Can we define the… —gap?

Incompleteness, lack, aporia, unknown unknowns and how we carry on regardless

Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

Revision of this post at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com June 2024.

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There are so many gaps, one might ask is there only one gap? One might then answer that the answer lies in the gap, perhaps, so there be no way to know. We urge ourselves on to know. On.

You know what.

There are gaps of knowledge, gaps of experience, gaps of not knowing, gaps of unknowing, gaps of concern, gaps of (mis)-information, like known unknowns within the mists of unknown unknowns… on… on…

—and further there are also the well-considered systemic gaps or systemic incompleteness which gaps both themselves and that notice of them, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem/s coming with the tagline: “with profound implications for epistemology”. I.E. things we make in our imperfect way will remain just-so because this sentence is false.

• All cretans are liars.

• The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao.

We can breath in here until we breath out. A sigh aporic, and where/when we remain suspended, undecided, undecidable, but continue to live. Draw water, carry wood.

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We can label or brand or personify and personalise the sides of the gap. Us/them etc.

Note: there may be more than two sides of the gap but there is less cognitive effort when we binarise the…—gap and then forget we have binarised it into a short-cut or prejudice. 
Like the gap between subject and object. Where’s the abject? Where’s the eject? Do we need to conjugate our declensions until the preferred pronoun turns up and feels included at last. Surject.

There are so many things we can do with the gap. Both in practice and in power.

We can fill the gap with a wedding between the parties. Forming a alliance that harmonises the spheres. As in Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian subjectivities, with the resulting baby of the marriage, a fantastic thing called a tragedy (the goat song), here creativity playing the role often claimed by reason (if reason is some binding of faith and authority as obedience to mediate the gap.)

Or, we can make them fight each other eternally, in a cosmic war for control of Valhalla, and call it a dialectic. They come together when/where they die in battle but live again once mourned to fight on the day of the dawn of their synthesis. Every day has a morning.

We can also sunder these surrenders into manifold differences and call their co-wearing interactions a structuralism, where they rub against their comrades to become as comfortable as old boots or newly minted preferred pronouns.

Here the story arc returns us to Gödel, via genre/gendered-noun-classes/grammar into sets, logic, mathematics, serial systems of symbolic mechanicks drawn out of a consciousness put to task to study their own processes, where undecideability is—

…paradoxes reveal the gap, but do not necessarily fill it (decide it).

Gurus may like to pontificate at this point, holistically (preferred style in the current age) intimating that they can indicate a way across to holiness, but anyways…

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In my take, I throw into the ring for consideration, a preference called composition, and remove the eternal violence as a necessary feature. (The military references and terms even in the Tao Te Ching are quite high).

Composition is a kludge, a hack of a fix, jerry-built xxaptation, a rap in the gap. But this will be explored more on another day.

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Even with the gap filled, or at least there has been something chucked into it, like an eternally receptive landfill, there are difference styles and excuses. Even without the notice that the gaps are gappy and these gaps might not be very similar. Like infinite infinities, the gap of gap between gaps that gap us into the world as gappy nihilism or cloudy unknowing mysticism, blowing a gale perhaps like a hellish heaven just-like-the paradise of Gregor Cantor’s transfinite numbers, transgap gaps, gapsgap gap

The… —gap.

What differs us, styles us.

We are all at the same at the edge?

I look around.

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What unites the gaps, is not how they might all be one, nor all incarnations of the one, or none, nor that they are all different in their unhappiness, and have have nothing in common, or are united in nothing, or not even nothing, nor less than nought.

Now. No.

What unites them at the edge is a human impulse to throw something into the gap. Or egg someone on/to/by/over/under/through…

This is the urge, the moral/worldbuilding hope, a hopeful hoping, a hoping hopefullness, that gets on with it. Hope will have a separate post one day.

Every breath in and out is hope, just perhaps not very intensely felt all the live long day.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Live goes on

Getting on making do

making good

make believe

making special

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It’s the rashness, not the urge to fill the gap that is the problem. Types of things rashly thrown into the gap, include:

• belief/attachment

• faith in faith

• the heart of hardened hope

• god (our favourite local football team)

• god (the focus of our practice)

• god (the soul of souls)

• devotion (I have a personal relationship with a personalized gap/god)

• mysticism (my wife doesn’t understand me)

• drugs (consciousness is a gap)

• order (this one is very brittle)

• love

• obedience

• anything really depending on who and what context you live in

And all of these can be used as a shibboleth, as a uniform, as an identity, as a technology of empire, a Valhalla of eternal excuses.

Sure, they are dogmas, but they are useful dogmas to somebody… —else.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

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This follows from a comment conversation on the facebook Pyrrhonism group with Wm Kuch. OP was Andrei Mirovan with (SEXTAN) PYRRHONISM and CLIFFORD'S PRINCIPLE: a difficult marriage.

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Revision of this post at whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com June 2024.