practical inquiry regarding meaning » intelligibility
The overarching goal of the O-phase is psychological balance. We can't fully appreciate the wonder of existence if we're constantly battling psychological distress or are otherwise only capable of appreciating wonder in a peculiar way to the exclusion of the others. So, when we say psychological balance, we refer to balance with respect to how we're attending to our experience. This will involve a healthy balance between subjective, objective, and active modes of attention.
Humans are particularly prone to psychological imbalance just by virtue of the fact that our experiences are so complex. Our experiences are complex because they're a function of how we're relating to our world, and the human world is incredibly complex. This complexity is mostly due to our complex social relations. Our goals and, so, the activities we perform to achive our goals are highly complex; the ways we relate to others in their various wildly diverging roles is highly complex; and, of course, the collective body of objective knowledge possessed by humanity is beyond immense. It's easy to get lost.
Because the complexity of our world is primarily due to the complexity of our social relations, the goal of achieving psychological balance will largely be a function of fostering healthy relationships with others. For better or worse, we're all much bigger than our personal selves. We're connected with many many others insofar as our goals and activities are mixed with theirs, our actions affect them and their actions affect us in ways that neither of us ever think about, insofar as we're dependent upon each other in countless ways, and so on. Given this social connection to psychological balance, the overall practical goal of this Project's O-phase might be thought of in terms of feeling at home. The degree to which we feel at home in the world is often a good indicator of our psychological balance, and this feeling of being at home is largely a function of our relationships with others.
The tasks of achieving psychological balance will thus often be approached in terms of how we relate to others. To what degree are our goals and, so, activities aligned with others? To what degree do we feel bonded with others in the sense that we can intuit what each other are feeling subjectively? To what degree are we able to successfully reconcile competing claims and judgments with each other in precise language that's available to anyone just the same, objectively?
There's a notable wrinkle to this issue of attaching the notion of psychological balance to the notion of feeling at home in our highly complex social world. Doing so could very well lead us to see how whole societies are psychologically imbalanced. Many societies in our world are unfortunately skewed toward adopting an instrumental approach to the world—seeking ways to use and manipulate the environment toward personal or group gain as aided by technology. This means that many particular individuals who don't feel at home in the world may actually be more balanced than that of their society's norm. Or, what is probably more often the case, some individuals tacitly try to counterbalance society's imbalance, which means those individuals are imbalanced to a degree at least inversely proportional to society's imbalance.
But, given that we are always already connected to others in complex ways, to work out these larger societal issues is ultimately to work out our relations with others, and to aim for psychological balance means to aim for that balance as it exists in the community of humankind as a whole and hopefully beyond (to other communities of which we are members, including animal and plant life).
