a conceptual spirit of telos • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project

	a conceptual spirit of telos aspects of life as conceptual art gary e. davis	May 21, 2026

Lovely life, as the days are living theater: scripts we live, games we play—idioms, stereotypes, and clichés, living in unwitting storiating, narrrated by fabulations and fictions defining days without evident plot—or several plots competing for prevalence.

A literary sensibility appeals to actualizing one’s potential for being relative to horizons of aspiration drawing us into advancing conceivability—to my mind,
at least.

Aspirations by literary professionals may be more modest, say, wanting “many generalizable insights on how to conceptualize human flourishing” [ref.2.17: vii].

More than that, though, we want general insights on conceptualizing—how to conceptualize better, even how to think best about insight.

That’s always going to be relative to the ongoing presence of a given life which is
in its own era (implicit psych-ecology of development—its implicit dev-ecology, “one’s lifeworld comprehensibility”: bottom half of that page).

The “better” conceptualization generally orients itself relative to a lifeworldly scale of conceptual aptness, idealzing (to my mind) a general conception of modality, which individuates in “growing up,” from simpler / tangible understanding to more-complex / abstract undestanding.

(That can be troped as an x/y axis: simple-to-complex [x] vs. tangible-to-abstract [y], where given situational aptness maps around some neighborhood of the plane.

But that begs a question of the point being in time—and scaling quantitatively is empirically difficult in developmental psychology, if not scientistic in pretense (like behaviorism). Criterial assessment is easier.

Anyway, such heuristic modeling can be useful, e.g., grade-level standards, sensibility in teaching. But heuristics easily conceal real complexity, i.e., “reality.”)

Specifically fair articulation of devecological understanding (curricular, clinical) would be relative to one’s purposive interest, likely alien to usual self-reflection, yet explicable in good* conceptual prospecting, I venture.

In any case, I Value (one Values) reliable prospects for fulfillment, which imply ever-open promise for better (higher) fulfilling, where (ideally) learning never ends.

I want the appeal of comprehensiveness to yield fruitful promise for a proffered manifold (psychal to planetary) scale of thinking or full mindfulness orienting largel-scale interest in practicality.

Born of healthy living, intelligence of wholly flourishing life is manifoldly enactional, beyond basic flourishing, oriented by a (the?) better sense of being.

That includes appreciations to further:

How appealing can phenomenality become?
How valuable can be implicit understanding of oneSelf as projective and creative irt phenomenality?
How best can we appreciate authentic life?

I love to learn from critical reflection, love to give way to a fullness of feeling in complement with a eudaimonic (eu-: good, -daimonic: spirited) mode of flourishing.

I find telic cohering in a 3-fold conception of enactionality (which I need to more-clearly explain), based in an isomorphic conception of intelligence (“manifoldly enactional” above) which, in time, individuationally shapes a “telos” of one’s life (an old notion for me).

I know that I’m not giving adequate narrative time to respect logical well-formed-
ness (model-theoretic specificity), but that can be done, relative to well-estab-
lished research in action theory. So, what I’m doing above is implicitly a promissory note (here explicitly noted).

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