Project

	engaging text made to speak gary e. davis	March 23, 2026

A pleasure of going with the flow of text, regardless of what’s the writer’s, what’s “mine,” may easily become a reflective tension of wanting differentiation: wanting to make claims about the writer’s understanding (typical for scholarship); or wanting to appreciate one’s own self-reflectivity (typical for individuation). For the latter event, letting oneself be subject to one’s discerned understanding as projections is not subjectivism inasmuch as a learning process is desired which transforms confusion of the difference between writer and reader into enhance- ment of reader self-understanding and enhanced appreciation of the writer’s understanding. Subjectivism is different: It’s either oblivious to the difference between percep- tion and fabulation (taking discerned meaning as simply the writer’s meaning); or accepts an inevitability of problematic subjectivity which lives with confusions between self and other as a reconciled condition of normal undecidability (some- times accurate, sometimes not, but so it goes), rather than as another chance to become less subjective through careful dwelling and reflection. Besides, the notion of subjectivity is an inauthentic, invalid notion of self. The common presumption that self is “subjectivity” (and interpersonal relations are “intersubjective”) is an historical ruse, because good individuation is regularly outstripping subjective dispositions. In good individuation, subjectivity is a mode of selfidentical engagement which is relative to a person-al stage of development, through which oneSself is venturing, not settled. Subjectivism is settled with its obscure self-relativism. Good individu- ation is on a learning curve. Classically for educational psychology, this stage-relative venturing is in a “zone of proximal development” whose upper boundery avoids challenge by too much complexity; and whose lower boundary is boredom from low novelty. There’s a virtual sphere of individuational comfort zone for engaged learning. An articulable stage of learning—a lifepsychal cohering—can usefully be called an ecosphere of understanding. As a developmental stage, one’s understanding can be usefully called devecospherical. One’s lifeworld comprehensibiity can be usefully understood as an horizonal era of life which is devecological. A standard approach to this in educational psychology is to have established “grade level” standards of understanding by which student comprehensibility can be normatively assessed. In higher education, it’s common to distinguish a course difficulty as lower division undergraduate, upper division, masters level graduate course, and supervised independent doctoral level studies. Creative reading and misreading aren’t just individualizing or subjective. They’re indicators of engagement which can also signal a developmentality of learning process. Mysteries of how one reads imply issues of where one is with frames of mind. Accordingly, reading may be usefully regarded as devecospherical, relative to an apt conception of developmental parsing (Piagetan, Kohlbergian, Jungian, domainally historicist, etc.). A way of thinking is devecological (Platonic, Kantian, Hegelian, phenomenologically Husserlian, Heideggerian, Modernist, Postmodern- ist, etc.). A way of reading may be understood relative to an array of standard approaches to interpretation. Creative reading and misreading are events of appropriation. Though “one can speak of the genius of a language as the potential of its grammatical and semantic resources” (Geneses, genealogies, genres, & genius, refs.2.16 p. xi), it gives being—being invoked as meaningful—relative to devecological engaging.

 

Be fair. © 2026, gary e. davis