Oscar Wilde’s Radical Wit | Hacker News Reader

Oscar Wilde’s Radical Wit

laphamsquarterly.org

56 pointssamclemens11 comments

One of the most enlightening books I read as a teenager was "The Wit of Oscar Wilde" a gift from my father. It taught me the value of a well phrased insult or what we refer to now as backhanded compliment. Things like "I always feel smarter after listening to you". Stopped me getting in so many fights for calling (much larger, stronger kids) morons.

I wish more theatre companies would perform his work.

Listening to, watching and otherwise enjoying The Importance of Being Earnest has increased my understanding and love of the English language no end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_7SoF1HLQ

It's one of a very small number of plays from Wilde's era that is still performed despite Victorian London's having plenty of theatres:

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/mt/theaters/pva234.htm...

> ... neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

Science at least aspires to moral impartiality in some contexts but how on earth can this be ascribed to art? Can you see Guernica morally impartial? Or even American Gothic? Let alone art forms such as movies, music, video games, comics, etc. Are any of these forms notably thin on moral approval or disapproval? Morality seems to be common as dirt in art, if not actually essential to it.

In what sense can this quote not be nonsense?

You have to understand "art for art's sake". Read Whistler's "Ten o Clock" lecture. Whistler was a friend of Oscar's and some say had a stronger wit.

Oscar Wilde: I wish I had said that.

James McNeill Whistler: You will, Oscar, you will.

Basically people want artists to make things that serve a narrative, or have a utilitarian function, but art does not have to justify its existence.

Moral approval and disapproval are concepts Hume and others developed that are separate from morality itself. In a terrible description, it's how our emotional response influences whether we view it as moral, rather than any reason based analysis of the action.

So I'm pretty sure he's saying art and science are unable to feel emotion, and the events of the artists' life are too recent to judge him purely on his art.

Well for one separating the art, the artist, and the apparent reading of it by the context. Even putting aside that featuring something in a work doesn't imply approval for it at all look at how many have failed to make anti-war films for one. There are countless examples of this separation and dissonance from intention and differing values.

> Morality seems to be common as dirt in art

True. But there are schools of thought in art that deal with aesthetic contemplation. It aspires to be devoid of moral discoursing, but by the nature of being consumed and critiqued by society tends to fall into moral discourse. Is Nobokov's Lolita about eroticism or pedophilia? Is Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza about beauty or emptiness of a hedonistic lifestyle? I can think of Camus's Stranger which did not serve any moral prescription to me. Because of it's subjectivity and people's trigger happiness when deriving meaning, art becomes about morality. Same can be said about a lot of technological and scientific improvements. Black mirror literally just does that.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. (...)

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

From the preface to Dorian Grey.

So art can contain morality and moral judgment as part of the subject matter, but the artistic quality itself is independent of moral.

Morality seems to be common as dirt in art

And this is why Wilde challenged and denigrated morality (middle-class morality was the pejorative term both he and Shaw liked to use). He was actually an extremely moralistic writer and philosopher. See for example the Soul of Man under Socialism:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1017/1017-h/1017-h.htm

So much moralizing is reflexive, simplistic, and just plain cheesy that I think it fair to say that it is antithetical to art. And in science, well, science sometimes leads to some morally troubling conclusions.

All of which leads me to one of my favorite Wilde quote:

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

If you think that's nonsense, take a moment to reflect on it. Then reflect on it a little more. It's a sentence whose wit springs from subverting the moral assumptions inherit in the words themselves.

"For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel and degrading" -De Profundis

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/De_Profundis_(Wilde)

Belongs to that most nakedly introspective catagory of writing. Like Augustine, Montainge or Poe's Eureka

This was a nice article, especially since I'm a fan of his The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which I'm ashamed to say is the only work I've read by him. In particular, he stands in an odd relation to the other socialist thinkers of his era; Marx known as a thoroughly rational type who went to pains to avoid moral arguments save for the rhetorical devices he was known for even in personal correspondance and Kropotkin apparently seeing no issue with making such moral arguments to argue for socialism. Wilde's stance on morality and argumentation is thus different to both of them - eschewing the rigorous systematic critique of the capitalist system (as the production process of capital, Marx) while also departing from a familiar morality which, at least in their day (and to me even today) moved anyone to the socialist cause (Kropotkin).

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