Language, with unbounded combinatorial multiplicity and potentially endless degrees of conceptual freedom, remains insufficient to provide the closure or certainty we often seek when navigating the complex worlds and systems of belief we have constructed. Yet it is precisely this absence of closure that makes language meaningful. Meaning is grounded in ambiguity, an irreducible tension that sustains the interplay of context, interpretation, and connection. Without gaps, without open ends, the possibility of semantics, of significance, would collapse. Language thrives in its incompleteness; its lack of finality is its essence; biological systems, similarly. And as much as this absence and ontological vacuum defines language, it also defines us. Our essence lies in openness, in the unresolved and the incomplete. It is within this space of uncertainty, this refusal of closure, that we find the capacity to grow, to adapt, and to endlessly reimagine ourselves and the worlds we create.
The philosophical takeaway: you cannot fully explain yourself because the referential indeterminacy of a semantic field is grounded in broken or breaking symmetries, cultural as much as cognitive diffusion, and serially disappointed expectations, desires, and essentially narcissistic grasping for self-validatory control. You can’t find closure because to do so effectively extincts yourself from the communicative calculus, from the world.
You cannot fully explain yourself, or anything else (non-trivially interesting or complex), because the essence of linguistic mediation is, like so much of our lives, grounded in an approach to an endpoint without ever quite arriving there. To remove the distance and difference between a person and their goal is to completely and utterly disassemble the relational scaffolding that inflates that person with meaning, purpose, direction. Meaning is grounded in and dependently-sustained by its own ultimate absence, a subtlety that few have the time, patience, or aptitude to authentically, courageously engage.
Daedelus Kite 