Spleen

There was once a great movement to overcome the “curse of Platonism” on the imagination. Plato made us believe in beauty, love, and the soul: abstract essences that originated in a higher power. So when we banished God as an impotent idea we also impoverished our world. We lost beauty, love, and the soul, because our language still adhered to these abstractions. Today, however, we suspect that this was a misreading of Plato. Perhaps Plato had discovered that to be before an object of one’s true love, or to stand before something really beautiful, is a crushingly banal experience. To a loved one we utter inanities, and feel as moved by a few nice words as we do before the Venus de Milo. A feeling of universal togetherness and immortality occur naturally after a half bottle of wine and watching the sun set over a lake. These are GOOD things, thought Plato, and enslave us to The Good, the general, the banal, the ethereal sky where there must exist perfect triangles and blue flowers. It is not a matter, therefore, to override any curse, but to admit the good as good and reject it. There is no shame in pursuing something less than good, for it bears all the specificity of spleen.