Zest

Taking an interest in things, events, ideas, interactions with others... making and sharing observations, perceptions, intuitions... connecting one's own experiences to the larger pageant of life... that's how a capacity for selective and focused attention gets honed and refined, so that we can begin to fashion a voluntary field of experience ("what I agree to attend to") and assemble a coherent pattern of living.

And, it's a requisite condition of a life of commitment, plurality, and intentional relation, or what Royce calls the philosophy of loyalty.

Further, it's a crucial step on the road to what James and Bertrand Russell call a life of "zest," and which most people nowadays just call happiness.

James: “wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness (etc.) there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’…”

Russell: "unhappiness is very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ‘ethics, mistaken habits of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends."

John Kaag also targets zest, in his American Philosophy: A Love Story, as inseparable from a life worth living. He connects it as well, through James and before him Emerson, all the way back to Socrates.

So... my current working hypothesis is that what I'm really tracking, in my inquiry into whatever it was Josiah Royce's Spirit communicated to me all those years ago about those elusive Germans, is the possibility and the necessity of zest, for a life well-lived.

By the way: my reconstructed habit of pounding the Chromebook along with the Seattle's Best first thing, well before sun-up, is proving zestful too. I was just treated to a lovely orange-pink predawn. Zest means not wanting to miss it.