Continuing Closure

For now, just some significant quotes and paraphrases (from Closure).

THE PROBLEM

The contemporary predicament. The circle of self-reference in which thought has been increasingly enmeshed – typified by rhetorical self-denials and the use of inverted commas … a predicament so insistent and destructive that it is not sustainable at all. … signs of its destructive force can be found [in philosophy and] throughout our culture … to uphold moral behaviour despite acceptance that others adhere to different moral codes … to believe that science might uncover ultimate laws, despite our suspicion that science is not itself value-free.

[Many] people have shown the inevitability of the failure of closure – particularly linguistically [eg Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida] … [so how do we escape from arbitrary relativism or nihilism? ] … a world full of possibility but a world without any particularity.

To try to imagine material without activity is to imagine complete closure … The world realized through material necessarily has the appearance of stability. Look closer and this stability hides a seething flux.

THE FRAMEWORK

All forms of life … are closure machines.
[2nd law springs to mind – or, to avoid the mechanistic metaphor, all organisms operate by closure.]

Closure is many layered.

Preliminary closure … the means by which an organism converts the flux of openess into an array of possible particularities – [the means of pure experience, maybe multiple and linked at this level, but remain distinct].

First-level non-preliminary closure … preliminary closures become “held as one” with a new material form. [material form “arising” and not inherent to the preliminary closures.]

And so on …