Cooperative self-completion means: whoever lacks a capacity doesn’t have to develop it in themselves first, but can look for someone who already has it. A person doesn’t have to embody every component themselves; they’re allowed to be part of a network. What sounds at first like a convenience is an anthropological claim: the individual is not conceived as a full complement — they are designed for completion. And the condition under which this completion succeeds is neither sympathy nor similarity, but a shared cause that holds difference together.
#Why Does Self-Optimization Solve a Real Problem Wrongly?
Because it closes the gap in the wrong place. The problem self-optimization responds to is real: no one can do everything. Its answer is to close the gap within the individual, through training, retrofitting, completion. Cooperative self-completion answers the same problem with a different movement. It closes the gap between people instead of within one.
Which answer seems plausible depends on a rarely spoken premise. Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls it the view of human nature: the tacit assumption about what a person fundamentally is. Whoever holds people to be, at bottom, capable of development tries different forms of organisation than someone who starts from the opposite assumption.
“Would I run different experiments than if I assumed people are all just selfish self-optimizers anyway?”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, TransitionTV: It’s Always the Broken Heart, 2026 (transl.)
The view of human nature is therefore not a matter of attitude but a condition of possibility: it decides which attempts a person even considers. Whoever doesn’t reckon on another person contributing a capacity without tallying it against them never tries the cooperative variant, and proves themselves right by never having tried it.
#Why Do New Year’s Resolutions Fail?
New Year’s resolutions fail, seen from the concept of cooperative self-completion, less from a lack of willpower than from the way they are built. Typical resolutions (more exercise, more discipline, less screen time, finally finishing the project that has been lying around) are self-optimization in miniature: a gap is identified, and the individual is meant to close it within themselves, alone, by their own strength, from a set date. If the resolution doesn’t last into February, it’s tempting to read that as personal failure and to make the same resolution more strictly next December. That repeats the very construction that didn’t hold the first time.
This entry reads that construction against the background of a finding Gwendolin Kirchhoff states in her fourth conversation with Elisa Gratias, on Homer’s Odyssey and Christopher Nolan’s film of it (2026). Asked what we can take from the hero’s journey for ourselves, and what we may have lost sight of, she answers with a diagnosis: we are “entrepreneurially shaped” by an “optimization and productivity culture” that expects the individual to take their fate into their own hands. What drops out of view, she says, is a very large picture: “that fate is greater than we are, that there are connections we cannot see the whole of.” That picture, she says, can bring a certain peace and calm, and above all a view outward. In bourgeois modernity, by contrast, people are busy “looking inward, into the box of the psyche,” at “everything that is supposed to be optimized there.” More on this in the entry on fate.
She does not talk about New Year’s resolutions in this conversation; the connection is this entry’s own. If you resolve, at the turn of the year, to take your life into your own hands, you turn your gaze straight into that box: inward, toward whatever in you needs improving. Cooperative self-completion reverses the direction. It doesn’t ask what has to change about you from January on, but which capacity you’re missing for what you have in mind, and who within reach has it. The promise to yourself becomes a question to others: asking someone to help, joining a group that works on the same cause, handing a task off instead of training yourself into it.
This is not a method that guarantees a resolution will succeed. It only moves the place where the gap is looked for, from the individual into the space between people. And, as this entry reads it, it leaves room for the larger picture Kirchhoff speaks of: for connections “that none of us can see the whole of,” not even on New Year’s Eve, while writing the list.
#What Distinguishes Cooperative Self-Completion From Division of Labour?
The direction of the operation. The obvious objection is that this is all just division of labour, and has been since the Stone Age. When you speak of division of labour, you mean one specific movement: a task gets broken into parts, and the parts get assigned to people; the person becomes a function of the task. Cooperative self-completion starts the other way around. It begins with the people, and assembles from them a capacity none of them possesses alone. Well-executed division of labour can arrive at the same result; the difference lies in where you start — with the task, or with those involved.
Friedrich Schiller described the price of the first movement in the Sixth of his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). The Greeks, he writes there, had laid human nature out side by side without tearing it apart, “for the whole of human nature was represented in each of the gods.” Among the moderns, it is different:
“We also displace and magnify individuals to form the image of the species, but we do this in a fragmentary way, not by altered combinations, so that it is necessary to gather up from different individuals the elements that form the species in its totality.”
— Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter, 1795
Schiller reads this finding as mutilation, and for the division of labour he has in view, that’s accurate; he is not, thereby, proposing a cooperative method. What’s striking, though, is that his description, read against its own grain, already contains the counter-movement: going from individual to individual to gather up the totality. That is exactly the operation at stake here. It becomes mutilation where no one gathers anymore. It becomes completion where a shared cause demands the gathering.
#Harmony Without Sameness
If difference is the resource, then sameness costs exactly what is supposed to carry the collaboration. The Chinese tradition formulated this early and concisely. In the Analects, Confucius distinguishes two ways of being together that easily collapse into one another in translation: “The superior man is affable, but not adulatory; the mean man is adulatory, but not affable” (Confucius, Analects XIII.23). What “affable” and “adulatory” render here is, in the original, the concept-pair harmony and sameness. Harmony presupposes different people who listen to one another. Sameness erases the difference from which something could arise.
The I Ching carries the same thought further in its thirteenth sign, T’ung Jen, Fellowship with Men. On the image of this sign, Wilhelm’s commentary states, in substance: fellowship must not be a mixing of individuals and of things — that would be chaos, not fellowship — but requires an organised diversity in order to lead to order (cf. Wilhelm, 1924, on Hexagram 13). Organised diversity names precisely what makes a structure capable of completion: distinct parts in a recognisable order. The same sign also names the condition under which such fellowship holds: not private purposes of the self, but goals of humankind, bring forth lasting fellowship among people (cf. Wilhelm, 1924, on Hexagram 13). Where the cause that is larger than the interests of those involved is missing, a group of different people remains an assortment of different people. Both are developed further in the entries on the noble one and the I Ching.
#How Do You Find the Missing Component?
By putting a narrow, answerable question in the place of further training: which component is missing from this structure, and who, within reach, has it? Gwendolin Kirchhoff describes this as a change in the direction of thought — away from the individual who arms themselves, toward a group that examines itself.
“If we want to approach this question with civilisation — how about we think as a team for once?”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Manova: Failed Dystopias, 2026 (transl.)
In the observation from which she develops the thought, groups get stuck on a problem. Instead of training those present, the question becomes which way of thinking is missing entirely from the room. Once the component is named, the task shifts from qualification to search: “Find someone who has that, and your problem solves itself.”
This movement differs from encounter and from recognition, even though it presupposes both. Encounter asks about the quality of the between, about an I-Thou that must not be reduced to purposes. Recognition orders backward: it names what is, and gives it its place. Cooperative self-completion asks forward and functionally: what needs doing, and who can do the part I can’t? It is the instrumental sibling of the two, and stays usable only as long as the others remain intact. Where people see one another only as components, the concept has flipped into its opposite.
#Where Does Cooperative Self-Completion Reach Its Limit?
Cooperative self-completion is not a communal ideal. Gwendolin Kirchhoff holds that anyone who founds a community fails quickly on concrete people; the longing image regularly goes down in glorious flames. The concept therefore means something smaller and harder: the capacity to act within a manageable, concrete circle, on a named practical question. That, in her assessment, is also where effectiveness is realistic: at the level of the great political decisions, the room to act is small; at the level of the individual question, it’s larger than most assume.
“And there, our capacity to act is far greater than we think — significantly greater than we think.”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, MANOVA Meinungen, 2026 (transl.)
A second, unspectacular assumption belongs to this: that there are, in fact, enough people worth completing yourself with.
“And what we also underestimate is how many people of integrity are trying to work in the background, and doing so at great personal cost.”
— Gwendolin Kirchhoff, MANOVA Meinungen, 2026 (transl.)
Without this assumption, cooperative self-completion remains a technique with no application. The term itself is young; the insight it gathers has long been carried by leadership ethics and the Confucian relational order: that a person doesn’t have to overcome their limit in order to get beyond it. They have to know it, and they have to know whom to ask.
#Sources
- Schiller, F. (1795). Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, in einer Reihe von Briefen, Sixth Letter. English edition: On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.
- Confucius. Analects (Lun Yu), XIII.23. English edition: Confucian Analects, trans. James Legge, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893.
- I Ching: The Book of Changes, Hexagram 13 (T’ung Jen / Fellowship with Men). German edition: R. Wilhelm (trans.), I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen, Jena: Diederichs, 1924. English edition: The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. C. F. Baynes, New York: Pantheon Books, 1950.
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). Failed Dystopias — conversation with Elisa Gratias, Manova, 8 June 2026 [48tQgnOdoa0].
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). “It’s Always the Broken Heart” — conversation with Elisa Gratias, TransitionTV, 11 July 2026 [PacfD3S-yyU].
- Kirchhoff, G. (2026). AI Robots, UFO Nonsense, Energy Shortages — MANOVA Meinungen with Ernst Wolff and B-LASH, 13 May 2026 [xh66rBObOSc].
- Kirchhoff, G. & Gratias, E. (2026). «Das Schicksal ist größer als wir» Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff über Christopher Nolan und das Leben (“Fate is greater than we are”: Gwendolin Walter-Kirchhoff on Christopher Nolan and life) [Video]. TransitionTV, YouTube, 18 September 2026 [smlQFizE8Lg] (quotes 31:22–32:19). The Manova version Die Odyssee (DjtervR5tR4) is the same conversation with different timestamps.
