Perfectibility

The Enlightenment held to a belief in human perfectibility, it is often said. The term itself was coined by Rousseau, but Rousseau saw it as a deeply ambiguous faculty, “the source of all misfortunes of man.” Perfectibility is the faculty that draws together and motivates all other faculties so as to realize one’s desires in the world; it is the faculty or impulse that makes desire active in the world. Imagination, which, for Rousseau, has infinite scope, impels desire; perfectibility coordinates other faculties so that desire may be realized. Left to exert its power on the world, however, perfectibility leads to tyranny – for only total control can achieve a perfect realization of (infinite) human desire.

Hence, perfectibility has to be “denatured” and turned inward to produce virtue; infinite imagination must seek its satisfactions within the imagination itself, and only this redirection of the impulse toward perfectibility will enable human beings to live in relative peace with one another, without seeking to realize their desires tyrannically on others. Rousseau warned that the Enlightenment was in danger of precisely this form of universal tyranny, as (in Matthew Maguire’s words) the “perfective faculty is unleashed upon reality without discernible limit.”