Such a programme for a treatise on government might lead us to expect in the Politics mainly a description of a Utopia or
ideal state which might inspire poets or philosophers but have little direct effect upon political institutions.
The notion of rearing the Superman is only a new form of an
ideal Nietzsche already had in his youth, that "THE OBJECT OF MANKIND SHOULD LIE IN ITS HIGHEST INDIVIDUALS" (or, as he writes in "Schopenhauer as Educator": "Mankind ought constantly to be striving to produce great men--this and nothing else is its duty.") But the
ideals he most revered in those days are no longer held to be the highest types of men.
I left the conservatory, and, at the same time, the rose and my
ideal. You may carry that song and dance to your impresario."
He yearned above all things for experience and felt himself ridiculous because at his age he had not enjoyed that which all fiction taught him was the most important thing in life; but he had the unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the
ideal of his dreams.
So to say, we would split the difference between the
ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.
As counter-examples, there are numerous schools of Buddhism, some of which DO offer a type of heaven; and the Confucian
ideal of reciprocity can easily be, and often has been, misinterpreted in the same way as Semitic religions.
Their ardor alternated between a vague
ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy
ideal of a woman that his mother had been.
Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a still larger design which was to have included an
ideal history of Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy.
Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood--the culture of ennui for its own sake--is certainly carried to its
ideal of negation by Amiel.
The higher virtue, which is identical with knowledge, is an
ideal only.
Nor were such characters
ideal. There exists a monition of the Bishop of Durham against irregular churchmen of this class, who associated themselves with Border robbers, and desecrated the holiest offices of the priestly function, by celebrating them for the benefit of thieves, robbers, and murderers, amongst ruins and in caverns of the earth, without regard to canonical form, and with torn and dirty attire, and maimed rites, altogether improper for the occasion.