Ideal or perfect is, by its undeniable fragrance of flawlessness in every way, so far from the world we encounter experientially throughout our lives. The word perfect has somehow gotten prostituted in a desperate attempt to not feel like we’re constantly falling short. This is what ideals do – they judge you 24/7 because in comparison to them you’ll always be lacking, somehow.

There are pockets of experience where we get a glimpse of the vicinity of the perfect and approach something akin to bliss, a moment of pure joy and content, but then a neighbour turns on the louder than a riot beat up old lawn mower, someone says something so down to earth and inappropriate, the cat refuses the carefully picked new food and goes on a hunger strike, you’re late to a meeting fiddling with a broken washing machine, and you still haven’t taken care of the yesterday’s fight with your partner. Life sneaks up on you as its thing is to make you contend with things and face those, while ideal sits somewhere on its cloud munching grapes in eternal nirvana of perfection. Perfect is such an overrated and colloquially thrown about used up word. It’s unnecessary for contentment and joy (most of which BTW come as positive emotions associated with figuring out problems on the path to something we see as valuable or desirable). We need a challenge to grow but we need ideals too. How to bridge the chasm between the real and a perfect ideal?

Plato had an idea and called his 2.0 version of an ideal “the forms”. In his opinion the ideal is not to be thrown away defeated by the everyday mundane reality, which has a tendency to make us bitter if we lose (self or collectively appointed) meaning out of sight. He proposed the ideal as “the forms”. In his philosophy the forms are real things residing somewhere beyond this world. They are a sort of object of which this world is a far less perfect echo, and the highest of the forms is just “Good”. It is not a deity of any sort, more like a source of perfect. The forms are applied to everything be it geometrical bodies, us, the government, business, relationships, flowers … For our practical purposes here we dispense with forms as real things but keep the idea as a thought experiment that there is something inherently more perfect than its manifestations in this world we call real. If we have a concept of how something should be in its best version, we have a far better chance of getting close to it and making reality a bit better by our actions and decisions. We can contribute in a productive way approaching the Good, no matter how flawed and imperfect we are ourselves.  The forms can be interpreted as guides pointing us to doing something well or better. They are  a blueprint and instructions on how to build and conceptualize things to make the final outcome better for everyone included, not necessarily perfect, but better. Plato doesn’t see the ideal in the forms as a delusion detached from reality but as part of meta-reality, as objects in their own right. It’s our job to take reality into consideration and construct something in dialogue with the very real and pressing concerns, all the while keeping something of the transcendence of an ideal as a lighthouse to govern our direction.

If you were baking a pie for the first time you may have a form of a pie in mind, a perfect pie to guide you through everything from planning, to shopping for ingredients and combining them, then baking for a certain amount of time to get the crust just right. What you take out of the oven may be close or very far to the form of a pie, but in the next try the pie you bake may be closer and that is good enough. There is an idea of a perfect sphere, but can you make it? You can try and get better at correcting the mistakes, but flawless remains a higher realm concern. The forms are absolutes taken out of time and space but urge us to get more ambitious about “better” without the judging eye of the delusional accessibility of “perfect”.