Arts
Season 4 of Paideia Today begins with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. Wilde initiates literary modernism, which in turn sows the seeds of a sort of postmodernism rarely discussed by those tracing the history of ideas. It is vital, however, because it connects the pursuit of a rather ugly 'aesthetics' movement with an assault on goodness and truth. Goodness, beauty, and truth have been seen to be connected since the ancient world. But in literary modernism, we see the doctrinal severance of beauty from notions of morality and truth. Horaces's dictum for the poet was 'to teach and to delight'. Wilde's pursuit of delight, however, is presented in an amoral fashion (in keeping with the fashionable agnosticism of his era). It is no accident that the twentieth century was marked by what C.S. Lewis described as 'the Abolition of Man', but also by a total departure from the educational aims of the world prior to then, in pursuit of a transhumanist and often posthumanist ideal.