This split between the practical and the ideal is generally acknowledged by modern thinkers and `common folk’ alike. But what is the `practical’ and the `ideal’? I think they are very much different from both the traditional and modern prejudices. I don’t think that prejudices are wrong as such; often, they carry good and useful information, though often undisciplined and only partially reliable even when true. But… Prejudices sometimes have to be corrected to make them better prejudices, more accurate and better suited for understanding reality (sort of: `ideal’) and dealing with reality (sort of: `practical’).
I’ll start by quoting definitions for `practical’ and `ideal’, using that ever reliable and literate dictionary, Webster’s of 1913. In that source, we find that `practical’ is an adjective meaning, “Of or pertaining to practice or action.” Somewhat useless for most purposes, but we can then learn that `practical’ means: “Capable of being turned to use or account; useful, in distinction from {ideal} or {theoretical}; as, practical chemistry.”
We can also learn that `ideal’ can be a noun meaning: “A mental conception regarded as a standard of perfection; a model of excellence, beauty, etc.” We can also read an illustrative quotation:
The ideal is to be attained by selecting and assembling in one whole the beauties and perfections which are usually seen in different individuals, excluding everything defective or unseemly, so as to form a type or model of the species. Thus, the Apollo Belvedere is the ideal of the beauty and proportion of the human frame. –Fleming.
Webster’s 1913 defines `ideal’, used as a noun, by: “Existing in idea or thought; conceptional; intellectual; mental; as, ideal knowledge.” A second definition reads: “Reaching an imaginary standard of excellence; fit for a model; faultless; as, ideal beauty. –Byron.” Another quote is of some serious interest in my current task:
There will always be a wide interval between practical and ideal excellence. –Rambler. [1913 Webster]
The above definitions and quotes deal with the `practical’ and the `ideal’ assuming pre-modern ways of understanding the world in categorical terms. See The Life of a Human Animal Begins at Conception. And Ends at Death. Maybe. for a discussion of the rare but real blurring of even personal identity or sex of human beings. Along these lines but more importantly: what is the ideal for males—over-muscled men talented at violent activities or the bearers of talents equally dominated by males such as mathematics and theoretical science? Some of the above definitions and quotations imply the ideal would be Mike Tyson with the brain of Einstein; in the modern American viewpoint, he should also be sensitive and tenderhearted with maybe Rambo’s ability to handle weapons and commit mass murder with a military flavor.
We live in a world of evolution and development, a world in which things move under partial control of global structures but those moving things shape those global structures as they move and as they begin to form more complicated entities. And so it is that we need to change to new concepts and language such as global/local and abstract/concrete. For the most part, and certainly in the context of this discussion, we can think of concrete as `particular’ or `specific’ or even `peculiar’. I’ll be writing several essays and won’t deal here too much with the particulars, but—as a hint of future suggestions, I’ll deny that `just war’ is only an ideal concept of no application in the real world of diplomacy and boots on the ground. I’ll deny this because I consider the relationship ideal/practical to be at least analogous to (quantum wavefunction)/photon.
In any case, I perhaps implied the error that all evolution and development of, for example, human being both individual and communal, is bottom-up. It isn’t. It’s bottom-up and it’s top-down and sometimes a struggle between the shaping processes at the bottom and the force-generating structures at the top. From the top, relationships evolve and develop as fast as the stuff at the bottom which reductionists think to be all there is. Above is the abstract, below the concrete. The language of `practical’ and `ideal’ can be pretty misleading as can even be that of `concrete’ and `abstract’. But, mostly it’s useful and truthful–if only in part, so long as we remember that the ideal itself is evolving and developing. The stars not unmoving nor eternal, life in this world not eternal—not even in the way of eternal return of the ancient ones of our race. And so it is that we, at least from our perspective inside Creation, cannot think of the human `ideal’ as having come into existence in some mystical way at the (ontological) instant of Creation. I claim we can regard that instant as one when God manifested certain absolute truths, but those truths were used by evolutionary and developmental forces which produced men, concrete animals with specific and contingent sexual natures as an example of an important, but not `absolutely true’ aspect of the human animal or communities of human animals and, hence, of the human moral person which can develop from that animal or its communities.
In somewhat simple language which points to the truth, the ideal and practical, while different and—in some sense—coming from different directions, are intertwined in a way far more intimately and far weirder than any two balls of string after a pair of kittens finished their work.
What is the true and greater ideal: individual freedom or cooperation with the community (to the point of submission?)?
And neither really determines the other, though one might be dominant at any one time. Let’s talk economics.
First, I’ll note this isn’t so much different from asking: what is the ideal human physique: short and broad or tall and slender? We live in a world of evolutionary and developmental processes. We live in a world of differing environments which have selected different characteristics from human populations, monkey populations, rodent populations, fish populations, etc. In the case of human beings, there are human populations with different characteristic reflecting responses to their environments, over generations. For example:
- The Maasai people “are a Nilotic ethnic group inhabiting southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.” This is a hot and dry region and Maasai seem to have adapted to their environment by becoming tall and slender, increasing the ratio of heat-emitting skin to total body mass.
- The Eskimo “have traditionally inhabited the northern circumpolar region from eastern Siberia (Russia), across Alaska (United States), Canada, and Greenland.” These people are typically stocky and have a low ratio of heat-emitting skin to total body mass, even though they wear heavy clothing over most of their bodies.
There is no ideal human physique and I’m claiming this fact isn’t so much different from the more complex question of personality attributes. We have attributes inclining us toward individualistic endeavors and other attributes inclining us toward communalistic endeavors. Some groups of human beings might have stronger, even much stronger, inclinations toward individualistic endeavors and some might have stronger, even much stronger, inclinations toward communalistic endeavors. Some groups might be more of a mixture, perhaps allowing for comfortable behavior of a more individualistic sort, for example, when working as a writer and thinker and comfortable behavior of a more communalistic sort when doing volunteer work for their church.
Is it individualism or communalism which is more truly human? Which is the ideal of human life: to be a freestanding individual or be a loyal and humble member of a community? Of course, those of practical sense—especially those who understand what is meant by “evolutionary and developmental processes”—will likely conclude that this matter, perhaps many matters, which are often treated as being subject to a priori analyses are actually a matter of the evolved and developed attributes of a physical creature. Even the `ideal’ is something of a many-headed beast and not fully different from the `practical’.
I’m going to be a bit unfair to a good young thinker and claim the problem can be seen in even this title for a blog posting by The Audacious Epigone:
Breadwinning father, homemaking mother remains ideal in The Current Year .
It’s not an ideal. It’s a desirable situation based upon empirical (practical) facts on the ground. By using such language, better thinkers (including more than a few philosophers) have encouraged the lesser thinkers who trace their psychotic thinking back further than Marcuse and Gramschi—think Ralph Waldo Emerson—to propose their own ideals. If the sexual dimorphism of the human race is an `ideal’, why not try to change to new ideals? If such efforts are seen instead as ideological goals based upon dreams and in conflict with facts, then the sheer insanity (psychosis or separation from reality) of much modern thinking becomes more obvious. To put it in theistic terms, the God of Moses or the God of Jesus Christ or the God and Father of all other gods and all else (working through the Demiurge in Plato’s theology) could have created a different world or a different set of living creatures to live in whatever world He created. It is God’s acts-of-being as manifested reality which give us the ideals for human animals, and we learn more facts about that manifested reality and come to better understand it even as we change the human parts of that reality by evolving and developing into somewhat different forms of human being.
The various sorts of roles for males and females, such as “breadwinners and homemakers”, are natural ways of behavior, responses to—for example—the modern economic conditions. The obvious—Yes!—ways in which human communities will organize themselves correspond to practical goals, efficient ways of going about the formation of families and the raising of children and so on, determined by the human sexual dimorphism which arose by evolutionary processes and are refined by developmental processes. There are no ideals governing empirical reality but for those found in that reality or those which arise as that reality evolves and develops.
To pay attention to reality is to pay attention to what the Creator has done; to pay attention to reality is to pay attention to the wisdom the Creator would impart to us if we respond as His trusting children.