If Language Could Speak

Well, I think we've identified the fly in the ointment of being: language.  

Me?  I love language, nor would I ever take it for granted. It is such a luminous miracle, that with every post I can't wait to inflict it upon my unwary readers.

Wait a second. A voice is coming into my head. It appears to be the far off Voice of Language itself, saying: 

Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God.

I am being reminded that even words about God aren't God. That's bibliolatry. But looked at from another angle, language is not not God either, or God couldn't have just told us what he did! 

This touches on the eternal mystery of immanence-transcendence, in that God is immanent because transcendent. In a flatland cosmos there can be neither Creator above nor creation below, and certainly nothing in-threetween.  Unless one is just plain careless, the world itself proves the existence of God.  God is necessary. We are contingent.

Nevertheless, even in our contingency we necessarily partake of a bit of necessity. This is what it means to be in the image and likeness of the Creator.  Because of this principle, an atheist could not possibly exist in a godless universe; if God exists, only the atheist can not know it.

Before diving more deeply into this vertical instant, are there any other chestnuts we can yoink from the flames of The Infernal Library?

Infernal library. Which brings to mind the left's impulse to throw our civilizational library into the inferno: for example, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and now a book that hatefully suggests it might not be such a good idea to pump up children with hormones to indulge their gender confusion.  

Come to think of it, Big Tech is rapidly showing itself to be a virtual inferno of book burning. The light it produces is brightest just before things go totally dark.

What is the problem with language, whether digital or analog? Is it problematic in itself, or only when misused?

Surely the latter: as always, corruption of the best is the worst. Everyone on our side of the aisle knows there is a profound difference between, say, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Dre. But how? By virtue of what principle?

Well, there are a couple of sub-principles between the Principle itself and the principle of language.  What are they, and in what order?  

The Infernal Library hints at the nature of the problem:

I was struck by the fact that many dictators begin their careers as writers, which probably goes a long way toward explaining their megalomaniac conviction in the awesome significance of their own thoughts. 

Man doesn't just have language, be has an imagination, and the imagination is infinite. Which isn't necessarily a problem. Problems arise when language + imagination are superimposed on the world; or, more to the point, when one begins in the head rather than with the world.    

The world comes first. Indeed, in many ways this goes to the nature of the first world in which we live, which, not coincidentally, has its roots in Christian metaphysics.  Say what you want about the world, but the world's objects will object when your words don't conform to them.  

I remember the exact moment I flipped from Kant back to reality: it was while reading chapter one of Stanley Jaki's Means to Message. Must have been 2001 or 2002, but it took awhile for it to sink in. Years, not seconds. 

At the time, I had no idea how counter-revolutionary was Jaki's principle; nor even that I had, through my extensive leftist indoctrination, assimilated its dysfunctional revolutionary counterpart in an unconscious manner. No one told me explicitly: reality begins in your head! And yet, I implicitly believed this Kantesian nonsense. 

Here is Jaki's antidote, like a cold and bracing slap in the face that awakens one from a metaphysical coma:

philosophy and science depend on a means, an object, some physical reality, which even spoken words are, as the carrier of their message....

The first step should be the registering of objects, or else the philosopher will be guilty of a sleight of hand, however sophisticated. He will have to bring through the back door the very objects the use of which his starting point failed to justify.

His starting point failed to justify.  Professor Gödel, call your office! 

If objects are not presented as the primary datum, some other factors will expropriate that role.

Factors such as, oh, desire, wish, power, will, ideology, etc.  The initial revolutionary move is absolutely crucial, and allows all the other lunacy to enter.  Is this what is embodied and conveyed in the metamythical structure of Geneses 3?  What do you think?!

Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment (NGD).