Wilde
<< • Preface - • >>
In his 1891 essay "The Celts in English Art," Allen praised the "great and triumphant aesthetic movement" because of its urgent need to rebel against "Germanic rule" in English art and politics.
Among the many Celtic writers who combined radicalism with a decorative aesthetic, Allen retained a special tribute to Mr. Oscar Wilde—the wise man knew for his rare insight and strong common sense.
<< Allen's views on Wilde's artistic philosophy >>
Wilde's essay "The Human Soul under Socialism"—as we will see Allen's "Individualism and Socialism"—appeared in the biweekly review of the same issue, and letters of mutual appreciation soon crossed each other in the mail.
"I beg you, allow me to express my joy in your article," Wilde wrote.
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The equally enthusiastic Allen called Wilde's The Soul of Man a "beautiful and noble essay," and 100 years after this exchange, when Allen needed a name for his new philosophy, he chose a coin minted by Wilde from a portrait of Dorian Gray.
In Wilde's novel, the aristocratic and debauched Lord Henry predicts a "new hedonism" that both evokes and reinforces Pate's insistence on acceptance, with Lord Henry explaining to Dorian that "no theory or system involving sacrificing any mode of passionate experience will ever be accepted, but will teach one to concentrate on life." ”
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Like Lord Henry, Allen defined "neo-hedonism" as a revolutionary ethic of liberating "self-development" that he believed would correct the idealization of Victorian tradition of deprivation and "self-sacrifice".
Allen channeled Wilde's wisdom with bold dialogue, beginning his essay with the subversion of common-sense moralism: "Old asceticism said, 'Be good and you will be happy.'" "The new hedonism says, 'Be happy and you will be good.'"
In a continuation of his earlier aesthetic works, he insisted that sex is the source of "everything sublime and sublime in our nature," from "our love of bright colors and elegant forms" to our feelings of compassion and filial piety.
As a man who broke with tradition, Allen pointed to obscene figures like historical texts, feminist writers Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley as evidence of Darwin's scientific approval of sexuality.
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Allen argues that their disregard for sexuality is an important part of hedonistic individualism, which has led these thinkers to break new ground in their respective fields.
In the middle term, their sexual choice – Wollstonecraft's decision to have illegitimate sex with the philosopher William Godwin, which led to the birth of their daughter Mary, who then decided to elope with Percy Shelley, leading to her illustrious literary career – proved to be a boon to British culture.
Allen further argues that, in the long run, this act of liberation promises what he elsewhere calls "the great age of humanity," comparable to Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan England.
Allen, therefore, sees his hedonistic ethic as a serious social "obligation": it forces everyone to "freely develop to the highest possible point in all directions."
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<< – Allen's new hedonistic values – >>
Because of people's respect for sex—the new hedonists will "recognize in the sexual instinct the origin and foundation of all the best and highest things within us," Allen said—the hedonist's "goal is always to use sexual instincts without abusing them, either by imposing abstinence or by acquiescing in a hateful regime of "unfair marriage."
At the end of the essay, Allen finally envisions a future society in which the internalization of hedonistic values makes questions of love and fertility an aesthetic choice rather than a social pressure or economic convenience: in this hypothetical utopia, not only would the "noblest, purest, most sane, healthiest" people be free to fulfill their moral obligations to reproduce, but they would also enjoy the task.
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Thus, evolutionary aesthetics allows Allen, like Pate and Clifford before him, to reveal indirect moral rewards in non-moral experiences of aesthetic pleasure.
At the same time, Allen sought to salvage his eugenics from a reliance on coercive, and even somewhat utilitarian discourse, otherwise in conflict with his liberalism: he initially emphasized the intrinsic value of happiness, he appropriated the classical language of "hedonism," he denounced marriage as an institutionalized form of sexual control, he claimed to be allied with the aesthetic movement, perhaps in an attempt to downplay his own domineering dogmatism.
The New Hedonism deliberately made a shocking attack on bourgeois virtues and institutions, which set the tone for Allen's controversial career for the years that followed.
For example, one conservative critic declared that Allen's article was nothing more than a scientific apology for a rampant culture of evil, from the "lawless sexual passions" of working-class murderers to neo-Greek homosexuality "at the top of society."
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Allen's most widely discussed work, The Successful Woman—a novel experiment that applies neo-hedonism in the real world—does little to alleviate the lewdness charged by these problems.
Real Women appeared in John Lane's controversial keynote series, which was titled from a collection of short stories by feminist writer George Egerton and designed by decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley.
Moreover, Allen's polemical inscription to the novel insists that it was the first work he wrote "entirely and exclusively to satisfy his own taste and conscience," clearly putting his radical principle of self-determination into practice.
As Nicholas Rudick observed, even liberal critics consider the novel's sincere defense of the heroine—the "martyr of truth and justice," refusing in principle to marry her lover and eventually committing suicide—to be extremely endured extremes.
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Most importantly, The New Hedonism and The Successful Woman gave Allen a prominent voice in small-scale debates about aestheticism and cultural evolution in which Allen found himself defending Spencerian promises of progress against what he called "conservative Jeremede."
Much of the debate has focused on "degenerate" theories that contradict Allen's optimistic evolutionism, which explains the rise of aestheticism as evidence of the impending decline of civilization.
Throughout the nineteen-nineties, reactionary evolutionists, such as Cesar Lombrosso, Ray Lancast, and Max Noh, issued dire warnings about human decentralization: Nodo's The Fall, the most important of these works, became an English translation in 1895, the same year Allen published The Fallen Woman.
<< - Allen is different from Wilde - >>
Unlike Wilde, Allen was not prominent enough in Europe to ensure Nodau's dramatic condemnation, but certain passages of the Fall could easily be applied to Allen's work.
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Moreover, Nordau's partisans in England—especially while Wilde was on trial—quickly directed his criticism at other writers associated with the aesthetic movement, including Allen.
In Tom's essay, for example, travel writer and barrister Hugh Stutfield argues against the "spirit of modern defiance" that is pervasive in Britain's cultural landscape.
In his tirade, Stutfield took aim at a series of lawbreakers, including the New Female Novelist, the "ego-fanatic" aesthete, the follower of "Aesthetic Hellenism," a political revolutionary, the founder of utopia, and the builder of a socialist castle in the air.
But Stufeld concluded that the real masterminds of this tradition of attacks were intellectuals like Allen and Wilde, who blended scientific views on sex and pleasure with progressive politics and taste for the avant-garde.
It is likely that the condemnation of Stutfield and others will only help The Woman become a bestseller. Rudick noted that the company's sales remained strong after Wilde's conviction in May 1895.
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Allen has spent decades devising evolutionary methods to achieve such a utopia, and Stutfield's side is an impact on the optimistic mind of evolutionary aestheticism.
However, Allen continues to apply evolutionary paradigms to culture—for example, in the series "The Evolution of Early Italian Art," published by Palmel magazine and British Pictorial magazine earlier than early 1896 – showing the extent to which he retained his progressive beliefs, yet embattled.
His history of Italian painting, written at its peak, remains one of the main "upward evolution towards more modern types".
Allen argues that whenever an art movement "necessarily seems a bit monotonous in time" and begins to fall into decadence, the desire for "diversity" soon leads to "new themes" and "more advanced compositions."
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In this creative activity that continues to flossom, Allen rediscovers the suffocating possibility that Nordau's fashion cannot be reduced. ”
<< Wilde's critique of science in prose – >>
From the very beginning of Wilde's career, he was a greedy and attentive reader of science. Many scholars have noted the apparent influence of other evolutionary, psychological, and anthropological thinkers on Wilde's philosophy of aesthetics.
For example, Heather Sigrote reads a portrait of Dorian Gray in the context of Wilde's patent interest in psychology, which for him "challenges the hard distinction between science and art."
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In addition, some scholars have highlighted the optimistic, at least positive, aspects of Wilde's understanding of science. Elisha Cohen argues that Wilde developed an "aesthetic politics" by focusing on psychology through "images of beautiful brain cells" that focused on "evolutionary processes" rather than useless individual actions.
In Cohen's view, Wilde's "neuroaestheticism" combined the pleasures of playboy with socialist criticism of exploitation, thus turning his attention to the continued life of the species.
Similarly, John Wilson Foster asserts, "Wilde associates science not with pessimistic or somber materialism, but with optimism and progress." ”
David Clifford adds that "ideas about evolution blend seamlessly into the ideas of progress, individualism, and Telos"—I think Wilde gathered ideas from Spencer, Allen, Clifford, and Darwin, and aestheticists admired him.
Wilde
In many ways, Wilde's fusion with Allen began with his undergraduate studies in science and philosophy, long before both authors published an article.
Wilde's Oxford and Ordinary Notes, preserved circa 1874 to 1879, documents his contacts with many of the scientific and philosophical thinkers who inspired Allen, from Darwin and Huxley to Kant and E. Wilde. B. Taylor.
Wilde's notebooks had an equally keen interest in Clifford's works on geometry and ethics. He was particularly interested in mathematicians' theory of the "tribal self," which postulated that primordial self-consciousness extended to a person's entire social group.
In his notes on the subject, Wilde points to the anti-utilitarian and contradictory individualistic effects of Clifford's theory: if "protecting the self," Wilde reasoned, "not the individual self, but what Clifford calls the tribal self," then moral value does not lie in "the greatest happiness of the many," but in "the service that a part of a community does to the community."
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By assuming the concept of social welfare, the failure to eliminate individual autonomy provided the anthropological basis for Wilde's anarcho-socialism, which he later elaborated in The Human Soul Under Socialism.
The young Wilde also turned to Spencer for ways to reinterpret the laws of nature in order to reaffirm a sense of cosmic harmony. In the first few pages of the book, Wilde summarizes the philosopher's ideas about the essential unity of the sciences of sociology, biology, and psychology.
Wilde's later description of progress adapted accordingly to Spencer's view: progress. Wilde points out that "it is only the human instinct for self-preservation, the desire to affirm the nature of the self: but after a while, there is a great desire for higher freedom—self-preservation." ”
In Wilde's view, Spencer saw progress as a universal process of differentiation and integration, which indicated individual deviation from norms—whether or not they were politically significant.
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The author thinks
Wilde's exploration of these ideas culminates in one of the most striking essays in The Ordinary Book, in which a shrewd discussion of embryology gives way to philosophical consequences for his research.
Wilde's flamboyant language and complex grammar borrowed from Pate's signature style, and Wilde's determination to see only the potential for upward development was closer to Clifford's optimistic explanation of Spencerian evolution.
Like Clifford, Wilde's prophetic tone exudes an almost religious belief in the ability of humans to ascend to "greater heights."
Notably, Wilde describes evolutionary progress in an aesthetic, especially formal, complexity: "invisible" and "terrifying" single-celled organisms are distinguished in a Spencerian way, entering beautiful, diverse and coordinated parts of the human body.
As we shall see, the idea that evolutionary progress parallels the civilized process of aesthetic self-improvement is at the heart of Wilde's utopian aestheticism, which he later expounded.
bibliography
[1] On Wilde's feminist thought[D]. Ziwei Zhao, Liaoning University. 2012
[2] Wilde's view of women in the third place[D]. Zhu Xiao, Shanghai Normal University, 2010
[3] Interpretation of female figures in Wilde's plays[D]. Honglian Li, Qingdao University. 2010
[4] Female characters in Oscar Wilde's social comedy[D]. Wang Jia, Chongqing University. 2009