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The Philosopher

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Book cover Oscar Wilde

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Abstract

In An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring remarks: “It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next” (Wilde. An Ideal Husband. In The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray, 389–476. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.). If this might seem to reflect an ambivalence toward formal philosophy, Wilde was an avid consumer of it over the course of his life. This chapter tracks Wilde’s engagements with philosophy, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Continental influences like Georg Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer. In contrast to existing studies, this chapter does not attempt to synthesize Wilde’s works into a coherent “philosophy” of art or society, preferring instead to illuminate how he engaged—diversely and sometimes inconsistently—with the thinkers that inspired him. Rather than aligning Wilde clearly with any specific school of thought, this account proposes that Wilde was a skeptical reader of philosophy, which he treated less as a means of advancing toward truth than as a medium (albeit imperfect) for reflecting upon the process of truth-seeking.

Ay! I can bear the ills of other men,

Which is philosophy.

Oscar Wilde, The Duchess of Padua

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Nightingale and the Rose,” House of Pomegranates, The Happy Prince, and Other Tales (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 187–200, 197. A similar moment appears in Wilde’s “The Remarkable Rocket,” a story in which an egoistic firecracker who has been unluckily discarded in a pool of water reflects upon the many attainments to which he can still lay claim:

    I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.

    “Then you should certainly lecture on philosophy,” said the dragonfly, and he spread a pair of lovely gauze wings and soared away into the sky. (Oscar Wilde, “The Remarkable Rocket,” A House of Pomegranates, The Happy Prince, and Other Tales. London: Methuen and Company, 1908: 233–54, 251)

  2. 2.

    Oscar Wilde, Commonplace Book. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 107–152, 135 [145]. For all references to Wilde’s Notebook Kept at Oxford and Commonplace Book, I have included the pagination from Smith and Helfand’s edition, followed by the manuscript pagination in brackets (as shown).

  3. 3.

    Wilde, “Nightingale and the Rose,” 197; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 204.

  4. 4.

    Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), xviii.

  5. 5.

    Philip Smith details the limitations of Brown’s source base in “Philosophical Approaches to Interpretation of Oscar Wilde” in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (New York: Palgrave, 2004): 143–66.

  6. 6.

    Regina Gagnier and Lawrence Danson alike have noted that Brown’s deliberate turn away from Wilde’s immediate intellectual and social contexts renders the account somewhat abstract, making it more difficult to discern how his varied literary output “amounts to a philosophy” (Danson, 187). See Regina Gagnier, “Wilde Lite,” English Literature in Transition 41.4 (1998): 472–75; Lawrence Danson, “Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art,” Victorian Studies 42.1 (1998): 185–87.

  7. 7.

    Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand, “The Context of the Text,” Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith and Michael S. Helfand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989): 5–34, 34.

  8. 8.

    Josephine Guy and Ian Small, Oscar Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 258.

  9. 9.

    Simon Reader, “Wilde at Oxford: A Truce with Facts,” Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2017): 9–27, 14. Giles Whiteley points out, in like spirit: “The notebooks constitute a kind of creative testing of the philosophical water, rather than a fully fledged ‘system.’ This aspect of the notebooks has been ignored by Wilde studies in favor of a kind of name-checking: the gravitas of the proper name Hegel is supposed to rehabilitate Wilde as a serious thinker, as though such a rehabilitation were necessary in the first place.” Giles Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum: The Truth of Masks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8–9.

  10. 10.

    Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for Use of the Young,” in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 572–73, 572.

  11. 11.

    Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for Use of the Young,” 572.

  12. 12.

    See Guy Willoughby, “Oscar Wilde and Post-Structuralism,” Philosophy and Literature 13.2 (October 1989): 316–24. Bruce Bashford and Michael Y. Bennett have likewise proposed that Wilde in many ways anticipates the work of twentieth-century philosophy, from Henry Johnstone’s treatment of “cooperative argument” in Philosophy and Argument (1959) to Bertrand Russell’s challenge to British Idealism in “On Denoting” (1905), respectively. See Bruce Bashford, “‘Even Things That Are True Can Be Proved’: Oscar Wilde on Argument,” in Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2017): 53–72; Michael Y. Bennett, “Wilde Thoughts on Philosophical Reference in An Ideal Husband: ‘An Ideal’ Versus ‘The Ideal’ Husband,” in Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2017): 151–166.

  13. 13.

    Smith, “Philosophical Approaches,” 156.

  14. 14.

    William Stanford and Robert McDowell, Mahaffy: Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (New York: Routledge, 1971), 150.

  15. 15.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 148 [199].

  16. 16.

    William Wallace, The Logic of Hegel with Prolegomena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), lii. Smith and Helfand do not note the close correspondence between Wilde’s remarks upon Kant and those contained in Wallace’s volume, though they have scrupulously documented Wilde’s transcriptions from Wallace elsewhere in the notebooks.

  17. 17.

    Giles Whiteley has persuasively established that Wilde consulted Edward Caird’s volume in “Some Unnoted Sources in Oscar Wilde’s Commonplace Book,” 64.4 (2017): 628–34.

  18. 18.

    Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown (New York: Oxford, 2009), 10.6–8; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1 (London: Trübner and Company, 1883), 239–41; Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865): 1–41,16.

  19. 19.

    Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class: An Oxford Guidebook (Oxford: Parker, 1860), 19.

  20. 20.

    In 1863, Lady Wilde translated Wilhelmine Canz’s Eritis Secut Deus, a German novel in three volumes, which translates literally as “Ye Shall Be as Gods,” though it was published under the more provocative title The First Temptation. The novel tracks the progress of Robert Schartel, a gifted professor of philosophy who “has all the gifts and qualities that could make a life noble, except faith in God” (63). Anticipating Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of the übermensch (superman), Schartel believes that man might “make a world of beauty and harmony of his own will and power by culture and knowledge,” but despairs of this dream as “every evil act committed by his followers is flung back to him as a consequence of his own teaching, a deduction from his own philosophy” (64). “The First Temptation by Lady Wilde,” Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine 4 (July 1863): 63–70. In this case, the accusations prove to be true, and only his wife, sustained by the religion of her upbringing, is able to withstand the lure of sensual pleasures. As William Hamilton would note in 1882: “the hero is an Hegelian Philosopher, whose religion is the cultures of Beauty, and perhaps the English publisher may have feared that such a theory would school the faith or morals of his readers, but in any case nearly the whole edition was burnt, accidentally as was supposed, and the work is now very scarce in consequence.” William Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London: Reeves and Turner, 1882), 97. While we do not have any evidence that Wilde himself read or engaged with his mother’s translation, we do know that he conferred with her about the German Rationalists at some length. Lady Wilde was an avid consumer of German philosophy, routinely invoking the work of Hegel, Kant, Schelling, Fichte, and Schopenhauer in her essays. She ensured that he was tutored in both French and German from an early age.

  21. 21.

    See Smith and Helfand, “The Context of the Text.”

  22. 22.

    Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 34.

  23. 23.

    Benjamin Jowett, Introduction to The Republic in vol. 2 of The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1873), 142.

  24. 24.

    See especially Plato, The Republic Book III: 402–403 and Book V: 472–483.

  25. 25.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 128 [109]. Wilde alludes here to Jacobi’s 1787 On Faith, or Idealism and Realism, which contended that although the “thing-in-itself” of which Kant speaks—that is, the existence of an object independent of its perception—cannot be directly known but must instead be accepted on the basis of faith.

  26. 26.

    Aristotle highlights the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic in Topics 1.10–13. See Aristotle, Organon, ed. Octavius Friere Owen (London: Henry G. John, 1853), 370–74.

  27. 27.

    Jowett, Introduction to the Republic, 142.

  28. 28.

    Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum, 57–8.

  29. 29.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Rise of Historical Criticism,” Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, IV, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007):1–67, 30.

  30. 30.

    Wilde, “The Rise of Historical Criticism,” 30.

  31. 31.

    Benjamin Jowett, “Sermon VII: Heb. Xi.4, in Arthur Penrhyn Stanley,” Sermons Biographical and Miscellaneous (London: John Murray, 1899), 130–151, 142.

  32. 32.

    Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, eds., The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, vol. 2 (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1897), 169.

  33. 33.

    Qtd. in Arthur Quinn, The Confidence of British Philosophers: An Essay in Historical Narrative (Leiden: E.J. Brille, 1977), 163.

  34. 34.

    F. Max Müller, My Autobiography: A Fragment (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 130.

  35. 35.

    Müller, Autobiography, 142.

  36. 36.

    Friedrich Max Müller, “Comparative Mythology,” Essays on Mythology, Traditions, and Customs (London: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1867): 1–143, 8.

  37. 37.

    Müller, Autobiography, 142.

  38. 38.

    For further discussion of Müller’s treatment of history in relation to Hegel, see Jon R. Stone, Introduction, The Essential Max Müller on Language, Mythology, and Religion (New York: Palgrave, 2002): 1–24. The only extensive discussion of Müller’s influence on Wilde appears in Smith and Helfand’s “Context of the Text,” where he features as yet another mentor who would encourage Wilde’s inexorable turn to Hegelian philosophy (8–10). While Smith and Helfand note Müller’s wariness of adopting a strictly Darwinian approach to history, they do not remark upon Müller’s critique of Hegel.

  39. 39.

    F. Max Müller, The Sacred Books of the East 39 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891), 24.

  40. 40.

    Jerusha McCormack, “Oscar Wilde: As Daoist Sage,” Philosophy and Oscar Wilde, ed. Michael Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2018): 73–104.

  41. 41.

    Oscar Wilde, “A Chinese Sage,” in Journalism II, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde VII (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 237–43, 238.

  42. 42.

    One might turn, for an additional example, to Wilde’s 1895 trial. On that occasion, Edward Carson asked Wilde to comment on one of his “philosophies”: “The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth”? Wilde retorted: “Oh, yes; I think so. Half of it is true. The life of contemplation is the highest life, and so recognized by the philosopher.” Merlin Holland, ed., The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper, 2004), 76. The remark bears a striking resemblance to Wilde’s famous dictum on utility: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it” (Wilde, Dorian Gray, 68).

  43. 43.

    Wilde, “A Chinese Sage,” 237.

  44. 44.

    Wilde, “A Chinese Sage,” 238.

  45. 45.

    Wilde, “A Chinese Sage,” 237.

  46. 46.

    See Philip E. Smith, “Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of History” in Oscar Wilde and Philosophy, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2018): 29–52.

  47. 47.

    Henry Thomas Buckle, The History of Civilization in England (London: Parker, Son, and Bourn, 1861), 19–20.

  48. 48.

    Oscar Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 153–74, 159 [29].

  49. 49.

    Wilde, “Rise of Historical Criticism,” 29.

  50. 50.

    Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 159 [29].

  51. 51.

    Buckle, 18.

  52. 52.

    It is an idea he would revisit in “The Rise of Historical Criticism”: “History, no doubt, has splendid lessons for our instruction, just as all good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth. But, to set before either the painter or the historian the inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued, is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress: Il ne faut demander de l’Art que l’Art, due passé que le passé” [translation: “One need ask of art nothing but art, of the past nothing but the past”] (Wilde, “The Rise of Historical Criticism,” 17).

  53. 53.

    Oscar Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford, 156 [21].

  54. 54.

    Wilde, Notebook Kept at Oxford 162 [43].

  55. 55.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 132 [131].

  56. 56.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 143 [177]. In the final line of this passage, Wilde abbreviates the quotation from Bacon; the translation provided reverts to Bacon’s original Latin text. See Francis Bacon, Novum Organum in vol. 4 of The Works of Francis Bacon (London: Longmans and Company, 1875), 77, 51, 47, 110.

  57. 57.

    As Simon Reader observes, Wilde may well have been attracted by Bacon’s stylistic use of the aphorism, taking it as “an example of open, unfettered inquiry that evades Aristotle’s logical systems” (19).

  58. 58.

    Bacon, 47.

  59. 59.

    Bacon, 110.

  60. 60.

    Bristow’s discussion pertains specifically to the Philosophy Notebook and Wilde’s juxtaposition of Bacon and John Elliott Cairnes’s critique of Auguste Darwin in Essays in Political Economy (1873); See Joseph Bristow, “Wilde’s Abstractions: Notes on Literae Humaniores, 1876–1878,” Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity, ed. Kathleen Riley, Alastair Blanchard, and Maria Manny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 69–90, 86.

  61. 61.

    See, for example, Joseph Bristow, “Oscar Wilde’s Poetic Traditions,” Oscar Wilde in Context, ed. Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 73–87, 75–77. Chris Foss has suggested that Wilde is more easily reconciled to the “unresolved contradictions” of Romantic thinkers like John Keats or Friedrich Schlegel, who embraced a dialectical process that did not necessarily reconcile thesis and antithesis. While we know that Wilde was a great admirer of Keats, I have, to date, been unable to verify that Wilde ever encountered or remarked upon the philosophy of Schlegel. Still, the comparison is a tantalizing and generative one. Taking a cue from Foss, I propose that we place Wilde with the context of an altogether different strain of German Romanticism: one that, as we shall see, was just as invested in the failures as by the possibilities of dialectic. See Chris Foss, “Oscar Wilde and the Importance of Being Romantic,” Wilde Discoveries: Traditions, Histories, Archives, ed. Joseph Bristow (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2013): 43–64.

  62. 62.

    Wilde, An Ideal Husband, in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 389–476, 397.

  63. 63.

    Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 397.

  64. 64.

    See, for example, Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 108–109; Whiteley, 283; and Joseph Pearce, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 82–84.

  65. 65.

    Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 25–6.

  66. 66.

    Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000): 168.

  67. 67.

    Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 173.

  68. 68.

    Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Company, 1892), 11.

  69. 69.

    Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, 13.

  70. 70.

    Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, 13.

  71. 71.

    Lady Wilde, “Divinity of Humanity,” Essays and Stories (Boston: C.T. Brainard, 1909), 133.

  72. 72.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 123–206, 193. The claim is reinforced by the dialogue’s full title: “The Critic as Artist: with some remarks upon the importance of discussing everything” (267).

  73. 73.

    Oscar Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 161.

  74. 74.

    Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 231.

  75. 75.

    Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” “The Decay of Lying,” Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 72–103, 92.

  76. 76.

    Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, 69. Schopenhauer appeals to Hamlet repeatedly over the course of The World as Will and Idea, noting on one occasion that the famous “mousetrap” scene is a precise illustration of how art should help to illuminate truth: “If the whole world as idea is only the visibility of will, the work of art is to render this visibility more distinct. It is the camera obscura which shows the objects more purely, and enables us to survey them and comprehend them better. It is the play within the play, the stage upon the stage in ‘Hamlet’” (345). For Schopenhauer, then, the work of art should always function as it does in Shakespeare’s play: it should reflect and sharpen one’s perception of reality, while also spurring one on to contemplation, revelation, and action. In other words, art does not serve as a simple mirror of reality: it presents an opportunity to suspend one’s suffering by creating, in effect, another reality.

  77. 77.

    Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, 287.

  78. 78.

    See, for example, Josephine Guy’s notes on the essay (Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 366n and 407n).

  79. 79.

    Wilde, “Decay of Lying,” 37.

  80. 80.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 179. Schopenhauer once wrote: “[…] in a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like an acrobat on a rope—in such a world, happiness is inconceivable. How can it dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is the sole form of existence?” (Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, 35).

  81. 81.

    Indeed, Wilde’s pessimism arguably becomes most apparent in his treatment of the material world. In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which I discuss at greater length in Chap. 6, Wilde wryly suggests that private property constitutes a source of corruption for the elite and the impoverished alike, leading men to equate their self-worth with material wealth: “For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. […] The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.” Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 231–68, 237.

  82. 82.

    Oscar Wilde, “The Truth of Masks,” in vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 208–228, 228.

  83. 83.

    Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum, 5.

  84. 84.

    Whiteley, Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum, 16.

  85. 85.

    “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth,” as Jean Baudrillard puts it, “it is the truth which conceals that there is none.” The citation from Ecclesiastes serves as the epigraph to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994), 1.

  86. 86.

    Schopenhauer, Studies, 61.

  87. 87.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 278.

  88. 88.

    Qtd. in Quinn, The Confidence of British Philosophers, 163.

  89. 89.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 127 [101].

  90. 90.

    William Wallace, Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 354.

  91. 91.

    Wallace, Prolegomena, 190.

  92. 92.

    Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 477–538, 499.

  93. 93.

    Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 427.

  94. 94.

    Michael Y. Bennett examines Wilde’s critique of idealism by positioning him as an antecedent to Bertrand Russell in his essay “Wilde Thoughts on Philosophical Reference in An Ideal Husband”: “An Ideal” versus “The Ideal” Husband, Oscar Wilde and Philosophy, ed. Michael Y. Bennett (New York: Palgrave, 2018): 151–66.

  95. 95.

    Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 440.

  96. 96.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 141 [169].

  97. 97.

    Pater writes: “Hegel, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, estimating the work of his predecessors, has also passed a remarkable judgment on Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s writings. ‘Winckelmann by contemplation of the ideal works of the ancients received a sort of inspiration through which he opened a new sense for the study of art. He is to be regarded as one of those who in the sphere of art have known how to initiate a new organ for the human spirit.’ That it has given a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that can be said of any critical effort” (147). For astute explorations of Pater’s relationship to Hegel see, for instance, Giles Whiteley, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (Oxford: Legenda, 2010); Kit Andrews, “Walter Pater as Oxford Hegelian: Plato and Platonism and T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 72.3 (July 2011): 437–59.

  98. 98.

    See Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

  99. 99.

    Wilde remarked in his Notebook Kept at Oxford that “the Berkeleyan hypothesis of abolishing the substance of matter altogether” was troubling, for the “same argument however wd justify the abolition of the soul” (165 [59]).

  100. 100.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 141 [169].

  101. 101.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 140–141 [168].

  102. 102.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 133 [133].

  103. 103.

    Benjamin Jowett, Introduction to Parmenides in vol. 4 of The Dialogues of Plato (Oxford: Clarendon, 1875): 121–58, 155.

  104. 104.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 133 [132].

  105. 105.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 136 [151].

  106. 106.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 151 [214].

  107. 107.

    Oscar Wilde, “Notebook on Philosophy,” 1876–8, “Oscar Wilde and His Literary Circle Collection,” MS W6721M3 N9113, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles, CA. The original line appears in George Grote, “Plato and the Companions of Socrates,” The North British Review 43 (1865): 351–84, 373.

  108. 108.

    Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies,” 142.

  109. 109.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 140.

  110. 110.

    Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 140.

  111. 111.

    Montgomery Hyde. The Trials of Oscar Wilde (London: W. Hodge, 1949), 123.

  112. 112.

    Wilde’s appeal to aesthetic and literary dialogue in the courtroom was in Merlin Holland’s words “insanely quixotic” and almost certainly precipitated his undoing (xliii).

  113. 113.

    Heraclitus, The Fragments of the Works of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature (Baltimore: M. Murray, 1889), 101.

  114. 114.

    Wilde, Commonplace Book, 147 [195].

  115. 115.

    The concept was originally expressed in a 1674 letter to his friend Jarig Jelles. Spinoza, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1995), 260.

  116. 116.

    Hegel writes: “That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.” George Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, ed. William Wallace (London: Oxford University Press, 1892), 100.

  117. 117.

    Carolyn Lesjak, “Oscar Wilde and the Art/Work of Atoms,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 43.1 (2010), 1–26, 3.

  118. 118.

    Lesjak, 2.

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    Kimberly J. Stern

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Stern, K.J. (2019). The Philosopher. In: Oscar Wilde. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24604-4_5

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