Tending the Garden Episode 7 – “The Praxial Modalities”

In this episode, the AI hosts continue through Tending the Garden by J. Daniel Alejos, stepping into one of its most structural chapters: The Praxial Modalities. This conversation translates abstract moral formation into the grammar of how people actually learn, live, and are shaped.

Alejos outlines four primary “modes” through which formation occurs — Story, Game, Instruction, and Philosophy — each representing a different way truth becomes embodied. The hosts break down these modalities as the architecture of human culture: Story shapes emotion and identity, Game structures reward and consequence, Instruction transmits explicit teaching, and Philosophy provides the deep frameworks that give coherence to the whole. Together, they form the operating system of moral life.

The episode highlights Alejos’s insight that formation is never random; it is always happening through these channels, consciously or not. Recognizing the pattern gives us the ability to tend our own souls — to see which modes dominate, which have gone silent, and how they interact to create alignment or distortion.

By the end, the hosts frame the Praxial Modalities as the “how” of moral geometry — the blueprint for how goodness, meaning, and coherence travel from truth into practice. This chapter turns moral theory into lived architecture, preparing the ground for the next discussion on how our formation, once understood, begins to form others.