Self/personal difference irt multiple perspectivity

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life as literary psychology, part 1 of 5

Beyond “my” assimilating what others say (or accomodating it to one’s own interests), we commonly want to implicitly appreciate the other’s perspective, assess the other’s genuineness, or keep up with a play of perspectives. “Knowing They Know That You Know” renders so-called “mind reading” as “one person’s ability to interpret another person’s mental state...in order to assess its validity” such that interaction—interpersonal action—involves “keep[ing] track of ... different mental states at [the same] time.” Selves can be considered irt “how well an individual is able to track multiple sources,” when the “source” is another person.

Individuality, individuation, thematics,and living senses

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Individuality is normally regarded from a social perspective. Even overt individualism is dependent on social perspectives (as anti-traditionalist, anti-socialist, etc., thus parasitic on sociocentric views).

Individuality can also be regarded relative to a given life, usually biographically or autobiographically. Theoretically, one might try to generalize from life studies to form an approach to individual development as such.

a note on “selfidentity”

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Yes: no hyphen. The identity that a person is is so much more than something one has, such that a wholehearted reflectivity or conception of oneself can be more and better than what’s standardly meant by ‘self-identity,’ which has two standard senses (according to M-W Unabridged online):

a note on discursive reading

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Consider a review of Enjoyment: the moral significance of styles of life by John Kekes. However accurate the reviewer Jason Raibley is, we have a narrative that one can work with, which is valuable relative to its cogency as discursive episode on, in this case, a sense of living well.

A keynote of the narrative’s accuracy is (1) one’s sense that the account of the author’s thought implies what one might expect an expert in the area to argue; and (2) the reviewer’s disagreements hinge on views of the author’s thought that one might expect the author to have, regardless of the reviewer’s preferred view (which would be assessed on its own apparent merits).

a conceptual reverie

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Wanting to understand art is an admirable thing to want. Failing to do so exemplarily has no bearing on the value of seeking to understand.

Idealizing that value is a good thing, even if the diversity of arts inhibits a generalizable understanding of art “as such.” If no generally valid sense of art is possible, due to the individualizing nature of art, then understanding that—the individualizing nature—may be possible in a general way, except inasmuch as the individualizing pertains to a specific art’s nature, i.e., the art individuates itself as such (a self-formativity of the art—or self-reconstitutive capacity of the art), such that various individualizing natures become evident, to the implausible limit point of each given work of art implying a genre all to itself (like highly-individuated persons, where a proper name becomes generic) in a garden of as many kinds of art as there are works (implausible because the talent required for such diversity of distinguished works is scarce).