Card Sessions: Significance
In a network, synkinaesthesia.
Our adding value through our being and becoming, is a function of selfhood, service and synthesis. This living dynamic balance and adaptive structure, expresses itself through a five-fold dynamic process:
- selfhood
- service
- synkinaesthesia
- synthesis
- significance
With our imagination and understanding of life and signs becoming increasingly co-extensive, co-extending, cultivating and co-evolving.
Life and Signs
Our becoming synkinaesthetic beings, to the full extent of our evolutionary understanding and aligning with our evolutionary purpose, corresponds with a similar five-fold structure and process, a becoming ourselves through:
- imagination
- knowledge
- experience
- understanding
- play
Enkinaesthesia and Synkinaesthesia
Card: Enkinaesthesia
Sensibilities turned performance, virtues turned
paths, lines of emergent, unfolding, cultivating
and evolving participatory inquiry, with life and
signs, co-extensive, co-extending, instigating,
co-arising and co-evolving: embracing, enacting
and emphasising the dialogical nature of the
backgrounded feeling of being, in service to the
pervasive co-agency of evolution.
Card: Synkinaesthesia
Mind evolving, with our thoughts
and felts turning increasingly
proprioceptive, with phronesis
guiding our performance, virtues
turned paths, lines of emergent,
unfolding, cultivating and evolving
participatory inquiry, with life and
signs, co-extending, inviting and
co-arising: embracing, enacting
and stewarding the dialogical
nature of the pervasive thinking,
feeling and enacting of being,
in service to the immanent and
regenerative co-agency of
evolution.
Civilized Universe
“The fundamental basis of this description is that our experience is a value-experience, expressing a vague sense of maintenance or discard; and that this value-experience differentiates itself in the sense of many existences with value-experience; and that this sense of the multiplicity of value-experiences again differentiates it into the totality of value-experience, and the many other value-experiences, and the egoistic value-experience.
There is the feeling of the ego, the others, the totality. This is the vague, basic presentation of the differentiation of existence, in its enjoyment of discard and maintenance. We are, each of us, one among others; and all of us are embraced in the unity of the whole.
The basis of democracy is the common fact of value-experience, as constituting the essential nature of each pulsation of actuality. Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. This characterizes the meaning of actuality. By reason of this character, constituting reality, the conception of morals arises. We have no right to deface the value-experience which is the very essence of the universe.
Existence, in its own nature, is the upholding of value-intensity. Also no unit can separate itself from the others, and from the whole. And yet each unit exists in its own right. It upholds value-intensity for itself, and this involves sharing value-intensity with the universe. Everything that in any sense exists has two sides, namely, its individual self and its signification in the universe. Also either of these aspects is a factor in the other.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
Play: Imagination and Understanding
“Play has a corresponding epistemological and ethical significance: a truly ethical society can only arise if all parties acknowledge the inherently playful character of meaning and communication (Rorty 1991).
Philosophers argue that the freedom of the will differentiates us from the ‘causal determinism’ that governs the world around us (Kant 1781/1950), because our free will is precisely what allows us to cope with choices.
Whenever we judge our actions as good or bad, we must refer to ethical principles about what is considered right or wrong, which require both imagination and understanding.
Following this argument even the notion of ‘common sense’ refers not to a common understanding based on compulsory agreement, but to the possibility of reaching such agreement, when all people enjoy the free play of imagination in harmony with the understanding (Kant 1790/1987).
Thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition (Kant 1781/1950; Schiller 1983), already alluded to in Chapter 1, have argued that an essential component of human rationality is the capacity to imagine the world ‘as if’ it was different from empirically manifest reality.
The human imagination has been shown to involve the ‘playful’ construction of abstract, even fantastic ideas that differ from empirical sense data.
But in a corollary line of argument, philosophers have demonstrated that the imagination serves a greater function than the generation of mere fantasy (Chapter 3 expands on the topic of imagination and how we practise it).”
— Johan Roos
