The idea of perfection; but in relation to what?
A lack thereof.
There is, in human perception and experience, all manner and magnitude of what we might describe as
adverse information; to some degree recognition of discomfort, fear, and pain are essential survival tools. And given how many lives that made it through how many days over the course of how many years, we can expect that the basic idea of a
lack of this alarming, threatening, even painful and harmful data input should be possible did eventually occur to someone.
But in this we are considering a question of comfort; the idea of perfection seems to require some additional value assessment. If I mention a small sculpture called
Bison Licking Insect Bite, part of what is fascinating is that it is adapted from a broken spear-thrower, and maybe most days I might overlook a very basic point about what this relic represents: A simple expression would have to do with when humans or their ancestors developed a comparative idea of broken and whole, or recognize healing insofar as what is broken can be made whole, or at least functional, again.
Among modern humans, we often recognize explicitly that nothing is perfect, and if we consider the rise of human thought and function, we might think of a moment akin to disappointment, recognition that something is not whole while wishing it was. Compared to this wish for completion compared to what is incomplete, the prospect of perfection seems nearly an inevitable thought.
And, honestly, at what point in human development did it occur that someone asked, "What's wrong?" and someone else answered, "Everything!" And if, at the advent of writing, some took the time to record their disappointment about how their lives were going, that can't
really have been when such existential comparisons first arose in human conscience. Was there never an adolescent at Göbekli Tepe who would rather have been out hunting instead of putting holes in aunty's skull in order to hang it from the ceiling? And if, sometime between someone in Botswana, seventy thousand years ago, believing that
taking the red pill burning the red arrowheads would keep the snakes away, and someone in southeastern Anatolia drilling skulls to hang them from the ceiling for reasons that probably made a good deal of sense in their moment sixty thousand years later, someone had said, "Y'know, I feel like we've sort of lost our way, here, gotten away from the essence of what we're doing," it would have been extraor―... oh, right. Anyway, somewhere between a limbic experience of making noise and fire to scare the snakes away, or drilling skulls for reasons we might describe as significantly more neocortical, it seems clear that not simply had the focus changed, but also the underlying context.
Anyway, yeah, something about the short form. I would expect propositions of perfection precede monotheism itself. Observe that diverse philosophical periods—
e.g., ancient Greek, Christian, and modern scientific—consider
differentiation. Prior to questions of the Big Bang, philosophers struggled to understand the nature and implications of the fact of basic differentiation, such as why the Universe existed at all, or how anything was related to or separate from God. Indeed, if God is perfect, what is the rest of this all that is not God? A more familiar version of the question is to wonder why God bothered with Creation in the first place.
In the moment, the notion of
zero occurs to mind, and something about how it compares to the idea of
nothing. The quick note on the idea of
nothing is that it is around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE that the concept of nothing starts to appear in the philosophical record. But much in the way that the basic idea of counting zero would seem to inevitably demand the idea of nothing, there are so many comparative pathways drawing humanity toward the idea of everything, wholeness and completeness, lack of wrongness or negative information, or, as such, perfection.
Try to imagine the first person in our evolutionary lineage to weep in mourning because the offspring was dead. And then imagine the first person in history to say that in a perfect world the child would live. We can also wonder what all went on in between. But if neocortical humanity might writhe and wail and empathize with the suffering of other animals, the suffering of human kin might raise extraordinary sympathy. The prospect of a
lack of suffering, incompleteness, and brokenness seems not simply inevitable, but very nearly requisite. Combined with the idea of a spear-thrower that doesn't break, a roof that doesn't leak, a cave without the cold draft, or a day and night without the damn snakes, the idea of a circumstance in which none of these challenges beset and befall seems more than just something that will eventually occur, but something that must occur.
Our idea of perfection, though, evolves alongside our capabilities. Consider the idea of affluence, and what technology brought prehistoric and ancient people; perhaps we might consder the idea of luxury, inasmuch as a society might think itself able to afford some odd ritual obligation like poisoning women of childbearing age for the sake of jealousy. And maybe it seems a petty, even awful, juxtaposition to consider the luxury pompous authority demanding perfection of construction labor, but the thing about mathematics is that we can therein express particular and achievable assertions of perfection. If the experiential prospect of a lack of adverse information had not completed a transition into an assertion of perfection, then the math of a circle, the idea of a real and perfect thing, ought to suffice. Human creativity could easily paper over the gaps until experience and philosophy could fill them in.
(Flip-side: We can try telling ourselves, no, humans wouldn't transform technical and precise concepts and reapply them in alternate contexts, and, moreover, that it would be foolish to suggest of our species such wildly deviant behavior it has no history of displaying.)
lots
