A Short Piece
What never reaches a final point of completeness in space could be more temporarily “complete” because of it.
The thought of Gödel, Derrida, and the like is widespread in the world today, as are critiques of Plato, Platonism, Gnosticism, and other doctrines of “full presence” or “a final resting place.” The language of Lacan’s “lack” and “impossibility” are also very much in the air, and all of these notions are ones I’ve used and think can be applied to Hegel. In fact, I don’t think Hegel can be understood without these resources, so please do not mistake me as arguing in this work that these notions are wrong or should be done away with. Rather, I want to offer a slight inversion in thinking that might help us see how “incompleteness” and “becoming” can entail a kind of finality and completeness practically. To cut to the point, “becoming” is incomplete relative to space, for “a final point of full presence” is never reached, whereas relative to time only “becoming” is (more so) “fully present,” for it is only what never ends that is present in all of time. In other words, in emphasizing “becoming,” we seek (a sense of) “completeness” not in space but in time, and if indeed time is somehow “more fundamental” or “moral real” than space (or at least equally real), then “temporal completeness” is actually in a sense “more complete” than “spatial completeness.”
Humans experience the world spatially even if we are arguably more temporal (if we had space but no time, we’d be dead or perhaps a frozen hell), and so it is very natural for us to organize our values and metaphysics in terms of space. If it is not possible for humans to ever bring “final completeness” into a present now (or single moment of space), then it’s very easy for the human to conclude that “therefore, completeness is not possible at all.” And, indeed, there is a very real sense in which that is true, but there is also another sense in which that is only spatially true, not temporarily. When I use the phrase “(in)complete” (with paratheses) to refer to “finding completeness in incompleteness,” this is a spatial and temporal claim, for we as humans necessarily experience both. The “completeness” of my “(in)completeness” comes from the potential of time, for if “I am always becoming” (as necessary for “(in)completeness”), then relative to time “I am always present.”
If I am here today but not tomorrow, then relative to time I am “incomplete,” but if I was always here, then I would be “complete.” Now, I might not be complete spatially or compositionally (for I might not be who I want to be), but that “incompleteness” is more so a matter of space. What matters for time though is that “I am always” (whatever I might be), but since time necessitates change, this mean “I as change am always unfolding.” That and how I change is a spatial consideration not really relative to the temporal metric, and so as far as time goes, “always being” (which is “becoming”) is equivalent to “full presence.” No, I am not “fully present” in terms of space and time, as I must be to be fully present, but we see where a kind of completeness is possible from time if I identifying myself as “a being of becoming” (which is Hegelian and Nietzschean). In this way, “(in)completeness” (versus “pure incompleteness” or “pure completeness”) becomes possible.
To always be is to be fully present relative to time, for one is present in all time. Now, none of us can live forever, and all of us were born in history, so none of us are “fully present,” but we can be “relatively such” relative to the time we were allotted (say eighty years). How exactly are we “fully present” to time? Well, it’s precisely by not reaching “a final resting point” in space, because reaching a final point in space would mean we stop relative to time. Thus, “incompleteness in space” is precisely what makes it possible to achieve (something like) “completeness in time” Failure in one is what makes possible success in the other, though paradoxically we are made of both, causing confusion and the need for nuance and care.
“Autonomous being” is problematic, not so much “being in becoming” (“(be)coming”), and here we can suggest that an acceptable “sense of being” can be derived from time, just not space. If our “sense of being” is derived from space, we flirt with effacement, but so can also be our fate if we fall into “autonomous becoming” in being overly temporal. This is where a dialectic is important, as is needed for us to avoid “autonomous anything,” and basically my point is to clarify how we can derive “a sense of being” at all, and that is possible thanks to temporarily. As with being, our thinking must also be profoundly temporal, but please note that just “knowing” we need to derive our being from time (as “becoming”) is not the same as actually doing such — which brings us to the need to make our “becoming” meaningful (via freedom, “The Absolute Choice,” facing fear, etc.).
If we “become” and don’t just let ourselves be carried by impersonal and deterministic forces, then we can derive “a sense of completeness” from temporarily, the horizon which makes change possible. We cannot gain it from space (except perhaps in death, the point where things finish, which we don’t experience), and so trying to find “a final resting place” in a “stable being” can lead us into pathology and neurosis, but we can gain “a sense of fitted-ness” from time. Since we are spatial to some degree, that means we can never be “fully complete,” but it’s also not the case that we have to be “fully incomplete.” Thanks to temporarily and the possibility of choosing to meaningfully experience time (through “becoming”), we can experience “(in)completeness.”
Now, to be clear, I still think an emphasis on “incompleteness” is ultimately warranted, for we do not primarily experience the world as time but most “vividly” in terms of space (colors, shapes, tastes, sensations, etc.), and since we never achieve a “full presence” in space, then there is a very “tangible” sense in which we never achieve a “full presence” at all. And yet we do exist in all moments of our time, making it possible for us to sublate our “incompleteness” into “(in)completeness,” based on how we live. Ultimately, none of us actually do find “a final resting point in space,” so there is a sense in which all of us are “fully present to our time,” but this isn’t necessarily a meaningful realization unless we choose to acknowledge it and live accordingly. This is where it is necessary to make tough choices to “become” in facing our fears, achieving “intrinsic motivation,” “becoming-other” — the subjects of Nietzsche and Hegel. Details on that must be filled in, but the point is that we must reverse our metric from being primarily spatial to being more temporal. Spatial incompleteness is necessary for the fullness of time.
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