my concern is mainly, do you as an artist, or just a person, have to have an ideal?
it seems to me that without an ideal, you can only see the world through observation, a cold, rationalist, agnostic, passive, academic mode of thinking.
back the joyce thing, it's a perfect illustration of modernism isn't it?
if we say art used to have nature as its ideal, which made the artist strive for the position of god. then as the nature was flattened, and the object changed from the world to our perspective of the world, the ideal had be located in the mind of the artist himself. naturally, the ideal took the form of craft, technique, innovation, virtuosity, where Joyce comes in, not only representing this evolution but as a good catholic drawing attention to the silliness and ungodliness of it as well.