Wildean Individualism as Aesthetic Proto-Personalism

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.