flourishing humanity • gary e. davis • berkeley

flourishing humanity

gary e. davis

March 21, 2022

		“humanity” again
			Commonly, ‘humanity’ has both ethical and demographic overtones, corresponding to its normal meaning. Reading the term resonantly, “the meaning of ‘humanity’ is: the humane being of us all,” I noted many years ago. That’s a specie-al (or “universal”) meaning, because We are the planetary species that can define itself, and one may own an oriental focus on humanity by avowing its prevailing importance (or ValueV) shown by one’s fidelity to that importance. We may enown humanity with others—oneself sharing fidelities, finding the other in oneself. “One’s conception of humanity mirrors one’s own humanity. Enrichment of one’s own humanity is mirrored by enrichment of one’s conception of others’ worlds” (“ethics…”). “Humane humanism of humanity is about actual lives’ potential for flourishing together.”

		flourishing
			Flourishing there is more than a process (analogous with other forms of life: intransitive verb). For persons, flourishing is a deliberate way of life, as if we are “homo prospectus,” a notion in positive psychology that emerged many years after I got involved overtly with “conceptual prospecting.” I recognize, light-heartedly, that deliberately flourishing—engagingly, persistently responding to appeals—is a kind of hunting and gathering, exemplified by my hope that obsessive following of good journalism will aggregately provide me durable orientations for making conceptual prospecting practical, progressive. My gardening expresses a responsive sensibility that idealizes developmental furtherance which may gain glimmers of Our evolving—the durably telic cohering of intelligent life at anthropic scale—worth recounting and enriching. But expression isn’t as such exemplification. Advocacy doesn’t entail influence (which most advocates don’t live to see). I’m not vain about that. I do what I enjoy, usefully, I hope.

		three modes of progressive practice
			So, now: Heuristically consider a devotion of flourishing to enactively scale from the appellant cohering of one’s ever-learning life through glimmers of specieal telic cohering. Consider the scaling as having three follow-up or practical modes: exemplification of something, advocacy of that, and advancing the presence of that (i.e., efficacy of influence). Mode itself is a trope for conceptual domain, naming a proximal manner of consideration which can be more complex than present need. I want to return to this in a general inquiry about conceptuality. Each of the three practical modes above participates in various continuua: individual development, scales of “global” appreciability, scales of value and ValueV, scales of care, scales of regional (cultural and socio-political) relevance, scales of humanity, scales of inquiry, creative pertinence, discursive teaching, organization, and more. The aggregate nebulousness of all that at least implies that appropriateness of action (especially for me: thinking, writing, and teaching) isn’t primarily normative. It’s practically domainal relative to a stipulated or appellant range of engagements, being appropriate. The following is a brief sketch of specific topics which involve groups of themes and directly related texts which will be later convened for topical development. That is not yet a syllabus. I hope to exemplify an advocacy which advances a conception of practice-based conceptual prospecting (or theorizing) which is useful.

psychacultural exemplification

culturally social advocacy

		sociopolitical advancement

enjoying a political aesthetic

What may be the better, the best conception of humanity?

I have fun preferring—finding pleasure in—scales of modal continua which are more-practically able to exemplify (appreciate), advocate (realize), and advance (actualize) humanity than other approaches I’ve found.

Later, I want to focus on five topics which exemplify a notion of leading global agenda:

astute reasoning
educational excellence
collaborative global political leadership
climate leadership
sustainability

Of course, that’s no surprise, because we might all easily agree on a leading global agenda like this, even as one’s own preferences would veer from my constellational appeal for telic cohering of humanity.

next—> points of humanity