Perfection - Many Concepts

Many Concepts

The foregoing discussion shows that the term "perfection" has been used to designate a variety of concepts:

  • The word "perfection" has a special meaning in mathematics, where it gives a proper name to certain numbers that demonstrate uncommon properties.
  • In physics and chemistry, "perfection" designates a model — a conceptual construct for bodies that in reality do not precisely correspond to the model.
  • Elsewhere the term "perfection" is used consistently with the word's etymology ("perfect" = "finished"). That is perfect which lacks nothing. This is how the term has been used in ontology (a perfect being), ethics (a perfect life) and medicine (perfect health). In these fields, the concept is understood variously as ideal model or as actual approximation to the model.
  • Also called "perfect" is that which completely achieves its purpose. Christian Wolff gave examples from biology (perfect vision) and technology (a clock that runs neither slow nor fast). Here "perfection" is less fictitious model than actual approximation to the model.
  • That is "perfect," which completely fulfills its functions. In social discourse, one speaks of a perfect artist, engineer or carpenter. The term is used similarly in art criticism, when speaking of perfect technique or of the perfect likeness of a portrait. Here again, "perfection" is either ideal model or approximate realization of the model.
  • In aesthetics and art theory, perfection is ascribed to what is fully harmonious — to what is constructed in accordance with a single principle (e.g., the Parthenon, the Odyssey).

Except for the first, mathematical sense, all these concepts of "perfection" show a kinship and oscillate between ideal and approximation.

However, the expression "perfect" is also used colloquially as a superlative ("perfect idiot," "perfect scoundrel," "perfect storm"). Here perfectum is confused with excellens of an approving, admiring or condemnatory kind.

Perfection has also been construed as that which is the best. In theology, when Descartes and Leibniz termed God "perfect," they had in mind something other than model; than that which lacks nothing; than that achieves its purpose; than that fulfills its functions; or than that is harmonious.

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Famous quotes containing the word concepts:

    When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.
    William James (1842–1910)

    During our twenties...we act toward the new adulthood the way sociologists tell us new waves of immigrants acted on becoming Americans: we adopt the host culture’s values in an exaggerated and rigid fashion until we can rethink them and make them our own. Our idea of what adults are and what we’re supposed to be is composed of outdated childhood concepts brought forward.
    Roger Gould (20th century)