Good Old Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. 

He was an Irish writer and poet whom I first heard of in an RSA lecture series featuring  Slavoj Zizek (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g). When Dr. Layne suggested we find an Epicurean for class Monday Oscar Wilde suddenly popped into my head. And I'm not sure I can prove that he was, in fact, a sure disciple, but I like him. He writes really great essays. One, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, has some pretty scandalous insights. 

Oscar Wilde belonged, for a little while at least, to the school of Aestheticism, believing that life had to be lived intensely, following an ideal of beauty. I snagged the following from wikipedia as a brief introduction, 

"The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. As a consequence, they did not accept John Ruskin's utilitarian conception of art as something moral or useful. Instead, they believed that Art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful. The Aesthetes developed the cult of beauty, which they considered the basic factor in art. Life should copy Art, they asserted. They considered nature as crude and lacking in design when compared to art."

For Oscar Wilde, I don't think John Stuart Mill's--people want to be happy; that seems pretty clear. What makes people happy? Why, pleasure makes people happy--works. He states in his essay, and I would like to select a couple of clips, (I hope they can stand for their own defense).

"the chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely any one at all escapes...The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism."

"Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan...has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand 'under the shelter of the wall' as Plato puts it, and so to realize the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable gain and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however are exceptions."

"Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism...under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realized Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally. For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It had led individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought it was the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is...Now, nothing should be able to harm a man except himself."

With regards to Epicurus, but also to keep in mind as we begin looking more closely at the Stoics I think this last clip, 'nothing should be able to harm a man except himself' is the main crux.