gary e. davis
Ultimately, We are living with ultimate openness of “nature”: of evolving humanity, evolving Earth, of our place in one galaxy (which is not a frivolous observation!),
of the Universe (a Universe?) that’s ultimately expanding into...., well, into Into-ing (“Nothingness”?).
All we can do is increasingly design our futurity, our being home—fruitfully, progressively, durably—in being well, in belonging, in enabling neighborhood,
and advancing humanity.
In a useful sense, philosophy is conceptual homemaking. Good thinking expresses humanistic exemplarity, firstly “upward” in “growing up,” in gaining authentic sophistication (one hopes); then, “downward” by example of one’s life, by teaching, enabling, and mentoring.
Good thinking in the climb of higher individuation may lead to fruits of conceptual inquiry that give high grounding for exemplarity and good thinking in light of that, which may enable.
Anyway, It all begins in being well—lifeworldly flourishing.
We live into our futures, and at best articulate what’s importantly past. We evaluate what’s appropriate among elements of remembrance or documentation; and select
what matters for going forward. We do genealogy to serve promising possibility.
There’s no such thing as “the” past. Gravity of Time is appellant, futural, recedingly horizonal.
So, with all due regard and appreciation for 20th century thought, I—we—live in this century, which was not anticipated by the ancestors. We appropriate the given,
rather than thinking of our 21st century relative to 20th century thought. Our
presence was dimly immanent to the past that we find, unlike tracing back to a seed,
The Origin, The Creation—even though a seed, literally speaking, doesn’t anyway determine “its” environmentally-relative phenotype.
We humans grow by selection of what is to matter, as much as growing by appreciation of the given. And the given doesn’t constitute individuated appreciability. Relative to what becomes cherished history (i.e., what becomes the historiology), we are Events
of appropriations. Lives originate from futuring (so to speak) which appropriates given importances prospectivity. As it goes for individuation (historicity, relative to development), so too for history (historicality relative to evolving).