Our horizon is Manhattan. Our past we know without having to know. Our present we know without need to care.

Viewed from New Jersey, the morning sun glints off two million windows in ten thousand buildings. We predict—and daily prove—all the furniture in all the rooms opened there to light. We populate in no feat of imagination offices with workers, classrooms with children, subways with commuters, streets with laborers, apartments with families. We know those families well enough, we do not need to inquire. Our future is expected. Their expectedness is our future. Never is our breath caught, nor heart skip, nor our eyes blink. Our world is so ordinary.

From the sky descending, skyscrapers float beneath us. We dream. We are awake. We land. We construct more buildings. That’s what we do. Steel cubes fuse rigidly into skeletons. Exterior steel sheeting drapes, shapes containing of a million volumed spaces. Polished granite blocks coagulate into gestalt of facade.

We make our world and simultaneously it hides from us. Skyscrapers are metaphysical constructions—permanent forms apriori for meagre experience. Tinker toys, Lincoln logs, erector sets, tree houses, snow forts. Barbi dolls and Ken dolls in doll houses. Make-believe is real. Is real make-believe?

From childhood playing to playing adult, the scale changes, but the design remains the same. Buildings gargantuate higher and higher, platted on the city grid. Five hundred parallel streets converge in the infinite distance. We travel in sameness toward our horizon.

City life is not religious. Sensing we are ordinary and have no magic, prophets and zealots come out of the countryside. Their fear of us is like city walls holding them back. They are edgy, but their aspirations embolden them. They batter our gates with words of prophecy. Storming upon us, they avoid glimpsing their reflections in store windows, on polished granite walls, in the million urban mirrors. They are afraid to see they are brown sparrows and black crows, speaking an ancient cacophony, convincing none of us. No one has ears for their religion. Rejection fuels their passion. They hate that we do not listen.

Manhattan is a philosopher of words. The business of the island is words. Every conversation echoes seminary debate. Word splitting is a major industry. A million workers commute into the city each day to create words. Carpenters of wordwork, they type into their personal computers, joining words. Sentences surge abroad as proposals, pleadings, speculations to buy and sell more words.

What is the reality of words? Words refer only to other words. Words are facts, but are not facts. Facts dissolve into words. All our world is impermanent, but remains the same.

Meanings fluctuate with the stock market. Each change is relative, measured by the previous change or the change to come tomorrow. Cultures jockey on the trading floor. We calculate their past, present, and future value. What meaning could words have when ground is hidden?

Our human situation is to be bound within language. We cannot be concerned with anything outside the referential circle of words.

9/11 ruptured our human situation. 9/11 opened a hole in our world. 9/11 confronted us with an ultimate fact, outside of our human situation.

The ultimate fact of 9/11 is the encounter with our self-declared enemies as transcendent, moral human beings. 9/11 compels us to understand that the supposed victims of American freedom, market globalization, and urbanized, secularized ordinariness are not victims. They are responsible. They glory in their capability to make responsible moral decisions. This ultimate fact is outside our language, their language, any language. It shames the babble of politically correct anthropology with which we theorize their entrancement and our ordinariness.

Our pre-9/11 sympathy for our enemies as victims, whose acts of terror we must understand and forgive, was a deceiving construction of our cultural bounds. We dehumanized our enemies by denying them human beingness—their transcendence of their historical situation through moral action.

The hole in ground zero is the rupture in our world. It is our encounter with an ultimate fact.

The ultimate fact is not a priori. It is not a transcendental form. We could never discover it by philosophical thinking, since all philosophical thinking is inside language and has no access to ultimate ground. We could never discover it by scientific investigation, or ethnology, or scholarly research. All methods of empirical investigation are inside the circle of culture. That is why we could not imagine mass murder in the twin towers. Imagination is not the product of knowledge or range of experience. Our imagination is a characteristic of our mode of being.

The hole in the ground is opportunity to encounter another ultimate fact. All of us sense another ultimate fact calling to us.

We cannot know what this other ultimate fact might be before we experience it. We will know it only in decisive act: by stepping through the rupture in our world.

Encounter with a second ultimate fact is not guaranteed. No ultimate fact necessarily implies another ultimate fact, because facts are contingent. If another ultimate fact shall exist, we will discover it through decision we have not yet made and action we have not yet begun.

I believe the second ultimate fact will be our encounter of ourselves as moral beings. Ground zero shall be the ground of New Being.

What would it be like to encounter ourselves as moral being? We hesitantly speculate a notion of what might happen. We know what happened when we encountered their moral being. Our history would be unsettled, our present disoriented, our future opened.

The ceremony marking the end of the recovery effort at ground zero was silent. No one spoke. We are humble and inadequate before heroes whose lives were destroyed at the World Trade Center. Silence is our grief for all the desperate deaths. Silence is our awe in the presence of the ultimate fact. Without words, the new world opens to us.

The question we now ask is simple. Shall we go where we have no idea where we would be? Where we have no guideposts to past or present or future? Where endless ratiocination finally falters?

Distractions already tempt us. We receive offers to make our journey safer and easier. Some voices implore us not to take the journey at all.

In the last century, we watched Europeans fail their test before history’s bar of ethics and fall to inhuman temptations. Will we be stronger than they were? Will we succeed where they failed?

Will we act upon our ultimate facts courageously as authentic individuals?

Will we reject all opportunities to shirk our duty to define our moral being—to re-invent our humanity?

Will we resist the thrill of charismatic leadership?

Will we reject the security that comes from trimming civil rights and constraining social liberties?

Will we turn down religious and ideological dogmas promising all the answers?

Will we resist authoritarian politics?

Will we forbear collectivism and other fascisms and totalitarianisms of our age?

Early in our history, we were asked, “What, then, is the American, this new man?” Now we ask again: Who will we be, the new American?