Project	cohering lightness of preferring better being

	loving to follow extraordinary interests gary e. davis	June 2023

Though I doubt that educational psychologist Howard Gardner regards himself as extraordinary (he’s quite humble in email discussions with me), he has richly prospected the character of canonical excellence because (to my mind) our conception of what minds can do is exemplified by what the best minds do.  Such appeal of the best minds echoes the classical appeal of “genius” (which was initially about divining a spirit apart from one’s own potential for being) and aspiring for perfection (whose godliness is really a receding horizon of pheno- menal cogency—a fabulous appeal—which draws a follower into higher minding). Apparent extraordinariness may scare folks, which we see these days in anti-intellectualism, expressed as animosity toward “elites.” What brainy girl or boy didn’t experience some exclusion from the bully commons? What artistic sensibility wasn’t sometimes made to be for others the uncanny stranger, the alien? But extraordinary sensibility keeps confidence about its paths because it created its confidence from the hard won pleasure (hedonic) of fulfilling (eudaimonic) aspiration, which Aristotle wasn’t the first to articulate, nor are contemporary theorists of flourishing the last to explore. Tales of the uncanny stranger are as old as storytelling. When Odysseus returned from the sea, he was unrecognizable to his loved others, which was really about Homer facing the commons and finding fabulous oppor- tunity unwelcomed?—or Leopold Bloom ending his archetropal day at last finding fabulous love. Life can be extraordinary, for it contains the “nuclear” “fire in the crucible” of evolving creativity. Such is the locus of the holy grail divined by aliens. Who’s to arrive? “God knows,” as luck would have it. So good it is that horizons of Our evolving evince “pragmatic ways of life,” derived (to my mind) from leading virtue of prospecting the future of humanity in the creative universe of evolving intelligibility, whose beauty is beyond mathematical elegance. Ultimacy is the extraordinary reality of Our Earthanity, open to arrivals, unborn—and Awaiting conceivability?

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Be fair. © 2023, gary e. davis