Saturday, December 11, 2010
mindality
I need ‘mindality’ relative to terms—mentality and mind—that don’t work for what I have in mind.
When one says that something is “mental,” likely meant is that the something is brainy content or a piece of mind. Using ‘mentality’ likely doesn’t mean the condition of something’s being mental; ‘mentality’ usually means something like a frame of mind. There’s a gestaltism, if not holism, implied by “mentality.”
But one could stipulate the unusual meaning for one’s use of ‘mentality’; one could have in mind an interest in the condition of being a mental state-event: “A mentality of seeing red might be explained in neurocognitive terms of….” Conversely, being mental is implied by any gestalt of mind or “mentality” in the usual sense.
There’s a resonance to ‘mentality’ that expresses the part/whole or focal/gestalt difference, such that a mental state-event may imply a mentality (in the usual sense) associated with it, as when seeing red implies a desired preference for red: “Show him a red car, and he’s going to want it, because he wants everything red.” It’s easy, then, to understand that a mental state-event has a condition of its being that may imply a scale of that, an implicature: “Red arouses her credit card.”
What about ‘mind’? What is the word for referring to a condition and open-ended implicature of being of a mind, implying perhaps a way of being relative to giving attention—appreciative or not (to variable degree); more mindful or less mindful.
I’ve been using ‘mindal’ and ‘mindality’ in my notes so long, it flows into sentences easily—too easily: I allude, with no prefacing or explanation, to “…always-embodied mental life (which I happily, … call mindality),” in “feeling as minding” after using the term with no definition at all, as if its sense is ordinary. I refer to “the implicit value of humanistic life, which is primordially Self-formative or wholly mindal),” without a second thought.
Always-embodied mental life may be understood as primordially Self-formative, where ‘Self-’ (capped) alludes to the nonattentive background of oneself, such that ‘Self-formative’ (primordially conceived—“what?”) may be understood as ontogenic and epigenetic and bioanthropological.
Mindality is an auratic notion implicating our living minds as expressions of being in time (implying an ontogenic flowering) and in Time (implying our “nature,” whatever that might be well understand to be).
But the implicature belongs to only living minds (or to the generalizing conceptibilities [?] of living minds). There is no metaphysicalist “Mind” in Nature emerging into our so-called souls. There are selves; I even like to talk of selfness. But it’s all about instances of us as oneself or another—perhaps entertaining concepts of plural generality. But it’s always someone or so many someones bringing themselves together in concepts of presence or great conceptions of our nature, biogenesis, whatever.
Selfness of oneself, identify all told—it’s all lovely conceptuality, conceivability belonging to we who sleep and play and leave behind some traces.
