THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICISM: PATER’S “IMAGINATIVE” SYNTHESIS OF EMPIRICISM AND IDEALISM THROUGH HERACLITUS AND KANT Kanarakis Yannis ARISTOTLE UNIVERSITY OF THESSALONIKI School of English Language and Literature CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I: PATER AND THE EMPIRICAL PARADIGM OF HERACLITUS 1.1. The Spirit of the Age and Heraclitean Flux 17 1.2. The Heraclitean Doctrine 24 1.3. Heraclitus and Science in the “Conclusion” 33 1.4. Heraclitean Empiricism: Associationism and Sensationalism in the “Conclusion” 47 1.5. The Materialistic Ethics of Heraclitean Flux and Relativity 62 1.6. The Aesthete and the Scientist 71 1.7. Pater, Darwin, and Heraclitus 78 1.8. The Science of Imaginative Prose: Darwin and the Essay 84 1.9. The “Relish” of Flux: Abstraction in the Renaissance 95 1.10. Heraclitus and Abstraction 103 CHAPTER II: PATER AND THE IDEALIST PARADIGM OF KANT 2.1. The Paradigm of J. S. Mill 115 2.2. Kant’s “Empiricism”: Victorian Responses to the German Philosopher 120 2.3. Pater and the “Least Transcendental Parts of Kant” 131 2.4. The A Priori and Herbert Spencer 143 2.5. Aesthesis and Aesthetics 155 2.6. The Centripetal and the Centrifugal 162 2.7. The Purposiveness of Pater’s “Imaginative Reason” 171 2.8. A Model for the Individual 182 2.9. The Form of Copernican Revolution 191 2.10. Empirical Relativity and Idealist Functionalism 202 2.11. The Last Romantic 210 2.12. Heraclitus and Kant: Classicism and Romanticism 216 CHAPTER III: PATER’S SYNTHETIC VISION: MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, AND THE “BEATA URBS” 3.1. “Beauty” and “Pain”: The Corrective Revision of Pater’s “Imaginative” Work and the “Child in the House” 222 3.2. Formal Aspects of Marius the Epicurean 238 3.3. The “Age of Religious Revival” and Pater’s “Fourth Phase” 248 3.4. Of “Sensations”: Heraclitus, Cyrenaicism, and J. S. Mill 258 3.5. Of “Ideas”: Kant, Stoicism, and Pater’s “Second Thoughts” 272 3.6. Stoic and Idealist Shortcomings 288 3.7. “Eye” and “Duty”: The Synthetic Paradigm of Early Christianity 298 3.8. “Visible Symbolism” and “Unseen Morality”: Beauty as the Symbol of Morality 310 3.9. “Religious Beauty”: The Metaphysics of Aesthetics 323 CONCLUSION 337 WORKS CITED 341 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to thank the Institution of National Scholarships (IKY) for its financial support, which made this study possible. I would also like to express my gratitude to my family and Elias for their understanding and patience, and for making it easier for me to concentrate on this project. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my supervising committee, the source of inspiration and realization of this work. INTRODUCTION In 1877, G. G. Zerffi, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 1 published in the fifth volume of the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society the first of his four essays on “The Historical Development of Idealism and Realism,” where he acknowledged that [f]rom the very first dawn of consciousness man tried to solve the phenomena surrounding him in two divergent ways, which up to our times have been followed by two opposed parties. The controversy between idealists and realists, or materialists, is as old as man’s power of thinking. The history of man’s intellectual development in a wider sense is but the struggle between the two (I, 120). Zerffi’s interest in the topic was not accidental, since the critic was addressing, in the light of the historical research typical of his time, a phenomenon that had decisively shaped the character of 19th-century thought. This phenomenon involved the intellectual turmoil engendered by the “struggle” between the 19th- century “realists” on the one hand, as represented by Bentham’s political economy, Mill’s inductive empiricism, Comte’s positivism, Darwin’s evolutionism, and Tyndall and Huxley’s agnostic materialism, and the 19th-century “idealists” on the other, following the work of writers like Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, and T. H. Green, who were influenced by Continental philosophy and upheld the importance of deductive thought, the return to religion, and the dynamic participation of the human mind in the production of knowledge. The marks of this “controversy” between the advocates of scientific relativism, naturalism and laissez-faire liberalism, who 1 Gustavus George Zerffi (1820-1892) was a very interesting 19th century figure. He was a Hungarian journalist and a secret service agent of Austria, who moved to London in 1853 becoming a member of the Royal Medical College and a secretary of the German National Association. Later on, he became a lecturer at the National Art Training School in South Kensington writing extensively on history and art. 2 envisioned a radical disruption from traditional values, and the idealists or humanists, who struggled to salvage what was left of the “old” world, can be detected in nearly all facets of 19th-century thought. Indicative of this conflicting atmosphere was the intellectual climate at the University of Oxford, where there were two influences: “the one, in more or less cordial alliance with Comte’s positive philosophy; the other, the more theoretical philosophy which connects itself with the names of Kant and Hegel” (Young 13).2 Zerffi’s study, nevertheless, which was finished in 1880 with the publication of the fourth and last essay on the topic, also reflected a catalytic shift that was gradually taking place at the time in the course of this long-standing “struggle.” It was the significance of this specific shift, as we shall see, that Zerffi’s historical emphasis on the development of the phenomenon actually underscored. During the last quarter of the 19th century, the profound consolidation of the idea of evolution in the Victorian imaginary, along with the spread of Hegelian historicism, gave birth to a new cultural viewpoint, which, as the historian puts it, did not “isolate phenomena in nature, facts in history, words in languages, art-forms in aesthetics, diseases in medicine” (I, 143), but rather strove to attest “union and harmony” among “discordant voices” (I, 120).3 This reconciliatory trend, just before the expiration of the 19th 2 This intriguing coexistence of conflicting outlooks, just before the advent of modernism, has been characterized as typical of 19th century thought by a series of studies, which offer a multiplicity of perspectives on the complexity of the topic.The conflict between the two schools of thought in terms of philosophic speculation is the object of Wendell V. Harris’ The Omnipresent Debate (1981). There are certain other studies which touch on the issue by implication. I can indicatively mention here Emory Neff’s Carlyle and Mill (1926), David DeLaura’s Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England (1969), Edward Alexander’s Mathew Arnold and John Stuart Mill (1965) and Mathew Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Modern Temper (1973). 3 As Zerffi claims, “[s]cientific universal history becomes the more necessary the more the different special branches of science increase in details. History has to connect the apparently isolated facts, to trace in the discordant voices of generations and their complicated actions union and harmony” (I, 120). Later on in the same essay, after presenting “Darwin’s theory” as a principle of “union and harmony” too, he introduces Darwin as the first synthesizer of “realism and idealism”: “[t]he most important historical fact in the development of idealism and realism is undoubtedly Darwin’s theory. It is as influential as the astronomical discovery of Copernicus, the laws of Kepler or Newton’s theory of gravitation. It has been attacked as gross realism, and still the very basis of Darwin’s theory of descent 3 century, decisively affected the course of the long “controversy” between the two rival schools of thought, making Zerffi optimistically envision its ending by asserting in his study that “down to our times […] realism and idealism, speculation and experience, are trying to form the only possible united basis of our future scientific and historical progress” (I, 143). Paradigmatic of this climate of compromise was a series of late-19th-century thinkers, coming from different disciplines, who endorsed a radical form of reconciliation between the traditionally conceived “opposed parties:” Herbert Spencer, for example, fused a posteriori stimuli and a priori inherited mental formations so as to come up with “evolutionary Kantianism,” T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley grounded their absolute form of morality on an empiricist conception of feeling, G. H. Stout, H. Strut and H. Rashdall propounded a form of “empirical idealism,” H. S. Maine, W. Bagehot, W. K. Clifford, Leslie Stephen and D. Ritchie synthesized evolutionary biology, utilitarianism and Kantian criticism, whereas H. Sidwick blended utilitarian and idealist premises, following the early example of J, S. Mill’s union of Benthamite reason and Coleridgean feeling. The impact of this ground-breaking shift in perspective that Zerffi portrays was also reflected in the literature of the time. One of the first writers who responded with his multifaceted work to this reconciliatory climate was Walter Pater, the father of British Aestheticism. As an Oxford don, Pater spent most of his life in the university, where he was directly exposed to the intellectual shifts and debates of the time. He was extremely well-read in both philosophical traditions due to his fascination with contemporary thought, as Billie Andrew Inman’s invaluable study of is, as his greatest antagonist, Agassiz, has acknowledged, an ideal theory, a thought engendered a priori” (I, 142). Zerffi’s whole consideration is actually permeated by the Darwinian and the historical perspective as his diction (“dawn of consciousness,” “surrounding,” “struggle,” “history,” “development”) clearly manifests. 4 his readings and library borrowings has demonstrated,4 and responded to the intellectual anxieties of the time with work which, from his first essay in 1864 to his death in 1894, extended over a period of time that distinctively overlapped with this stormy period.