Wildean Individualism as Aesthetic Proto-Personalism

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.