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feeling for our time |
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I wonder in wandering, heart of lightness, see. Happy solitude may channel enchantments of the Inner Child as conceptual appeals of the outer world, an embodied sublime mirroring idealized inwardness, maybe leading to a generative sense of Worldness altogether. More realistically: Little “literary” value seems to belong to most of the world most of the time. Nevertheless, through news over many years, wanting a clear sense of our humanity became an addicting chase after a telic cohering in modes of our evolving, as if the cohering story at some great scale—“the” Cohering—might really be discerned. The chase was always a humbling pretense—as if, like so many lines from others’ poems (ephemeral stories from others’ lives, domains, lands) could be weaved into Our Story. The elusiveness, the chase, gained almost an eros. Even so much inhumanity dramatized what humanity We always already wanted in the face of so much struggle. But the leisured reader should bear as much as one can, and do something where one can—right?—at least making one’s little position in whatever pointillism preserve that desired sense of humanity through small example, the mundane “activism” of a life—and more is better; idealizing aspiration is better. Persons die, and life goes on. Fall, stand, move on. There is no other choice that makes sense, since making sense is, in a sense, all that keeps life purposeful, and life should go on well—lucid life deserves to flourish, because we say so. We resolve and commit and work....and play and love and all that jazz (and maybe spite the black cosmos). What scale of sense can be sustained for meaningfulness (if not so pretentiously wanting to act for the sake of our humanity, which idealists commonly do)? Is there a better polestar than wanting conceptual cogency at the largest scale, the highest view sustainable that one might understand—even if that turns out to be relatively modest (given my talents)? I go hunting and gathering the best ideas for generative coalescences, presuming a working prescience, a modest gambling. Yet, for what directions?, to what Purposes?, is a leading question. Reconciled to pretenses of culminative conception, I welcome facing dissolutions, because that’s led to more insightful explorations enough that I’m seldom much disappointed by a downbeat denouement. A paradigmatic example of setting myself up for frustration (dissoluting incomprehension) might be asking: What are humanities for—ultimately? How does such questioning live well? (The cynic may say it’s the budget developer’s gripe; the professionalists wave at idleness; and the humanists show such vanity.) What’s philosophy for, ultimately? “For”: best advocate of, which purposiveness serves. Eating idealized aspirations draws desire into telic promises of fulfillment, but dissolving at worst into verbal fun, and likely educing lots of fruitful time. Some moral philosophers talk readily these days about love (nonreligiously, as a value born from the biology of altruism). Can one tenably map Love, as also a cognitive trait, into some good sense of evolving mind? How may love of exploring weave into love of creating weave into love of real discovering? How may love of exploring, creating, and discovering map into a love of humanity (and conversely)? Maybe philosophy beyond metaphysicalism becomes literary psychology, some meta-anthropology of feeling for our time. Can some kind of comprehensive Love gather philosophy, psychology, and Literature into a leading sense of our humanity? Can some valid and appealing intimacy of humanism and our evolutionarity, all humanistic inquiries, all humanistic discourses, be validly knitted into some appellant cohering love of enhancing humanity? In the planetary university—one might call it the universCity—distributed inquiries still anticipate coalescences and hybridities; still long for that appellant cohering of comprehensive comprehension first shown as philosophy. But now, we more plausibly idealize a fission of distributed mind (e.g., far more research is reported in journals and anthologies than as monographs), no longer plausibly a singular mind. The ideology of singular genius has lost tenability (save by the miracles that prove the rule of distributed genealogy). So, an idealized advance would be some netweave of inquirers who haven’t found each other yet—or, more likely, they have found each other, because their specialty is so specialized that everyone interested knows all the interesting players; but may lack some conceptuality that diciphers how they might coalesce, something philosophy always sought to provide, once upon a time in classical terms that confounded it (and leads to theocentric politics), born too early for what it dreamed about “Being” with yet no sense of cultural evolution (but it was the dream that led to scientific inquiry). Now, conceptual dreams are derived from real inquiry (not speculations allegedly shaping inquiry), where hope of coalescence realistically lives—something beyond any inquirer (I imagine), though we’re starkly reminded by leading names that all insight comes to embodied minds, which are always singularities trying to draw themselves into as much as conceivable, maybe evincing an interplay of each other’s prospects among the various preferred domains—seeking an ecstasis of discourses’ Love?—a new high species of lovers’ discourse? That would be a unique kind of Love, rather singular in its evincing. Well-formed formulation required. But that and likely complexity make specialized foci increasingly points in a pointillism with less and less prospect for the pretty hope of grand cohering. Evolution is a soup of punctuated equilibria bubbling like a boiling liquid of Time, coherences fading as others emerge. Someone trying to conceive an order in the discernible bubbling resorts to a historigraphical science of bubbling as such (how crucibles come, in general, to live brightly). The videographer turns a particular era of bubbling into an exemplar (quite amenable to theorization of the unrepeatable era). Exemplars are compared (Comparative Studies), but the patterns become an aesthetic of videography (philosophy of one’s speciality) in flows computationally uncapturable (which many well-funded researchers won’t admit), like an elusiveness of any given mind vining through inwordness in light of many loves. Next: intimation in flourishing.
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