Perfection In The Perfect Man

The next angle of perfection to be analyzed is slightly more personal to humans in general as it deals with perfection in oneself and not our thoughts, philosophies and ideologies. Taking perfection in terms of the perfect person can be considered as a difficult topic to approach as different people may have different views of what the perfect person should be. For example there have been distinctions made between what Germany led by Hitler during the Second World War and what colonial powers such as Britain thought were the perfect race. Hitler’s Germany was inspired by a newfound love for Aryanism; the idea of the German people being the “master race” in the world. Whereas in Britain the British were considered to be superior than other races

Liabilities who he believed should be dealt with. Hence he initiated the Holocaust against the Jews and sent several disabled people to their deaths along with them. This was the cost at which Hitler chased perfection. He believed that the dominance and victorious character of the Aryans must be displayed. Friedlander noted that ironically, Hitler was not victorious in the war and therefore the so called perfect dominance of his master race, which had already cost the lives of millions of people, “seemed to be nothing but an imagination” (316). A similar situation occurred with the British colonists. Despite the fact that they believed their education, morals, dignity and status was above that of all their colonies they could not hold these colonies for long. They wished to share their culture with the colonial states believing that these states wished for their perfect system of rule. Unfortunately the colonies did not believe in this perfect system and most of them eventually revolted until they were granted independence. Hence we see a failure in the idea of the perfect

The perfect person may be considered to be someone who is all good. Somebody who does nothing wrong and lets no evil affect his decisions. But this raises the question; what is good? In another of Plato’s works named “Euthyphro” the questions “what is holiness? What is sin? ” is addressed (5). Euthyphro’s dilemma is explained by Panos Dimas in his article when he says that if something is “loved by the gods….Socrates characterizes it as something that happens to it and therefore presupposes that the pious has already been constituted” (2). What this means is that we cannot be sure of what is good or bad because we do not know the real essence of what piety is. The basic question of the dilemma is: are morals considered ethical because the gods says so or do the gods say morals are ethical because they actually are? It is impossible to answer this question as the essence of what constitutes as good, bad, ethical and unethical is uncertain at best. Therefore it is impossible to say what good and bad really are. Hence a perfect person cannot truly be all good because we do not know what constitutes as