What we tried to do in the so-called “making of a counter culture” was affirmative, unlike anomic culture (e.g., the anti-war movement which permanently shaped many worldviews). Our generative culture, in principle, embraced anomic culture as a way to its annuling. We were the answer.

Both trends might be legacies of the Beats. Or does the trace go back to Whitman and a post-European sense of humanity latent to the idea of America? Going forward, “postmodernism” (or post-theocentric, post-metaphysicalist culture) can be characterized as two kinds of trend: one I avow, associable with humanistic psychology; and one trend, which is primordially cynical, leads to an “affirmation” of simulacral sensibility, and implies nihilism.

Anyway, it wasn’t re-tribalization we were trying, though the anthropological echoes were obvious in the agrarian way many lived, which led to the ethos of sustainability.

“Familialization” is an infelicitous term, but it fits: making extended families by choice (intelligent choice, we would think: mating minds), rather than relative to families of origin. A sense of human originality emerged as deep friendships. For the likes of me, a sense of our humanity as such—a conception of human potential—emerged with the mating minds of my rather academic life.

Those were days of long letters, crafted as best young minds can, yet giving time to the medium, making the time to care. Isn’t it the nature of friendship that it provides for rich time, received with care according with care given? Maybe it’s only youth, due to its cohortian horizons, that may feel thinking together as a flowing singularity, anticipating each other’s thoughts, finding oneself expressed through the other. So called “True Love” may belong only to highly entwined self formations, available only to youth (and artists or high inquirers), as if really becoming Of one mind, where one’s amazement is ours, so thankful for our belonging together in The Same.

Actually, literary history belies youth’s sense of ready originality. Belles lettres, in the name of each other, may write height to height through an inwordness of the simple poem, full, if not possessed, of Time.

My model back then (so beyond me at 25) was “Duino Elegies.” It’s comical to recall what I wrote one week, so long, the “Lovely Trial.”

Our real net of friendships would eventually disperse around the country, according to lives taking their own courses. So it was like having one’s ownmost family spread about, for those who were spiritually on the road for some years afterward, mid-‘70s through mid-‘80s. Persons of my generation (plus and minus a few years) might easily feel a great story remains largely untold.

I made myself no child of the Cold War years, no child of ontological cynicism. I lived deeply, I think, with the evolving notion of authentic postmodernity, unlike the simulacralists who turned a philosophical understanding into academic journalism.

It’s easy for me to feel distance on the 20th century (which actually “ended,” as much as any era has a border, around 1990), like a millennial who, like all youth still, lives as if everything is future (and the past is entertainment). Conversely, the 21st C is very quickly becoming alien to a 20th C mind (Dreyfus and Kelly’s All Things Shining seems lame to me; I don’t recommend the book). However, exploring the difference is useful (though not overtly on my agenda): how something primordial came to closure in the 1990s. Though every era remains a child of its parent era, and eras imply millennia of social evolution, and humanity is intelligence of the Earth; still, we are primordially futural, in a sense of imaginative, aspiring, and idealizing potential giving gravity to precedent, keeping legacy alive for generative time, not for its own sake. (A difference between “liberalism” and “conservatism” can be seen as a politics of time—but pursuit of such a theme also isn’t part of my agenda.)

In light of what I’ve lived through, All Things Shining is not appealing, partly because I’m not oriented to writing for introductory philosophy courses (though budget-strapped Departments of Philosophy do need to attract more students). Yet, I certainly stand for the importance of philosophy! But what might philosophy as such best be[come], after metaphysicalism, after the now-distant Cold War years of postmodernist culture? What may philosophy well be as no longer after anything, but looking into horizons of our bright evolving? What constructive sense might be made of such rhetoric as “our bright evolving”?

At best, everything is by our design—intrinsic pleasures and extrinsic pleasures. Homemaking (architecture, interiors, landscaping) is various kinds of environmental design. Gardening and urban farming are horticultural design. Dinner parties are joys of culinary design (such as one can make time to at least simulate a connoisseur). Travel is not tourism, but adventure design.

Such extrinsic value also has intrinsic value, which we welcome because, for a very good life, intrinsic value prevails over extrinsic value. (We don’t especially welcome feeling that intrinsically valuable aspects of life also have extrinsic value.)

Intrinsically appealing is friendship, especially intimacy in friendship. Of course, intimacy itself is intrinsically appealing; yet, lastingness is weaved through the quality of its friendship.

There are many kinds of loves, endless potentials for kindressness, and manifold facets of solidarity, all implying intrinsic value. The intrinsic pleasure of appreciating refined arts (musical, literary, dramatic, visual) expresses intrinsic potential for “artistry” of sorts in one’s life.

I won’t try here and now to capture a scale of intrinsic value; yet—no surprise—my prospects for various, partial trials feel intrinsically appealing, especially for someday venturing to conceptually meld all the trails into a selformative landscape.

O, language, serve all the entertainers, from disclosive play to all manner of inquiry: our frivolities, our humors, the parties, a strident bathos, formal comedy, plangency and irony, our ultimate openness, our wit, our heights, and love of insisting presences.