Closure

A Story of Everything

Hilary Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134982622
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

For over 2000 years our culture has believed in the possibility of a single true account of the world. Now this age is coming to a close. As a result there is a deep unease. We are lost both as individuals, and as a culture. In the new relativistic, post-modern era, we have no history, no right or moral action, and no body of knowledge. In their place is a plethora of alternative, and sometimes incompatible theories from 'fuzzy logic' to 'consilience' proposing a theory of everything. Closure is a response to this crisis. It is a radically new story about the nature of ourselves and of the world.
Closure exposes the central questions of contemporary philosophy: language and meaning, of the individual and identity, of truth and reality, but it is also philosophical in the broader everyday sense that it enables us to make sense of where and who we are. A central principle, the process of closure, is shown to be at the heart of experience and language. As a theory of knowledge it has dramatic consequences for our understanding of the sciences, involving a reinterpretation of what science does and how it is able to do it. It similarly proposes a profound shift in the role of art and religion. But, above all, it reshapes our understanding of ourselves and the organisation of society, our goals and our capacity to achieve them.
A superb new account of how order is created out of disorder, Closure is an exhilarating work of conceptual geography.

Part I
THE STRUCTURE OF CLOSURE

Introduction: the making of reality and ourselves

In the familiar everyday picture of the world, the world is divided into things: the sun and moon, the sea and sky, houses and people, tables and chairs. We are able to describe these things and the way they interact through language. We refine our account of the world by testing our views against reality. We throw out those descriptions that are not accurate, or modify them, so that our account of how things are is continuously improved upon. Something is understood to be true because it accurately reflects the way the world is, and is false because it does not do so.

Yet despite this everyday assumption, the Prologue concluded that the world cannot be a thing or consist of things. It cannot be so because when examined closely the notion turns out to be inconsistent. Moreover it was shown that this inconsistency leads to paradoxes and confusions which threaten to undermine our most central theories and beliefs. Yet if the world is not a thing or a combination of things it cannot be that we identify things in the world, nor that through language we describe these things or how they are related. As a result the state of things cannot account for the truth and falsity of our descriptions. If the world is not a thing or combination of things, then there is in the world no sun and moon, no sea, no sky, no houses or people, tables or chairs, no leaves, no bits of dust. In which case what are these things that in combination make up what we take to be the world? What is experience and language if not a reflection of reality?

Part I of the story of closure offers a preliminary answer to these questions by describing the underlying structure of closure. It is a structure which is then developed and applied throughout the remainder of the book. This first part is subdivided into three chapters. The first chapter introduces and defines the central terms and identifies the general characteristics of closure. The second chapter offers an account of the process of closure as it applies to human experience and language. The third chapter gives an initial description of the mechanism by which closure enables us to intervene in the world.

The case will be made that it is closure that gives us language, and thought, sensation, and experience. For the process of closure is the means by which our experience is constructed. It provides the content and form to reality through the realisation of individual closures. Moreover, it will be argued that not only is closure the basis of experience and language, it is the means by which we engage with others, the means by which we intervene in the world, the means by which we are able to make things happen.

1
AN OUTLINE FRAMEWORK

Openness and closure

It is through closure that openness is divided into things.

The words ‘the world’ suggest a place that awaits discovery, a place that can be charted and described, that can be catalogued and in part known. The world, however, for reasons that have already been made clear, is not a thing nor is it differentiated awaiting discovery. Yet it is not empty. Instead it is open, and in place of ‘the world’ I shall refer to ‘openness’. I do so to avoid our slipping back into the familiar and mistaken notion of the world as a thing. Instead ‘openness’ indicates a site of possibility: a space that is not a thing or combination of things but is at the same time full. It might be called an undifferentiated flux, so long as the description does not encourage us to imagine that its character has after all been captured, thereby reducing it to a thing once again, even if on this occasion it is a moveable, changeable sort of thing.

At the outset, there remains a risk attached to the introduction of the term ‘openness’. For as with all such terms our present habitual inclination is to provide a particular content, and thereby use the word as if it referred to a thing. To draw attention to this a line or cross could be put through the word in order to indicate that it was not to be held in this manner.¹ A strategy of erasure is however inappropriate, for such a strategy makes it look as though a word either refers to a thing or it does not refer to a thing, while as I will later argue it does neither. In due course the risk of misunderstanding will be avoided for it will be shown that ‘openness’ like all apparently referring terms has no discrete reference nor in principle could it have one.

Even though ‘openness’ does not refer to a thing the term can nevertheless be provided with content. In the context of the individual, openness can be conceived as the other of experience. Not as a collection of things that are the external cause of inner experience but as the space within which experience takes place. In addition, openness can also be conceived as the other of language. Once again, not as that to which language apparently refers, but as the space within which the activity of language takes place. The issue of the relationship between language and the world has in many philosophical circles largely replaced previous concerns about the relations between the human subject and external reality. However, the account of openness is deliberately couched in both of these contexts. In either case there is a similar question to be faced: how is it that as individuals we perceive the world as consisting of things, if within openness there is no differentiation, and how is language capable of dividing openness into things or, perhaps it would be better to say, of fashioning within openness things, both material and abstract, collective and singular?

In its most general form the answer to these questions is to be found in the process of closure. It is through closure that openness is divided into things. Without closure we would be lost in a sea of openness: a sea without character and without form. For in openness there is no colour, no sound, no distinguishing mark, no difference, no thing. Yet openness is not nothing, it is infinitely dense with possibility, but it is not differentiated. It is closure that provides particularity and differentiation, and with it the pieces of reality, the material of the world. It is through closure that we are able to identify things, understand our circumstances, and intervene to a purpose. Language and perception are both the outcome of closure: the complex product of layers of closure that interact and combine. Yet closure does not describe or map openness, nor does it have either content or form in common with openness.

Through closure therefore there are things. Closure enables us to realise objects of every type and variety. Closure is responsible for our being able to describe the atoms of hydrogen and the molecules of water that make up the sea; for our being able to experience a sunrise over a field of corn; or hear the sound of a log fire and the warmth that it brings; it is closure that makes possible the kiss of a lover or the pain of injury; closure that allows the crossword puzzle and its solution; the words of language and the meanings they offer; Newton's theory of gravity and Shakespeare's sonnets; the state of peace and the activity of war; a society based on tyranny and a society based on democracy; the universe: its beginning and its end. Without closure there would be no thing.

Closure can be understood as the imposition of fixity on openness. The closing of that which is open. It is the conversion of flux into identity, the conversion of possibility into the particular. It is achieved by holding that which is diverse as one and the same. Such a process is not limited to human beings, or even animate beings, but it is at first perhaps easiest to understand the process of closure in the context of our own linguistic and perceptual closures where the closures involved are both new to the individual concerned and relatively unconnected to prior closures.

Suppose that we are looking at a random pattern of dots on a page. If asked what can be seen amongst the dots, we can imagine scanning the pattern looking for some combination of dots that allows the formation of an image of some sort. To begin with nothing may be seen other than the dots, but in due course let us suppose that an image of a face is identified. Having found the face the dots are no longer a random pattern. Instead we have the experience of seeing a face, of discerning perhaps the eyes and the nose, even an expression. The page of dots is now not what it was. The dots appear to be the same yet we see something which we did not previously see, which we can describe and identify and which was previously absent. This thing which we see is an example of a closure: the outcome of a process of closure.

Now it might be supposed that this face, this closure, was always there lost in the random pattern of dots waiting to be discovered. But what else could be found in the dots, in this imaginary version of drawing by numbers? If there are a hundred dots on a page and each dot can be linked to any of say ten dots surrounding it, there are, by many orders of magnitude, more combinations and shapes on this single page than there are atoms in the universe. There is therefore no practical limit to the number of possible images to be found. So what is happening here? It is not that the dots already contained these images and that we simply uncovered them ready and waiting for us, but that through closure we realised – we made real – particular shapes and images. It can be seen therefore that the page of dots is a page of unfathomable possibility, capable through closure of realising a world of almost infinite complexity.

In the context of this example, closure can be understood as a process which generates something from a space of possibility. The page of dots has unlimited potential but it has no concrete form until a process of closure has taken place and realised a particular thing. It is however only an analogy for the relationship between closure and openness, for the page of dots is not openness and is already the outcome of a complex process of closure. Nevertheless, if all human lifetimes had been spent examining the single page of dots still new things could be found. Each new shape could be added to those found previously thereby generating combinations of images whose inter-relation could itself become a basis for further closure offering stories made from the patterns. What was once a page of dots could thus become a multi-layered plethora of signs and images, pictures and stories, that could be extended and explored without limit.

So it is with the relationship between closure and openness in general; only more so. The page of dots in this example is itself the outcome of many prior layers of closure. It is through these prior layers of closure that it is possible to realise this part of openness as a page of dots. Over the next few chapters an attempt will be made to give a preliminary account of the detailed mechanism by which this takes place. It will as a result be seen that openness is already constrained both by the particular linguistic closure, ‘the page of dots’ itself, along with many layers of linguistic and non-linguistic closure which preceded it and which enabled this complex closure to take place.

As in the example of the dots and the myriad ways they can be combined, there is no practical limitation on the ways in which openness can be closed. All of the variety and detail of the world is provided through closure and in the realisation of things the unlimited character of openness is obscured, hidden behind a seemingly solid wall of known orderliness. Certain images that we have found in the page of dots that is openness have become central to us because they are linked to other images found elsewhere on the page and combine to tell an overall story. This story enables us to find our way around the dots and to refer seemingly precisely to each dot on the page. Having developed this complex web of closures the original unlimited possibilities held within the dots is gradually obscured, and our attachment to the images we have realised through closure grows so strong that we cannot conceive of alternatives. What we take to be reality is thus the complex web of closures we have come to use in order to make our way about in the world, and as we become accustomed to them and rely on them so the original possibilities held within openness fade from view.

We have the impression that there is no alternative than to see the world as we do, and to divide it into the familiar objects of everyday life; but instead it will be argued that the categories of language and the objects that make up reality are the result of closures and could have been otherwise, for in principle there can be no logical limit to the number of possible closures available. Although, as it will later be shown, seemingly unlikely closures can be realised, we are not in a position to adopt any closure we please, for we are constrained, on the one hand, by the historical legacy of previous closures held within the web of language, and on the other, by our physiology. The closures that make up language and perception are not therefore realised in isolation but in the context of a web of previous closures which serve to reinforce each other and the closure in question. The web of closures within which new closures are formed provides the framework or environment within which we operate. As a result of the familiarity of our closures and their self-reinforcing character the process of closure and the plasticity of openness is obscured. In combination these constraints are often sufficiently tight to give us the impression that there is no alternative to the closures adopted, and that these closures are demanded by the way the world is divided up, with the consequence that the particular closures we happen to have realised are often mistaken for a description of the world. In this sense we are imprisoned by our own closures and cut off from the diversity of openness. It is as if we are lost to the plot of one story we have constructed from things we have realised in the limitless page of dots that is openness and have yet to appreciate that there are whole libraries of alternative plots and characters. Occasionally through the apparent fixity of our particular closures we can glimpse the teaming mass of possibility of what might have been, and what might be, and thereby come to appreciate that openness is neither captured nor described by any particular closure or set or combination of closures.

Through the process of closure the character of openness is hidden but it is also through closure that reality is realised. Each closure provides something that we did not have previously, and at the same time obscures the openness from which that something was realised. Closure can be seen therefore to be in part a loss, an obscuring of openness, in the same way that catching sight of the face in the dots is also the loss of the other things that those collection of dots might have been. Yet without this loss we would have no-thing. While the obscuring of openness is an inevitable corollary of the provision of things, it is through the realisation of things that we are able to make some sense of where and who we are, and of how we might intervene in order to change our circumstances. Closure enables us to escape the flux of possibility through the provision of particularity; and while it obscures the potential of openness, without closure and the provision of things we would have no means of understanding, or intervening, to any particular effect.

The linguistic turn in philosophy has made it look as if an account of sensation and perception, in terms for example of physiology and brain processes, is part of the natural sciences and as such distinct from an account of language. I shall argue however that sensation and language are not different in kind but are both forms of closure. Nor are they the only forms of closure, for they are themselves only possible as the result of simpler, more elementary closures. Human experience is the result of many levels of closure within each individual, each of which has the capacity to interact with, and alter the character of, the others, and which in the case of high-level closures such as language are also able to interact with the closures of other individuals both present and past.

The account of closure outlined here is therefore at the same time a theory of language and a theory of perception. More generally it offers an account of organisms that intervene to a purpose in openness, of which humans are but one.

The mechanism of closure: material and texture

Material is an enclosure that on the one hand takes place in openness, but which at the same time contains openness in the form of texture.

In due course, as the account of closure unfolds, an attempt will be made to describe with some precision the manner in which layers of closure interact in order to provide individual human experience and the social framework within which that experience takes place. Before it is possible to do so however it is necessary to explore further the nature of closure, its mechanism, and its characteristics.

Consider again the example of the page of dots. In the page of dots it was possible to find patterns or images. These patterns can be seen to be in addition to the initial perception of the page of dots. Nor are these patterns and images merely present awaiting discovery but are in some sense the product of the process of closure itself. It was argued that the initial page of dots contains an almost limitless number of possible patterns and images and is in this sense open. Closure in this instance consists in the process of realising these images or patterns. We can therefore consider the images and patterns as the outcome of the process of closure. This outcome of closure it will prove helpful to identify as ‘material’.

Closure, of whatever form – and three basic forms will be identified: preliminary, sensory, and inter-sensory closure – consists in the provision of a particularity: a particularity which was not available prior to the closure. There is something present, or perhaps not present, as a result of the particularity. Thus when the dots are held as an image of a face, a new thing is created, and we perceive something that we did not perceive previously. The image of the face we find in the dots is neither the same as the dots themselves nor is it the same as an idealised image of a face, instead it is something new. All closure provides a particularity which is in addition to the context in which the closure was realised. Material is this ‘thing in addition’, and it is material that provides us with what we take to be reality.

It is not difficult to distinguish many different forms and types of material, but each is the product of closure. Sensations, the perception of physical objects, and meanings are all in this sense material. Thus the shapes and colours, the sounds, smells, and tastes, that provide the sensory elements of experience are material, realised through closure. So also are the individual physical things that we identify, and the world in which they are placed. Then again, in the context of the closures of language, any unit of meaning associated with a word or combination of words is material. In this context, if we are unable to make sense of language, either because we don’t understand the individual words or because we are unable to understand their use in combination, it is because for the individual concerned closure has not taken place, and in the absence of closure no material has been realised. Similarly for perception, if we are unable to find a face in the dots when told to look for one, we can be said to lack this perceptual closure and have realised no material. When the face is ‘found’, the closure has taken place and material realised. As a consequence we see something that we did not see previously.

So what is involved in realising material? The provision of material can be seen to be the outcome of holding that which is different as the same in some respect. For example, in order to see a face in the dots we have to hold a set of dots together as one thing, namely a face. To do so we hold these different dots as the same in this respect. They are the same in virtue of all being part of a face. The material realised, the face, is the outcome of closure and the means by which these different things are held as one. The process of closure can be described therefore as the holding of that which is different as the same through the realisation of material. This principle can be seen to apply to all forms and types of closure, and all forms and types of material.

While all forms of closure consist in the provision of particularity in the form of material, the first or preliminary layer of closure realises material from openness, while subsequent layers of closure realise material from other forms of material themselves the outcome of prior closure. It is to these subsequent layers of closure that most of our attention will be devoted. In either case, closure consists in the holding of that which is different as the same thereby realising something in the form of material that was not previously present. In the case of preliminary closure the flux of openness is held as material, while in the case of later closure material realised from prior closure is organ...