“How well do we understand why our ideas might not appeal to others?” Love this question, it’s one that I’ve neglected too often. One lens on appeal is that it depends on whether our philosophy shares commonalities with areas that the “learner” already cares about. Sometimes those jumping-off points are “hunger for meaning” as you suggest. But sometimes it’s other things, like intellectual aestheticism or simple love of an activity. I wonder if appealing to “more parts of a learner” from a wider variety of disparate sources of caring, may be a useful aspiration?
In some ways, a preference of “being rational” can imply an implicit preference for only caring about one thing at a time (or at least not expressing conflicting desires simultaneously), which may make this aspiration more difficult to approach.
“How well do we understand why our ideas might not appeal to others?” Love this question, it’s one that I’ve neglected too often. One lens on appeal is that it depends on whether our philosophy shares commonalities with areas that the “learner” already cares about. Sometimes those jumping-off points are “hunger for meaning” as you suggest. But sometimes it’s other things, like intellectual aestheticism or simple love of an activity. I wonder if appealing to “more parts of a learner” from a wider variety of disparate sources of caring, may be a useful aspiration?
In some ways, a preference of “being rational” can imply an implicit preference for only caring about one thing at a time (or at least not expressing conflicting desires simultaneously), which may make this aspiration more difficult to approach.