Hating Perfection: A Subtle Search for the Best Possible World

by John F. Williams

The best heaven and the worst hell are the same place. Travel with author John F. Williams into the jungles of Laos and into a new understanding of existence.

In lively short stories, Hating Perfection shows the everyday world as uncanny, equally strange as the imaginary worlds of Borges or Kafka. This engrossing, strikingly original book invites you to experience your life in a new way.

Hating Perfection weaves its stories together with an elegant logic. Our hateful world—painful, unjust, ruthless, fatal—stands revealed as the best of all possible worlds, flooded everywhere by a perfection both alien and addicting. What we want is different from what we get. But the reason why has a divine splendor.

Stand beside the author for a time, and look in the direction he is looking. Your troubles may still be your troubles, but the world will be more than it was.

Genres: Philosophy

359 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Dana Sawyer]

Simply one of the weakest books of “philosophy” I’ve ever read. The only mystery that draws us on as we read this book is trying to grasp why any of the academics who endorsed it claim it’s profound. As a professor of philosophy myself, I can assure anyone that Williams doesn’t offer us even one new insight; his best positions are those that have already been presented with stronger arguments; for instance, he tells us (as if it’s a new idea), that if the cause of the universe is a God, then we might wonder what caused that cause, but if we posit a non-contingent universe, no cause need be implied. Old news. But this is the tip of the iceberg on why this book is simply a recycling of earlier post-modern tropes, sprinkled with a bit of Leibniz and Wittgenstein. I say ‘postmodern’ because he shares the position that a “perfect world” would be bad because it would limit the freedom of those who disagreed with its metrics of perfection (btw, Lewis Mumford made this same point nearly 100 years ago in “The Story of Utopias”) and it would demand a reduction of “subtlety” on the part of the universe (an iteration of the POMO view that the universe doesn’t favor any particular worldview). As a last word for now, his title is misleading: he doesn’t hate perfection, he hates a childish strawman’s view of perfection while telling us that the truly perfect world is the one he proposes.

[Karla Kitalong]

I'm not sure I would recommend this book. The author's credentials are not stated explicitly--at one point he says he's a representative of a Chinese ceramics factory, but he writes like a philosopher and considers questions a philosopher would entertain. He and his wife seem free to spend months at a time in China, which suggests academic careers that include periodic sabbaticals. I guess I like to know WHO the author is. Otherwise he's just a random guy telling stories that he wants to tell.

What kept me reading? At intervals throughout the book, he tells stories about living in China that he seems to think illuminate his philosophical musings. It was (for me) a lot of work to make the connections to the philosophical claims and arguments, but I found the stories interesting and resonant with my (albeit short) China sojourn.

[Will Deonne]

This is probably one of the most important books I've ever read. Philosophically sound, it has the ability to interpret everyday things, and not so everyday things, in a way that questions, explain, and answers existence. Truly a remarkable piece of allegorical work.

Loved it.

[Michelle Theresa]

This is a bizarre book. I’m afraid I can’t say that it’s a good book. Fortunately for my conscience, the author believes that this is the best of all possible worlds – indeed, a perfect world—so he is bound to take my harshest criticisms as constitutive parts of that perfection, and thus as ultimately good. Likewise for everything else that is prima facie bad: rape, genocide, the KKK—all are ultimately good on the Perfect World Thesis. With this in mind, I won’t mince words, knowing that no matter what I write here, it are perfect. (Oops, was that a grammatical error? No matter: bad grammar is just as perfect as good grammar, since this is the best of all possible reviews according to the implicit universal consensus of all reviewers. If I didn’t include some grammatical errors, how could you be expected to appreciate the grammatical parts of my writing? You would quickly get bored and lose the will to read, perhaps despairing of ever reading again. But I digress - I’m getting ahead of myself).
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[Sarah W]

Somehow this book manages to be awful and profoundly depressing. I strongly recommend not reading this. The series of anecdotes from Williams' time living in China are at times interesting, but mostly illustrate his privilege as a (rich?) white, male Westerner. Although he seems to have collected reviews from a number of employed philosophers, Williams references no other philosophical works. (He also freely quotes himself responding to the blurbs in the front of the book.) He switches between arguing about human life at an evolutionary scale and an individual scale when it is convenient for whatever point he is making. Repeating himself over and over seems to be the accepted form of argument here. (Also a couple of weird illustrations of women are thrown in for no apparent reason.) I can't say that Williams makes no interesting points in his book, but this feels like a vanity publication in every way.

[Rick]

In many philosophical discussions there is room for error and opinion, places of argreement and disagreement. This author uses repetition to cover his errors, and his arguments have mostly internal and circular validity. In short he is full of opinion in his "pop philosophy" (my phrase) treatise. However I did get a few "take aways" like his discussion of free will and determinism, which was somewhat but not completely coherent.

[Randy Page]

This was sent out to everyone in the American Philosophical Association but it's not clear why given the utter garbage contained within.