The PCS continuum of life • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project

	the PCS continuum of life thinking across modes of person-al life gary e. davis	August 25, 2025

PCS is a shortened acronym for a longer one I’ll sketch below. This graduated sense of being person-al can be very useful for progressively pragmatic thinking,
to be discussed later.

Human being (being human) is essentially person-al, from intimate senses of self, through private interpersonal engagements and cultural conceptions, to public social and political relations.

Being person-al can be conveniently distinguished as:

P | psychality: deep Self background and articulate sense of self.
p | personal in the ordinary sense, which is interpersonal, “personal”
c | cultural meaning
C | conceptual meaning (types, values, abstract meaning)
s | social relations of public life
d | democratic or political relations of public life

Person-al life is usefully parsed as psychal (P), [inter]personal (p), cultural (c), conceptual (C), social (s), and, in principle, democratic (d): PpcCsd personity,
PCS as shortened acronym.

The differentiations aren’t mere conveniences. The acronyms trope essential kinds of difference, though boundaries in actual life are seldom clear and not usually understood in those terms; probably more like: Inner self, outer self; inner life, outer life; grounded, abstract; valuable, shareable; public near to one’s life, distantly public.

I’m interested in easily referring to a holism of humanity, from immanent to most general. This continuum, one of several I want to employ, serves my practical interest in holistic thinking about being “human” or person-al.

OneSself is indisputably more than articulate selfidentity, as depth of back-
ground expreience—depth of Self—is forever open to implicit futurity (“fates”
of beliefs and preferences, due to individuated experience), dispositions, pre-attentiveness fading into non-attentiveness melded into felt capabilities (confidence about potential to act effectively), and excluded un-attentiveness. Also, oneself has near-to-mind purposes and values orienting daily and seasonal activity. The S/s difference is real (¶ 5 here | ¶ 10 here).

So many interpersonal relations partially compose selfidentity which is irreducible to the sum of them (family, friends, work life, neighborhood, etc.) because a person lives their years in a singular way, apart from all relations, as well as being variably engaged in each: intimate, familial, kinship-like (friendly, neighborly), invested friendships (casual, deep), solidarities (private and public), and civility of every day. The s/p difference is real.

Cultural life, from folk inheritance by family through choices in higher edu-
cation, instills preference for near-term values and life-oriental Values, as well as possibly high flourishing engagements of aspiration and career.

All awareness relies on types of meaning in experience. Most linguistc items are (or imply) concepts which gain functions through grammar.

Beyond ordinary linguistic life, a person may want overtly conceptual understanding for the sake of complex understanding which serves large scale engagement.

Much of public life is merely social (casual, cooperative, coordinarive, collab-
orative), especially for work life and leisure time.

Genuine interpersonal life isn’t best understood as social, because it involves selfidentical bonds. Social life is composed of conventions and norms. Inter-
personal life includes conventions and norms, of course; but selfidentical bonds prevail.

In a situation where we need to choose between either orienting ourselves by convention/norm or by relying on our bonds, we’ll prefer our bonds.

Someone else may object that “we” should prefer norms (or they complain that we’ve violated convention), but that will be a situational issue, calling for inter-
personally exceptional considerations which may not be genuinely relevant.

We all agree that political particpation is vital to making, sustaining, and advancing public good, though we’re often slackers about it. We want to benefit from public goods (e.g., protection of nature, access to health care); good society (in some sense of goodG), good government; and should support the goodH of humanity through electing enlightened leadership, as well as by local advocacy and engagement.

So, the odd acronym (PpcCsd) is importantly heuristic for a useful segmentation of the person-al continuum of life—the PCS continuum, for short—which can be associated with interest (educational, cultural, social, political) in scaling person-al values high and far, deeply and immanently, for present lives, then for future generations.

Such is a sense of being “human” for valuing “humanity.” I don’t want to exclude the values associated with ‘human’, ‘humanism’, ‘humanity’, and ‘humanitarian’. Rather, I would give each strong association with being a person, expressing personity or a person-alism. Altruism is deservedly sacrted because the other is
a person like oneself. Being humanitarian is about feeling others’ presence as persons.

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