“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 to believe that, they might just as well,” she would say, hollow-voiced. Such bleakness of heart in one so young was disturbing, and Mickelsson rarely called on her if he could help it. Sometimes, turning to her side of the room, he would find her large, sullen eyes settled on him—beautiful eyes, shiny as dark glass—and he would wonder in brief distress whether there were perhaps something he ought to be saying to her, some phrase he had at hand, insufficiently valued, that might transform her way of seeing. She reminded him a little of a bird in winter, round head drawn in toward the shoulders. He knew better than to brood on it. He’d seen enough to know that philosophy follows chemistry. If she stared at him with the cool detachment of a wood-nymph, or someone terminally ill (he got a memory-flash of his father in the hospital), it was not because she’d been musing too long on, say, Spengler.
Miss Mariani was still watching him with large-faced interest. She had not noticed, apparently, that the discussion of I. F. Stone’s charge was, for the moment at least, dead. Harry Kaplan in the back row passed a note to the red-headed girl beside him. Weber? Webster? She opened it, glancing up nearsightedly at Mickelsson and, seeing that she’d been caught, blushed. He returned his attention—thinking he might quickly get rid of them—to the opinions of Alan Blassenheim.
“I take it you’re suggesting,” he said, “that there is indeed a ‘divine plan,’ a sort of ‘museum of eternal forms,’ as a certain reading of Plato has it“—he shot a look at Blassenheim, telegraphing the punch and half smiling to soften its effect when it came—“and Nature, by random evolutionary groping, struggles to find her way to those forms one by one.” He glanced at Nugent, then back, as he added, “More or less like the roomful of apes at typewriters, trying to stumble onto War and Peace.”
Here and there students snickered, Nugent among them, not necessarily because they’d understood. (Out of control, he thought; he couldn’t even handle the discussion of freshmen.) Blassenheim blinked, not yet fully aware that his suggestion had been made to appear too silly to pursue. Mickelsson felt at the back of his mind a troublesome struggle of contradictions: annoyance at the too easy laughter of the young man’s classmates, and a twinge of pity for Blassenheim, whose suggestions, after all, were more interesting than any those who laughed at him were likely to come up with; a touch of impatience at the fact that, year after year, one covered the same old ground; but also a surge of impatience with himself, not just for losing the thread, falling into chaos (there was a time when he’d have laid all this out clearly, with contagious excitement), but also for striking out at poor Blassenheim. He thought of his own son Mark, unhappy in college, an eager, nervous boy whose teachers had no appreciation of his gifts—his sweetness of soul, his devotion to ideas, his monkish diligence and care. It was not, he was certain, the opinion of a doting parent. Mickelsson knew the university world, its shoddiness and self-absorption; and he’d seen the boy’s carelessly graded papers.
The thought of his son brought with it a clammy sensation it took him a moment to identify: the visit of the I.R.S. agents, their alarming knowledge of everything in his life, including the fact, trivial in itself, that Mark was involved in anti-nuclear demon
strations. Their visit had been more than a month ago now. He’d heard nothing since. Alas, nothing from his son either.
“I don’t mean to dismiss your suggestion too hastily,” Mickelsson said, struggling against inertia—struggling and, at the deepest level, failing, dealing with Blassenheim’s murky, difficult notions by a magic trick: deliberately changing the issue. “It may well be that the universe is filled with ghostly forms waiting to be realized. But if they aren’t yet realized—or, worse, if they should happen never to be realized—it would seem necessary for us to figure out in what sense we can claim they exist.”
Quickly, Blassenheim said, wildly improvising, darting up his hand to give his speaking legitimacy, apparently unaware that his point had been palmed and pocketed, “I understand your objection, but maybe that’s where, like, consciousness differs from the rest. Maybe it’s wrong to talk about physical objects and eternal forms—the perfect zebra, say.” He smiled and shrugged, opening his hands again. “But maybe with thoughts it’s a whole different business. Like mathematics, for instance, or chemical formulas. Like the number two. It was up there for millions of years before anybody thought of it, right? It’s built into, you know, like, the structure of things.” He folded his arms, closing the hands on the well-developed shoulders.
“Well, not really, not exactly,” Mickelsson said and pretended to smile. Should one drift off to Wittgenstein—words as names, words as functions? He sighed and glanced at the clock.
Now Michael Nugent had his hand up, his pale eyes a little like those of an I.R.A. killer, or so Mickelsson imagined. “Are you saying the ‘eternal verities’ that Faulkner talks about, there aren’t any?”
Mickelsson started to answer, then paused, arrested by a hunch that the boy was speaking ironically, scoffing at Faulkner’s hopes. He met Nugent’s eyes and believed the hunch correct. “All I meant to be suggesting,” he said, looking down at his pipe for a moment, “is that ‘Plato’s Ideas,’ insofar as we can call them that—” He paused again, glancing at Miss Mariani, who sat smoking hard, writing in her notebook. She breathed the smoke deep, then let it seep out. He’d lost his thread. Then it came back to him. “ ‘Plato’s Ideas’ ”—he spoke directly to Nugent—“have a fascistic tendency only if we argue that the universe is hopelessly unreasonable, so that the rule of reason in human society is unsupportable, absurd.” Abruptly he got up from the desk, went to the blackboard behind it, and picked up a short 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 left—then nodded, decisively, at Blassenheim.
“But isn’t it true,” Blassenheim asked, “that all that really proves is that Plato had a sort of aristocratic bias, like the modern, like, capitalist? He couldn’t believe that a Jew like Einstein or a fifteen-year-old kid might be the real philosopher kings? I mean, some things are right and some things aren’t right, that’s all there is to it. If an evil government survived for a million years, it would still be evil.”
Again Mickelsson nodded. “Of course it would,” he said. “By definition. The problem is—”
Again Nugent had his hand up, furiously waving it.
He realized with a start that Brenda Winburn was staring at him, her large, dark eyes still as gun-barrels. Perhaps it was only that the others were gathering their papers and books, ready for the bell. Her stare was murky with shadows, like that of a child on drugs, though he doubted that it was that. He had an irrational sense that in a moment she would break out of her terrible lethargy of soul and shout at him, or snarl like an animal, expose him as a quibbler, an obscurer, a time-server, a fraud. Along with his fear of her came a sexual stirring. Michael Nugent’s face was white, his hand stretched up, desperately reaching. That instant—fortunately—the bell rang. With the back of the hand that held his pipe he touched his forehead; then he smiled, as if grudgingly, and nodded his dismissal of the class. Most of them, as usual, went out shaking their heads. As usual, he’d fooled only the smart ones.