Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

“Try this, then,” he said. (Nugent was still muttering.) “Does the fascism we’re annoyed by lie in the stupidity of the masses, that is, their preference for cheap solutions backed by force—mental fascism? Obviously, Socrates frowns on that too.” Some of the class nodded. “But think, now. Perhaps we can nail Plato yet! Possibly the problem was deeper, the very concept, however blurry in the German mind, of transcendent ideals against which multitudes of people can be measured—Gypsies, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, not just Jews, though mainly Jews, certainly. Was the problem—the tendency toward fascism—the belief in ‘transcendent ideals’ against which whole groups of people, as I was saying, can be measured and found to be ‘defective’? Transcendent ideals—immutable forms, the Realities behind Actuality: as some would put it—are much frowned upon these days. Even Heidegger, whose philosophy gave a certain comfort to the Nazis, had no patience for transcendent ideas; and the feeling’s standard—the existentialists, the so-called hermeneutics …” He watched the class write down existentialists, hermeneutics. He swung his leg.

“Plato’s the philosopher who taught us about transcendent ideas, so if it’s true that they’re the problem, then Plato has to go—maybe go live in the woods with the expelled poets.” He smiled. “Well, what do you think?” After a moment he glanced at the blackboard, thinking of writing the question down. What do you think? There was nothing there but the no smoking sign someone had written and, in Mickelsson’s hand, Wednesday’s assignment.

“Notice what we’ve said here; let me put it to you again,” he said. “Maybe there’s something always wrong with transcendent ideas, something ‘deeper’ than the particular situation. Anything bothersome in that statement?”

Nugent had his eyes screwed up. He seemed almost on to it, but he wasn’t yet sure. As for the rest, they watched Mickelsson like children struggling—some of them irritably—to figure out the rules of an unfamiliar game.

“Well, all right, let it stand for now,” he said. “To continue the argument—” (Dirty trick, of course; Socratic.) He glanced at the window. The birds were gone. “In principle, nothing’s more beautiful, we may feel, than the strict idealist view of things. But the question is—” Blassenheim’s hand went up. Mickelsson pressed on: “The question is whether the Ideal exists in actuality or only in our clumsy, moment-by-moment emotions—continually shifting potential; in other words ‘out there’ or ‘in here’ or both: God’s voice, so to speak, or the opinion, on a particular Tuesday, of some human—or both at once. Am I leaving things out?” He waited. No response. “Put it this way. Darwin might say—and Aristotle, as we’ll discover, might partly agree (if the terms were made clear)”—he smiled, ironic—“that the Ideal is everlastingly evolving, so that in effect there’s no such thing as an absolute, static Ideal, only the shifting implications of Being. But if that’s always true, a fact independent of our personal existence …”

It was impossible to go on ignoring young Blassenheim’s hand One knew pretty well what tack he would take, but no matter; nothing was happening anyway, and one could always work one’s way back to the point at hand. Mickelsson nodded, giving Blassenheim the floor, the same instant glancing at Nugent, who smiled with sudden enlightenment and jerked his head, raising his hand, then drew it back down. His queer pallor and large, seemingly lashless eyes had the odd effect of making him appear to be watching the proceedings from far away—ancient Ireland, perhaps—though he sat among the others, presumably in the same dimensions of time-space.

Blassenheim looked at his desktop, deferential, and raised his eyebrows as if to make his face look still more meek, though his accent—Long Island Jewish—suggested to Mickelsson a kind of tough-kid irreverence, perhaps originally a defense against an overprotective mama and Long Island schoolteachers just like her. He glanced left and right, like a basketball player about to make his move, and he spoke slightly out of the side of his mouth, his s’s thickly liquid, almost z or sh. “But isn’t it two different questions, really—whether there’s even such a thing as an Ideal and, if there is, whether an ordinary person can perceive it?”

“Yes, of course,” Mickelsson began. It was a good point, if the boy could figure out what to do with it, nail the old epistemological issues, who can know the Ideal and how, and separate out the content issues, are the ideals situational or transsituational? He should give the boy some help; but his thought hung, snagged, on Blassenheim’s comfortable use of the word perceive. He’d grow up to be a lawyer, big firm in Manhattan. He already had the look. Clean cut. Shiny brown, abundant, blow-dried hair.

Blassenheim hurried on, deferential and aggressive. “If Darwin’s view is right, there’s nothing inherently good about a creature that survives except the fact of its survival.” He rolled out his hands, as if bargaining. (The Darwin argument faintly rang a bell; then Mickelsson remembered: his own book.) The boy said, “But how can you be sure that Reality doesn’t have, like, built-in standards? Like maybe the closer a creature gets to one of those standards, the better its chances of survival.”

“That’s conceivable, of course,” Mickelsson said, startled by the queer direction the boy had taken. (Heading for Bergson?) He really ought to stop and get back on track, or at least make some effort to sort out the many possible claims the boy seemed to be making. Perhaps in response to Mickelsson’s expression—a one-sided smile he only now became aware of—the class was showing signs of boredom and amused contempt, the usual effect when Blassenheim trotted out one of his theories, though they all liked him. (In all fairness, they were equally bored by Mickelsson’s theories, or even Plato’s, if the presentation lacked punch.) The blond girl-athlete, Brenda Winburn—swimming team, if Mickelsson’s memory served—was staring out the window. She was, he’d long since discovered, the class nihilist, not that the word was within the range of her vocabulary. “I guess if people want