Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART ONE.

Perhaps the place to begin with these two "personality types" is to recognize them as just that--"types." Ideal types in both instances and, therefore, useful as heuristic devices rather than descriptive history.

After acknowledging the typological nature of these devices, one should consider the different emphases of their inventors and try to decide whether or not such differences have a decisive impact upon the way in which such types are best understood.

A superficial comparison of these two types will seize upon the fact that Weber was a founding figure of sociology and Pater a literary man and then summarily conclude that the latter's typology suffers from a failure to attend to the role of social or environmental factors.

I hope to avoid this kind of superficiality in my analysis. That said, to ignore the potential relevance of such an obvious difference would be irresponsible.

Let us begin with Pater--or, rather, with the expositor of Pater who, in my view, does the best job of "distilling" from his body of work the "configuration that underlies all his criticism," J. Hillis Miller (see, e.g., Miller's article "Walter Pater" in the 2nd edition of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism, pp. 720-722).

Miller rightly outlines the manner in which Pater embraced the notion that all of human experience reflects the Heraclitean flux. This notion saturates Pater's approach to literature and to life itself. Moreover, it lends a distinctly solipsistic flavor to Pater's world-view, for once Heraclitus has cut from beneath our feet all solid ground, each individual is left with nothing to hold on to but a rushing stream of impressions and her or his own interpretations of the same.

It is those who travel this far with Pater, and this far only, who are in the greatest danger of producing a superficial reading of his project.

For Pater does not see each individual consciousness as a self-enclosed monad bobbing about in the Heraclitean flux; instead, he posits deep commonalities among consciousnesses and, indeed, among the very elements of the flux itself: "It turns out that for Pater, the moment, though unique, is not single. Each 'impression' is 'infinitely divisible'"--for it is in the very nature of the flux to be so (Miller, 721). Each impression snatched from the primeval soup of experience is "self-divided" or, in Pater's terms, "Anders-Streben" (Other-Striving). As Miller explains, "The moment is in battle against itself in a way that recalls the Heraclitean flux, the Parmenidean or Empedoclean battle of opposites" (ibid).

It is via this appreciation of the complexity of the moment or momentary impression that Pater introduces the dimensions of diachronicity and conflict into his "system":

"The uniqueness of the momentary impression is a result not of its singleness but of its special combination of antagonistic forces flowing into it from the past and destined to divide again, each to go its separate way into the future. This means that the moment, at first seemingly so isolated, is connected by multiple strands to past and future" (ibid).

Here one observes Pater's often remarked debt to early Greek and Hegelian philosophies; but it is with respect to his rarely remarked debt to Kant that we discover his affinity to Weber. Pater's Kantian side argued that the ethically appropriate response of the individual to the Heraclitean flux was not to "go with the flow" merely, but rather, to "purge away by an effort of refinement or askesis all impurities in the moment, all irrelevant associations" in order to arrive at "the unique 'virtue' of each moment, meaning by 'virtue' the power or energy specific to the elements concentrated in that moment" (ibid). Pater spoke of this power or energy in terms of its ability to induce "pleasure" in the person savoring the moment, but it would seem that pleasure is but one possible response to this activity and, in the interests of thick description, one might wish to invoke Longinus (a la the Paterian Harold Bloom).

In any event, for Pater's Victorian contemporaries, the scandalous aspect of his "system" was that, lurking beneath his ethics, there lay an unapologetic aesthetics (cp. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics and aesthetics are one" remark 6.421 of the T L-P).

In addition to diachronicity and conflict, Pater's "system" contains an "implicit theory of repetition, so Viconian or Nietzschean in its resonances" (ibid, 722). For Pater, what distinguishes history from a record of "one damn thing after another" is the manner in which existing elements re-combine and, therefore, recur.

"The 'virtue' of a given moment does not die with that moment. It divides again into the various elemental forces that have entered into it. Those forces are always potentially able to combine again in a repetition of the earlier flame, a reincarnation that will be no less unique and no less 'wholly concrete' for being a recurrence" (ibid).

As an example, Miller suggests that "A great figure such as Plato is unique, in Pater's view, only in being a special combination of ideas and images already present long before his time" (ibid). Pace Hegel, Pater did not endow history with any specific linearity or teleological direction. The task of the historian and critic is, therefore, the "scrupulous discrimination of the particular elements that are configured in a painting, a poem, a work of philosophy, a personality" (ibid). Pater was less concerned with producing "predictions" than "explanations" and he was less concerned with producing "explanations" than "appreciations."

Weber was likewise indebted to Kant insofar as his ideal type of early modern personhood employed an ethical discipline or askesis as a means of managing his own participation in the unruly world of experience. The specifically sociological contribution of Weber was his insistence that human beings are capable of directing the flow of experience (the flow of the flux, as it were) by means of the social forms that they impose upon the found world. These social forms are, in part, the product of individual exercises of askesis cooperatively performed and, once established, they provide an artificial environment conducive to the recurrence of such acts and, therefore, their (potentially) perpetual institution (see, e.g., Kim, Weber's Politics of Civil Society, p. 74).

Reading Weber together with Pater allows one to recognize the latent aesthetics of Weber's sociology as well as the sociological possibilities of Pater's criticism. We shall return to these matters in PART TWO of this post.