By now, the pattern is clear: systems can be perfectly lawful locally yet fail globally. Escher showed us failure; fictional worlds showed us success. But what does it mean to inhabit a system we know cannot fully close? This is the question of living without closure—a condition increasingly familiar not only in art and fiction, but in modern life itself.
Orientation Over Mastery
Traditional notions of worldhood imply closure: a system that is knowable, navigable, and coherent. Escher defies this: no single vantage, path, or logic can integrate the whole. The lesson is not despair or paralysis. Instead:
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The task becomes orientation.
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Success is measured not by mastery, but by the ability to navigate, interact, and act meaningfully within local frames.
Living without closure requires recognising that partial engagement is sufficient, that local understanding can guide action, and that the impossibility of total comprehension is not a failure of judgment, but a structural fact of certain systems.
Institutional and Social Implications
We encounter non-closure not only in art or literature, but in institutions and infrastructures:
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Bureaucracy: Complex regulations may be internally consistent yet impossible to fully grasp. Officials do not escape the system; they learn to navigate it.
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Data and AI systems: Algorithms may operate flawlessly in isolation, yet their interaction produces outcomes that are unpredictable or opaque. Practitioners orient themselves locally, making decisions within what they can grasp.
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Governance and policy: Multi-layered regulations, incentives, and social structures resist total comprehension. Actors succeed by learning paths and heuristics, not by attaining omniscience.
In each case, closure is impossible, but functioning is still achievable through orientation and adaptation.
Intellectual Practice
Even in thought and knowledge, closure is rare:
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Science and epistemic systems: Theories may be internally consistent yet incomplete, underdetermined, or contradictory with others. Scholars act locally, testing, refining, and navigating knowledge without expecting a final, all-encompassing system.
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Philosophical reflection: The act of theorising is itself partial. Systems can be intelligible in parts, while the whole remains forever out of reach.
Escher’s impossibilities offer a model: we can understand how systems work locally without demanding global actualisation. Knowledge becomes a practice of navigation, not conquest.
Existential Implications
Living without closure is also a personal condition:
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Life itself is a system of partial knowledge, competing rules, and locally lawful patterns.
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We rarely inhabit a fully coherent, fully knowable world.
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Like Escher’s figures, we act within frames that make sense, even if the frames cannot be composed into a single inhabitable totality.
The alternative is not collapse or despair. The alternative is orientation, engagement, and careful traversal. Closure is not a prerequisite for meaningful action.
The Ethics of Navigation
From this perspective, ethics shifts:
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We do not demand impossible perfection from the systems we inhabit.
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We focus on responsible engagement within the frames available.
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Escher’s impossibility reminds us that the lack of closure is a condition, not a defect, of complex systems.
Some systems will never be fully coherent globally. Our task is to live, act, and decide responsibly within their local lawfulness.
Conclusion
Escher taught us that perfection at the local level can block global inhabitation. Fiction taught us that worldhood requires inhabitable coherence. Now, we see that inhabiting the uninhabitable is itself a form of mastery—not by imposing closure, but by cultivating orientation, adaptability, and resilience.
In the optional final post, we will consider why Escher’s lessons matter now: why contemporary systems—from AI to governance—mirror his impossible architectures, and how the skills of navigation we have discussed are becoming essential.
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