generative humanities • gary e. davis • berkeley


	Project	discursive moments

	generative humanities gary e. davis	November 26, 2021

I’m thrilled to discover the “Humanities and Human Flourishing” research group.

In a message on their contact page, I wrote “I've been advocating conceptually
for years what you're aiming to advance as positive humanities.” To advance as
—but I suggested a new perspective on “positive,” relative to their conception of psychology.

“The RAISE acronym is felicitous”—Reflectiveness, Acquisition, Immersion, Socialization, and Expression—“but the way creative individuation actually goes is IARSE,” and I continued:

It’s vital to appreciate that Our intrinsic self-enhancive interest (amply evidenced by research into healthy child development) calls for immersion in curiosity and fascination before innate capacities gain (individuate into—acquire) capabilities (cf. the “Capabilities Approach” developed by Martha Nussbaum for “cultivating humanity”).

Yet, individuation itself calls for reflective learning which individuates capability for frame independence (re-framing capability) and flexible perspectivity.

Through that, socialization serves individuation, contrary to the dominant sociocentrism of the human sciences, which tends to be sociologically biased—understanding individuality relative to its sociality—and oriented to lowest common denominators of inter-personal interaction, which easily serves public policy, i.e., scalable programming.

Socialization through individuation in light of reflective learning based in immersive acquisition of capabilities may create the basis for creative expression that makes inquiry—artistic and scientific—possibly original.

So, what’s “positive” there is generative. It’s a generative flourishing that We want from being well. Indeed, “well-being” is basically about being well as generatively as we can.

So, I think about all this as generative psychology of flourishing.

In a few weeks, Oxford University Press will be publishing their Handbook of Positive Humanities. Meanwhile, lots of material is already available through their site: a discussion of their “conceptual model” and publications (a few of which are fully available through their site page).

I’ll follow up (for my own enrichment) with those materials already available; and eventually turn this page into a table of contents of specific discussions by me relative to some of their work and related research.

That will involve an extended discussion of my conception (based on others’ formal research in “positive” psychology) of generative psychology and development of other interdisciplinary conceptions, including an extended notion of interdomainal philology and conception of 21st century philosophy.

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