</a>Challenge of closure

Functional Complementarity of Higher Order Questions: psycho-social sustainability modelled by coordinated movement (Part #12)

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Implicit in a focus on questions is a search for "closure". An answer provides a degree of closure -- effectively de-energizing or discharging the question. Paradoxically the "closure" provided by an answer may be in some cases characterized by an unusual form of "openness" -- acknowledged notably through the insights triggered in answering a koan. Curiously the "challenge of closure" is also of particular importance to Christian evangelism:

As the century draws to a close, mission leaders are increasingly talking about the subject of "closure". Here, then, is a working definition. Closure: The completion of the task of presenting the Gospel to every person in the world -- in his mother tongue, or an understandable trade language -- while providing an opportunity for those who respond to grow toward maturity in Christ through a local body of believers. [more]

The challenge of closure has been extensively explored by Hilary Lawson (Closure: A Story of Everything, 2001). It is an attempt to provide an account that overcomes the problems of self-reference inherent in other philosophical systems. In the words of one reviewer, Tim Gwinn (2004):

Both realism and relativism take as a basis that there is some 'thing' - namely, the world - to which these accounts are deemed to apply. By contrast, the beginning in Closure is to not take the world as a 'thing' to be grasped or understood. Instead, the world is to be thought of as the "openness", which is the site or space of possibilities that occur in the absence of our attempts at comprehension. Lawson uses the phrase "undifferentiated flux" as another way of attempting to illustrate the notion of "openness". (But this is illustrative and not meant to indicate some physical "flux".) In this sense, "openness" is not a 'thing', but a lack of our imposing of closures.

"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 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." [p. 3-4]

'Things' occur with closure. "Closure can be understood as the imposition of fixity on openness....It is the conversion of flux into identity, the conversion of possibility into the particular." [p. 4] [more]

The inadequacy of any explanatory closure is also the fundamental theme of Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem (1931) with regard to mathematical and philosophical questions -- proven by a particular use of prime number theory (see E Nagel and J R Newman. Gödel's Proof, 1958) [more]. This challenge has also been explored by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, 1979)

Self-reflexively, in relation to the more appropriate exploration of more insightful questions that is the theme of this paper, it may therefore be asked what kind of closure is sought by who -- when, where and how -- and why?!

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