IN THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century Benjamin Jowett introduced elements of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel into the Oxford Greats course. The study of German philosophy, at least in its Hegelian strain, was, however, optional rather than compulsory in the 1870s – Kant features on Wilde’s Finals paper, but Hegel does not. The study of these thinkers was probably left to the discretion of the tutors of individual Oxford colleges. While Jowett’s students at Balliol were encouraged to grapple with the bewildering complexities of Kant and Hegel’s writings, it is unlikely that Wilde received the same stimulus at Magdalen, where the teaching was neither as adventurous nor as competent.
Nevertheless, Wilde was fascinated by both philosophers, and his attraction to them probably had roots in his Dublin past. His father’s library contained various works of German philosophy, such as the writings of the intellectual Lessing; Speranza was familiar with other Teutonic thinkers such as Fichte and Novalis. Like many readers of her generation, she also fell under the spell of Arthur Schopenhauer’s vast and vertiginous The World as Will and Idea. She certainly knew something of Hegel’s ideas, too, as she translated a German novel entitled The First Temptation, or ‘Eritis Sicut Deus’, in which the protagonist is a Hegelian philosopher.
Wilde may have read some German philosophy in his adolescence; he certainly discussed it during his undergraduate years with his mother.1 As Speranza read continental philosophers, such as Schopenhauer, in their original languages, it is likely that she was also familiar with thinkers, such as the German Friedrich Nietzsche and the Dane Søren Kierkegaard, who were not yet translated (or but little translated) into English during her lifetime. This opens up the intriguing possibility that she may have introduced her son to the electrifying writings of these two philosophers, to whom he has often, and with much justice, been compared.
Writers from continental Europe often visited Merrion Square and the Wildes made frequent trips to France, Germany and Scandinavia. As Celts, the Wildes believed that they shared greater racial affinity with the peoples of mainland Europe than they did with the Anglo-Saxon English, so it was only natural that they should feel greater cultural and intellectual kinship with continentals. Many Irish intellectuals, Wilde’s parents among them, were proud that English philosophy had never gained dominion over their country. That philosophy was dominated by empiricism, which is based on the belief that knowledge must be derived exclusively from sensory experience, and ought to be attained by experiment and observation rather than through the sort of abstract reasoning that characterises German philosophy. Facts, in a word, must come before theories, and scientific data before conceptual speculation.
Some of Wilde’s parents’ writings, and many of his own, can be described as an extravagant crusade against empiricism, and as a declaration of the superiority of philosophical ideas and the poetic imagination over mere facts. The Wildes fought passionately against what Matthew Arnold called the English ‘despotism of fact’, for political as well as philosophical reasons. If they admitted the truth of the English world-view there would be no intellectual vantage point from which they could criticise colonial rule in their country. Moreover, admitting the sovereignty of facts would be tantamount to acknowledging an English victory because facts are, of course, always manipulated by the governing power.* Wilde’s interest in German philosophy at Oxford, and his contempt for English empiricism, are an affirmation of his Celtic identity.
Wilde was intrigued by the Kantian notion that sensory data must be processed by our minds before we can comprehend it. Kant analyses the processes that render raw facts intelligible – we filter and sort them, he says, using innate mental ‘categories’, such as our inbuilt grasp of the concepts of time and space. Kant thus offered a challenge to empiricism, which assumed our ability to see the external world objectively: how can we see the world ‘as it really is’ when we perceive it through the innate categories of our minds?
Wilde believed that the Enlightenment philosopher had brought ‘speculation’ from the outside world ‘back to man’, reinstating him, just as Socrates had done, as ‘the theoretical and practical measure of all things’.3 His fundamental message was similar to that of a poem from the Greek Anthology, a collection of ancient verse Wilde adored: ‘Measure yourself first, and know yourself, then you can begin to measure the world.’
Hegel, in contrast, moved the focus of philosophy away from man, and set out, in Wilde’s phrase, to ‘re-conquer the world’.4 Yet while the early nineteenth-century thinker focused on the external universe, there was nothing empirical about his perspective. He was an Idealist who saw in human history the progressive realisation of the Geist – the ‘mind of God’ or the ‘world’s soul’. The Geist evolved over time through a constant process of contradiction and negation, which would one day be resolved in a perfect synthesis.5 Human history would then reach its apotheosis and the ‘mind of God’ made manifest. The notoriously obscure and abstract character of Hegel’s writing makes his ideas extremely difficult to grasp. Wilde deciphered them with the aid of Jowett and Symonds, whose commentaries on the classics draw heavily on Hegel, and by reading William Wallace and T.H. Green’s lucid introductory studies of the philosopher, which he purchased from Shrimpton’s bookshop over the winter months of 1877–78.6
With the rise of modern science in the eighteenth century, empiricism had come to dominate the English intellectual landscape, as, indeed, it does to this day. Wilde believed that this philosophical outlook was largely responsible for the limited and impoverished character of England’s intellectual culture, which held up, as an ideal, the ‘thoroughly well-informed man’ desperate to cram his mind full of ‘rubbish and facts’.7 For Wilde, as for Kant, facts were highly problematic entities; moreover, if they remained unilluminated by philosophic theories, they were meaningless. ‘Facts,’ as he put it, ‘are the Labyrinth: ideas the guiding thread.’8
Wilde’s anti-empiricism provided a philosophical context for his theories on art, such as his championing of fantasy over realism; it also inspired his criticism of science, whose claim to objectivity had, he thought, been undermined by Kant. Wilde believed that scientists often unconsciously projected on to facts the cultural and intellectual prejudices of their historical period. In one of his introductions to Plato’s Dialogues, Jowett argues that such preconceptions are far more pervasive in scientific and ‘commonsensical’ cultures which, believing themselves to be ‘resting on facts’, are unaware that they are actually ‘resting on ideas’.9 Wilde glossed the passage with the word ‘good’.
* It is interesting, in this context, to read Wilde’s 1889 review of J.A. Froude’s novel The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. Froude summarises the ‘Irish Problem’ thus: ‘The Irish disowned the facts of life, and the facts of life proved the strongest.’ In his article Wilde challenges this view, partly on the grounds that Froude’s ‘facts’ are actually fictions invented to justify English rule.2