Openings: Acknowledging Essential Moments in Human Communication

Conclusion: Some Closing Remarks on Openings

199 conclusion Some Closing Remarks on Openings In concluding his book The Perfectibility of Man, the philosopher John Passmore notes that writing a book “can be a ‘vital joy,’ but a joy which is inevitably united with the thorns of anxious care. It is not a contribution to perfection, as perfection is classically understood. To write anything worth writing is to arouse opposition, controversy—writing does not promote the classical perfectibilist ideals of unity and harmony or contentment; it is to abandon all hope of self-sufficiency, to make oneself dependent on a multitude of other human beings, to surrender one’s peace of mind, to stir up one’s passions, to struggle with time.”1 Indeed, to write a book is to open yourself to all of these things and thus to reveal something of your social, psychological, rhetorical, political , and philosophical being. To write a book is to make decisions about how much of an open book you want to be. Abiding by a phenomenological orientation to my subject matter, I have attempted to be open in this book. I tried to be true to my topic. The essence of human beings has much to do with openings. Indeed, we are an opening, a process of disclosure that is called to witness and be responsible to the otherness in our lives. Discussing the truth of openings requires that we pay 200 • Openings careful attention to and acknowledge the way this truth discloses and thereby opens itself to us. The empirical ways of science and phenomenology demand as much; so, too, the spiritual ways of religion. Directives from science, phenomenology, and religion inform this book, as do directives from the over two-thousandyear -old tradition of the art of rhetoric. With this art we create and close openings. Being aware of the consequences of such symbolic action is well advised. Our country’s ongoing healthcare debate is a case in point. I have given readers openings to agree or disagree with all that I have to say, to argue for or against my positions, to commend or broadside my judgments regarding a host of matters. Jobs well done are openings for possible praise. Mistakes are openings for possible criticism. I certainly hope that at least a few of the first of these two openings are present throughout the pages here. A metaphysical impulse for perfection informs our being. No sane person likes to bring a project to a close with nothing but failure in hand. This concluding chapter gives me one final chance to encourage readers to think about the importance of taking the time to put themselves in a position, a dwelling place, where it is possible to open themselves to the wonder of anything, to its truth. With my closing remarks on openings, I want to keep things as open as possible, although I fully admit that I am taken with an astute observation offered by the literary critic Frank Kermode: “it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end.”2 Science, Religion, Phenomenology, and Rhetoric Wondering about openings has brought us face to face with a three-part question that lies at the heart of both religion and science : Where did we come from, how, and why? The Word and creationism! An exploding singularity and evolution! These are the general options that religion and science, respectively, offer us for addressing the where and the how of the question. But what about the why? Science’s answer to this question takes us back to the big bang, that instant of beginning of time that cosmologists , dedicated to staying as open to their data as possible, term the “epoch of cosmic inflation.” This epoch began about Conclusion • 201 10−36 seconds (a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second ) after the big bang and ended by about 10−33 second. In that precious and incredibly microscopic moment of time, the entire cosmos came into being. It is still expanding, an opening to end all openings, home to an infinite number of places to be. This first opening event may have been the result of what cosmologists term the “negative gravity” exerted by “dark energy” composing the singularity. This energy overwhelmed ordinary gravity in the singularity, generating an immensely powerful antigravity, or cosmic repulsion; hence, the big bang. Based as it is on scientific observation, experiments, and high-powered...