Reaching

An aspirational higher life for me is a life in which I exercise farther-reaching capacities than I have exercised hitherto, making intrinsically desirable gains in vitality. Three broad phases of increasing human vitality involve reaches to the personally interesting, to the socially important, and to the transcendent. Every significant success of reaching is correlated with a program for righting, that is, for promoting good order to the extent that states of things may be affected by exercise of that higher capacity, and these points of correlation are marked as “values”; but investment in an aspirational model of life is not the same as compliance with a prescriptive model of life.