What Is “Ideal”?

Today in the freshman group for the 2008 cohort, I mentioned this question (the 08 freshmen are really interesting): what is “ideal”?

The concept of “ideal” is one I use fairly often, though I haven’t made many distinctions about it. In “Scattered Notes on Love and Hatred During the Period of Seclusion,” I brought up the connection between “idealism—subjective idealism—philosophy”; in an earlier article I probably mentioned it too (though I couldn’t find it); and more than two years ago, when I talked about “My Life Ideal,” I was using the word ideal entirely in everyday language; while two and a half years ago, in one of the articles that marked a clear turning point in the style of all my writing, I wrote: “I am a realistic idealist, or an ideal realist.” By a turning point, I mean that the articles before that felt strange to me, as if they had not been written by me, whereas those after it often felt much more familiar. That article happened to fall in the later phase of that boundary, and was precisely somewhere between estrangement and familiarity. In any case, I can now reinterpret the phrase “realistic idealism or ideal realism.”

Looking back at that article now, it still feels rather immature (I imagine that a few years from now, this article will feel the same), but what makes me happy is that some of the basic lines of thought and feeling remain consistent. For example, the view that “when revolution is needed cannot be clarified by theory” was only recently expressed again in my article “Why Is Violent Revolution Unreasonable?”; by then I had long forgotten the wording I originally used, and that article only took shape after being influenced by Kuhn, philosophy of language, and so on.

Perhaps it is also worth mentioning that at the date of that blog post, I was still in that romance, and the rapid collapse of the relationship not long afterward ultimately did not change my view of love—despite a long period of struggle.

But the concept of “ideal” in that article was, after all, unreflective. That is not to say I used it wrongly; I would still defend the wording I used then, but one must nevertheless admit that such everyday usage is extremely vague and ambiguous.

Philosophy must ultimately take root in everyday language, but that does not mean philosophy can be content with “merely” speaking in everyday language. The work of philosophy is to clarify concepts; if everyday language were enough, then philosophy would not even get off the ground. Philosophy needs to clear away the tangled and confused associations in everyday language, to smooth out the contours of concepts and illuminate the connection between concepts and intuition. Although everyday language is the nearest to intuition, being too close often makes things harder to see clearly; this is why philosophy must always sort things out by tracing their history, then, after standing at a different and somewhat more distant angle of view, look back and examine those things that had originally become all too familiar. Perhaps one can thereby gain deeper insight.

(At a little after one o’clock today I wanted to sleep, but after lying down for a while I found myself completely awake; I got up and wrote for a bit, then felt sleepy again, but couldn’t sleep; I got up and wrote some more, and now sleepiness is striking again… so the saying “after two rounds it weakens, after three it is exhausted” really applies—looks like I won’t be able to pour this article out in one breath… I’ll get up tomorrow and decide based on my mood…)

August 31, 2008

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.