The quintessence of Oscar Wilde's socio-philosophical views in the works of 21st-century thinkers

Sukharev Ilya Anatolievich

The Advanced Educational Scientific Center (faculty) – Kolmogorov’s boarding school of Moscow State University, 10 «А» class

Scientific adviser: Neshina Anastasia Yurievna, PhD, the associate professor of AESC MSU

The object of the author's attention within the framework of this work was the socio-philosophical views of Oscar Wilde, set out in the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism. There, the writer, as a man of art, creatively comprehends trends in politics and public life, comes to new conclusions regarding the future development of humankind. In his work, Oscar Wilde brings to the fore a synthesis of contradictory socialist and individualistic trends in philosophical thought.

The essay did not make a splash among his contemporaries: only a few socialist leaders appreciated just the anti-capitalist component of the work, although it was not the point. Moreover, even in the collected works of Oscar Wilde, edited by Isobel Murray of the famous series of Oxford authors in 1989, this essay was surprisingly ignored, although it discussed the problems that the writer had been solving throughout his career.

However, we find a continuation of Oscar Wilde's concepts among the works of the 21^st-century thinkers. Some of them directly cite The Soul of Man under Socialism, others, not mentioning Wilde, express similar ideas. Their works are also considered in this study: Slavoj Zizek – a culturologist and social freudomarxist; Alain Badiou – a philosopher; Takis Fotopoulos – a philosopher and economist; Alberto Toscano – a social theorist, cultural critic. Based on their works, conclusions are drawn about the relevance of the socio-philosophical views of Oscar Wilde and the utopianism of his political views in the 21st century. For example, Alain Badiou writes about contemporary art that it “cannot merely be the expression of a particularity (be it ethnic or personal). Art is the impersonal production of a truth that is addressed to everyone” (Badiou A. 2004), which completely rejects Oscar Wilde's thesis “art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known” (Wilde O. 1891), but they agree on the issue of private property.

In today's world of victorious liberalism, when the “end of history” has come, nothing can be conceivable outside the general ideology, but at the same time, the ideology itself proclaims the complete freedom of thought of each individual. This paradox occupies the minds of today's philosophers (mainly of the socialist persuasion), and in the course of our work, we will analyze how to deprive the concept of Oscar Wilde to solve this contradiction.

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