historical “psyche”

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‘Psychal’ and ‘psychality’ also allows more-direct association with its classical Greek root, psyche, which is revealing of the Self/self Difference.

The combining form ‘psych-‘ originally meant “life, spirit, soul, self” (M-W Unabridged). All of that! life itself? life as “spirit”? essentially spirit, but life apart?

Greek psyche is “akin” to Greek psychein: to breathe, blow. I blow, but do I breathe?: Forgetting that I breathe, by attending to anything in my day, “I” continues to breathe, as if there is another I within me: spirit, like the wind of Nature breathing.

recalling intra-psychal differences

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When a child personifies a toy, their enjoyment of actual interpersonal relations is mapped into relating to the toy (creating a “real” relation-
ship). Multiple toys, multiple personified relations; but the child has a dim conception of being one self having multiple personified relations.

Likewise in actual interpersonal relations. Being personal is relative to relations with actual others; and multiple relationships are multiple interpersonal relations that don’t clearly cohere. To be “personal” is ordinarily to be [inter]personal variably.

psychality again

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I posted over a year ago that “I began using ‘psychal’ in mid-March, 2011, because I wanted a correlate of my term ‘mindality’,” which is “associable with phenomenological interest.” [“psychality,” Jan. 2020]. “…Psychal interest in mind or psyche is experiential (or phenomeno-
logical). Psychological interest in mind is methodic, structural, or conceptual...” (sweet transgression, Mar. 2011).

The middle ’o’ of ‘psychological’ is merely a conventional connector between the root ‘psyche-’ and ‘-logical’. I substitute ‘a’ for inquirial (inquiry-al) interest in psychality: psychalogical interest.

I mentioned in November, 2011 that “...my preference for ‘psychalogical’ over ‘psychological’…is analogous to a difference between [interest in] phenomenal experience and systematically-interpreted experience” (“...developmental interest”). But that is better represented as two kinds of inquirial interest: phenomenological and empirical.

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foresting life

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This is a letter emailed to the author of a NY Review of Books review of three books about Charles Darwin. I’m musing across a scale of interest from cellularity to facing the black cosmos.

A couple of “[…]” points in the letter refer to irrelevant chat-level content. [Bracketed text is slight amplification or explanatory indications that another reader might not recognize.]

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praise for gifted longevity

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Freeman Dyson died this week, age 96.

I commented at the NYTimes obituary.

I’m noting that here because I’ll soon prospect at length about giftedness as model for understanding the nature of intelligence, which is to be employed for a realistic idealism about human potential, which will serve prospecting notions of highly flourishing life.

There’s a typo in my NYT comment I can’t correct there: We “mis-imagined that heaven as someplace else.” I meant: We mis-imagined that heaven is someplace else. We mis-imagined heaven as someplace else. We’re the diasporic (diaspora-ic) species, hungry for greener pastures.

Dyson’s last article for the NY Review of Books notes that, in the beginning. “the universe was divided into earth and sky, the earth made of perishable stuff in constant turmoil, the sky made of immortal stuff, serene and ageless” (January 2020).

Yet, alas: We’re all children of the pale blue dot.

Freeman Dyson exemplified the leading edge of Our evolving. | March 19: And more today from Edge.org.

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