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> If your attempts to realize your perfect idea destroy it, it is because you discovered the flaws in your idea in the process. It doesn't have to be. I think

> If your attempts to realize your perfect idea destroy it, it is because you discovered the flaws in your idea in the process. It doesn't have to be. I think my main disagreement with what you're saying starts with how you allude to the idea of idea possession. What is "your idea"? What does this mean? Many perfect ideas appear universal. Who "came up" with the idea of the perfect sphere? Or the idea of love? Or the idea of adventure? Notice how, when you try to realize any of these ideas, you fall short. People who created this, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque are betting that universal ideas do indeed exist, and that intelligent enough creatures are bound to have them. When you realize something imperfect, you are bound to lose some connection with the perfect idea that you started with. This does not mean there was something wrong with the original idea, that it was "bad" or "wrong" in some sense. You cannot create a perfect sphere, but is the idea of a perfect sphere bad or wrong? > Their perfection wasn't destroyed by creation -- it never existed in the first place. About your example with Lloyd Wright: that perfection existed in a sense. It existed in his mind. Maybe not the plan for the house that would actually be executed, but the idea, the feeling of living in such a house. Where do you draw the border between pure concept and practicalities? I remember being a kid and wanting to create computer games. I had very clear ideas on how the best game ever should feel like. The things I actually created were shit, and ended up destroying my ability to preserve these initial feeling of an ideal game. Don't you see how doing can be destructive in the realm of ideas? It is funny that what I am saying here does not feel controversial to me (famous thinkers said this sort of thing millennia ago), but it does feel blasphemous in current western society. We worship productivity, and forget to question the very idea of productivity to begin with.

Declanomous 10y ago
I agree with everything you said, except I think a perfect idea would be perfect regardless of any imperfect executions. Your vision for a game might still be perfect, but you might derive less pleasure from thinking about it because those thoughts are now tangled up with your feelings of failure. For another metaphor, the imagined perfection of a member of the opposite sex, and the inability of reality to match that expectation, is a consistent trope in art and media. Happy Together, by the Turtles, pretty much any song written by River Cuomo (Weezer), 500 Days of Summer, etc. I think the issue is that our individual understanding of perfection is flawed. Perfection is more like Plato's forms, in the sense that something perfect might exist, but we can only begin to imagine what that is. Perhaps Plato is right, and perfection cannot exist in reality, but failure to attain perfection in reality would not cause the true form of something to be any less true.

Declanomous 10y ago

I agree with everything you said, except I think a perfect idea would be perfect regardless of any imperfect executions. Your vision for a game might still be perfect, but you might derive less pleasure from thinking about it because those thoughts are now tangled up with your feelings of failure. For another metaphor, the imagined perfection of a member of the opposite sex, and the inability of reality to match that expectation, is a consistent trope in art and media. Happy Together, by the Turtles, pretty much any song written by River Cuomo (Weezer), 500 Days of Summer, etc. I think the issue is that our individual understanding of perfection is flawed. Perfection is more like Plato's forms, in the sense that something perfect might exist, but we can only begin to imagine what that is. Perhaps Plato is right, and perfection cannot exist in reality, but failure to attain perfection in reality would not cause the true form of something to be any less true.