Perfection
These have historically been addressed in a number of discrete disciplines, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry, ethics, aesthetics, ontology, and theology.
Hence the Greek "teleiotes" was not yet so fraught with abstract and superlative associations as would be the Latin "perfectio" or the modern "perfection".
[3] The oldest definition of "perfection", fairly precise and distinguishing the shades of the concept, goes back to Aristotle.
This was formulated by Lucilio Vanini (1585–1619), who had a precursor in the 16th-century writer Joseph Juste Scaliger, and they in turn referred to the ancient philosopher Empedocles.
[9] The Greek mathematicians had named these numbers "perfect" in the same sense in which philosophers and artists used the word.
[13] Soon after, the Stoics introduced the concept of perfection into ethics expressly, describing it as harmony — with nature, reason, man himself.
[16] As early as the 5th century CE, two distinct views on perfection had arisen within the Church: that it was attainable by man on earth by his own powers; and, that it may come to pass only by special divine grace.
[17] Still, the Church did not condemn the writings of the Pseudo-Areopagite, purportedly the first bishop of Athens, voicing a natural possibility for man to rise to perfection, to the contemplation of God.
[19] The second half of the 16th century brought the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent, and a return of the Catholic concept; and also, heroic attempts to attain perfection through contemplation and mortification.
[21] Otherwise, the 18th century saw great declarations championing the future perfection of man, as in Immanuel Kant's Idee zu einer allgemeinem Geschichte (1784) and Johann Gottfried von Herder's Ideen (1784/91).
Partly it would be by way of natural development and progress (the view espoused by David Hume) but more so by way of education (precursors of this view included John Locke, David Hartley, and the leaders of the Polish Enlightenment) and by way of overt state action (Claude Adrien Helvétius, later Jeremy Bentham); reliance was placed in cooperation among people (Charles Fourier, 1808), later in eugenics (Francis Galton, 1869).
It linked the people of the Enlightenment with the idealists and romantics — with Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Polish Messianists — as well as with the 19th-century Positivists and evolutionists; Herbert Spencer penned a great new declaration championing the future perfection of man.
[21] In 1852, John Henry Newman, the future British cardinal, wrote that it would be well if the English language, like the Greek, had a term to express intellectual perfection, analogously to the term "health", which addresses man's physical state, and to "virtue", which speaks to his moral nature.
Such striving, he adds, "is often egocentric and yields poorer moral and social results than an outward-directed behavior based not on self-perfection but on good will and kindliness toward others".
Plutarch stated (De Musica) that, during the early Greek age, musical harmonies that were recognized as perfect were legally binding at public performances.
His authority was so great that architects and other artists continued using this proportion, even when ignorant of its source, as late as the Middle Ages.
[25] Another early idea — one that was to be espoused by many illustrious writers and artists of various periods — found perfection in the circle and the sphere.
Cicero wrote in De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods): "Two forms are the most distinctive: of solids, the sphere... and of plane figures, the circle...
In the famous illustrated Les très riches heures du duc de Berry, paradise is depicted as contained within an ideal sphere.
Baldassare Castiglione, in his Courtier, wrote, of Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo and Giorgione, that "each of them is unlike the others, but each is the most perfect [perfectissimus] in his style.
It was variously held to be: In the eclectic view of the late Renaissance, perfection in a work would require uniting the talents of many artists.
Cesare Ripa, in his Iconologia (published 1593, but typical for the 17th century), presented perfezione as a concept of equal status with grace (grazia), prettiness (venustà) and beauty (bellezza).
[31] Earlier in the 18th century, France's leading aesthetician, Denis Diderot, had questioned whether perfection was a more comprehensible idea than beauty.
"[32] In the 20th century, Paul Valéry wrote: "To strive for perfection, to devote endless time to a work, to set oneself—like Goethe—an unattainable goal, are all intents that are precluded by the pattern of modern life.
Besides the world, there is no thing that does not lack something and that is harmonious, perfect and finished in every respect..."[37] At a certain moment, Greek philosophy became bound up with the religion of the Christians: the abstract concept of first cause became linked with the religious concept of God; the primum movens became identified with the Creator, the absolute with the divine Person.
In this view, the absolute from which the world derived could not be grasped in terms of human concepts, even the most general and transcendent.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, indicating that he was following Aristotle, defined a perfect thing as one that "possesses that of which, by its nature, it is capable."
In Benedict Spinoza's philosophy, however, there was no personal God, and perfection became a property of — even a synonym for — the existence of reality (that is, for the essence of things).
He also distinguished variants — perfectio simplex and composita, primaria and secundaria — and differentiated the magnitude of perfection (magnitudo perfectionis).
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.
