Wildean Individualism as Aesthetic Proto-Personalism

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.