat these relationships respectively. His explication provides a helpful point of departure for this analysis although not uncritically: In the first conception, [individualism], this relation remains external: reflection is not of the

same order as the self and, conversely, the self is something that always falls outside of reflection, something against which a position can be occupied and a (critical) distance taken. [...] The second conception sees the self and reflection as forming an organic unity preceding any conscious indentification. [...] This is the personalistic conception of the self. The self and reflection share one and the same nature, and the relation between them is internal. [4]

In other words, the individualist sees the primary purpose of life and society as providing freedom to the person to obtain autonomy by willfully self-determining the life he or she desires. In this way, the will is set as a sovereign over the self and this capacity for autonomous self-determination is either catalyzed or obstructed by social forces. Personalism, as movement, evolved in part as a response to what is percevied as an artificially bifurcated phenomenology which atomized the person into a will and a social marionette. Rather than understanding the person as a will which seeks to exert external control over the self, personalism reconfigured the person as an organic whole which does not assimilate anything external without a reorganizing of the totality which is achieved solely by internal forces. [5] Certainly there are aspects of Wildean individualism which appear consonant with this artificial bifurcation of the person as a critique of oppressive social forces. There are, however, as this analysis will attempt to show, sufficient grounds for the reconsideration of Wildean individualism as a holistic unity of the self and the will which prefigures the personalist critiques of traditional individualism.

In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (hereafter referred to as The Soul of Man ), Wilde first introduces the concept of individuality by critiquing the insufficieny of the "individualism" that is buttressed by overt materialism. Even in our contemporary day, it is apparent how individualism can be transposed onto capitalist sensitivites by concluding that the accumulation of wealth is necessary for the individual to obtain the power of autonomous self-determination within society. If an individual desires a life for his or her self which includes certain possessions or material luxuries it will first be necessary for the individual to obtain the wealth required so that one is wilfully free to shape the self with whatever material goods are desired. [6]

Wilde develops the pre-conditions of a society in which the material circumstances would contribute to a society's capacity to cultivate Wildean individualism: the abolition of private property and the distinguishing of poverty. [7] Following this discussion, Wilde points to a few examples (primarily artists) who serve as examples of this achievement:

But it may be asked how Individualism, which is now more or less dependent on the existence of private property for its development, will benefit by the abolition of such private property. The answer is very simple. It is true that, under existing conditions, a few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire and others, have been able to realize their personality more or less completely. [8]

Wilde is implying that the material freedom (i.e. the person of wealth is free to obtain what he or she desires) of these examples enables their individual freedom to "realize their personality." He continues:

Under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realized individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. [9]

Wilde goes on to flesh out how modern society has done damage to the notion of individualism by burdening it with shallow materialism and putting the onus of a man's self-realization on his material freedom. He makes a point to highlight that the individualism of which he speaks is not merely that of the examples he has given. However, because of the following explication of the "materialistic individualism" it is not precisely clear where the "great imaginatively-realized individualism of such poets" falls between the corrupted materialistic individualism, and the ideal Wildean individualism. Wilde clearly sees these poets as having realized an individualism which grasps toward Wildean individualism and was able to "imaginatively" circumvent the corrupting influences of materialism. This is an important clarifying distinction, because it emphasises the idiosyncratic nature of his understanding, use and advocation of the notion of individualism. [10]

Wilde's critique of material individualism folds into his utilization of Christ as the Wildean individualist par excellence. [11] Wilde foregrounds his classicism and pivots on the image of Christ: "'Know Thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be Thyself' shall be written. And the message of Christ to man was simply 'Be Thyself.'" [12] Wilde's interpretation of Jesus' teaching notwithstanding, "be thyself" seems prima facie to be the slogan of individualism from the 19th century to the present day. Nevertheless, the ambiguity and ubiquity of this turn of phrase— be thyself— requires more thorough explication to uncover Wilde's intended meaning.

Wilde continues, "What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, 'You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don't imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your perfection is inside of you.'" [13] Wilde's bifurcation of the internal and the external is significant to note with regard to our initial qualification (vis-a-vis Breeur) to the distinction between individualism and personalism. The objection may be raised however, that in this passage, Wilde's explication of Jesus' teaching is with regard merely to external material goods i.e. riches. However, his appeal to self-realization as something that arises internally leaves the door open for personalist, rather than a traditional individualist, interpretation of Wilde's phenomenology. [14] In order to demonstrate this, it will be necessary to show that Wildean self-realization is not merely the freedom for the individual to willfully self-determine the life he or she desires to live, but rather the actualization and unity of a pre-existent will and self.

There are a variety of peculiar consonances between Wilde's development of the person and the work of French personalist Emmanuel Mounier. Putting Wilde's writing in dialogue with Mounier will draw out crucial aspects of Wildean individualism which exemplifies its unique relationship to personalist philosophy. The concluding section of this analysis will give special attention to three substantial congruencies in the anthropological dimensions of Wilde and Mounier: the separation of thought from action with the emphasis on being, the constant of change when adopting a personalist viewpoint, and the inclusion—rather than exclusion—of others in ideal self-actualization. Exploration of these three examples will not only provide the grounds for demonstrating the complex nuances of Wildean individualism, but distinguish its unique position in relationship to the historical development of personalism.

Having done this, the analysis will conclude by explicating Wilde's aestheticism with particular regard for the nature and role of the person. Beginning as an artist and aestheticist conceptualizing the nature of the person and social existence, Wilde's unique aesthetic idealism translates into a complex and nuanced vision of the self as an organic and dynamic unity involved in ongoing interiorizing and exteriorizing actualization and development. As a result, his aestheticism leds itself to an phenomenology much more resonant with personalist philosophy (particularly that of Mounier) and can adequetely be qualified as a type of aesthetic proto-personalism.

Doing, Being, Thought and Action

Aware of it or not, Wilde is part of a trend in European philosophy in the 19th century which criticized over-intellectual philosophy as putting too high of a stake in the world of thought disunified from the world of action and vice versa. Both Wilde and Mournier highlight important critiques of this idealism as feckless. [15] In A Personalist Manifesto Mournier places new emphasis on the embodied spirit (as opposed to the disembodied spirit): "Bourgeois humanism is based essentially on the separation of spirit from matter and of thought from action." [16] In Wilde's Critic as Artist, Gilbert turns the notion of "the contemplative life" on its head for his interlocutor: "Yes, Ernest; the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming —that is what the critical spirit can give us." [17] What is important to note about this consonance is twofold: first, the reinvigorated organic unity of the person's thought and action, and second, the dynamic interrelation of the individual with the transience and mutability of temporal existence.

The dialectic synthesis of the spirit and matter (or thought and action) can be conceptually mapped onto this analyses focus on the interrelation of the will and the self. By foregrounding the embodied nature of the spirit and matter, Mounier bypasses the dualistic conceptions of the person. Gilbert, in this passage comes at this type phenomenology from a slightly different angle. It would appear at first, that through Gilbert, Wilde is making precisely the opposite assertion but equating doing with action, and being with thought and therefore advocating the pure life of the mind. But this is a misreading of Wilde's intention. Wilde's emphasis on doing is defined by Gilbert's subsequent criticism of the mindlessly overworked masses. His goal in replacing the emphasis on the contemplative life, and the goal of being, is to reunite the will with his inner depths, and through art evoke the moods and emotions of the true self. Gilberts being, in this way, evokes for us a sense of the organically unified person, in will and self, who is not alienated by the material requirements or oppressiveness of Victorian society.

But Gilbert takes it one step further in his search for the critical spirit. It is not merely being, he says, but becoming. Gilbert later says, "[...] each mode of criticism is, in its highest development, simply a mood, and [...] we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent." [18] Breeur, in facts, cites this excerpt from The Critic as Artist as the sincere expression not of the individualist, but of the personalist. [19] It is evoked by the critical spirit promoted in the Critic as Artist, that the goal of life is not to have the space for the mechanistic redefinition of the self (as the individualist might say), but rather, the space for the organic unfolding of growth that is the unity of the self, and the true selfs dynamic dialectic of existence with others and society. Mounier writes, and is worth quoting at length:

A person is a spiritual being, constituted as such by its manner of existence and independence of being; it maintains this existence by its adhesion to a hierarchy of values that it has freely adopted, assimilated, and lived by its own responsible activity and by a constant interior development; this it unifies all its activity in freedom and by means of creative acts develops the individuality of its vocation. [20]

Mounier and Wilde both hinge their thought and deductions on the evolutionary progress and dynamism of the self and the collective as well as an organic image of the life of the person. [21] Mounier's focus on the individuality produced by creative acts parallel's Wilde's emphasis on the development of the critical spirit and the primacy of the artist in this endeavor. Mounier's strong focus on the "vocation" and Wilde's aestheticism and primacy of the artist will be returned to in the final section. At this point in the analysis, it serves primarily to underscore a strong similarity in the way Mounier and Wilde both conceptualize the unity of the person—the self and will—by attempting to overturn dualistic constructions of thought and action or doing and being.

The Predictability of Change

The subject of the dynamism of the person pivots precisely our second dialogue between Mounier and Wilde: the constancy of change. As we will uncover, the significance of this similarity lies in it implications about both thinkers consideration of the person as an organic unity. A traditional individualist may struggle to conceive of an phenomenology which accounts for the dynamism of existence on apart of the organic, changing nature and intersubjectivity of the self in existence. Instead, the will would be accountable for the dynamism of existence change in the self purely because of alterations enforced by the will. This is not what we see in Wilde nor Mounier, but rather, a whole person as a totality who is involved in the iterative evolution and actualization of his or her being, and as a result cannot be predicted, pre-determined, or immutablely definable self.

In laying out his social theory in The Soul of Man, Wilde writes: It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really know about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. [22]

What is important to note are the implications of Wilde's sincerity about human nature concerning his conceptualization of the person. Mounier reflects Wilde's sentiments in his introduction to Personalism when he writes: "But [personalism's] central affirmation being the existence of a free and creative persons, it introduces into the heart of its construction a principle of unpredictability which excludes any desire for a definite system." [23] Notably, both Mounier and Wilderare foregrounding the essence of creativity in the human spirit as indicative of his fundamentally undefinable and organic nature as a person. They are both then drawing the conclusion that any system (be it social or otherwise) which is based upon a static conceptualization of the person will fail because it will never account for the flexibility and change intrinsic to human nature.

From this basic axiomatic observation, Mounier goes on to draw out the basic conclusions we should make about our understanding of the person qua person. In spite of a person's essential mutability he argues:

[...] the essence of the person, being indefinable, is never exhausted by its expression, nor subjected to anything by which it is conditioned. [...] It is the living activity of self-creation, of communication and of attachment, that grasps and knows itself, in the act, as the movement of becoming personal. [24]

Mounier goes on later in Personalism to highlight the nature of the person as a "dialectic of the interior and objective." [25] It is a necessary cyclical movement of interiorization and exteriorization where the person is in the constant motion of inward self-development and outward expressiveness of this self which then must reengage with exteriorized world by interiorizing it, so on and so forth. "It is this primordial motive which," Mounier writes, "moves us to exteriorize our feelings in mimicry or in speech, to inflict the imprint of our action upon visible works and to intervene in the affairs of the world and of other people." [26] Gilbert, in The Critic as Artist, could hardly have constructed a more appropriate phenomenology to underscore his vision of the critical spirit at work in man. The true artist, for Gilbert, engenders the critical spirit by interiorizing experiences of his fellow man and the collective cultural expression. [27] As a creative critical spirit then, he is engaged in part and parcel to the recreative motion of the race itself, just as the race plays a critical role in his ongoing development and evolution as person. This personalist vision helps to qualify the person not as an agent engaged in recreation as a will directed over a malleable self, but as a personal totality embedded in organic development of the self in relation to the life of the collective. Its certainly in this spirit that both Mounier and Wilde can curious extrapolate their vision of the unique person, over the course of history as a unity of unique persons, who each hold history in their hands. [28]

The Inclusion of the Other

In The Soul of Man, Wilde develops his critique of the moralistic oppression of social forces against the individual:

[...] A man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realization of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should life. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to life. And unselfishness is letting other peoples lives alone, not interfering with them. [29]

One might expect that the individualist would stop here, asserting that the goal of social intercourse for each person to cultivate an unobstructed freedom of expression for each other. But Wildean individualism does not stop here. Rufus Burrow, in his Personalism: A Critical Introduction, lays out this distinction between the individualist and the personalist ethic: the personalist self is understood as a relational being, as opposed tot he individualist self which is atomized and non-relational. [30] In both The Soul of Man and De Profundis, Wilde constructs this more nuanced vision of the inter-relationality of the Wildean individualist and his community. Following his treatment of selfishness and its relation to individualism, Wilde turns the notion of egotism on its head by asserting that it is actually born out of the insinuation of one's life on another. Instead, the Wildean individualist "will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous lives of others." [31] Notably, this becomes not merely the freedom of all in pursuit of self-actualization, but in fact the inclusion of others in one's own personal growth and development.

In De Profundis, Wilde explicates this in light of his interpretation of the teaching of Christ: "But while Christ did not say to men, 'Live for others,' he pointed out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life." It is not evident that Wilde read any of Edmund Husserl's (1859–1938) work on intersubjectivity, but at this point, Wilde gestures toward this parallel intellectual development in continental phenomenology which would lay the groundwork for personalism as a movement in French philosophy. [32] Developing particularly the work of Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) Mounier clarifies this inclusion of others (evident in Wilde's writing) as pivotal to the distinction between individualism and the outlook of personalism: "[...] if the first condition of individualism is the centralization of the individual in himself, the first condition of personalism is his decentralization, in order to set him in the open perspective of his personal life." While Wilde would probably not have opted for terminology of "decentralization," it is vitally clear from Gilbert's explication of the critical spirit, and Wilde's depiction of the cultural artist functioning in society, that interaction and the free development of others is necessary to the free development of the self. This is the spirit of inter-relationality and the decentralization which lies at the heart of Mounier's personalism.

In this way, the language of the unbounded will asserting power over the self becomes obscured in Wilde when having been freed from all force of others, the self now enters back into being determined by others. This curiosity is echoes a precise advancement that personalists like Mounier attempted to explicate which appeared lacking in the individualist mentality. It is necessary to see, that in order to conceptualize the person as a holistic unity, one must account for the influence of other person's on the self. One cannot simply be freed from others, but must be freed unto others. For the individualist, the ideal is the continually mechanistic atomization of opposing wills so that each self can be as free to self-determine as one desires; but for the personalist— and the Wildean individualist—the ideal is the environmental co-determination of selves in their freedom in the process of perfecting the system and each personal totality of which it is composed. It is in this spirit that Wilde concludes The Soul of Man: "When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. [...] It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection." [33] It is a pivotal distinction to make, that Wilde, particularly in The Soul of Man, does not advocate the development of a society in which an individual can be whatever he desires, but a society in which each individual can be truly actualized into what he is. [34] The former casts society as an compelling force which restrains the will from determination of the self, the latter casts society as a compelling force which inhibits the individual from actualization of his person as a totality. The materialist individualism which Wilde critiques occupies the former, his interpretations of the teachings of Christ occupy the latter. Reading him in parallel with Mounier, we see how Wilde's development of being and becoming, the inconstancy of human nature, and the inclusion of the other add much difficulty in classifying Wilde among the ranks of the mechanistic individualist. Instead, Wildean individualism appears arguably much more like a predecessor of the organic phenomenology of the sensitivities of personalist philosophy which follow him temporally. Through this preceding section, the conceptual crux of Wilde's proto-personalism and his vision of the person as a holistic unity has more and more clear: his aestheticism.

The Aesthetic

Throughout the course of this analysis, the conceptual stake upon which Wilde builds this holistic unity of the person has only been gestured toward. Having now the laid the groundwork of his general consonance with the French personalist Mounier specifically, we can further explicate the fundamental interdependence of Wilde's aestheticism with his conceptualization of the ideal individual.In his article in Logos, Terence Wright explicates Mounier's concept of the "vocation:" In Emmanual Mounier's vision, a personalist society will be realized only if there is a spiritual

awakening. At the heart of this awakening is the person's opportunity and willingness to discern and follow their vocation. In answering this call, the person will realize themselves and recognize their responsibility to the other. [35]

For Mounier, the vocation lies a the heart of the integrative "calling" (from the Latin vocatio ) of the whole person to society. This echoes strongly Wilde's vision of the aesthetic impulse, and the higher artistic calling of man encapsulated in Wildean individualsim. For Wilde, the will and the self compose a totality in the ongoing and iterative creative expression of the person through art. It is both creative by its exteriorization of the self through the art as a material product, and creative as an interior process of self-actualization, perfection and cultivation of the artistic temperament. The process of the true artist as supreme individualist is an intensely holistic and cyclical exercise in self-expression and self-development. The aesthetic dimension of Wildean individualism is organic in the deepest sense, because the function of its being and its becoming cannot be differentiated. Its essential nature is growth, and its growth is the constant actualization of the true self.

Wilde develops this aesthetic angle of his phenomenology through two different veins: the image of the ideal artist and the archetype of Christ. We see both of these archetypal ideals track, interchange and coalesce across his non-fiction and social commentary. In constructing Wilde's phenomenology of the artist, his unfolding of the organic nature of art and the artist constructs this unified version of the self. Wilde does this first by delineating the inseparability of the artist and his art. By putting the creation of art in dialogue with the nature of the artist, the artistic process becomes identical to the creative actualization of the self of the ideal individualist. As a result, Wilde's prescriptive imperative for the individual is cultivation of the artistic temperament by which, Wilde encapsulates a whole and totalizing vision of the person as an an organic unity existing purely in the aesthetic dimension.

To set the stage, Wilde's precise aphorisms enable us to draw some poignant conclusions about the conceptual relationship between art and the artist as well as the artist and the Wildean individual. In The Soul of Man, Wilde claims the "Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known." [36] This claim, therefore necessitates an investigation into Wilde's conceptual relationship between the artist and the individualist. This precise coalescence between these two persons reaches a head in Wilde's idealization of Christ. In De Profundis, Wilde claims "Christ is the most supreme of individualists , " and at the same time a few pages earlier, he sees "a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist." [37] It is certainly one thing for Wilde's ideal artist, and the Wildean individualist to look similar, however there is something else curious going on here—not only does Christ seem to be an archetype of the Wildean individualist, as well the artist but his life is also the ideal work of art itself. "His entire life also is the most wonderful of poems," Wilde writes, and later that "he is just like a work of art." [38] In his depiction of Christ as an artist, an individualist and a work of art in and of himself, Wilde has constructed an phenomenology in which the unique creative motion of each person's interior development cannot be distinguished from his or her individual outward expressiveness. And yet the same time, each person's unique outward expressiveness occupies a direct relationship to the unique inward self. [39] It is in this spirit that Vivian can claim repeatedly in The Decay of Lying that "art never expresses anything but itself." [40] On one level, Vivian is drawing conclusions about "art" the external work of the artist—that the product itself is whole in and of itself. To put it in plain language, it simply "is what it is." This is as much a commentary about art as expressiveness as it is critique of the social distortion and oppression of the expressiveness of the individual. [41] One might expect that the traditional individualist would stop here, and simply desire that art be allowed to speak for itself, but Wilde does not. Instead he takes it a step further in De Profundis while speaking of sorrow: "Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit." [42] Wilde's vision of the relationship between the art and the artist is sometimes so holistic it is almost in need of disambiguation. Wilde constructs a self for the ideal artist which is totalizing to the point of incorporating the exterior products of that person's existence. But it is Wilde's conceptualization of the dynamism of life and the infinite variety of personal experience that brings clarity to his thought.

Rufus Burrow writes, "Personalism or personal idealism maintains that person is 'the supreme philosophical principle.' This means that one who is interested in ultimate causes and reasons for things must seek for their explanation in mind or person." [43] In De Profundis, Wilde follows a similar idealism in his explication of Christ as the artistic fulfillment of prophecy: Every single work of art is the fulfilment (sic) of prophecy: for every work of art is the conver-

sion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment (sic) of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. [44]

For Wilde, every unique artistic expression is capable of a distinct perfection, and each unique individual capable of distinct perfectibility in so far as the person is a form of the ideal and each person uniquely so. This lens helps us to unpack Wilde's curious amalgamation of Plato and Hegel that Wilde strikes at the end of The Truth of Masks:

For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realize Hegel's system of contraries. [45]

And in the The Soul of Man he writes, "there is no one type for man, there are as many perfections as their are imperfect men." [46] We can conclude from this, that the ideal work of art, in Wilde's aestheticism, is an expression of the artist and that it is therefore perfected, as the individual is perfected. And each perfect unique work of art is the product of a perfectly unique person. This person is perfected through the development and actualization of him or herself through increasing accuracy of artistic expressions which are a representation of self, and therefore require the recognition of the self in order to be accurate and beautiful—"a work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament," he writes, "its beauty comes from the face that the author is what he is." [47] At this point, it becomes very difficult to comprehend Wilde's individualism simply as the mechanistic advocation of a society in which one is free to form oneself into whatever his or her will desires. It is a far more nuanced, iterative and organic process in which the self is actualized and discovered as a totality in seeking through artistic expression, critique of others expression, and ongoing actualization of the self. He writes in De Profundis, "to the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive of life at all."

It is for this reason, that Gilbert in The Critic as Artist, can emphasize the primacy of form in the artistic endeavor: "for the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion." This is the parallel to the precise inversion made in the personalist critique of the individualist—life does not proceed from transient desires of the will to the shaping of the self, but from the reality or form of the self to its ongoing expressiveness and actualization. The technique and temperament of the ideal artist are the highest goals of the Wildean individualist. The artist's "technique" is simple the whole expression of his personality.

Gilbert's evocative mythic description of the ideal artistic temperament is a pristine expression of this dynamic and organic experience of the self and the work of the Wildean individualist:

That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal. The wheels of his chariot raise the dust as a cloud around him. The gods are hidden from each other. They can recognize their worshippers. That is all.

This is not the vision of the determined will which has set out with a clear goal for its self-creation. Reality, for Wilde is not this mechanistic, nor explicitly predictable and neither is the self. Instead it is a complex groping through reality for both the expression of the self through art, and the discovery of self through the self's own blind expression. The creative energy is exteriorized, and reflexively interiorized and through expression of the self, it is a transformation of the self. This obscure dialectic totality of the ideal Wildean individualist comes to a fore by the deep nuance of his understanding of the aesthetic dimension, and the mystical work in which the true artist is engaged. [48]

The cultivation of the artistic temperament is the self-actualization of the unique individual, his capacity to see and express himself, and leave himself open and receptive to the unique and personal expressions of others. Wilde writes in The Soul of Man, "the work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive." [49] He is developing along the lines of the aesthetic, the expression of the form, and the cultivation of the critical spirit, a parallel conclusion to the ideal person and personal society that Mounier emphasizes by drawing on the work of Gabriel Marcel:

The self-reflective movement which constitutes "the individual" contributes to the maintenance of the human shape. But the person is only growing in so far as he is continually purifying himself from the individual within him. He cannot do this by force of self-attention, but on the contrary by making himself available (Gabriel Marcel) and thereby more transparent both to himself and others. [50]

Earlier in this analysis, we drew out the inadequacy of describing the Wildean individualist as an atomized and autonomous will. It is the aesthetic dimension of Wilde's phenomenology that now uncovers a deeply inter-relational construction of the self with regard to others and the constancy of change. The ideal put forth by Gilbert in The Critic as Artist, as well as the truly selfless persons pointed toward in De Profundis and The Soul of Man, are epitomized by the critical spirit of the ideal artist. Who, having expressed himself wholly, finds himself in an ever-changing cultural flux, with style changing always, through his ongoing dynamic interaction with others and expressions of their own selves. [51] As Rodney Shewan has aptly interpreted, "The central problem may be summarised by reversing Gilbert's analysis: only [Wildean] individualism can accomplish artist unity; only artistic unity can produce style; and without style there can be no art." [52]

Mounier sketches a personalist aesthetic which is not only Wildean in sentiment, but notably in its charming prose:

Transcendent as it is, 'sublime' in the proper sense of the word, art cannot be reduced either to the greed for sensation or the intoxication of life; nor is it, when embodied in its works, reducible to the pure contemplation of the idea, nor to the constructive power of the mind. It is the sensitive expression, through the whole range of our existence, of life's intimately unexpected character; [...] art brings us into contact with what neither the senses nor the thought can grasp of themselves; it makesus aware of our nearness both to the infernal and the supernal.

It is safe to say, in conclusion, that Wilde takes this aesthetic sentiment and raises it to highest place in his phenomenology, even higher than Mounier would have. Nevertheless, both authors, despite the distinctions in their approaches, construct a vision of the person as a whole and organic unity of the self which repudiates the mechanistic, materialist and reductionist phenomenologies which dominate their respective Modern cultural climates.

It was Wildes' shockingly progressive aesthetic theory, that elucidated for him a new way of conceptualizing the person which would come to dominate philosophical reflection on phenomenology and existence. In the final line of The Soul of Man, Wilde proclaims, "The new Individualism is the new Hellenism." Finding inspiration in his aversion to oppressive social norms and bourgeois society, Wilde mapped the primacy of the unique person onto his aesthetic idealism in the spirit of Hellenism, and both became interwoven in a pioneering modern conceptual framework. [53] A spirit which Wilde found uniquely exemplifed in Walt Whitman, an artist discussed regularly in personalist circles, and one of the alleged origintators of the term "personalism" and its outlook. [54] Like Whitman, Wilde deserves distinct attention in this same company of thinkers and philosophical pioneers.

Cf. Max Stirner, Stirner: The Ego and Its Own (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (Cambridge University Press, 1995)., 13-18; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989)., 164f; Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (New York: Signet, 1979)., 7-10, 73-81; Jean Paul Sartre, Of Human Freedom (New York: Philosophical Library, 1966)., 48-56. "Individualism" has come to mean many things to many different people and philosophical systems. There are many different interpretations and transmutations of Protagoras' statement that "man is the measure of all things. This is, in part the inspiration for this analysis, to more precisely understand Wilde's "individualism." For clarification purposes, throughout the course of my analysis I will limit my references to individualism to either the traditional "individualism" (which is laid out in the first section), or "Wildean individualism" which I am making the argument is closer to the construction of the self found in personalism than traditional individualism (a distinciton which is also developed in the first section).

Phenomenology is used throughout this analysis to delineate the conceptualization of the person itself because it is so closely tied, as we will show, to both the deeply personal interior and exterior experience of conciousness. Though this terminology would not have been used by Wilde, terms like anthropology and ontology both appear to fall short of what is being defined.

Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, trans. Philippe Auguste Mairet (London, 1952)., 18f

Roland Breeur, “Individualism and Personalism,” (1999)., 67 ( emphasis original ).

Breeur, “Individualism and Personalism.”, 70

Cf. Rodney Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism (Barnes & Noble Books, 1977)., 108; "The aim of [Wildean] individualism is not self-indulgence, or any form of selfishness."

Cf. Guy Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Pr, 1993)., 55; Christ is also an opponent of private property.

Oscar Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007)., 496 ( emphasis own ).

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 496 ( emphasis own ).

Cf. Xavier Giudicelli, “Aesthetics and Politics: The Afterlives of Oscar Wilde’s the Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891),” E-rea. Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone

Cf. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (Dover Publications, 2011)., 58.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 499; since interpretation and critique of Wilde's reading of Jesus Christ is outside the scope of this discussion, the analysis will acquiesce to Wilde's interpretation and philosophical conclusions about the teaching of Jesus. For an overview of Christ and Christianity in the world of Wilde see John Allen Quintus, “Christ, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1991).

13.2 (2016)., 3. Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 499 ( emphasis original ). Surely, Wilde was thinking of verses such Luke 17:20-21 (KJV): "And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you."

Cf. Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde., 58-61.

Mounier, Personalism., xxii-xxv; cf. Wilde, De Profundis., 47: Wilde writes, "Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of ones character."

Emmanuel Mounier, A Personalist Manifesto, trans. The Monks of St. John’s Abbey (New York: Longmans, Green and Co, 1938)., 19; cf. Rufus Burrow, Personalism: A Critical Introduction (Chalice Press, 1999)., 424f: Burrow in his conclusion, highlights Mounier's contribution of the embodied spirit as significant to personalist thought.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 439

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 445.

Breeur, “Individualism and Personalism.”, 73. It is worth citing at length the passage where Breeur underscores Wilde's assertion as the heart of personalism for both its lucidity, and to reassert the theoretical distinctions which ground this analysis: "In trust, I am in tune with the rustling of my deeper self, I remain a 'prisoner of the best in myself.' This trust in myself is the genuine form of self-realization. In this trust the individual achieves purity: life becomes completely tailored to the real, the 'essential,' an 'affirmation of the existence in its very essence.' Every actions emanates immediately and naturally from the 'deep self.' Life becomes 'candid through and through. Once again, it is clearly an ideal of purity that comes to the fore here. Trust in the deep, genuine, continuous self is distinguished from what Gusdor and Troisfontaine contemptuously call 'sincerity.' By this they mean the lucid description of what is, for them, merely superficial: the discontinuity of the self, the conflictuous, disjointed self of Baudelaire, Proust's 'multiplicity' of the self, or the interior division of the self described by the existentialists of the Forties. It is the 'sincerity' expressed by Oscar Wilde when he wrote: 'we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.' For personalism, purity has to do with a conception o the self as an organic unity, a continuity, a totality that precedes any fragmentation or any mechanistic conception of reality" ( emphasis own ).

Mounier, A Personalist Manifesto., 68. This is Mounier's ealiest and most precise attempt at the explicit definition of "a person."

Cf. Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 498f, 520ff; Mounier, Personalism., xviii-xix; cf. Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism., 105; For an indepth analysis of how Wilde's thought was shaped by evolutionary science see Caroline Sumpter, ““No Artist Has Ethical Sympathies”: Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution,” Victorian Literature and Culture 44, no. 03 (2016)..

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 520

Mounier, Personalism., xvi.

Mounier, Personalism., xviii.

Mounier, Personalism., 42.

Mounier, Personalism., 44.

Cf. Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 437-440.

Cf. Wilde, De Profundis., 60; Mounier, Personalism., 79.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 521.

Cf. Burrow, Personalism: A Critical Introduction., 230-232.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 522.

Mojtaba Jeihouni, “Oscar Wilde and Call of the Other in “De Profundis” and “the Ballad of Reading Gaol”,” The Explicator 74, no. 1 (2016)., 49: In his short article, Jeihouni draws distinct parallels between the phenomenological "other" as it is developed in De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and draws out how it echoes the work of French phenomenologist and existentialist Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). Jeihouni articulates that Wilde's humility and necessary patience articulated toward others in his later works, "exemplifies the Levinasian program of critiquing ontology and the modality of freedom. Levinas directly says: 'A free being alone is responsible, that is, already not free.'"

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 525.

Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism., 99: Wilde's view is that "A healthy state depends on the health of individuals, which depends in turn on full self-realisation."

Terrence C. Wright, “Emmanuel Mounier on the Person and Vocation,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 20, no. 1 (2017)., 57 ( emphasis own ).

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 506.

Wilde, De Profundis., 58, 55.

Wilde, De Profundis., 57, 67.

Cf. Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde., 107, 113, 133f. These sentiments are found widely in Willoughby, who does a comendable job of developing this paradoxical relationship between "art and christhood" throughout Wilde's entire opus.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 385, 391.

John Allen Quintus, “The Moral Implications of Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22, no. 4, An Issue Devoted to the Nineteenth Century (1980)., 564f.

Wilde, De Profundis., 52, cf. 61.

Burrow, Personalism: A Critical Introduction., 11f.

Wilde, De Profundis., 61

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 490; cf. Willoughby, Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde., 17; contra. Quintus, “The Moral Implications of Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism.”, 572.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 502.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 506.

Cf. Wilde, De Profundis., 89: "I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature—this is what I am looking for."

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 515.

Mounier, Personalism., 19.

James Sloan Allen, “Nietzsche and Wilde: An Ethics of Style,” The Sewanee Review 114, no. 3 (2006)., Allen's comparison of Wilde and Nietzsche's ethics of style hits the nail on the head with his quote of The Gay Science: "[...] [Nietzsche] proclaims: '"Giving style" to one's character—a great and rare art.' This art belongs to 'those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan... Here the ugly which could not be removed is hidden; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime... until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.'"

Shewan, Oscar Wilde: Art and Egotism.,199.

Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 525.

Burrow, Personalism: A Critical Introduction., 17; cf. Wilde, The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)., 352.