Impersonality

Abstract

Abstract This chapter is focused upon ‘impersonality’ as a centrally important and widely various phenomenon in Pater’s work, in his sense of the Western philosophical tradition, and more broadly to the nineteenth century and his modernist successors, with a close reading of the Imaginary Portrait ‘Sebastian van Storck’ (1886). Pater was especially preoccupied with the kind of temperament or personality drawn to the extinction of the self, and to the philosophical ideal of an Impersonal Absolute—with what he thinks of as the ‘malady’ of temperament in figures such as Coleridge or Pascal, and indeed with the ‘infectious mania’ of this recurring thread in the history of philosophy itself. Pater is deeply ambivalent both about the ‘malady’ and about the will to impersonality, and ‘Sebastian van Storck’ is the only work in which Pater considers the sickness of personality associated with ascêsis and self-negation outside the sublimation of art, or the transformation into a philosophical body of work.