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

piece of chalk from the tray. “If death, for example, is a regular and predictable feature of our experience,” he said, raising the chalk but not yet writing, half turning back to them to finish his thought, “so that the wish to avoid death and make life worthwhile is also one of our experiential facts—” He shifted his eyes, wishing he hadn’t mentioned death.

Quickly Mickelsson made three boxes, put a checkmark in each one, then drew a shadowy box-with-checkmark above them, with dotted lines radiating down from it, one to each box, like heaven’s love.

“If anything is constant,” he said as he made his picture, “then that Something transcends particular experience, though it’s also immanent in experience”—he jabbed his chalk at the checks in the lower three boxes—“and we have a chance, at least, of figuring it out.” He drew spectacles studying the boxes:

“As for Mr. Faulkner’s rather general notion of ‘eternal verities,’ well, the impulse is fine, but the language lacks the kind of focus we look for in Philosophy 108.” He smiled. Part of the class smiled with him, mirroring his grimness. He felt, for an instant, the sensation of a younger, more impartial teacher: benign and powerful, as if ideas were what counted. Nugent glanced, pink-faced and alarmed, at the students to his left, perhaps checking to see whether they resented his asking questions, making trouble. Brenda Winburn went on staring out the window. She was not the only one, it came to him. Several, mostly those in back, were glancing from time to time at the clock. The notebooks he could see were filled with doodles. (Woe was Mickelsson. They were on to him all right. Their evaluation-of-the-instructor forms would be blistering.

Knowledge of subject matter: Fair.Presentation of subject matter: Poor.Interest in students: Stinko.

He would do the sensible thing: forget to hand out the forms.)

His pipe had gone out. “Put it this way,” he said, letting his shoulders droop, avoiding Nugent’s eyes. “One reading of Plato—not a very good one, necessarily, but a common one, and one to which Mr. Blassenheim would seem to be inclining us—says eternal forms exist ‘out there,’ like lures in a fashion magazine. Darwin would say, if you pushed him to it, that the way to be, for zebras and human beings, exists not ‘out there’ but inside, respectively—or should we say exists largely inside?—zebras and human beings. Our nature, in other words, would be, for Darwin, not some goal we’re aiming at—the way a farmer aims his tractor at his red handkerchief when he turns that first furrow”—the class looked blank—“but our whole animal history and the whole grid of our genetic potential, including possible but as yet unrealized mutations. If we’re more loving than zebras, he’d claim, it’s not because God is Love and we’re closer to God than zebras are; it’s genetic programming: our children are more helpless; they need families and tender care for their survival. If there’s a form for human beings, he’d have to say, it changes with every evolutionary leap. Reason can figure it out, if it stays alert, or so we hope.” He pointed at the picture of spectacles on the blackboard. “But here’s the tricky part. In actual fact—that is, in practice—by ‘reason’ we always mean, consciously or not, ‘elite reason,’ the reason of people who’ve cut themselves off from farming or shoemaking or selling insurance to study ‘reason.’ We mean people who’ve devoted themselves to logic, mathematics, the traditions of human thought, and can therefore make some claim to knowing what they’re talking about. You can see the problem. I don’t know anyone who’d strenuously deny that some human beings are smarter than others; but it’s hard to know for sure who the smart ones are—it has too much to do with class, unexamined teaching methods and learning theory, and so on. And if the form for human beings exists mainly ‘in here’ ”—he pointed at his chest with his pipestem—“in all of us, each with his own somewhat special program—or to put it another way, if it exists ‘out there’ only in the sense that the chessboard on which a particular game is played exists transcendently ‘out there’ ”—he saw that they were lost in his verbiage but decided to trudge on—“then it seems risky to leave the definition of what we are, or ought to be—that is, what game life ought to play—in the hands of just a few, the reason-specialists, the philosopher kings of The Republic.” An image of his neighbor John Pearson came into his mind. The mysterious, possibly misanthropic smile, the eyebrows that went out like gray-black wings. He continued quickly, brushing past the image: “This is an argument often raised against Plato in recent years, ever since the philosopher Bertrand Russell cracked the door to it. Gordon Past’s book, for instance, Enemies of the Open Society. It’s an argument almost always overstated, as it is by Past; but there may be a sense in which it’s valid. The Germans allowed themselves a very small brain-pool during the Second World War. They’d even have killed Einstein, if they could have gotten him to come home. Meanwhile, in America, it was a fifteen-year-old boy who figured out a practical way to build the superfortress. In other words, we may be wise to distinguish between Plato’s idea that there are transcendent truths and his metaphoric political notion of how society might get at them.” An odd whininess, he noticed, had invaded his voice. He pushed on. “Looking for the truth isn’t fascistic. It means giving in to open-mindedness, subjecting one’s opinions and prejudices to analysis and rigorous argument. On that score, you might look at the Parmenides. Plato’s suggested means—the reasoning class in The Republic—may be something else, in practice anyway. On that point …” He let it trail off.

Miss Mariani was smiling. It was exactly as she’d always thought.

Inevitably, both Blassenheim and Nugent had their hands up. Mickelsson again glanced at the clock—two minutes