On the Incompleteness of Being

Finding Beauty in the Ambiguity between Subject and Object, and Other Drunken "Insights"

What is it to be human?¹ To be incomplete. To be ignorant. There is an ambiguity to humanity. A not-everything, a lack that defines us as a species. To exist as an individual constitutes a lack, a not-yet, yet an already-there. It contemplates time itself as a definition, defining ourselves as limited by time, by mortality, yet recognizing our transcendence of it, our ability to live beyond it. And not in a purely material sense, in the legacy spoken of in Linn Manuel Miranda's Hamilton,² but in a sense of Spirit, in a sense that there is something within us that does not die when we die, that does not end when we end, that continues after we pause. We know this because it has already happened, we are already beyond ourselves, outside of time, informing ourselves in a sense. If we continue, outside of time, then we have already, outside of time, lived our life, have made our choices, and are watching our life unfold as if on a DVR. It was once live TV, but is now recorded. It has happened already, but is still continually happening. Our concrete experience of time as we live it is perpetually incomplete. Even as we build a life through time, we constantly understand that we have more to give, that there is more to see, more to learn, more situations within which we must act. More opportunities to reflect upon what was already done. We must not ignore the ambiguities. We must not act as if we are certain, as if we are knowledgeable beyond all doubt.

Beyond a reasonable doubt. That is our legal standard for the most important legal decisions we can make about a case, about a human life, about the consequences of someone's actions. And yet, it still is not certain. We must commend the legal system for recognizing what we often forget: certainty does not exist, and if one supposes that it does, that supposition is to be met with suspicion. Certainty kills.

That is what is so beautiful about art. Even when it conveys a surety, it recognizes within its own existence as an artefact that it can be interpreted and re-interpreted, time itself shall have an effect. What was once certain can become uncertain, and what was once uncertain may itself gain certainty, if only for a brief moment, within the context of time and history.

We cannot do away with history, as it is our only guide in the materialist sense. In a purely materialist worldview, history is the only guide with which we can understand the future. Things have occurred before, and they occur again. The only gate standing between the two is ourselves, hoping for a difference. That difference is the being from which we can identify its own relationship to history, presence, and future.

It is a gift to be alive, to be a life. Without sounding too fluffy, we must take this approach as an absolute. It is precisely what we are here for.

There is a saying in entrepreneurship: good is better than perfect. Why? Because perfect never comes. Despite its cliché connotations, life is an adventure. And what do we mean by that? What do we actually mean? What is an adventure? It is something that contends with the unknown consequences of our choices to venture into something different than what we have already experienced.

An encounter with the unknown, in the wrong circumstances, can be traumatic and terrifying. Take some wars as an example.³ But do we not also encounter the unknown every single day? Every day brings new unknowns into our subjective encounter. The movie Falling Down starring Michael Douglas portrays this well. What causes the protagonist to break his cycle of Los Angeles commuting to a dead-end job? What is it that breaks him? What is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back? These are not surface-level questions. They are clichés for a reason. They are universally relevant. It is the individual that must step forth and take ownership. But the problem with many of the influential thinkers of the 20th Century⁴ is that they take the individual and assume it exists in a vacuum, that is not beholden to its relationship to the Other, or to society in general. They assume that since society imposes some burdens on the individual, those are necessarily negative and can be ignored in search of a Real Authenticity that flies in the face of external criticism. But this isn't true. External criticism operates as a "checks and balances" approach to our sanity. We know enough about the diverse levels of individuality and humanity across cultures and times to understand what is acceptable and divergent (problematically). We know what is "too far" and what is a healthy adventure for the soul.

Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Wallpaper by tak from Wallpapers.com.

You have to face the anxiety. But you have to recognize that there is an anxiety to face, and it lives within you, not outside you. To some extent, you are the problem. Nevertheless, you can also be the solution. Suffering is real. Suffering is even necessary. But you don't need to inflict it on yourself. Don't worry. It will find you, whether you inflict it on yourself or run away from it. Suffering will find you. That's the point. The question is: what are you going to do in the face of suffering? You have a choice. Ultimately, you have a choice.

This is your choice: are you going to laugh in the face of suffering, or die? Laugh or die. Those are the options. Because suffering is overwhelming. Suffering can overtake everything in this life. It can consume you. It's not hard to see that. It happens to plenty of people, all the time. It's probably happened to someone you know if it hasn't already happened to you. But there is something greater than suffering. Sure, you might have to go through suffering before you can see it, you may have to suffer before you can see the light. The light is blinding when you've been sitting in darkness. But it's all the brighter because of it.

When you're sitting in the darkness, it's near impossible to believe that light even exists. Do you think the prisoners in Plato's Cave knew that something existed beyond the shadows on the wall? That was all they knew. And yet, something did exist. And it was possible to experience it. And by sheer goddamn luck, one of the prisoners was able to experience the mind-bending reality that awaited him beyond the shadows. And it did exist. That is us. Living in the shadows, living by the artificial light, the shadows of man-made objects when a Really Real lives beyond, accessible to us even while we are chained to the wall.

Ambiguity is the only way out. The search for certainty will never succeed. This is why Artificial Intelligence will never offer the answers we most desperately need. Despite the ability to process more information than we could ever imagine in seconds, it will never truly understand the beauty of ambiguity, of uncertainty, of not-knowing, of epistemology, of not-being-there and nothing-being-there.

There is a crucial difference, perhaps hinted at by the phrase "less than nothing"⁵ that hints at the paradoxical nature of our very being. We are simultaneously non-quantitatively nothing yet bigger than anything that quantifies a something. We exist. That is more than most things. Most things do not exist. For every thing we can conceive of existing, there are an infinitude of possible things that can never exist, that we can never even conceive of not existing, such is their impossibility. And yet, we do. Here we are. Me, here, writing this. You, there, reading this. That in and of itself is not something to be disregarded.

We are not to be disregarded. We are to be regarded, to be recognized. There is immense potential in our ability to recognize the Absolute as a form of ambiguity, as a form of uncertainty.

But with that uncertainty comes a form of "almost-certain". We cannot simply say that because uncertainty is a necessary element of truth, knowledge itself is unobtainable, and each persona can subjectively choose the truth for themselves. No. Yet again, let us return to the "reasonable doubt". The very fact that a reasonable doubt could exist, and the fact perhaps that unreasonable doubts exist still, leads us to the conclusions that this must be the closest to the truth we shall ever come. There are still means with which we must measure the truth, and we must do so carefully and precisely to arrive at the truth. Otherwise, communication itself would not be possible.

To communicate, we must have a sense of what language is and what our words mean, even if they are open to interpretation. If I state that Ryan Gosling is a beautiful man, this can be interpreted to mean many things beyond the factual statement itself. It may mean simply that he is indeed a beautiful man, and I understand and appreciate his objective beauty. But it may also mean that I have a sexual attraction to him, and it would be open to that interpretation. People could debate over the precise meaning of my statement, including my subjective reasons for making it. But what would not be up for debate when I made such a statement is that I was actually saying that "all elephants are humans." There is no sense in which my statement about Ryan Gosling could mean that all elephants are humans, and thus within our own language we have a set number of parameters within which we can play. The truth is still in there.⁶

1. This is the question a friend and I were discussing over a few bottles of wine, after which I sat down and wrote this essay. Needless to say, I corrected a lot of typos. But if you’ve made it this far, I must’ve done a half-decent job. Somewhat as an experiment, I’ve left the text otherwise untouched. All the footnotes have been added a few days later (sober.)

2. The theme of legacy pervades Miranda’s Hamilton, and it’s understandable why. With a purely materialist worldview, legacy is the only possibility beyond death.

3. I was thinking specifically of the Vietnam war at the time of writing. All wars against foreign invaders are an encounter with the unknown, and yet some affect us so differently than others. Soldiers from WWII were not nearly as negatively affected, as traumatized, as the veterans from the Vietnam war. Why might that be? Perhaps it has something to do with the “broader purpose” of the war. It was quite easy to understand why we were fighting in WWII. Hitler’s regime was clearly something that should be fought against, and Japan was similarly insistent on combating the West. Without getting into the specific moralities associated with the geopolitical situation in WWII, you can at least understand that that represents something for young men to get behind. Contrast that to the Vietnam war, where the purpose was far less clear, and we have a far worse effect on our soldiers. Both of these instances represent encounters with the unknown, but one was far more chaotic and questionable, and it shows.

4. Primarily Foucault, but to a lesser extent the rest of the postmodernists as well.

5. A classic Hegelian phrase.

6. The final sentence I had written was “We are not agents of chaos.” But I don’t really know what that means or whether it added anything to the end (if you can call it that) of this stupor. Thanks for reading.