Perfection and Philosophy

Most philosophers who refer to perfection seem to haze into a world of symbolic justifications, perhaps mores, and pre-texts of archetypal ideas. Rarely are these ideas generated by the philosopher himself, or there is a caveat that these patterns or forms may be contingent on highly specific problems which embody the obsessions of individual people.

Partly understanding this, philosophers have made the mistake of not quantifying perfection, and sadly even this problem has not been widely revealed because there is often no counterpoint to perfection in the post-Holocaust era in which eugenics has gained a reputation of being "a little too clever" or under-cutting. Interestingly, quantification by itself poses a partial solution to the problem of perfectibility, e.g. that its key property is variation. Building on this, the compatibility of complexity specifically and generally (that is, coherently), promises to render perfection as merely a relativistic populist variable which, through this form of casualism, becomes hypothetically formalized.

And I don't mean to suggest that perfection is a mere hypothesis. Certainly forms such as mathematical manifolds, geometric regressions, and expressionist sculptures have optimal manifestations which bear out in specific codifications of properties. By saying these things are inadequate for perfection, we are not saying they are not perfected. Instead, we are saying that we do not prefer them aesthetically. People, by contrast, have an aesthetic capacity which renders them immune to critique. What is not judged to be value can be judged to be efficiency.

In the context of history, what does it mean to have perfection that is contingent upon complexity? It is a way of suggesting the meaningfulness of perfection, as a form that is wholly or mostly linguistic. This is a subtle means to a further subtlety, that pragmatics is of higher importance than perfection because of the pragmatic contingency of language. Another way of saying this, however, is that pragmatism is one form of perfection. Returning to quantification, it can be judged that pragmatism is not the only perfection---indeed a very small ratio of the total. In this way there is a set of checks and balances, which continues to relate with very real and functional categories.