Conclusion

Abstract

At the close of Pater’s career, then, one can summarize the broad strokes of his Platonism. He calls it a tendency and a temper; but it is really a critical acuity for negotiating or reconciling the paradox of opposites one sees on a daily basis, such as the many and the one, or the finite in the infinite, the recognition of form in matter, which in the right balance is beauty. Calling it a tendency emphasizes its enduring power in a person’s personality. It is taking seriously the importance of love in Platonism that opens Pater’s teaching up to charges of a peculiar or idiosyncratic form of the philosophy. Platonically, his aestheticism is the desire to possess beauty, and begins with the very things around us, possessing a high degree of form, becoming rarer and rarer, more select, as one learns to identify better instances of it and his taste advances. Because he is a lover and philosopher at once, he progresses up the Platonic ladder with enthusiasm for visible ideas and knowledge of Dialectic, which relies on scepticism, or a suspension of judgement, which is both a suspension of belief and disbelief. Because he becomes ...