The Terror of the Incomplete

Coping with Life's Lingering Lack of Closure (Vol. 4; Issue 39)

Do you happen to share my daily problem of painfully realizing, every late afternoon, that you will not complete your daily tasks? I hope not. It nicely illustrates a neurosis, or, to use the much-preferred Jungian term, a complex. It haunts me. My relationship with my To-Do list is intimate. And, these lists take hold of me in a manner relating to Harlow’s (1958) wire monkey experiment. It warrants exploration another day (when I’m courageous enough to expose further vulnerability).

The underlying problem lies in the horror that:

EVERYTHING IS FOREVER INCOMPLETE.

Hilary Lawson, a (male) 70-year old Oxford graduate, English professor, and founder of the Institute of Art and Ideas*, proposes “closure theory” as a way of dealing with incompleteness. As an example, consider the last land mass discovered on our planet. In the spring of 1931, Russian explorers identified an archipelago in the Russian high Arctic they called Servernaya Zemlya. It was the last significant area of land mapped on planet Earth. However, and lest even that example seduce you into a sense of closure, additional land masses emerge as global warming dries up the oceans.

Lawson’s idea of closure allows us to grasp pieces of reality, to plasticize it, in a manner making it more tolerable than, say, infinity. As noted, but it bears repetition, our conceptual structures, without exception, are destined to be incomplete. Cosmologists identify the universe as containing billions of galaxies held together by gravity. Our Solar System lies within the Milky Way.

Notice how these phrases organize our thinking. How can we even imagine a galaxy, which, while smaller than the universe itself, nonetheless consists of gases, dust, and billions of stars and their solar systems? It boggles the mind. Closure is a feature of all fields of study, especially mine.

Consider the audacity of Sigmund Freud (1900) who claimed he’d achieved an idea of a lifetime: Dreams always signify desires for wish fulfillment. Really? That one fantasy-laden aspect of the swirling dynamism of human subjectivity—influenced by hormones, neurobiology, sociology, culture, and more—can be reduced to our desires? It’s unthinkable. It’s too simple and reductionistic.

The same can be said for considering unbridled capitalism the solution to economics. It clearly creates unequal strata of a society. Communism, rarely practiced in its purest form, strives to achieve equality but pays the price in innovative entrepreneurs and freedom. Even single words create a form of closure. When you think of the word, movie, it encompasses films, directors, actors, producers, stage hands, set designers, and more.

Lawson proposes that, by identifying realms of closure, we achieve degrees of containment. I think it serves to bring some sense of tranquility. Encounters with the infinite elicit anxiety; closure, however imaginary, counteracts the jangly feeling. It remains tensely related to openness, meaning that, again, closure is nothing more than a concept containing pieces of phenomena. On some level, you remain aware of the infinite, the unending boundlessness of phenomena.

The idea of perspectivism, predating the idea of closure, covers much the same ground. It, too, offers ways to parse phenomena. In essence, it captures points of view, one at at time. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first coined the term, perspectivism, famously writing, “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…” (p. 458). However, the idea is traceable to the ancient Greeks.