What we are trying to do and who we are.
Gary David
Gary David has led two lives simultaneously: musician and epistemologist. Each informs the other and they blend like music and words in a song. Gary was interested in music from earliest childhood and has been told that he sang before he spoke. He performed all through his school years, while eventually graduating from Sacramento State University with a BA in political science.
After a 1958-1959 stint in the US Army, he moved to San Francisco to begin a professional musical career. He led a jazz trio, singing and playing in clubs, recording there until 1964 when he moved to Los Angeles and formed an experimental vocal-instrumental group he called ‘The Sound of Feeling’. The group featured Gary’s compositions and arrangements and twin sisters with remarkable voices, Alyce and Rhae Andrece. In 1967, well-known jazz critic Leonard Feather discovered the group. Author of
The Jazz Encyclopedia, Feather identified the group as an innovation in the history of jazz singing, and took them into the recording studio in 1968 to record their first album for the Verve label with Oliver Nelson as guest soloist on soprano sax. After appearing opposite Duke Ellington at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island, the group was signed to the Mercury-Limelight label where they recorded their second album,
Spleen. Both Sound of Feeling albums received Grammy Award nominations.
Simultaneously, Gary had begun his studies in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. In 1964 he met Canadian J. Samuel Bois, an ex-Jesuit, psychologist, general semanticist, and epistemologist. Bois was in the process of transforming epistemology into a new field he called
Epistemics: the science-art of innovating in the field of ‘human being theory’.
With Bois as his mentor, Gary studied and eventually taught from 1964 to 1976 at both the Viewpoints Institute and the UCLA Adult Extension School. Under Bois' tutelage, Gary received a doctorate in Epistemics in 1975 at the Union Institute and University, the first such degree given by an accredited college. His thesis, entitled,
Participating, stressed the coordination of both the affective and cognitive processes within the whole of organism-environment, from the individual to the human species. He used Bois’ model of the human being as a semantic transactor - a transactor of significance on both the non-verbal and symbolic levels - in which the electro-chemical, self-moving, affective, cognitive processes are all implicated in space-time transaction with a physical-psycho-social environment. As Gary explained, ‘participating’could be seen as the central theme that has infused his whole life movement regardless of what he does.
From 1974 until the mid-1980’s Gary participated in the somatic movement work of Emilie Conrad called ‘Continuum’. Seeing the significance of Emilie’s insights into the role of movement in the human being, he took classes, helped to develop the music, and introduced her students to epistemics.
His ongoing interest in affect as motivation came to a head in the mid-1990’s on reading
Shame and Pride by Donald Nathanson. Nathanson’s writing galvanized him both personally and professionally, and Tomkins’s work leaped a power or two in significance. He contacted Nathanson in 1999 and joined the Silvan Tomkins Institute where he began to study the work of Tomkins in earnest. He has more deeply incorporated his insights into Epistemics. Gary’s
presentation at the 2000 Tomkins Institute annual conference
Optimizing Connections, allowed him to show how participating in music can allow people to come together in freedom from scripts that might otherwise prevent joining.
In 1999, with science writer Brian Rothery in Ireland, he helped create the Philosphere website, dedicated to promoting, supporting and sustaining those 20th century writers who form the major influences of David’s epistemic world: L.L. Whyte, J.S. Bois, Alfred Korzybski, Silvan Tomkins, David Bohm, and Gaston Bachelard. This year, he and Rothery were instrumental in getting two major works of L.L. Whyte republished after they had been out of print for many years. Together, they wrote new introductions for Whyte's
The Next Development in Mankind and
The Universe of Experience. Gary is also the editor of Bois' textbook,
The Art of Awareness, now in its fourth edition since 1966, is still being used as an introduction to the subject in colleges and adult education.
Gary David continues to make music, doing occasional concerts and releasing recordings. Easily available are two vocal CDs,
Never Laugh At Stars (1990) and the new release
Thanks For You, a musical tribute to the early jazz work of Frankie Laine. Currently, he gives seminars and has a private practice in epistemic counseling, including affect education.
About us
Gary David
