Friday, January 4, 2019
What’s a good story of a “worthwhile” life?
Basically, what matters is that living be worthwhile. Something like that is taken for granted, for most folks, without care about definitions. Life goes on, life is, and it’s all too busy too often for time available. The varieties of worthwhile life are too many to cover in any scale of journaling or literature.
I want to suppose an ambitious ideal, for my own purposes—not one I expect others to accept, but it’s admirable, I’m sure. I want to simply refer to “worth-while life” with some specificity that pleases me for other discussions that refer
to “worthwhile life” and merely link here.
An academically worthwhile life is important to me. So, I stipulate that a worthwhile life may be a wholly flourishing orientation by inquiry which exemplifies good thinking for advancing community.
That’s not meant to be a generalizable notion of worthwhile life.
Given a worthwhile life, “high” (very appealing) importances would prevail for life orientation or would have oriental prevalence, I’ll say: “mattering” a lot, “worth” holding sacred, “valuable” beyond measure, etc. are polestars.
We all want authentic receptiveness and responsiveness to what truly matters. The meaning of ‘what truly matters’ varies immeasurably, of course; but there’s also great degrees of agreement (i.e., at least: overlapping understandings of shared values), which binds us fruitfully—or should, because belonging together fruitfully is intrinsically appealing.
I’ll have high importances in mind when I simply refer to “value.” (But prefer to refer to importances, thanks to philosopher Bernard Williams.)
In my imaginary story of human futurity, worthy values prevail globally. Ideally, for example, humanistic prosperity “should” prevail over opportunistic success for reasons of what truly matters.
In my story, worthy values are going to be emergent globally, through educational governance, healthy community, good parenting, and intrinsic (unsuppressed) child interest in thriving and flourishing.
There “is” (will be) resourcefulness enough for healthy regions and flourishing lives—for “the” Good of flourishive regioning.
Ideally... Anyway, I’m mediately hopeful, and ultimately optimistic about happy ends that ever promise anewals.
