Resumen de Walter Pater’s corrupt Heraclitus
The Conclusion that Walter Pater appended the first edition of his master work The Renaissance: Studies on Art and Poetry (1873) earned him a bad reputation for having corrupted an entire generation of young people to the point that he felt obliged to suppress this text in the second edition. But he once again included it in the third and fourth editions, following the publication (1885) of his historical novel Marius the Epicurean. The original version of his Conclusion was influenced lato sensu by the philosophy of Heraclitus and nothing suggests that, after including it in the last two editions with “some slight changes”, Pater had abandoned the philosophy of the great pre-Socratic philosopher. Does Pater’s inconsistency represent a paradox or perhaps a contradiction? This brief work —still in progress— analyzes the reasons for the initially negative reception of Pater’s text and suggests a hypothetical framework—relying on brief passages taken from Marius the Epicurean and The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Critic as Artist II and De Profundis written by Pater’s most outstanding disciple Oscar Wilde’—for analyzing how, from the postulates of Aestheticism and Heraclitean philosophy, a Victorian Christian could also embark in the new ideological direction marked by Pater’s Conclusion
