person-al being • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	a preson-al humanity

	person-al being gary e. davis	August 8, 2025

Our form of intelligent life expresses post-natural natures, though retaining senses of being human remain culturally important, as well as scientifically sensible. But we are primordially persons, actively designing the humanity of Our evolving.

The ecological scale of Our lives easily shows how post-natural our “nature“ is—how being “human“ calls for being person-ally through individuational educa-
tion and emancipation from mystification. “We are the species which can do ecological designing,” I noted earlier. “We are the progressive species who mapped that kind of value into natural change. Our evolving is post-natural.
We are evolving a kind of being beyond biological emergence of self-formative intelligence.”

All of those themes return in sprouts below.

The notion of nature began at best by the early Greeks, as a pre-biological conception of manifold life, from being Promethean (masculine) and Orphic (feminine) to modern Romantics (androgynous—or gynandrous, I prefer).

But such personification (or spiritualization), so exemplary of our “nature,” doesn’t anticipate itself as evolving conceivability domesticating its biological and material environs so intelligently that humanity now controls the viability of many species.

Yet, grand mythology intuited that our post-biological species of intelligence is the intelligence of Earth itself, Gaia conceiving Its evolvability via Our evolving.

We thereby should avow that there is to be teleology in nature for the good of all valuable life (biocentrism as environmental ethics).

‘Human’ has been associated with primate lineage only since the 16^th century. So, the biologization of lineage is modern.

Historically, a “human being” was always a person. “Mankind” is a partriarchal lineality, while being human has all the trans-gendered ambiguity that we normally associate with persons: affecting and being affected importantly; having the intelligent capabilities of persons; being social, but primarily interpersonal; being distinct from powers of nature and personifications of trans-generational aspects of being (and distinct from gods); and most of all, please (M-W Unabridged def. 3 : d) “having to do with, portraying, or arising from the small or large joys, sorrows, passions, struggles, or other interest-provoking experiences or situations of individual persons.”

But scientization has rightly revealed our speciation out of Deep Time. Bio-
logical emergence of self-determinative intelligence became profoundly anthrogenic. Even the pre-modern etymology of ‘human’ traces back through homage to humble Greek ‘humus’: earth, being of earth, a notion as old as ritual burial.

We arose from grounds of Deep Time to become another “nature,” a second, higher nature: Homo sapiens became Homo prospectus.

But scientism provides a powerful ideology for technologizing personity (e.g., “merging” with A.I.); and turning “human” interest into transactional games—“It’s just human nature” to be avaricious—where a predatory social darwin-
ism can lead to collateral famine, or genocide (“pluasibly” deniable by the ambiguity of what one means by ‘intend’).

May We hold self-evident the truth of being human: the humane being of us all.

How far should we go with CRISPR discretion? The question is already ante-
dated by aspiring for chilling “post-humanity,” where mastering genomics of intelligence trans-speciates Our heirs into beings as different from us now as we are from chimpanzees, because the history of science fiction portends Our desire to actualize whatever we can tangibly imagine.

Being an intrinsically valuable life is natural because we make and keep it so, but only inasmuch as we actually do.

Our, one’s vital self-interest is to be and keep fidelity to the potential of our nature (immanence of potential for being), our natural goodness which expresses our intrinsically person-al nature to be on a way to being an individuated, autonomous person, being oneSself person-ally well.

To be “human” just is to be a person, because the “second nature” of personity is post-biological, post-Homo. Life of a person is life for person-ality, thus of person-ality, causing mortal need to serve valuable desire.

Bi-directional wanting (need <—> desire) a good life, being “humanly” minded, is person-ally “causal” by intention, being purposeful, figur-
atively “ascendant” into a better quality of life.

Being anthropologically human (bio-minded) is retrojectively under-
standable only as scientific genealogy. Need always—whenever feasible
—served aspiraitonal life. An evidentiary genealogy of [inter]person-al life shows us serving aspirational progress (wanting more-perfect society, paradise), which we called “evolving” before that was scientifically dim-
inished by Darwinism as ecologically relative bio-adaptation (surviving sustainably).

Individuation has historically developed itself beyond baseline matur-
ation (or “adult” autonomy) into singular expressions of person-al potential. I signify that as a devo1—> devo2 continuum of individuation which anticipates a correlate sense of post-natural evolving.

Standard modeling from developmental psychology can be tenably extended beyond adult developmental modeling into engagements of singular life whose “model” is potenitally its recognized exemplarity, articulable at best in literary, artistic, scientific, and conceptual expres-
sions. Person-al life commonly lives beyond baseline developmental modeling. Traditionally, virtue ethics intuited our capacity for post-normative life.

Likewise, standard modeling from evolutionary anthropology can be tenably extended into post-naturalistic prospecting in complement with leading voices in scientifically informed humanities which work to advance human flourishing at high scale.

So, “evo-devo” psychology can be modeled to lead into higher modeling of evolving development— evo1/devo1 work leading into devo2/evo2 Work—such that the ultimate openness of Our evolving is prospectable in light of good* constellating of leading voices.

Of course, what is a “leading” voice? Not all conceptions are equal. There is demonstrably better understandings of our humanity in some academic domains of inquiry and accomplishment than in others, in accord with better conceptions of holistic inquiry, better orientation to advancing humanity.

A life is a rooting point (futuring singularity of its life cycle) in a bushy lineage of generations (ancestral genealogy) which melds with regional others’ bushy lineages (historical anthropology) in Our shared humanity whose shared futurity is called to humanely advance Our singular planetarity.

Thinking of oneSself heartfully exemplifies the person-ality of us all in shared relations. Being is better understood as person-al flourishing than as human flourishing.

But we also have cherished traditions of humanism, humanities, humanitarian aims, and human rights well-instituted in those terms. That’s a grand reserve standing for the best of Our being. Understanding those traditions as person-
ism, personities, personist aims is odd, though personal rights sounds less so. However, the kindredness of highly valued versions of humane life as highly person-al, kindred with being a person in the most familiar sense, better relates to lived senses of identity than being human, especially for the sake of regard-
ing interpesonal life as sensibly scalable into care for and about others as persons like oneself, not as strangers. Altruism based in person-al identification may be easier to feel than humanitarian charity. “Persons like me are avoidably dying.”

Person-al being is beyond “human nature,” yet the biogenic conditions of psychal-social life—anthropological and historical—clearly warrant referring
to our aggregate culturality as humanity, epsecially because the future of intel-
ligent life is planetary.

Yet, customers on a flight are regarded by pilots as “souls on board.” The better doctor of medicine is with a person more than a patient. The better counselor is with a person more than a client. The better teacher is with a person more than a student.

Soul: mysterious depth of one’s horizons, high immanence of being most truly one Self, a heartful sense of oneself, oneSself. The deep legacy of mythical soulfulness tropes the integral humanity of being a person of manifold kinds of person-al relations, especially in caring to inquire into one’s own “nature” to a degree which is far-sighted and highly immanent. Thinking of our culturally social lives manifoldly can enown a scale of care which expresses Our person-al humanity.

Anyway, the demographic sense of ‘humanity’ registers the scale of Our presence—Our high-scale belonging in Earthanity nevertheless, here for the sake of future generations and for health of Mother Earth’s awesome capacity for varieties of flourishing, in care of Us, intelligence of Earth, endowed to Care that the ultimate Openness of Our evolving can be in light of Our best designs.

next—> the PCS continuum of life