Area	still-flowering life

	What’s integral to engaged, meaningful lives? gary e. davis	May 14, 2022

Generally? Who can say. But, the best I can do seems worth sharing. The best I can do is to share what’s worthwhile; and what’s worthwhile to express follows from doing the best I can with what I have (notes, readings, work already available, and capability), which I’ve been doing for years, of course. The question above calls for endless (albeit mortal) answering. Time being limited, I prefer to share what’s most worthwhile for me. That’s always been my preference, because the limiting is relative to wanting to move on, after establishing a topic to be continued later, in the meantime setting a basis for interaction with others who may be interested (your reading). If we have follow-up, fine: I’ll gladly elaborate, clarify, extend, and learn from the interaction— advance my understanding. Mostly, though, interaction has been relative to others’ given texts—and my notes facing me, out of the variable past, as texts (not expressions for recollection regarded now as given), as if my texts are of an other, distanced from his initial occasion of formation, of formulation, there to be now thought newly. So, writing here hasn’t been largely interactive in a scholarly sense (though some-times very much so: Habermas, Heidegger, and many others’ work employed supplementally, and anticipating focal employment). Largely, I haven’t yet oriented my project relative to others’ work. But always, I’ve kept in mind a pole star of primary convening and writing relative to that selected, exemplary estate. Though accurate and fair (good faith) reading of texts is essential for me, I want to thereby engage “us” in furthering themes, topics, and projects. I want to appro- priate texts (and myself as text) into something newly ours, validly and fruitfully (maybe even originally). My topic title above occurred to me when I happened across a note I wrote 12 years ago—a feeling for the appeal:

“I’m especially interested in how valuing, aspiration, cognitive interest, and imaginability are integral to engaged, meaningful lives,....”

That sense is outdated now because I’ve done a lot, the past couple of decades. But it’s still valid—though I now think of valuing as oriented by a whole-life interest in ValueV, aspiration oriented by anticipated life span, cognitive interest as merely the epistemic mode of wholly mental interest, and imaginability as an imagist mode of conceivability. So, generally now, my sense of things is that: Being a life well includes preferring importantly, belonging, and love. Preferring importantly is authentically derived from childhood, from being open to new experience, new stances, new relations; and being curious about where being newly may lead. Belonging with others genuinely derives from trust. Love flourishes in a scale of caring, from near-and-dear to identifying with one’s—and our—humanity. Integral self-enhanciveness—which begins with infant joy—includes all of the above (and much more, of course). Self-love is at heart beyond notions of egoism. Flourishing gains complex mindfulness which is flexible, through excellence that is realistically, situationally apt, thus easily differentiating oneself from interpersonal relations (the backstage/frontstage dramactionality of mindfulness). In appeals of entrancing phenomenality, inspiration may turn into aspiration of enthralled creativity, a high enowning of craft that may be called “art,” yet is sufficient in itself without such evaluation, without pretense of being elite. But being pragmatically appealing always matters. Being exemplary, being enhancive, being progressive, or being good matters. Yet, being virtuous is not for the craftsman to judge. Lasting influence is not for the presenter to determine. Merely, I aspire to do the best I can. The relativity of being belongs to a life within evolving life. The relativity of one’s life in evolving life is the appellantly cohering mirrorwindow for understanding evolving itself (inasmuch as one wants to inquire into that), which may evolve the conception of evolving. Which conception is best is always an open question, best understood relative to leading minds (but who chooses?), the convened character of which is evolving, too (by whose conception?), especially in terms of inquiry into evolutionarity. Yet, ultimate relativism is avoidable inasmuch as the scientific community has an elusive but determinable singularity, relative to the evolving paradigms of scientificity. The humanities have an elusive singularity, relative to the evolving paradigms of philology. The evolving of paradigms—a conception of evolving paradigmicity—is best understood relative to a plural convening of conceptual inquiries, which implies that evolving is ultimately a cyclical engagement of human intelligence that ulitmately draws itself into its ongoing, appealing, and conceivably teleological evolutionarity which We design and generatively enown. No wonder, then, that evolving intelligence—evolving intelligibility, evolving conceivability—is ultimately Open, relative to the Great Silence.

next—> deep heights appealing to low shallows

 

Be fair. © 2022, gary e. davis