Plato lives on, damn him!

On reading A Very Short Introduction to Marx, through p38…

Can we not get away from our own ideals? I am struck, today, by the re-insistence of Platonic idealism in modern philosophy. Peter Singer summarizes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind in terms of a theory of the “Mind” of which all individual minds are particular manifestations. Then Hegel (via Singer) reads history in terms of the development of the Mind. How is this not Platonic essentialism? The separation of an ideal Mind from the fallen and particularized minds of individuals? Singers describes the Young Hegelians, most notably Feuerbach and Marx, pointing out this problem and trying to bring Hegel “down to earth.” First Feuerbach transforms “Mind” into human consciousness, something less mystical (but still overly universalizing, no?). Marx then gets even further into the dirt by pointing out capitalism as a social force alienating mankind from “itself” – this “itself,” of course, being mankind’s “species-being,” or sense of itself as a unified species. These ideologies, however de-mystified, still separate a universal ideal from a particular manifestation. Is this not problematic? To make things even worse, Singer points out that Marx had very little interest in the proletariat until he realized that the presence of a class of humanity that had nothing else but its “humanity” was the key puzzle piece in his philosophical worldview. He describes—and this quote really gets me—Marx seeing socialist workers in France and writing of them, “The nobility of man shines forth from their toil-worn bodies.” Here again, “the nobility of man”—is this so removed from Hegelian “Mind”—is juxtaposed against, and seeing to heighten in reflection, the individual representation of that man/Mind in the body of the individual worker. He’s not looking at the person, he’s looking at what the person signifies.

And that leads me to semiotics, where the signified pointed to by the signifier “cat” is not a cat is but an idea of cat-ness. Platonic essentialism again.

It would seem that Derridean post-structuralism would be best suited to de-regulating against the Platonism inherent in all this philosophy. Since I don’t know too too much about Derrida I can’t really talk about him yet. But I can talk about Judith Butler, and don’t you think that in her conception of gender performativity she depends upon a kind of radical new idealism? She acknowledges, better than anyone, that essentialism, is a farce, that no individual male is perfectly and unambiguously a “man.” But she says that that individual’s gender identity is performatively constructed by a cultural understand of man-ness. Does this not resituate Platonic idealism within a cultural context? Idealism still exists, but it is a cultural construct, in fact it is the very process of cultural construction itself.

The gap between the ideal and the particular is the fundamental crack in human understanding and, by extension, human philosophy.

Even the Aristotle’s who try to deconstruct Plato (as Feuerbach tried to deconstruct Hegel, and Derrida tried to deconstruct Saussure[?]), wind up simply resituating the place of idealism, not eliminating it completely. Perhaps only those who successfully do eliminate it are the existentialists and nihilists, who leave us with nothing. [but I don’t understand these philosophies yet either, so maybe I’m wrong]

I think that this ideal-particular gap is what I’ve been hitting on in my nascent idea of “lyrical presence” in the musical theatre performer. It’s the idea that we (WHO THE FUCK IS WE?) all want desperately to believe in the possibility of presence—which is, inherently, transcendence—and so we are drawn, as in a spiritual pilgrimage, to processes of representation that that make presence and transcendence feel palpably real, that bridge that gap and bring the ideal into the realm of lived experience.

Perhaps the “ideal” is one of those terms that structures human existence and therefore needs to be problematized (Foucault-style), as Warner does with “public” and Butler with “gender.”

P.S. I think one manifestation of this problem is my ongoing frustration that I CAN’T KNOW EVERYTHING!!! Because it would seem that, if I did know everything, I could distinguish ideals from particulars, I could account for all exceptions to any ideal model. Perhaps if I knew everything, I wouldn’t even need ideals, since the sum of my knowledge would contain all, and therefore only, particulars, and I would enter a new paradigm of knowing by which ideals and models are (somehow, magically) no longer necessary.