"Perfection is Death"

 A couple months ago, I shared with a friend the key take-aways from a post I'd written on this blog, grappling with the topic of perfection. I was writing in the piece about how I was seized at times by the sudden fear that I had previously enjoyed a perfect life, but that I had pointlessly smashed my own idyll in order to move to a new city and start a new existence as a law student. 

My conclusion in the blog, ultimately, was that, first, I was prepared to bite the bullet on the possibility that my previous life had been perfect because, second, perfection is something that always invites its own destruction anyway. Perfection necessarily means stasis, after all—which means immobility—since, why should one ever change what is perfect? Yet, the essence of life is movement and change. To stop moving is to drop dead. Therefore, I concluded at last, I was right to smash my own perfection and to embark upon a new, imperfect life, even conceding the truth of that perfection, because "perfection is inimical to life." Perfection is death. It must be destroyed, or else the organism, which requires change and motion, dies where it stands. 

Since writing the piece and sharing it with my friend, the phrase "perfection is death" has become something of a shared mantra between us, whenever we contemplate a life change that involves risk or compromise. We can sit there and point out all the potential flaws in the diamond. But, when the moment comes to make a decision, we plunge in regardless, even knowing and seeing all the flaws in advance. "Oh well," we say, "perfection is death." We could not expect perfection, or even want it, and so, we must rush in and embrace the imperfect, with all its attendant risks. 

This conclusion may have appeared to have emerged from nowhere, in a sudden burst of blogging, but it was actually a product of a long series of prior metaphysical speculations on my part. I had been working on a theory years ago that one of the many sound reasons why God cannot be said to exist or act is that God has been defined as perfect. Yet, perfection implies immutability, and without change or motion, there can be neither time nor action. Thus, the theory of God's perfection defeats the theory of God's existence. People were going to have to choose one or the other, and by insisting upon God's perfections, the theologians had eventually doomed the deity to non-existence. 

In working out this theory back in 2017, I wrote the following: "This is simply the question of whether existence is better than non-existence, since everything that is, is action, is motion. In an Einsteinian universe, the cessation of all motion would mean the cessation of time. This is why the attempt to imagine blissful states of being that would be essentially static always fail. Such a state would have to be incompatible with continued existence. It would persist in a sort of absolute zero. We'd have to cease to be, as the price for admission to such an unchanging paradise. As the philosopher Nicias says in Anatole France's Thaïs, 'In my opinion perfection costs too dear; we pay for it with all our being, and to possess it must cease to exist.' (Douglas trans.)* At least in this universe. This is why all life is to be found in action."

As with so many great life insights that we think we are the first to uncover, I find that this is in fact an old truth, which other writers long before had already laid their hands on (and I'm not referring merely to the author of Thaïs). Reading Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, All the King's Men this week, I discover the following chain of reasoning: "Life is Motion toward Knowledge. If God is Complete Knowledge then He is Complete Non-Motion, which is Non-Life, which is Death. Therefore, if there is such a God of Fullness of Being, we would worship Death, the Father." 

Warren's narrator, Jack Burden, is engaged here and throughout the novel in an ongoing debate with the man who purports to be his biological father (no spoilers here on that topic), who has abandoned a once-profitable law practice to take up a new life as a preacher of the Gospel. This putative father is one of several characters in the novel who embody the values of the genteel old-money South, and who object to Jack's involvement in rough-necked politics as a kind of willful dalliance with filth and corruption. Burden retorts to this line of argument, later in the novel: "Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is non-being. Then God is nothing."

But here, Warren's novel presents a warning. For it is Burden's embrace of the principle of imperfection in politics—the old thesis that if "you want to make an omelette, you got to break some eggs," which his mentor Willie Stark—a novelistic stand-in for the Depression-era populist Louisiana politician Huey Long—summarizes by declaring that the good things of the world must come out of the bad, for the bad is all we have to work with—and which Burden in turn summarizes as Stark's "theory of historical costs"—it is Burden's openness to this theory, as I say, that leads him to destroy some of the people closest to him and betray his own humanity. 

One can imagine my friend and I, after all, invoking the principle that "perfection is death" in some pretty inopportune moments. Should I take some soulless legal job defending the interests of the already-powerful, and abandon my public interest ambitions, we might ask—even though it involves moral compromise? "Oh well," we might say, "perfection is death." Should I work for some heinous institution involved in polluting and warming the planet, or building machines of death and destruction, or deporting people to danger and persecution, or imprisoning people in dark holes and throwing away the key? "Oh well," we might say. "Why not? After all: perfection is death." 

Perhaps the lesson of Warren's book, therefore—or one lesson of it—is that even if Jack Burden is right, even if perfection is death—perfection is not the only road to death. There are kinds of moral imperfection—kinds of moral compromise—that lead to death just as surely, as Burden all too literally discovers through his actions. I stand by our original conclusion, to be sure. Perfection is death. Life and motion require action, which in turn necessarily implies imperfection. But be warned. Perfection is not the only thing that leads to death. Evil is death too. And the classical metaphysicians may have had more of a point than Burden and I have been willing to let on: by defining evil as nonbeing, they may have been just as right as Burden was in identifying nonbeing with perfection. 

__

*The passage from Thaïs is worth quoting in full, for it adds the theological dimension that I am talking about here, and seems to presage the insights from All the King's Men in the following paragraphs: "perfection costs too dear; we pay for it with all our being, and to possess it must cease to exist. That is a calamity from which God Himself is not free, for the philosophers are doing their best to perfect Him."