Wildean Individualism as Aesthetic Proto-Personalism

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