How does man attain perfection? Mostly by giving up on the idea that perfection is something you arrive at. Many great thinkers took the question seriously and pondered it. Plato said that the soul became perfected by ordering reason over appetite, guiding itself toward what he called the “Form of the Good”. The Form of the Good is the highest reality, the source that makes all other Forms (Justice, Beauty, Equality) both exist and be knowable. Plato’s theory holds that behind the shifting world of particular things are perfect, unchanging Forms. A just act is just because it participates in Justice itself. The Good sits above all of them as their ground. My old friend Socrates admits that he can’t define the Good directly, so he uses three images. In the Sun analogy, as the sun makes things visible and lets them grow, the Good makes truth intelligible and gives the Forms their being. In the Divided Line, knowledge climbs from shadows and images, through physical objects and mathematics, to pure reason grasping the Forms, with the Good at the top. In the Allegory of the Cave, prisoners mistake shadows for reality. The freed prisoner climbs out, is dazzled, and finally sees the sun itself, which stands for the Good. For Plato, a person is perfected by turning the soul toward the Good, and he calls education a “turning around” rather than putting knowledge in. That’s why he feels that philosophers should rule:, because only someone who has seen the Good knows what makes anything worth having. Critics, starting with Aristotle, objected that a single abstract Good is useless for practical ethics, since a doctor pursues health, not Goodness itself.
Aristotle had eudaimonia (Eudaimonia is Aristotle’s term for the highest human good, usually translated as “happiness” but closer to “flourishing” or “living well.”). He believed that we should all flourish through lifelong virtuous activity. The Stoics (Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) believed in the ideal Sage or living in agreement with reason and nature. To the east, Confucius and Mencius thought self-cultivation toward the junzi, the exemplary person, was the way to go. The Buddha sought liberation from craving through the Eightfold Path as the road to perfection. Meanwhile, back in the Church, Thomas Aquinas said perfection was about union with God, built on Aristotle’s framework. The Methodist, John Wesley, said that “Christian perfection,” was a perfection of love rather than of flawlessness. Meanwhile, Kant felt that moral perfection was an infinite progress, never fully achieved and Nietzsche, the Übermensch, felt it was all about self-overcoming rather than conforming to inherited ideals. Montaigne was skeptical of the whole project of attaining perfection and urged that man accept his ordinary, imperfect humanity.
The basic thinking about perfection is split on the issue in roughly three ways. First, there’s the view that perfection is a completed state. Aristotle’s said that a person is “perfected” when they fully realize their nature, which for him meant reason exercised well over a whole life. In other words…you will only know it when you get there in the end…not terribly fulfilling along the way. Religious traditions offer similar endpoints (why give the faithful a reason to stop coming to church and filling the offering dish). Christian sanctification, Buddhist Nirvana, the Stoic Sage. Most of them also admit that almost nobody gets there, and the Stoics openly said the Sage was rarer than the Phoenix (maybe modern man should say…unicorn). Then there’s perfection as a direction in life, not a destination per se. This is the more practical view. Confucius described his own development, decade by decade, and only at seventy claimed his desires matched what was right. I’m reminded that my mother said that where she felt she could see her end zone at 60, everyone was pissed at her at 70 for being a drag on society and then came around to wonder at 80 that she was still alive (I wonder how they would have reacted at 90 and 100?).
Kant called moral perfection an “infinite progress.” On this reading, the perfected man is the one still working at it: honest about his flaws, steadily narrowing the gap between what he believes and how he behaves. That feels almost mathematical in that it mimics the asymptotic approach to some finite goal that can never be completely achieved. Approaching infinity and beyond (how very Buzz Lightyear-like) is even harder to achieve. And finally, there’s is the thinking that perfection is nothing but a trap. Montaigne, and much of modern psychology warn that chasing flawlessness breeds anxiety, rigidity, and contempt for others. The Japanese idea of wabi-sabi turns this around and finds a kind of completeness in the worn and the imperfect. The mature version may be wholeness rather than perfection: integrating your virtues and failures instead of pretending the failures away. If I had to compress it, you can’t attain perfection, but you can attain integrity, meaning you act consistently with your best understanding and keep revising that understanding as you go. That’s about as close as any tradition says a human gets. That is exactly why good old Socrates insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Why am I dissecting perfection to try and perfect it? Well, I’m increasingly feeling like my life is approaching perfection and I worry that that is a dangerous place to allow myself to inhabit. The ancients worried about that constantly. The danger isn’t in feeling good about your life. It’s in believing you’ve arrived. The Greeks called the risk hubris. Herodotus tells of Croesus, the richest king alive, asking the Athenian sage Solon whether he wasn’t the happiest of men. Solon answered, in effect, call no man happy until he’s dead, because fortune turns. Croesus later lost his kingdom. Herodotus also tells of Polycrates, so uninterruptedly lucky that an ally broke off their friendship, convinced the gods would destroy him. They did. Christianity made the same point through pride, the first of the deadly sins, and Wesley himself warned that the greatest threat to those who believed they’d been perfected was spiritual pride. There are also the practical dangers of complacency (the moment you think the gap is closed, you stop climbing), brittleness (a life judged “perfect” has nowhere to go but down, so every loss feels like a catastrophe), and blindness (Socrates’ examined life requires assuming there’s still something to find). But contentment and gratitude are different from that belief. Aristotle’s flourishing person can recognize that life is going well. Seneca and Marcus Aurelius both counseled savoring good fortune while holding it loosely, knowing it’s on loan. The healthy version sounds like “my life is very good, and I’m still working on it.” The dangerous version sounds like “I’m finished.”
So, as happy as I am with my life at the moment, I am prepared to continue to ponder how I can improve on it and am prepared to accept that I will never be totally happy and that there is always work left to do.