Benjamin Franklin And His Pursuit For Perfection
The quest for perfection was a task that Benjamin Franklin undertook towards self-betterment. He intended to conquer all faults of the human nature and become a man wholly aligned to a set of moral virtues that he came up with. “I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. ” However, he soon realized that the quest he had undertaken was much more difficult than he could have fathomed and in order to achieve perfection, he had to come up with a foolproof plan that would act as a guide towards his ultimate goal.
To begin with, Franklin wrote down a set of areas in which he wanted to achieve perfection in. These he made by highlighting key areas of interest, that he referred to as precepts, and then describing the sub-parts that constituted the precept. In this way, he avoided having a lot of virtues that would have been otherwise impossible to achieve. He arrived at a total of thirteen precepts. Even with the small number, he acknowledged the folly of attempting them all at once and went through the list by achieving perfection in the areas, one at a time. He made a book and upon each page, made a table. In the table, he created seven columns representing a day of the week and rows for each of the precepts. Franklin then made a little mark for every violation of the precepts he made throughout the day. This way, he was able to keep track of all the violations and his progress towards moral perfection. Every week, he sought perfection in a virtue and by the thirteenth week, he was done with all the precepts. Thereafter, he maintained the perfection until written monitoring of his progress was no longer needed. Franklin, however, failed to reach his goal of moral perfection, by his own admission. “I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it. . . ”. The trial had a positive impact on him though; he found himself a better and happier man than he would have been, had he never attempted his quest. Of all the precepts, the one Franklin found hardest to achieve was Order. “Order, too, with regard to places for things, papers, etc. , I found extremely difficult to acquire”. He attributed his failure in this area to the fact that he had not been earlier accustomed to it.
Severally, he almost gave up his quest because of this one fault and almost resigned to being content with always having a fault where order was concerned. He however seems to have given up on seeking perfection in this aspect, even after achieving much better success at other areas like temperance and industry. His statement “a speckled ax is best” was a reference to his analogy of a man who wanted his ax shined but was not willing to put in the effort to achieve that goal. It is a statement of despair that signifies giving up on a goal; one would rather give up and have a speckled ax than work hard to have it all shining.
