The Center and Frontier of the Cosmos

This post got totally out of hand, like a guitar solo that lost all contact with the song. My apologies in advance. 

Continuing with our unplanned attack on the gaslight (or mindf*ck) media, just as there must be a first cause, there must be a first knower. 

Each of us more or or less inhabits a world of belief, but at the beginning of the chain(s) there must be someone who genuinely knows (which is sometimes ourselves, to the extent that we have truly firsthand knowledge, experience, or expertise), and in whom we can reasonably place our trust, whether we're talking about medicine, economics, physics, history, religion, or what we call "news." 

Of knowledge in general, Pieper writes that

Before we, as believers, accept the testimony of another, we must be sure that he has authentic knowledge of those things we accept on faith. If he himself is, in his turn, only a believer, then we are misplacing our reliance. 

It becomes clear, therefore, that this reliance itself, which is the decisive factor in the act of belief, must be founded upon some knowledge on the part of the believer if it is to be valid.

Now, news is nothing but "the testimony of another." Is trust in this testimony warranted? 

Last I checked, about two thirds of Democrats, a third of independents, and ten percent of Republicans still have some faith in the gaslighters. Thus, either we are paranoid cynics or Democrats are credulous children. But if you don't know Democrats are credulous children who are relentlessly manipulated by spiritually depraved pseudo-adults, what do you know? 

In the final analysis, credibility cannot inhere in the message but the messenger: it is

a quality of persons, and can only be known in the same manner as we apprehend the other personal qualities of a person (ibid). 

This is relatively unproblematic in a realm such as pure math, or physics, or engineering, where there is broad agreement on facts and principles. However, the higher we move up the epistemological food chain -- into the "social sciences" -- the more disagreement there is. 

For example, relative to biology, history is infinitely complex. As history is "news of the past," news is the history of the present. And of course, the conduct of history is impossible in the absence of an interpretive framework that informs us what to look for. So, what is the framework of history, it's controlling narrative, as it were?

Jumping straight to the omega, the Christian answer is the person and all this implies. After all, only persons exist in history and conduct history, so we shouldn't be surprised to learn that personhood is literally at the center of the enterprise. 

What's the alternative? Mere subjectivism, AKA the tyranny of relativism? Or some version of Marxian historicism? If so, then historians and the people they study are subsumed into impersonal law. No, the Aphorist is once again correct:

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

Presumptuous? No doubt, but let's try not to be imbeciles:

To speak of God is presumptuous; not to speak of God is imbecilic.

Because we are dealing here with persons and not just molecules or abstract equations, this is where the abuse of language -- AKA logophobia -- enters the scene, and if you don't understand how language can be systematically abused, there's a good chance you're abusing it. Put another way, language has rights because it has duties. Satan knows this as well as anyone, and so should you.

What is the duty of language? Obviously, adherence to truth, which is why no mere animal can be trusted with speech. But even prior to this, we adhere to truth because it is loved. A person who doesn't love truth is fundamentally dis-ordered. 

{insert gratuitous joke about media/academia here}

No, one way or another you have to deal with persons, and you can't eliminate us with a bunch of tenured handwaving, or progressive identity politics, or reductive sociobiology, or absurcular humanism. The individual person is here, it is exceedingly queer, and it isn't going away. 

Now queerly, only the existence of an absolute being can explain the existence of contingent beings such as ourselves, just as only a view from outside or beyond the cosmos can explain the existence of the cosmos. What is this view? Well, first of all, it is a view, and only a person can have a view.

But again, from the Christian Perspective on perspectives as such, the person is the ultimate perspective, and no, we are not engaging in language abuse. 

Rather, we're being literal. Think about it: God becomes man that man might become God. This is the ultimate Metacosmic Formula, the final interpretive framework for everything; it is God's own heuristic. 

Well, okay, but why should we believe this?   

Logic leads inexorably to the conclusion that the universe is contingent, as are we. But this conclusion is necessary. How do we, as contingent beings, know the necessary, which is to say, eternal? We know the necessary insofar as we are images of the Absolute Person, who is Necessity itself. It is open to us, as we are to It, in a flow of...

Put it this way: ultimate reality is the act of pure isness: it is Isness Ising, so to speak. This is at the Center of things, but it is not impersonal; rather, the Is Ising is really an I AMing. The human person is also an I who is aming, except we exist in time. 

But we have a choice: we can exist at the material periphery of things, in a kind of sterile flatland devoid of verticality, or we can live in a space that is simultaneously center and frontier. Here again, this places history in an ultimate framework, as the individual person is freedom lived, and freedom is individual personhood realized in time. The rest is journalism.