I find very interesting how obsessed we get with perfection and how much we hate our imperfections. We want the perfect body, the perfect job, the perfect partner.
However, we have very limited empirical experience of perfection and if we were asked to define what the perfect body, job, partner etc look like we would probably struggle after the first few obvious and rhetorical words.
The truth is that we have probably never come across perfection. So why are we so obsessed in achieving it? Also, how can we achieve something that we cannot even fully describe?
Plato thought that when we die our souls ascend to a world of perfection, the 'Hyperuranius' (which yes it does suspiciously sound like 'Up your anus'), where we come across the Ideas. The Ideas are the perfect representation of everything. For instance, the Idea of 'pen-ness' is the perfect representation of a pen. Plato says that when we reincarnate in our next life we forget about the 'world of the Ideas', however our souls miss it so much that we spend our all life trying to replicate what we saw there.
Like when you wake up from a beautiful dream and you try to recollect it but you cannot.
In other words, we spend our whole life trying to replicate our experience of the Idea of pen-ness but can only master some shitty pens. We are never quite happy with our pens, but they are the best we can do. Plato's allegory is interesting because it brings to our attention that the acceptance of imperfection is not a weakness but a strength.
Accepting our limits and how much of those limits we still need to explore is the first necessary step to understand who we are.
Pushing ourselves should perhaps not be aimed at becoming something that we do not know (our so called perfect self), but it should a journey towards the realisation of our own full potential. Perhaps we are perfect when we have achieved our potential and become the best we can possibly be, rather than aiming for something which does not exist and never was.
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