#68: Plato (and Barbie) on perfection
If you won't accept anything less than perfection from yourself, I have some disappointing news from Ancient Greece. Back in the 4th (ish) century BC, Plato was telling anyone who would listen that perfection doesn't even exist in the material world - so, save your energy and lower your standards. Get the kettle on and then gather round to learn what this means for you, from Plato, Socrates, and ... erm, the Barbie movie.
Here's the monologue by American Ferrera (as Gloria) in Barbie:
'It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.
'You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because that’s crass. You have to be a boss, but you can’t be mean. You have to lead, but you can’t squash other people’s ideas. You’re supposed to love being a mother, but don’t talk about your kids all the damn time. You have to be a career woman, but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men’s bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you’re accused of complaining.
'You’re supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you’re supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. But always stand out and always be grateful. But never forget that the system is rigged. So find a way to acknowledge that but also always be grateful. You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. It’s too hard! It’s too contradictory and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you! And it turns out in fact that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also everything is your fault.
'I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing women, then I don’t even know.'
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, my gloriously imperfect friends. Guess what? There are 3 new cats living here at Imperfectionist Towers, bringing the catty total to 7. What have I done?! The 3 newbies are globetrotters, originally from Canada. They moved over to the UK with their human a few years ago. Sadly, their human’s little human turns out to be allergic to cats, and so they needed to be rehomed. I saw a Facebook post appealing for someone to take them in, so I immediately offered them a home - which is my default reaction whenever I see a cat needing a home, especially if it’s one that’s ill or old or grumpy or otherwise likely to be unwanted. Arta, Louis, and Grayson are currently living in my bedroom, settling in. They are yet to meet Bramble, Madam Puff, Minnow, and Pumba. The eventual introductions are going to proceed slowly and cautiously, to minimise drama. Having said that, none of the existing cats batted an eyelid when next door’s cat, Erik, wandered into the house a few days ago - I’m wondering if they’ve lost track of which cats actually live with us. Anyway. Stay tuned for further important cat updates.
Right then. On with the show, and with an episode that I can’t quite believe it’s only just occurred to me to do, so relevant is the topic to our imperfectionist purposes here. I want to talk to you about the metaphysics of the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. You see, Plato had some thoughts about perfection, and how close we earthlings are able to get to it (spoiler alert: not very close), and these thoughts provide a useful framing for our efforts and our perfectionist anxieties. I’m talking here about Plato’s theory of Forms, which is probably the view he’s most well-known for.
According to Plato, the world we live in is … kind of a mess. It’s constantly changing. It’s full of flaws. It’s an unreliable source of knowledge. It’s rough and ready. It’s basically a tangle of imperfection, but it’s all we have. Or at least, it’s all that’s available to our senses. But that’s not to say that we’re incapable of knowledge of things that are free from these worldly imperfections. We’re capable, for example, of forming the idea of a perfect triangle, even though we only ever encounter imperfect triangles as we go about our business in the world. And we’re capable of knowing what a cat is, in general, even though no two actual cats are exactly alike - which is a blessing, really, because I do need to be able to tell my many cats apart. (Wow, I didn’t realise until now that my cat anecdote at the start was going to have some important Platonic relevance - let’s all pretend that there was a clever philosophical reason for that intro, rather than that I just wanted to tell you about my cats.) And you, my friends, are capable of apprehending - that’s philosophy for ‘understanding’ or ‘entertaining’ - the perfect essay, the perfect working day, the perfect career, the perfect life, even though, unfortunately and disappointingly and frustratingly for you, you only ever experience imperfect versions of any of these things.
More upliftingly (if that’s a word), while your response - while our response - to these imperfections is often to blame ourselves for not being good enough; for Plato, imperfection is all we can expect from living in our flawed world. That’s kind of the deal, sorry. And while we’re capable of knowing what perfection is, that knowledge doesn’t come from experiencing perfection in the world. It comes, instead, from our encounters in the world of Forms. Forms are the ideal, perfect versions of the imperfect things we encounter with our senses. There’s a cat Form. A triangle Form. A justice Form. An essay Form. A number 8 Form. And so on. Forms exist, but we don’t perceive them with our senses. To perceive them, you need - and sorry about this - to separate your intellect from your body, but don’t worry because you already did this before you were born, which is how you ended up with your idea of perfection in the first place. It’s just that you’ve forgotten about having already done it.
Ok, now, I’m going to guess that while you might have been on board with the whole ‘we never actually encounter perfection in the real world’ thing, I probably lost you with the mention of that time when you were a disembodied intellect floating around and checking out Forms before forgetting about the disembodied floating even though you mysteriously managed to remember the Forms. But luckily for us, we don’t need to swallow that part in order to draw lessons from what Plato said about Forms. And the lesson is this: if you’re trying to attain perfection, you’re wasting your time. Perfection belongs to the world of Forms, and we don’t live in that world. We live in a muddled, chaotic, ever-changing world, and nothing in our world can ever measure up to the Forms. So, when you notice that you (or something you’re doing or something you’ve done) aren’t perfect, that’s not necessarily evidence that you’re less than you ought to be, or less than you could be. You simply can’t expect perfection in our world, the real world, the world we experience through our senses. Things in our world strive to resemble forms - but they can never quite get there. While there’s a triangle Form, for example, any triangle you actually make is going to have dings and bends in it, no matter how much time you spend trying to perfect it.
Even so, as I’ve said, things in the real world strive to resemble the Forms. If you want to make the best triangle you can make, given the limitations of the world we live in, you need to know what a triangle is - that is, in Plato’s terminology, you need to have an understanding of the triangle Form - and you need to work on making your triangle as close as you can get it to the triangle Form. So, having that idea of a triangle - of the perfect triangle, if you want to put it like that - is important in that it gives you something to aim towards. We need to know what sorts of changes - like making the edges straight - constitute improvements to our triangle, and what changes - like making the corners rounded - constitute deterioration. So, travelling towards perfection is fine and useful. It’s just a big mistake to think we can ever arrive there.
How far should we travel towards perfection? How good is good enough? Well, really, that depends on your purposes. If your toddler has demanded that you cut their sandwich into triangles, you don’t need to worry too much about accuracy. You basically need to be aiming at ‘shapes with 3 sides’, but your toddler isn’t going to care too much about whether the sides are laserbeam-straight. (If you have a toddler who does care about this, please accept my commiserations, and why don’t you go and have a lie down and maybe book yourself a massage?) If, on the other hand, you are precision-engineering a triangular piece of - I dunno - a scientific device or something, then the standard is going to be higher. You need, in that case, to be aiming at creating more triangular triangles than when you’re making your toddler a sandwich. Now, in cases like this, we don’t necessarily pause to reflect on just how closely we need to be striving to attain the ideal triangle. But I do think we have an implicit sense of it. We don’t dig out the protractor when our kids ask for triangles, even though we would in certain other cases where we had to do a triangle. We’re not aiming for perfection, just for good-enough-for-the-current-purpose.
I think you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you, smartypants? That’s right: ‘good enough for the current purpose’ is just as relevant when it comes to doing a decent job with that essay you’re writing, or with your career, or parenting, or whatever. But we often lose sight of that, and fixate on trying to attain perfection instead. Why is that? I want to offer two possible answers.
The first is that, very often, we don’t really know what counts as good enough for the current purpose - at least, not in a way that would enable us to modify what we’re trying to do so that we aim at something less than perfect. And often we lack confidence that we’re capable of doing a good enough job (let alone a perfect job), so we just desperately try to do the absolute best job we can do, and hope that it’s good enough. In cases where we have doubts about whether we’re capable of good enough, it’s not particularly helpful to distinguish between ‘good enough’ and ‘perfect’. Sometimes the answer here is: find out what the difference here looks like. Perhaps, for your purposes, you just need to scrape a pass - you don’t need to break any records. Knowing that sort of thing can save you a lot of wasted effort and a lot of anxiety.
But sometimes it’s not as simple as that. As an example, you know what the academic job market is like, right? Depressing. Way more applicants than there are jobs. How good does your CV need to be in order for you to get an interview for a job you’re applying for? Well, who knows? It depends what the other candidates are like, and you have no way of knowing that. In a situation like this, the advice to focus on good enough rather than perfection isn’t at all helpful. The best you can do, if you want to maximise your chances, is go all-out on being as great as you possibly can be - and I know this is what a lot of you are doing, often with dire consequences for your mental health. But perhaps there can be some comfort in taking a step back and understanding what’s going on. You’re being asked, in a situation like this, to throw a ton of effort into a project that you don’t completely understand. You don’t know what standards you need to meet. You don’t know whether you’re making sandwich triangles or precision equipment. Of course it’s stressful and exhausting. But that’s not because there’s something wrong with you. It’s the situation you’re in. The academic job market, I mean. And on top of that, there’s also Plato’s whole thing about the world in general being a hot mess.
Ok. Second reason why we might not be working with a clear sense of the distinction between what counts as ‘good enough’ and what counts as ‘perfection’. Sometimes, we don’t really know what perfection, in the relevant sense, is. We think we know what the perfect essay or the perfect job application or the perfect parent or the perfect whatever looks like, but actually we don’t. What seems like a coherent idea from afar actually falls apart when we get up close. Plato’s dialogues are chock-full of this sort of thing. Someone will come along confidently claiming to know what justice or piety or rhetoric is, and then Socrates will poke holes in everything they say until they end up admitting - and I’m paraphrasing here - that they didn’t know what they hell they were talking about. Often we’re striving for something that turns out to have impossibility built in, except that without Socrates to walk us through the problems with it, we don’t realise it’s incoherent, and we end up blaming ourselves for our lack of progress when actually the problem is that it’s literally impossible to attain what we’re trying to attain.
Now, Socrates might not be around any more to alert us to the incoherence of some of the stuff we’re trying to achieve - but, luckily for us, we do have the Barbie movie. There’s that monologue by America Ferrera’s character, Gloria, that begins, ‘It is literally impossible to be a woman’, and goes on to mention various conflicting demands that are placed on women. In case you haven’t seen the movie, I’ll stick the monologue in the episode notes. You can have a go at this yourself. Think of a project that is super important to you - the sort of project where it matters to you that you do a good job. Then write down exactly what ‘doing a good job’ involves. Treat it as if you’re writing a manual. Does it make sense? Are there any impossible-to-resolve conflicts there - conflicts that you didn’t realise you were beating yourself up about having not managed to resolve? Taking the time to write down stuff like this is such a powerful tool. I’ve spoken before about the things I’ve learned from it myself - things like, hmm, maybe I shouldn’t be simultaneously beating myself up for going too fast and for not going fast enough when I’m writing.
Your lesson from Plato, then, is: perfection isn’t attainable, and if you think it is, then you misunderstand what sort of world we live in. Think of perfection as less like the destination you put into your sat nav, and more like the compass points at the edge of the map. ‘West’ isn’t a place you’re supposed to reach. Instead, it’s there to show you whether or not you’re heading in the right direction. The sat nav bit is me, by the way, not Plato.
Until next time, friends. I’ll try not to adopt any more cats before the next episode.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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