our poetic condition • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	a philological sense of Our evolving

	our poetic condition gary e. davis	September 26, 2024

It’s not about verse. It’s the common tropality of making sense of life.

The Forward to The Poetic Species begins: “Edward O. Wilson has called Homo sapiens the poetic species because our cognitive infrastructure is dependent on analogy and associative thinking” ().

“True” (so to speak), but our mentability is more than cognitive (epistemic). It’s intentional (conative), relational (interal), affective, and cognitive. An actor is probably more interested in their purpose, identity, and feeling than in what their moment of action employs representationally (while accuracy is important, of course).

So, a scientifically normal reference to mentability as cognitive tropes the four-
fold character of attentionality (of “consciousness,” which is non-conscious [automatic, habitual] as well as attentive) which involves itself with engagements (open to receptiveness, responsively receptive). Denoting mind as cognitive is synecdochical—for “consciousness” too: standing for what is pre-attentive (easily recalled), non-attentive (but easily acknowledged), and a-attentive (brain-habituated capabilities), none of that exclusional (“Unconscious”).

Also, a tropality of understanding is more than “analogical.” It’s metonymic, metaphoric, synecdochal, and ironic. Normal reference to analogy is likely synecdochal of a fourfold tropal scale of isomorphism: degrees of near likeness or kindredness which may belong to understanding.

The Poetic Species exemplifies that We, the poetic species, live, at best, relative
to a Gaic scale of belonging. A singular poet may expresse many facets and degrees of more-or-less exemplary belonging, engagement, and appreciation, which echoes Our Earthanity (e.g., Jorie Graham or, earlier, Wallace Stevens).

And We Earthlings are free to let our species become unsustainable, unless some conceptual cohering of public policy (I merely prospect) coheres collaborative global political leadership.

A theoretical physicist very figuratively explicates their reality without burdening the reader with only-mathematical comprehensibility, thus dramatizing how our house of being (shared language) gives way to making us at home in Time.

Don’t be frightened by intelligibility beyond our darling personifications. But We’re Alone in designing better evolution of Our Earthanity.

Futurity reaches out to us like a horizon emerging from the vortexual point of
the directional distance we project our lives into.

Releasing oneSelf into reverie, intensive conceiving, or depths of memory may
be like all horizonality (a holism of being) advancing itself as one’s capability still emerging, if not also (to some degree) self-concealing potentials for compre-
hension. (Heidegger writes of “self-withholding in sending,” On Time and Being, 1962; “refusal,” in Contributions to Philosophy: from enowning.)

The sophistication which the doctor enowns is a Janus-faced caring to offer aptly valid advisory for futuring a life, a culture, a conceptuality, and goodG society,
in light of the best of Us.

They counsel reason to live well, to flourish relative to more-or-less exemplary models, even counsel how highly-minding authentically emerges to be more-or-less exemplary humanity (e.g., academic specialization, various kinds of genuine leadership).

You look into the emerging landscape without a story of its composition, just
a mélange of stars, maybe with coincidental constellating. Yet, the tropality of expanses may enhance your reveries, even—for some sensibilities—a conceptual garden may heighten, deepen, expand, or/and mirror newly revealed potential
of oneSelf, possibly becoming exemplary sensibility.

Higher education idealizes that (or should, in kindred ways). But authentic artistry of singular life doesn’t expect lasting influence. It hopes to be useful. Aspiring to enrich sensibility might be enough.

All in all, emergent conceptions of exemplary being can only be a poetics of spec-
ieal (specie-al) futuring whose horizonal appeal becomes efficacious across our seasons, at best across generatons through, let’s say, the Library of Humanity (having a nomadic location, evolving nature, evincing new horizons).

Conceptual venturing beyond academic norms may seem idiosyncratic (if not hermetic), but so it goes in wanting to advance a scale of exploratory belonging.

Effective scaling is isomorphic. Conceptuality is essentially isomorphic. This evolutionary condition makes us the poetic species. Engagement with Values of scaling (and fidelity to such Value) can be exemplary and practically influential through the literature which the market sustains.

The feasible isomorphicity of mindful holism spans all dimensions of inner Self, [inter]personal life, culture, conceptuality, sociality, and democratic prospects for appropriate global leadership.

Such a consonance of scalar belonging may flourish by engaged fidelities across the continuum of intimacies, extended family, neighborly kindredness, frienships, community solidarities, and civic life.

I’m searching for better aspiring for the better/best scalarity of inquirial and prospective engagement, especially through interdomainal engagements: better resourcing of scholarship and better conceptuality. Who is exemplary for holistic conceptions of generative humanities, educational excellence, public policy, and for prospecting a realistic, yet ambitious, conception of advancing humanity? Who better exemplifies potential fruitfulness of isomorphic belonging?