from unconcealment to mysteries of being

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channeling Heidegger in our century

Obviously, children grow up into a world which is busy and prevalently superficial. Unconcealing richness of life is enlightening.

Over the years, concealment of meaning and opportunity remains especially the case for lower-educated persons. Education dispels
a lot of illusions, but most importantly it reveals one’s integral potential for growth.

Worse yet is living under oppression. Emancipatory address dispels resignation and enlightens hope for freeing life, experiencing decency, and gaining recognition of one's integrity. But most importantly, emancipatory address reveals the elevating power of educational opportunity which may lead to a higher quality of life.

As Jesus said: Truth will set you free. That was an avowal of eman-
cipatory and enlightening potential within “you” and “us.”

But such an enlightened and enlightening view was already integral
to early Greek thought. And given the deep Greek lineage of oral ancestry, we can’t plausibly presume that Parmenides originated the idea that thinking and being are the same, i.e., the conception of thinking was intimately the conception of being. Mental engagement and being (engaging relative to one’s potential?) belong together. Mental engagement is an existential notion. (Recalling Parmenides was Heidegger’s last posting, 1973.) Homeric odyssey was an allegory of enlightenment through adventurous striving (even for Leopold Bloom). Individually prospective and self-determinative life was likely integral to seafaring culture long before the Greek Golden Age. Unconcealing one's potential opens one to primordial possibility.

Obviously, Socratic teaching was an emancipatory process, as well as educational: Maieutic disabused a person of misconceptions by bringing into being one’s potential to reveal better understanding, not only received through others’ better views, but by realizing that thinking is individuational. Non-concealment of one’s capability for enlightenment goes hand-in-hand with being open to sophisticating oneself in senses of educational challenge.

thinking: being. They belong together in the same enlightening and emancipating sojourn of being well.

Psychotherapy addresses congested striving for that, against over-
whelming struggle (which classical Greeks called polemos): thinking well: being well, emancipating one’s potential for self-determining educational path making, initiating educational processes which may actualize authentic intimacy, family, neighborhood, community, and region.

There being oneself proximally (there being as person) can become primordial engaging with there being phenomenality originarily, there being awing possibilities awaiting.

There’s no mysticism in an existential appeal of enlightenment and emancipatory interest. It’s as old as child curiosity and ongoing desire to learn.

But ordinary life militates against aspiring which may eventually give way into waiting possibility. Confronting power through exposure of “reason” as mystification, exposing “rationality” as propaganda, can be dangerous.

Confronting debilitating co-dependence can be dangerous, as well as difficult, all in all (in general conception), spanning a spectrum of interpersonal, social, cultural, and political life—where politics is dependent on sociality dependent on culturality dependent on conceptuality dependent on interpersonal life dependent on invested identity, especially when professional views are means of income.

Unconcealment got Socraties killed. Exposure of “Christian” ideology brought excommunication, satanizing, or the most horrific suffering
by dismemberment and fire.

And animal power at industrial scale can destroy habitability at continental scale, as well as engineer genocide.

But unconcealing truth is always only a beginning. Making originary beginning hold widely may call for innovation at unprecedented scale, especially when power flows planetarily like the climatic jet stream.

Inception may want a conception of sociality which is unprecedented.

Inception may want a conception of plural culture which calls for new conceptions of interpersonal life which calls for flexible pluralism of sociality, even protean self-identity by leading minds in public policy and foundational work in academia, due to the high complexity of Our evolving.

Who can appreciate all modes of challenges?

No one. The Conversation of Humanity belongs to constellations of diverse voices devoted to serving future generations. That’s a challenge for interdisciplianry work in higher education whose better conceptu-
ality is evolving, always.

Call philosophers to comprehend mysteries of being?: Gaza, Putinism, famine in Africa, capital formation at global scale.  

mysteries of passive “citizenship,” opportunistic “leadership,” warrior economies, and addiction to short-term profit.

Dangers to predatory capital of collaborative global political leadership (e.g., U.N. efficacy, WTO fidelity, enforceable international law) is the big, ugly deal that they live to annul. The difficulty of scaling up the UN Sustainability Goals to effectively engineer human decency across humanity is not good for business.

That’s a calling for humanities to advance conceptual innovation across all modes of education and professions.

How may humanistic education across age levels scale up humanity across all modes of life in an era where the universities “will not replace us,” yet venture capital is hungry to see “The Singularity Nearer: When We Merge With AI”?

Such high scale extrapolation requires high scale interpolation.

How can the future of humanity be led by the so-called “better angels of our nature” (by evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker)?

How best can we be good ancestors, paying forward for the sacrifices
of our ancestors who invested their precious, bearing time in hopes
for their heirs’ future prosperity, for free time to be well, so to have
the highly cultured leisure which we take for granted?

mysteries of being a challenging ancestor: unconcealing predatory privatism, de-mystifying invalid pretenses of insight, undressing “friendly” fascism, healing misogynous love, transforming education beyond instructional training, dissolving consumerization of citizenship, remedying theft (by oppressively imbalanced work life) of time to learn and think for a good enough life, good enough family, neighborhood, community, and region.

mysteries of being in Time: How do we best balance flourishing private life with progressive public life?

How do we best advance fidelity to standards of validity in social life?

How do we make and keep governance meritocratic without elitism?

How do we keep intimacy, family, friendship, solidarity, and civility lastingly alive?

How do we secure and advance educational leadership down from educator excellence and up from changing times?

What is being genuinely democratic?

What is good enough flourishing across all modes of being?

Time. Giving time, having time for dwelling, thinking, building.

True value isn’t difficult to appreciate, but difficult to realistically advance in there being no mystification tolerated, no mysticism required.