Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Individualism and the ‘aesthetic philosopher’
- 2 Empiricism and the Imperilled Self
- 3 Subjectivity and Imagination: From Hume to Kant via Berkeley
- 4 Metaphysics: Pater's Failed Attempt at Atheism
- 5 Sense and Sensuality: Caught between Venus and Dionysus
- 6 Pater's Copernican Revolution: The Desiring, Dying Body
- 7 Evolution and the ‘Species’: The Individual in Deep Time
- 8 The Moment and the Aesthetic Imagination
- 9 Ethics, Society and the Aesthetic Individual
- 10 Conclusion: ‘the elusive inscrutable mistakable self’
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The Moment and the Aesthetic Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Editions and Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Individualism and the ‘aesthetic philosopher’
- 2 Empiricism and the Imperilled Self
- 3 Subjectivity and Imagination: From Hume to Kant via Berkeley
- 4 Metaphysics: Pater's Failed Attempt at Atheism
- 5 Sense and Sensuality: Caught between Venus and Dionysus
- 6 Pater's Copernican Revolution: The Desiring, Dying Body
- 7 Evolution and the ‘Species’: The Individual in Deep Time
- 8 The Moment and the Aesthetic Imagination
- 9 Ethics, Society and the Aesthetic Individual
- 10 Conclusion: ‘the elusive inscrutable mistakable self’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And I do not call it fixity,
Where past and present are gathered …
T. S. Eliot. ‘Burnt Norton’, Four Quartets, 9Pater's preoccupation with the intensely felt moment of sensual or aesthetic experience goes back to the 1850s and persists throughout his career. In a poem written in the summer of 1858, just before he matriculated at Oxford, he asks with fearful innocence, ‘Where are the dead?’ (qtd Wright I, 136). In his mature works his inability to answer this question leads him to consider how it is possible to live under the sentence of death-eternal, when the ephemeral individual life is lost in evolutionary history. The intensely felt moment is his answer.
The expanse of evolutionary history and the precious ephemerality of a single moment within it define Pater's appropriation of ‘art for art's sake’: ‘For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake’ (R 153). As this celebrated declaration from the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1868, 1873) testifies, it is time and, more specifically, the moment that distinguishes Pater's aestheticism from Gautier's conception of art pour l'art (1835) or Swinburne's appropriation of that term in William Blake (1868) (101).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Walter PaterIndividualism and Aesthetic Philosophy, pp. 146 - 164Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013