ABSTRACT
Walter Pater's response to G. W. F. Hegel is not merely to his texts, but takes the form of a total Hegelianization of his aestheticism. This chapter examines Pater's Hegelian structure. Pater's reputation was initially founded on his comprehension of idealism and his aesthetic project ran concurrent with the philosophical movement of Oxford Hegelianism. Hegel's philosophy can be characterized as idealist. But Hegel is an objective idealist and when we say that Pater's aestheticism became Hegelian we mean that his subjective idealism gave way to an objective one. Objective idealism rests upon subject–object identity. Pater's contention in the preface to the Renaissance that the appreciation is constitutive of the thing-in-itself makes his phenomenology transcendental: the subject–object identity here being the unity of the noemic (conscious subject) and noetic (sensible object). For the aim of Pater's Hegelian ethics is one and the same as the aim of his 'reconsidered' aestheticism: namely, to serve to precipitate the coming-to-self-consciousness of the greater reason.
