This work emerges from my research into Heinrich Schenker and the intellectual traditions that informed his theoretical framework. In examining the philosophical lineage behind

Schenker’s ideas, I traced connections through Goethe’s concept of the Urphänomen and broader nineteenth-century scientific and aesthetic discourses, including eugenics and phrenology.

These inquiries led me further back to Plato’s allegory of the cave, with its assertion that human perception apprehends only imperfect reflections of ideal forms. While this model of

idealization appears abstract, its application within later historical contexts reveals how claims of objectivity and universality can become entangled with hierarchical and exclusionary

thinking. Plato: Plagiarized, Racialized, Genocide responds to these inherited structures of ideal form and representation.