Notes - the invisible that remains

Today began with the article below and ends with another. A Sunday in thought on what is, and what reality is also. As it is now completed, post. - Amorella                

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What do most scientists believe happens after death?

Bieu Huynh, studied at Nha Trang, Vietnam (1974) Answered 14h ago

Here is an opinion from Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on the last Dharma talk, in which he discussed the Buddhist approach.

We study this line: “Both subject and object of perception manifest from consciousness according to the principle of interbeing.” This expresses an understanding of deep Buddhism. The question of whether we continue to be after the disintegration of this body has been asked by so many people. And there are many ways to answer, according to our capacity to understand. There are at least two kinds of Buddhism. Those who practice popular Buddhism are practicing more devotion than meditation, so their understanding of rebirth is quite different. But to answer this question satisfactorily, you have to use the understanding given by deep Buddhism, the understanding that is in accord with science.

We usually believe that consciousness is something inside of us, and we go and look for the world outside. We think there is an objective world outside and there is a subjective world inside. Remember when we read from “Winnie the Pooh”? Winnie the Pooh thought he saw the footprints of a hostile animal, and he became afraid. But with the help of Christopher Robin, Winnie the Pooh discovered that the footprints he found on the snow were his own footprints! The same thing is true with the object of our inquiry – the so-called objective reality of the world. We think it is something distinct from our consciousness, but in fact it is only the object of our consciousness. It is our consciousness. That’s the hardest thing to understand and a basic obstacle for us and for science. Now a number of scientists are beginning to understand this concept. The British astronomer, Sir Eddington, said that on the unknown shore we have discovered footprints of unknown people, and we want to know who has been there before us. We come, inquire and investigate, and we find that they are our own footprints.

The world outside is our consciousness, is us. It is not something separate and distinct. The object and the subject of perception inter-are. Without subject, there is no object; without object, there is no subject. They manifest at the same time. To see means to see something. The seer does not exist separately from the seen; they manifest at the same time. If you imagine that the seer is independent and goes out in order to see the seen, that is a mistaken perception.

The Nature of Consciousness

Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and consciousness only lasts a millisecond. Consciousness is like an elementary particle, like an electron; its nature is non-local. Nonlocality is a word used by scientists about time in quantum physics. An elementary particle can be everywhere at the same time. We think that one thing cannot be several places at once, but scientists have agreed that an elementary particle – an electron – can be both here and there at the same time. It can be both this and that at the same time. It can be you, it can be me.

Many philosophers and scientists have said that the nature of consciousness has a cinematographic nature. A film is made up of separate pictures that last only a fraction of a second. Consciousness is like that, it just lasts one millisecond. Then, because moments of consciousness succeed each other continuously, you have the impression that consciousness is something that lasts. But the notion of a permanent consciousness is illusion, not reality.

Consciousness is only a flash.

It’s like a flame on the tip of a candle. You think there is one flame, but really there is a succession of millions of flames, one after the other, that give the impression that it is only one flame. The flame of this moment gives rise to the flame of the next moment, and the flame of the next moment gives rise to the flame of the next moment. Things exist only in one millisecond. And that is true not only with consciousness; it is also true with our bodies, because cells die to give rise to other cells. In a month, all our cells will be new cells. It’s like a river. We see a river and call it one name, but the water is not the same water, it’s always changing. You cannot swim twice in the same river, and it is not the same person who goes into the river. Tomorrow it will not be “you” who goes into that river. You will have changed, just like the river constantly changes.

Buddhism offers the example of someone holding a torch and drawing a circle in the dark. Since he moves the torch quickly, you have the impression that there is a circle of fire. But in fact there is only one dot of fire. Everything is fleeting and impermanent. Modern science acknowledges this.

No-Self and Samadhi

Science is now capable of demonstrating no-self. Neuroscience teaches that neurons communicate with each other very well, and they operate together without a leader or a boss. They are like an orchestra playing beautiful music without a conductor. Our bodies are made of many cells and there is coordination among the cells; they don’t need a president of all the cells in order to make decisions. There is no-self.

If a scientist knows how to maintain that insight on life, then that flash of insight will become a liberating factor. If you just accept that idea as a notion, that is not enough to liberate you from your fear, your desire, your despair. No-self and impermanence as notions are not very helpful. You need to maintain a long-lasting understanding in order to get liberation. That is why samadhi has been translated, “you maintain it like that.” You keep the insight alive and you make it last. In your daily life you are able to maintain the vision of impermanence, the vision of no-self as a living experience. Only that insight can liberate you from fear, from anger, from separation. It is like when you boil potatoes, you have to maintain the fire underneath them for at least twenty minutes for the potatoes to cook. If you light the burner and then you turn it off, you will never have cooked potatoes.

Samadhi is like that. Samadhi is the concentration needed to maintain the steady presence of that insight. Scientists are capable of finding no-self and impermanence, but what they need is samadhi to maintain that understanding throughout the day. They need the tools of mindfulness, concentration, and samadhi, in order to discover more. It would be helpful to have practitioners of meditation and scientists to collaborate, in order to discover more about ourselves.

You can be sure that the world is an object of mind. The sun, the moon, the earth, the cosmos, the galaxies – they are all objects of mind. And our body, also, is an object of our mind. And our mind, also, is an object of our mind. That is why we can investigate the object of our mind. When we understand the object of our mind, we understand our mind, because mind and object of our mind inter-are. One cannot be without the other.

When we believe that consciousness is permanent, and only the body perishes, that the soul continues and goes to heaven or hell, that is eternalism.

A right view should transcend a view of eternalism. A permanent, immortal soul is something that cannot be accepted, either by good Buddhists or good scientists. But the opposite view – that after this body disintegrates, you disappear altogether, is another extreme, another wrong view, called nihilism. As a student of Buddhism, you are not caught in either of these views. There’s only continued manifestation in different kinds of forms; that is rebirth, continuation, in the context of impermanence and no-self. Good scientists see that nothing is born and nothing dies.

Being a Cloud

Suppose you are a cloud. You are made of tiny crystals of ice and water and you are so light, you can float. And maybe floating as a cloud, you encounter a block of hot air so you become drops of water and fall as rain. You go down, you come up again, you go down, and you come up again. Transmigration, reincarnation, rebirth is always taking place in a cloud. And yet a cloud does not need to become rain in order to have a new life. A cloud has a new life every moment. Rebirth, continuation takes place with us in the same way.

There is a lot of cloud in us, and we continue to drink cloud every day. Birth and death are taking place in every moment of our daily life. We should not say, “I will die in twenty years, in thirty years;” no, you are dying right in this moment and you are reborn right in this moment. Rebirth is happening in the here and the now – not in the future. So when someone asks you, “What will happen to me when I die?” Ask him or her, “What happens to you in the here and the now?” If you know what happens in the here and the now, you can answer the first question very easily. You are undergoing birth and death right now because mentally and physically you are of a cinematographic nature. You are renewed in every instant, and if you know how to do it, your renewal is beautiful.

Selected and edited from -- today's quora dot com

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         1632 hours. I can continue to agree with Plato and his sense of a higher Reality of Permanence and also the above. Living beings are in continual transition both physically and spiritually but concepts may have a permanence that is neither physical or spiritual.

         You are looking for an example. This will do: 'perfection'. - Amorella

         1638 hours. Thank you, Amorella. I had not thought a word. What an interesting word to choose because I don't think perfection exists.

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perfection -  noun 

the condition, state, or quality of being free or as free as possible from all flaws or defects: the satiny perfection of her skin | his pursuit of golfing perfection. 

• a person or thing perceived as the embodiment of perfection: I am told that she is perfection itself. 

• the action or process of improving something until it is faultless or as faultless as possible: among the key tasks was the perfection of new mechanisms of economic management.

ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘completeness’): via Old French from Latin perfectio(n-), from perficere ‘to complete’ 

Selected and edited from the Oxford/American software

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         1759 hours. You picked an excellent word, Amorella. I have to check Wikipedia.  -- This definition is broken into categories and quite lengthy.

         I will  help by adding those that fit our specific focus. Drop the whole article in and I will delete what does not fit our purposes for understanding.. - Amorella

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Perfection

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Perfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness.

The term perfection is used to designate a range of diverse, if often kindred, concepts. These concepts have historically been addressed in a number of discrete disciplines, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry, ethics, aesthetics, ontology, and theology.

Term and concept

The form of the word long fluctuated in various languages. The English language had the alternatives, "perfection" and the Biblical "perfectness".

Aristotle.

To avoid the latter associations, the Greek term has generally been translated as "completeness" rather than "perfection."

The oldest definition of "perfection", fairly precise and distinguishing the shades of the concept, goes back to Aristotle. 

In Book Delta of the Metaphysics, he distinguishes three meanings of the term, or rather three shades of one meaning, but in any case three different concepts.

 That is perfect:

1. which is complete — which contains all the requisite parts;

2. which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better;

3. which has attained its purpose

The first of these concepts is fairly well subsumed within the second. Between those two and the third, however, there arises a duality in concept. 

This duality was expressed by Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, when he distinguished a twofold perfection: when a thing is perfect in itself — as he put it, in its substance; and when it perfectly serves its purpose.

The variants on the concept of perfection would have been quite of a piece for two thousand years, had they not been confused with other, kindred concepts. 

The chief of these was the concept of that which is the best: in Latin, "excellentia" ("excellence"). In antiquity, "excellentia" and "perfectio" made a pair; thus, for example, dignitaries were called "perfectissime", just as they are now called "excellency." 

Nevertheless, these two expression of high regard differ fundamentally: "excellentia" is a distinction among many, and implies comparison; while "perfectio" involves no comparison, and if something is deemed perfect, then it is deemed so in itself, without comparison to other things.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who thought much about perfection and held the world to be the best of possible worlds, did not claim that it was perfect.

Paradoxes

Vanini

The parallel existence of two concepts of perfection, one strict ("perfection," as such) and the other loose ("excellence"), has given rise — perhaps since antiquity but certainly since the Renaissance — to a singular paradox: that the greatest perfection is imperfection. 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. Their argument, as given by the first two, was that if the world were perfect, it could not improve and so would lack "true perfection," which depends on progress. To Aristotle, "perfect" meant "complete" ("nothing to add or subtract"). To Empedocles, according to Vanini, perfection depends on incompleteness ("perfectio propter imperfectionem"), since the latter possesses a potential for development and for complementing with new characteristics ("perfectio complementii"). 

This view relates to the baroque esthetic of Vanini and Marin Mersenne: the perfection of an art work consists in its forcing the recipient to be active—to complement the art work by an effort of mind and imagination.

The paradox of perfection—that imperfection is perfect—applies not only to human affairs, but to technology. Thus, irregularity in semiconductor crystals (an imperfection, in the form of contaminants) is requisite for the production of semiconductors. The solution to the apparent paradox lies in a distinction between two concepts of "perfection": that of regularity, and that of utility. Imperfection is perfect in technology, in the sense that irregularity is useful.

Perfect numbers - Deleted

Physics and chemistry - Deleted

Ethics 

Plato

The ethical question of perfection concerns not whether man is perfect, but whether he should be. And if he should be, then how is this to be attained?

Plato seldom actually used the term, "perfection"; but the concept of "good", central to his philosophy, was tantamount to "perfection." He believed that approximation to the idea of perfection makes people perfect.

Soon after, the Stoics introduced the concept of perfection into ethics expressly, describing it as harmony — with nature, reason, man himself. They held that such harmony—such perfection—was attainable for anyone.

Plato and the Stoics had made perfection a philosophical watchword. Soon it would be transformed, in Christianity, into a religious one. 

The Christian doctrine of perfection is in the Gospels as well as elsewhere in the Bible. Matthew 5:48 enjoins: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." 

Early Christian writings, especially Paul's, are replete with calls to perfection. Many of these are collected in a discourse by St. Augustine, De perfectione iustitiae hominis. They begin already with the Old Testament: "Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God." (Deuteronomy 18:13.) Elsewhere synonyms for "perfection" are "undefiled", "without rebuke", "without blemish", "blameless", "holy", "righteous", "unblamable", "unreprovable."

St. Augustine 

Augustine explains that not only that man is properly termed perfect and without blemish who is already perfect, but also he who strives unreservedly after perfection. This is a broader concept, of approximate perfection, resembling that used in the exact sciences. The first ancient and Christian perfection was not very remote from modern self-perfection. St. Ambrose in fact wrote about degrees of perfection ("gradus piae perfectionis").

Along with the idea of perfection, Holy Scripture conveyed doubt as to whether perfection was attainable for man. According to 1 John 1:8, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." 

Similarly Jesus said in Matthew 19:17: "And he said unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God..."; while Jesus does not deny that he himself is good, he does call into question the idea that anyone but God can even be good, let alone perfect. And St. Jerome wrote: "Perfectio vera in coelestibus" — true perfection is to be found only in heaven.

As early as the 5th century C.E., 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. The first view, which was championed by Pelagius, was condemned in 417 C.E.; the second view, which was championed by St. Augustine, prevailed at the very beginning of the 5th century and became authoritative.

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. And so, for centuries, two views contended within the Church.

Even as, for the ancient philosophers, the essence of perfection had been harmony, so for the Gospel and the Christian theologians it was charity, or love. St. Paul wrote (Epistle to the Colossians, 3:14): "And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness."

St. Gregory wrote that perfection will be realized only after the fulfillment of history — only "then will the world be beautiful and perfect." Still, everyone should make his own approach to perfection —  holiness. Discourses in moral theology and asceticism were generous with advice on how this was to be done.

The medieval concept of perfection and self-perfection, especially in its mature form, can be natural for modern man. As formulated by Peter Lombard, this concept implies that perfection is a result of development. And as described by Giles of Rome, perfection has not only personal sources ("personalia") but social ones ("secundum statum"). 

Since the individual is formed within a society, the second perfection subsumes the first, in accordance with the "order of the universe" ("ordo universi"). The social perfection is binding on man, whereas personal perfection is only becoming to him.

Theses on perfection persist within the Church to the present day. The first condition for perfection is the desire of it. Also necessary is grace — but God gives grace to those who desire perfection and strive for it. 

Another condition for perfection is constancy of striving and effort. Augustine says: "He who stops, regresses." And effort is necessary in things not only great but also in the smallest; the Gospel according to St. Luke says: "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." An aid in approaching perfection is an awareness of God's  perfection and of one's own imperfection.

Calvin

The 14th century saw, with the Scotists, a shift in interest from moral to ontological perfection; the 15th century, particularly during the Italian Renaissance, a shift to artistic perfection.

The first half of the 16th century saw John Calvin's complete conditioning of man's perfection on the grace of God.

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. This was the age of Ignatius Loyola and the founding of the Jesuit Order; of St. Teresa of Avila (1515–82) and St. John of the Cross (1542–91), and the 1593 founding of the Barefoot Carmelites. 

This was the culminating point in the history of the Christian idea of perfection; at the same time, it was the terminal point as there soon began attempts at reforming the idea.

The first half of the 17th century saw attempts at a Catholic reform of the idea of perfection. This was the time of Cornelis Jansen (1585–1638) and of Janenism — of a growing belief in predestination and in the impossibility of perfection without grace. 

With the second half of the 17th century came a further development in the doctrine of predestination — the doctrine of  "Quietism." Perfection could be reached through a passive awaiting of grace rather than by an active striving. This theory, formulated in Spain by MIguel de Molinos (ca. 1628 - 1697), spread in France, where it was espoused by Madame Guyon (1648–1717) and for a time attracted Francois Fenelon. 

The 18th century brought a sea change to the idea of moral perfection. Faith in it remained, but it changed character from religious to secular. This secular, 18th-century perfection was a fundamental article of faith for the Enlightenment. Its central tenet was that nature was perfect; and perfect, too, was the man who lived in harmony with nature's law.

Primitive man was held to be the most perfect, for he was closest to nature. Perfection lay behind present-day man rather than before him, for civilization distanced man from perfection instead of bringing him closer to it.

A second interpretation, however, took the contrary view: civilization perfected man by bringing him closer to reason, and thereby to nature; for reason would direct life with due consideration for the laws of nature. 

The former, retrospective view of perfection had antecedents in antiquity: Hesiod and Ovid had described a "golden age" that had existed at the beginning of time, and which had been succeeded by silver, copper and Iron Ages, each inferior to the previous. The renewal of this view now, after two millennia, was stimulated by European contact with the "primitive" peoples of the Americas. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was but one of many who wrote in a similar vein.

These two mid-18th-century schools of thought — one seeing perfection in nature and in the past, and the other in civilization and in the future — represented a reaction not against the idea of perfection, but against its transcendental interpretation: as, earlier, the measure of perfection had been the idea of God, so now it was the idea of nature or of civilization. It was the latter idea that ultimately gained the upper hand and passed into the 19th century as the legacy of the Enlightenment. 

The idea of perfection as transcendental, fell away; only worldly perfection counted. The idea that perfection was a matter of grace, also fell by the wayside; man himself must strive for it, and if a single man could not accomplish it, then perhaps mankind could. As God had been the measure of perfection during the Middle Ages, so now man was: the measure had become smaller, more accessible. 

To the thinking of the 19th century, such worldly, human perfection might ultimately be attainable by everyone. And if not perfection, then improvement. This would be the great concept of the modern age. 

At the very midpoint of the 18th century, there occurred an exceptional momentary retreat from the idea of perfection. It was in the French Encyclopedie. The entry, "Perfection" (vol. XII, 1765), discussed only technical perfection, in the sense of the matching of human products to the tasks set for them; no mention was made of ontological, moral or esthetic perfection.

Otherwise, the 18th century saw great declarations championing the future perfection of man, as in Immanuel Kant's Idee zu einer allgemeinem Geschichte.

Perfection was expected to come about by a variety of means. 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 Helvetius, later Jeremy Bentham); reliance was placed in cooperation among people (Charles Fourier, 1808), later in eugenics (Francis Galton, , 1869). While the foundations of the faith in the future perfectibility of man changed, the faith itself persisted. 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.

The idea of human perfectibility had, however, become more comprehensive. Man would attain greater perfection, in the sense that he would live more rationally, healthily, happily, comfortably. But there was no adequate term for this new conception, as the term "perfection" had a moral coloring, while the new goal was more intellectual, physical and social.

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 "virture",  which speaks to his moral nature. During the 19th century, the Germans would come to call perfection, thus construed, "culture" (Kultur), and the French would call it "civilization" (civilisation).

One of the elements of perfection, in its new construction, is health, understood by the World Health Organization as "a state of complete physical and mental well-being."

Still, the burgeoning achievements of contemporary biology have not dislodged the age-old interest in moral perfection — with the important distinction, that the goal now is not so much perfection as improvement. A classic early-19th century exponent of this view was Fichte. 

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the advances of science and technology appear to have been paralleled to some extent by increasingly pluralistic attitudes. The Polish philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz (1886–1980) has written: "To demand of someone that he strive after perfection seems equally inappropriate as to blame him for not striving after it." 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."

Aesthetics - Deleted

Ontology and theology

The Greek philosopher Anaximander described the world as "endless" (apeiron), Xenophanes — as "the greatest" (megistos). But while they ascribed great qualities to the world, they did not regard it as perfect.

Parmenides

Only Parmenides seems to have considered existence to be "tetelesmenon" ("finished"); and Melissos, his successor in the Eleatic school, said that existence "was entirely" ("pan esti"). Thus both saw perfection in existence; true existence was one, constant, immutable. Moreover, Parmenides thought the world to be finite, limited in all directions, and like a sphere — which was a mark of its perfection.

Parmenides' view was embraced to some extent by Plato. He thought that the world was the work of a good Demiurge, and that this was why order and harmony prevailed in the world. The world was the best, the most beautiful, perfect. It had a perfect shape (spherical) and a perfect motion (circular).

But Plato said nothing about the Demiurge architect-of-the-world himself being perfect. And understandably so, for perfection implied finitude, limits; whereas it was the world, not its creator, that had limits. A similar view was held by Aristotle: the world could be perfect, but God could not.

Only the pantheists Stoics held the divinity to be perfect — precisely because they identified it with the world. Cicero wrote in De natura deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) that the world "encompasses... within itself all beings... And what could be more nonsensical than denying perfection to an all-embracing being... Besides the world, there is no thing that does not lack something and that is harmonious, perfect and finished in every respect..."

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.

Features of an absolute existence were discovered in the Person of the Creator: He was immutable, timeless. And absolute existence took on the attributes of a person: it was good, omnipotent, omnipresent. Christian theology united the features of the first cause in Aristotle's Metaphysics with those of the Creator in the Book of Genesis. But the attributes of God did not include perfection, for a perfect being must be finite; only of such a being might one say that it lacked nothing.

There was another reason for the denial, to God, of perfection — in a branch of Christian theology that was under the influence of Plotinus. 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. Not only was that absolute not matter, it was not spirit either, nor idea; it was superior to these. It exceeded any description or praise; it was incomprehensible and ineffable; it was beyond all that we may imagine — including perfection.

Medieval Christian philosophy held that the concept of perfection might describe Creation, but was not appropriate to describe God. 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." Also (Summa Theologica): "That is perfect, which lacks nothing of the perfection proper to it." Thus there were, in the world, things perfect and imperfect, more perfect and less perfect. God permitted imperfections in creation when they were necessary for the good of the whole. And for man it was natural to go by degrees from imperfection to perfection.

Duns Scotus understood perfection still more simply and mundanely: "Perfection is that which it is better to have than not to have." It was not an attribute of God but a property of creation: all things partook of it to a greater or lesser degree. A thing's perfection depended on what sort of perfection it was eligible for. In general, that was perfect which had attained the fullness of the qualities possible for it. Hence "whole" and "perfect" meant more or less the same ("totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem").

Spinoza

This was a teleological concept, for it implied an end (goal or purpose). God created things that served certain purposes, created even those purposes, but He himself did not serve any purpose. Since God was not finite, He could not be called perfect: for the concept of perfection served to describe finite things. Perfection was not a theological concept, but an ontological one, because it was a feature, in some degree, of every being.

The 9th-century thinker Paschasius Radbertus wrote: "Everything is the more perfect, the more it resembles God." Still, this did not imply that God himself was perfect.

The concept of perfection, as an attribute of God, entered theology only in modern times, through Rene Descartes — and in the plural, as the "perfections" of God.

After Descartes, the concept of perfection as a principal concept in philosophy was upheld by other great 17th-century thinkers. 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).

Leibniz wrote: "As M. Descartes states, existence itself is perfection." Leibniz added: "Perfection, I call any simple quality, if it is positive and absolute, such that, if it expresses something, it does so without limits."

At the same time, Leibniz also construed perfection, in his Monadology, in an utterly different way: "Only that is perfect which possesses no limits, that is, only God." 

This concept would last out the entire 17th century. Subsequently, Immanuel Kant would describe perfection as "omnitudo realitatis" ("the omnitude of reality"). Thus perfection, which during the Middle Ages could be a property of any individual being, in 17th-century philosophy became as well, and indeed preeminently, a property of God.

Leibniz's pupil and successor, Christian Wolff, took up this concept of perfection — but with a difference. Wolff ascribed perfection not to being as a whole, but once again to its individual constituents. He gave, as examples, an eye that sees faultlessly, and a watch that runs faultlessly. He also distinguished variants — perfectio simplex and composita, primaria and secundaria — and differentiated the magnitude of perfection (magnitudo perfectionis).

Wolff's pupil, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, derived perfection from rules, but anticipated their collisions (regularum collisio) leading to exceptions (exceptio) and limiting the perfection of things. Baumgarten distinguished perfection simplex and composita, interna and externa, transcendentalis and accidentalis; and, positing so broad a construction, he arrived at the conclusion that "everything is perfect."

In short, Wolff and his pupils had returned to the ontological concept of perfection that the Scholastics had used. The theological concept of perfection had lived only from Descartes to Leibniz, in the 17th century.

Thanks to Wolff's school, the concept of perfection lasted in Germany through the 18th century. In other western countries, however, especially France and Britain, in that century the concept of perfection was already in decline. It was ignored by the French Grande Encyclopedie.

The history of the concept of perfection had undergone great evolutions — from "Nothing in the world is perfect", to "Everything is perfect"; and from "Perfection is not an attribute of God", to "Perfection is an attribute of God."

With Christian Wolff's school, everything had become perfect. This was a singular moment in the history of the ontological concept of perfection; and soon thereafter, that history came to an end. . . .

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.

Selected and edited from Wikipedia for private purposes by the Amorella

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         2224 hours. The above was a wonderful read; many points are reminders of previous reads back in the 1960's and 1970's. This Wikipedia reading was as a lecture I would have liked to have given had I the intellectual and scholarly wherewithal, which I do not. I did however, and still do have the heart and passion for the subject: perfection. (2227)

         You see boy, today show example of how I know you better than you know yourself. I know your heartansoulanmind, my young man, the invisible that remains after the physical is gone. That's the way it is in here, in this blog of some years: Encounters in Mind. - Amorella