ABSTRACT
A number of Walter Pater's critics have sought in recent years to rehabilitate both the term 'aestheticism' and the category of the 'aesthetic' upon which it rests. Aestheticism is directly related to G. W. F. Hegel's death of art thesis: aestheticism is the result of that same Reflexionkultur which is responsible, according to Hegel, for art's 'dissolution'. It is the 'autonomy' of the artefact from the Idea which precipitates both aestheticism and the death of art. The idea which underwrites Pater's 'reconsideration' of his aestheticism, the totalization of and by Hegel, and through which Pater sought to reintroduce his aestheticism into a Hegelian metaphysics and ethics, is both the product of ideology (the Idea), and its reproduction. Pater's mature aestheticism adopts this function of recognition wholesale. Pater's 'reconsidered' aestheticism cannot therefore be characterized as transgressive. Pater's aestheticism is entrenched in ideology and carries with it the seeds of dangerous ideas: repression of alterity, negation of the self and other.
