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
5 - Sense and Sensuality: Caught between Venus and Dionysus
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
And haply when the tragic clouds of night
Were slowly wrapping round thee, in the cold
Of which men always die, a sense renewed
Of the things sweet to touch and breath and sight
Michael Field, ‘Walter Pater: A Poetic Tribute’Walter Pater carefully satiated his desire for innocuous sensations. He kept a bowl of rose petals on his desk and fresh orange peel on his window sill to create exquisite aromas (Bussell 285). Once, at a luncheon party, he was playfully asked: if he were to be a fish what kind of fish he would be. To this he replied, ‘a carp’ (qtd Seiler 1987: 105). In this dry parody of his popular image Pater would be, no doubt, an ornamental carp with luminescent silvery multi-colours to make him a fish of vivid beauty. He would exist to experience pure, unreflective, superficial sensations, aware only of himself and his immediate surroundings. Not only was he painfully conscious that his aesthetic followers conceived him as such, there was an element to Pater that wished to be this complete and unreserved aesthete. Yet it was not to be. Despite his quiet enjoyment of heightened sensations, his famous affirmations of sensual experience and the appropriation of his ideas by a generation of undergraduates, in Pater's broader aesthetic philosophy sensation has ambivalent status: it is not so much a creed as a problem.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Walter PaterIndividualism and Aesthetic Philosophy, pp. 85 - 108Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013