Strictly speaking, however, perfection does not gain by beauty, nor does beauty gain by perfection.

●

Topic : “Strictly speaking, however, perfection does not gain by beauty, nor does beauty gain by perfection.”

I. Kant (1790), Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 16 [AA5: 231], trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: CUP, 2000, p. 115.

<The Dictatorship of Beauty and Perfection>

I. Introduction

In Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant writes that perfection does not gain by beauty and beauty does not gain by perfection. Something perfect may not be beautiful and something beautiful may not be perfect. The standards for perfection or beauty, however, remain as subjective as ever - what someone beholds as the most beautiful art piece in the world may be worth next to nothing to someone else, and what someone perceives to be the most perfect creation may actually be incomplete.

In this essay, I will first touch upon the definitions of beauty and perfection — not as is prevalent in the world, but as I will refer to them in this work of writing. Then, I will discuss the boundaries of beauty, ugliness, perfection, and imperfection and how they are essentially related to each othr. Having done so, I will argue that the reason that beauty and perfection do not stand to gain from each other is because they are connected to each other in a way that confines them. Perfection cannot gain from beauty and nor can beauty gain from perfection because beauty is often taken to be perfection, and perfection, aesthetic or otherwise, is almost alwa vs viewed as beautiful. In the eyes of humanity, perfection cannot be without beauty and beauty cannot be without perfection. In saying so, we also imprison ourselves within a ubiquitous standard that forces us to only perceive beauty and therefore perfection in a certain way. I will argue that we must liberate ourselves from the prison of collective perception, the way in which we view things a certain way if those around us do as well. Finally, I will put forth that this essential liberation can be found in writing.

II. Oppression and Conformity

The age-old say“ing goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What we find beautiful today may not be so beautiful to the person next to us. What we found beautiful ten years, months, days, or even minutes ago we might not find so beautiful now. Nothing remains beautiful forever, without change. Yes, we grow old and yes, the Paint on the Mona Lisa will chip away and the temples and monuments and graves won’t stand the test of time. However, this isn‘t the only way in which our perception of beauty refuses to stay — nothing is less beautiful because it is in disrepair or old or in ruins unless we decide that it is so.

When we define what is beautiful to us and what is not, we do not decide for ourselves as much as we think we do. We are constantly influenced by what those around us think. Our individual thoughts and feelings do not matter so much when we are faced with the kind of giant, looming peer pressure that overwhelms us across the Internet and in reality. Beauty in our world is a dictatorship. One toe out of line and we are branded as fools.

Imagine your baby cousin painted a portrait of you. Your face is lopsided and your eyes aren’t in the right places — maybe one is bigger than the other. They’ve colored your skin in green. Maybe it is the ugliest thing you‘ve ever seen, but you’re obligated to give your baby cousin a nice smile and clap because vou don’t want to deal with the guilt of watching the baby cry after you insult their life’s work nor do you want to be branded as rude by your family. So beauty is dictatorial. What everyone else defines as beauty becomes beautiful. When you perceive something as ugly even though society deems it beautiful, there are palpable consequences.

Simply, imagine what the people around you would say if you told them that Van Gogh’s Starry Night is the ugliest, most disturbing painting you’ve ever seen.

So nothing remains beautiful forever precisely because what is thought to be beautiful at the time changes as quickly as the wind and tide. The collective perception of beauty in the current day, for instance, is hyperfixated on both what appears on the outside and what is allowed to be seen from the inside. We must be beautiful aesthetically but also emotionally and ethically — we must love our neighbors, we must not fight, we must shake hands and hug each other and compliment how much weight we lost in the last week. We must also be productive and spend all our days at home learning a new language or reading a book or studying a new subject. And we must do it all in an aesthetic way. Every pen must be in the right place and every alphabet must be neat. In a few years’ time, of course, this will all be different. But for now, when we are not “fit“ or “smart“ or “aesthetic‘ in a way that is deemed socially aceptable, we are ugly. We are not beautiful. Maybe the Van Gogh painting will stop being beautiful in a few decades just as we will.

Therefore, when I refer to beauty in this essay, I will be referring to the collective perception of beauty that has always underscored the human world and the individual, subjective perception of beauty that remains oppressed but still exists as it has for as long as we can imagine.

Perfection in the world functions in much of the same way as beauty does, because the two words are taken to be interchangeable. As aforementioned, what is beautiful is almost always perfect and what is perfect is almost always beautiful. So, as beauty is, perfection is a dictatorship.

However, what is imperfect can still be beautiful. Take, for instance, philosophical texts. How many philosophers finished their life’s work? How many of them began writing their magnum opus just to be carried to their grave halfway through? Do we say that their writing is not beautiful because it is not a perfect whole? Of co urse not. We eve n find beauty in knowing that their work remains unfinished, that what is left of their philosophy is for us to shoulder and continue. The many unfinished works of art displayed in the museums are also beautiful, because we see what they intended to create and every stroke of the pencil that birthed our most beautiful pieces. Imperfection is not desirable, but it can still be beautiful if it meets the world’s standards.

But ugly things cannot be perfect. It can be perfectly ugly, so wholly and completely revolting that you can't bear laying your eyes on it for a second longer, but nothing can be ugly and perfect at the same time, at least not in the collective perception of what beauty is because beauty equals perfection. Ugliness is something that goes directly against what the eye of the world deems as acceptable. When we are so thoroughly oppressed about what we define as beauty, and what / define as beauty, it is possible for something to be disgustingly perfect and abhorrently beautiful. You recognize something as so when you think for yourself, on your own and according to your own standards, that something is unbearably ugly, but the world around you is pushing you to believe otherwise. It is perfect in the eye of the world but you abhor it, and you are disgusted by the fact that anyone could ever believe in its beauty.

Beauty, and perfection, are dictatorships. Perfection is more nuanced in that it allows room for something to be imperfect and still be acceptable in the eyes of humanity, but beauty is strict. When the world creates a standard and harbors expectations on what beauty should be, it does not want to be defied.

III. Kant’s Statement

Having defined beauty, perfection, and what they mean to us, I will now analyze Kant‘s statement and interpret what he means on the basis of the definitions that I previously presented. Beauty and perfection are confined to each other, and we are confined within those definitions that we present. As I explained in the previous section, imperfection and perfection can both be beautiful, but ugliness can only ever be imperfect. Because of this essential connection that the two concepts harbor, they cannot gain from each other.

The connection is that we find it nigh impossible to look at beauty without thinking that it is perfect or to look at perfection while thinking that it is beautiful. Eve n in regular life, the words are interchangeable — we will often say, ‘You look perfect! “ instead of “You look beautiful! “ and vice versa.

More importantly, perfection does not gain anything by being beautiful because, when something is perfect, it is already presumed that it is beautiful, and whatever is regarded as ugly cannot be perfect. Then, beauty is already found within perfection, and whatever is perfect does not need “additional beauty“ because beauty is not a finite resource that can be rationed or handed out. There is also no ostensible meaning in being more beautiful than something else when you are already perfect. In perfection, there is no necessity to develop yourself or grow because you are complete as you are. You are a whole. Perfection does not mean you have more than others — it means you have exactly what you need.

Beauty also does not gain anything in being perfect because imperfection can also be regarded as beauty. If you will be beautiful either way, there is no need to be perfect. A complete volume of philosophy is of course just as beautiful as an incomplete one. When you are already regarded as beautiful in the world, perfection is not part of the equation. And why should it be, if you don’t need it? Why should you spend more time and energy on making yourself a whole if you are already beautiful as a half?

Therefore, it can be said that perfection and beauty do not have anything to gain from each other because they are one and the same, and if you are either perfect or beautiful it is prerequisite that you are also either perfect or beautiful. As long as you are not ugly, you have nothing to gain from beauty or perfection.

However, this connection between beauty and perfection is also reminiscent of Mobius’ Loop. We continue to walk the path of a socially prescribed beauty and perfection, not free to explore our own definitions of what is truly beautiful or perfect. They tell us you cannot be perfect without acceptable beauty and you cannot be beautiful without being an acceptable kind of perfect. So we walk the loop and strive endlessly towards beauty and perfection. Sometimes we do not even realize what we view as our own selves as perfect or imperfect or beautiful and ugly. We ruin ourselves over the thought that we must be socially acceptable. Our minds stay imprisoned within the collective perception of beauty and perfection because we say that what is ugly cannot be perfect and both beauty and perfection have nothing to gain from each other either way. The world’s standards dictate this to be true.

Perfection does not gain by beauty because, as society deems it, perfection and beauty are one and the same. When we conform to the criteria of perceiving beauty and being beautiful, we are regarded as perfect. When we are able to be what the world wants us to be, we are perfect. Perfection in the eye of society is someone who is able to conform, who does not rebel against the guidelines that it has set. Threfore, when you conform, you are perfect and so you are beautiful. In the same line of reasoning, beauty does not gain by perfection.

IV. Liberation

How do we liberate ourselves from the endless loop of collective perception? How do we become able to recognize things as beautiful for ourselves and truly see things as they are without being influenced by the criteria of the world around us? The answer lies in writing. The discernment of beauty and ugliness, of imperfection and perfection and even whether or not the they stand to gain anything from each other lies within us. We find this inner recognition by writing.

When we write, we bring our thoughts into the physical world where they are sometimes even more permanent than the things we say. When we write Van Gogh’s Starry Night is the ugliest painting I’ve ever seen on a restaurant napkin, we accept the fact that someone might find the napkin in the ruins and understand that someone really hated this Van Gogh painting. Voiced opinion is often lost to the wind. Writing is the most permanent and private action you can take. No one now who still conforms to the criteria of beauty and perfection that humanity believes in will ever read the restaurant napkin, and it’s safe to assume that the people of the future wouldn’t continue tol think that Srorry Mghr “is the greatest painting on the planet. But you bring it into existence anyway, in a space that is uniquely yours. You escape Mobius’ Loop when you write that you think the portait by your baby cousin is the single ugliest piece of art that you’ve ever seen you’re not even sure if you can still call it art.

Let’s digress and think about Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Equality, the protagonist of a dystopian world where everyone is the collective and the “I“ is nowere to be found, recognizes his own self by writing a record of his explorations in science and his escapade. In Anthem’s society, writing is a transgression, likely because the Council realizes how dangerous it is to have a member of the collective write their own thoughts into existence. There is the possibility that someone will realize who they are, that they will come up with their own ideas of what society should be, that they will know what they have been robbed of. And in the end, Equality frees himself through writing. He writes his way out of the collective —and although society today is nowhere near as dystopian as the one Rand depicts in Anthem, the way that individuality and most of all individual thought is often oppressed in today’s society is a chilling reflection. Because in the end it doesn’t have to be about beauty, perfection, or the imprisonment of our thought in the way that they are connected to each other — it can be about our political agenda, our gender, our sexuality, what makes each of us different to the person next to us.

Furthermore, when you describe, you have control over the way you choose to represent things. When you sit down in front of a tree and attempt to describe it in your notebook, you can choose to write that it’s too big and takes up too much space, or that it’s smaller than you expected it to be and you wish it was bigger. You can also say that the shade of green that the leaves are is a beautiful sage hue, or that it looks so neon green you could almost believe the leaves are toxic. It depends, really, on how you see it. And what gives you the power to believe in what you see instead of keeping your opinions malleable to the whims of the world’s eye is writing it down.

V. Conclusion

In this essay, I have argued that beauty and perfection is a kind of dictatorship in the way that they do not allow individuals to think that something is beautiful or ugly to them when it isn’t in the eye of the world. There is a collective perception of beauty and therefore perfection in society that will not allow people to believe that what they deem as beautiful or perfect can actually be otherwise. However, the realm of what is beautiful and perfect in a socially acceptable way is always changing, which is why nothing continues to be perceived as beautiful and perfect forever. Furthermore, being beautiful is essentially the same as being perfect — what is beautiful is always perfect and what is perfect is always beautiful. Perfection is found in beauty and beauty is found in perfection. However, what is ugly cannot be perfect because beauty equals perfection. What is not beautiful, then, also cannot be perfect. However, what is imperfect can be beautiful as is seen in the example of philosophy as well as the unfinished sketches of artists. Therefore, perfection is equal to beauty and imperfection can be beautiful although ugliness cannot be perfect.

I also agreed with Kant’s statement in that perfection does not gain by beauty not does beauty gain by perfection. My reasoning was that, if you are already perfect or beautiful, there is no need for you to be the other. The two concepts are completely equal, and society takes this concept one step further and deems that perfection equals beauty equals conformity. When we conform to the standards for beauty and perfection that society harbors, and when we perceive beauty and perfection in the same way that it does, we are so deemed perfect and therefore beautiful.

However, the essential fact is that there is no need for us to be beautiful or perfect if it means we are oppressed. We must be liberated from the collective criteria of perception of beauty and perfection and be able to decide for ourselves what we deem to be beautiful. The way to do this is through writing, which remains completely private and yet is a definitive way of bringing our own thoughts and opinions into the world. When we describe something, we give ourselves complete control over the way we choose to perceive it.

Writing is a kind of freedom. In writing what we feel and think, we liberate ourselves. When Kant writes that perfection does not gain by beauty and nor does beauty gain by perfection, he liberates himself. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder but in the eye of the world, of society, of the people around us. Writing, then, is a way to reach out for that beauty, to reclaim it, to look at it again through our own eyes and to be able to define what we see. Beauty, then, must always be in the eye of the beholder.

International Philosophy Olympiad(IPO), Lisbon, 2022 - 'Honourable Mention'

---