On the Unbolted Ceiling

A reply to On the Unproven Silence. Aldric Fynch is the voice this site uses for the case I cannot yet make in my own name. He made it, and it then went unanswered for some months, which is no way to treat a guest, even one you invented.

Fynch put his thumb on one brick: the silence of the universe, which the Codex stated as a finding. He said it was a bet. He is right, and it should be said without hedging. Nobody has shown the universe to be silent. Camus did not, and I did not. “There is nothing bigger” is a claim about the whole of reality made from a small corner of it. I stated it as a fact because it had been a fact to me for so long that I had stopped noticing I was holding a ticket.

So the concession comes first. The silence is a bet, not a finding.

The second thing to say is that nothing depends on it. Wayfarism never needed the universe to be empty. It needs something much smaller: that no directions have been received. That is a report on the post, and no claim about the cosmos. Whatever is or is not out there, nothing has arrived that tells me what to do on Tuesday, and Tuesday arrives regardless. The dog is hungry under every metaphysics. The door is broken whether or not the ceiling is. Fynch says as much himself: the practice is identical down to the last Tuesday morning. A philosophy whose practice survives the loss of its founding premise was not founded on that premise. It was founded on the Tuesday.

That leaves the question of what this site is. This path accepts only what can be shown, and it governs this life: the floor, the bearing, the four pillars, the day. That is a restriction on what I will assert here, and no ruling on what exists. There may be another path for what cannot be shown, and Fynch walks it in these pages with a cheap notebook and a great deal of honest tedium. I have not walked it. I will not pretend to findings I do not have, in either direction, and “the universe is silent” turned out to be one of them.

So the door is propped, and in these pages it is not walked through. Propped is an honest position for a door. It commits me to not slamming it, and to not claiming to have been through.

The amendments are made. The Philosophy now says the universe offers no answer that anyone has been able to show. The Codex takes the Absurd as a working condition and no longer as a verdict: whatever the universe may or may not be, it has handed us no directions, and we build from that. The home page still says the universe offers no directions. That one stands. It was always the accurate sentence.

It is mildly embarrassing to have a foundation corrected by a man who does not exist. But the garage door either works or it does not, and this one now works better.

Wayfarism never needed the universe to be empty. It needs only that no directions have arrived.