Project	discursive moments

	conceptualities of importance gary e. davis	January 26, 2019

There’s significance in meaning: worthwhile potential in denotational actuality. There’s appeal of engagement in expectant experience. We always want worthwhile time: satisfying engagement. The notion of “value” (importance) is readily understood relative to want of satisfying engagement. Well-being is rooted in being well, yet that presumes desiring to act. The developmental, distant “spine” of desire (distinct from need) is trust in one’s surround (not a question for infancy), trust in one’s capacities and potentials, and trust in others’ presence. We live to be well across our life span, finding and sustaining meaningfulness, then giving way to more. That’s the “existential” calling implicit to all value conceptuality: Selfal (whole-hearted) engagement whose enjoyment also may contribute to new generations in some lasting way. Preferences in keeping with that give good sense to claiming that “intelligent” choice is the basis of value. The Point of humanity is good* gardening: gardening emergence of as much creative happiness as possible, brought into as much confluence as possible, for the sake of whatever may flourishingly result. I say that confidently, because good* is objectively assessible—I will argue, relative to recent work on consequentialism—without need of “greatest good,” because greater good is always possible—always the horizon for any developing life in evolving culture. I want to understand “enlightenment” and “wisdom” relative to high individuation and Our evolving. I stand for authentic appeal to high cultural humanism for the good* of intergenerational life. May high cultural humanism prevail in Our sense of global humanity. So, to my mind, there is good reason to say that there is the better way of living and venturing: Ideality realizes intrinsic potential for wholly flourishing life and conceives value relatively. The way that is most congruent with ideality is the better way. Such idealism is ostensible, like a rainbow, because it may really draw us as endless venturing fruitfully. I want to extend such a conception of value for thinking about public policy: Degree of high quality of life is criteriologically assessable. Some high qualities of life are better than others relative to impartial reasons. A generative-psychological comprehension of high flourishing is objectively definable. Values have scalarity: a determinable domain (horizon) of relevance and determinable range (topography) of reference. Competing values are decidable in terms of their different scalarity. The better scalarity is the better value. I’m being obscure at this point, but I’ll clarify that the validity of a value is its determinable scale relative to the project-ivity that it serves. Comparable values that serve different scales of project-ivity favor the better scalarity of project. A life-span envisioned project-ivity (e.g., career that would “change the world”) ventures a comprehensive telic cohering of the life (I call this AProject-ivity), which is more important than a project-ivity that lacks any sense of comprehensive engagement. Thinking in terms of lifelong values is preferrable to thinking opportunistically. But tight alignment of engagements with life-span values is not always better than loose alignment, because creativity and discovery require openness, even whole-hearted surrender to mysteries of life primordially re-envisioning its horizons. That’s hallmarked by feeling that one’s life is entering a “whole new era.” The older we are, the more that retrospection becomes retrojective of one’s life as dividing into eras, sometimes as a matter of having lost, in a mid-life era, a love from youth of venturing that has been unconcealed in the new era of life now, as if “I’ve” been reborn to embody my True Love at last.

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Be fair. © 2019, gary e. davis