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| Philosophy and Football Posted by Merlin Jetton on 2/04, 6:00am | ||
| On page 1 of today's Chicago Tribune print edition is the following. There's no such thing as perfect Every season has a flaw; ask Tom Brady or Plato by Steve Johnson: February 4, 2008 Perfection, we can all agree, is not attainable, although spell check gets us closer. Make that "attainable." It is an ideal, Plato suggested, that we can only try to approximate in the real world. Plato's example was a chair, never quite achieving the "chairness" we had in mind. [snip] "'Perfect' is a trap, a bogus concept that has the effect of making great achievement seem impossible and distant," says Jesse Kornbluth, editor of a Web site, Head Butler, that celebrates excellence. "In fact, 'perfect' does not exist in life -- no one, for more than a minute, bats 1.000. Why does 'perfect' endure? Advertising: 'the perfect vacation,' 'the perfect gift.' A much better metric is 'the best.' There, we have context, not an absolute." [snip] For true perfection, Dotson looks around him: "I think that whoever created the universe certainly knew what they were doing. I'm awed every day by just the sight of a tree or the sky. That's perfection, yeah. Nature has achieved perfection, and it seems to be doing it mindlessly. I don't think anything human ever does." 'There's a dilemma here' Philosophers have argued whether nature, with its implications of the untainted primitive, or civilization, with the reach toward reason, is closer to perfection. But we know perfectly well that arguing is what philosophers do. "You've got to be very careful when you talk about perfection," says Kenneth Seeskin, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. "There's a dilemma here. The dilemma is, on the one hand, it's hard to tell someone to strive for something less than perfection. But side No. 2 is that it's very easy to make the standards of perfection so high that anything short seems to be inadequate." Running through philosophy, he says, are two essential thoughts on perfection. "One, very broadly Platonic, says you try to understand human behavior by looking at the ideal and seeing the degree to which we fall short, and that's how you understand and critique human behavior. "You then have another tradition, very broadly speaking Aristotelian, which says that looking for standards no one can reach is really misleading and leads to undesirable consequences and what you need to do is look at the way people in fact behave." [snip] Even the Patriots' season, one victory away from the simple, no-loss definition of "perfection," has contained many imperfect moments. At season's start, the team was caught using a video camera to spy on a rival: perfection with a pit stop at cheating. In the 12th of their 16 regular-season games, the Patriots should have lost to the lowly Baltimore Ravens. Only a stunning series of miscues by the Ravens, including a timeout that allowed the Patriots to maintain possession of the ball during their winning drive, let the New England team win. Perfection by coincidence, or perhaps kismet. | ||
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