Monday, March 4, 2024

What is Mythopoetics?

 

The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species.

"Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis of social action. In fact, few human activities are so ubiquitous and daily based as the narrative action, whether in the form of traditional stories, which gather tales about the group’s identity and origins, or in the simple tales of daily life which constitute ordinary communication, like the ones that give an ordered account of the day’s course, or the projects for the morrow. We are used to think narratively, generating more or less closed scenarios, with characters and objects, either material or conceptual, which have a set of relations organized according to the sequentiality of our intuition. We start from the models of our particular tradition, and inherit with them a set of concepts, densely interpreted within cultural processes, whose metaphorical contents show their belonging to some myth. Even in the spheres where it has been deliberately attempted to leave behind any mythological link, we find our thought permeated by notions whose origin is mythological. Such is the case, for example, of Western legal systems which are based upon the idea of positive law, for despite of having developed a structured system of thought according to chains of syllogistic reasoning, contain concepts as elements of the system whose origin is mythological, as that of equality before the law, whose origin can be traced back to Christian theology, in the idea of the formal equality among all men in relation to the sovereign will of God.1The genealogy is not only conceptual, but also ritual at a more basic psychological level, since the very same representations of trials date back to the ancient ceremonies of old mythologies. We cannot be surprised by the mythic root of most of our concepts and systems of social order, for our symbolic constructions were originated in the vital process that began long before our modern social structures. In one way or another, myths belong to social life and have an interpretation in relation to the past life of the group, forming a narrative scheme that entails a specific worldview.

Myths are linked to the psychological formation of our personality. Unperceptively the tales of the community shaped the features that we consider our values. We discover our individuation thinking a tale, identifying ourselves with some character, inventing a personal identity from some of the narratives that the group has to offer, through an imitative action that spontaneously shapes us. The myth is sung by the shaman, the poet, the prophet, the sage, but it is transmitted as well by the mother and the master, in a process of enculturation that is continued in all spheres of social life. The majority of the world’s mythological traditions relate the origins as the appearance of the gods or the ancestors out of preceding chaotic states, as if after a given instant, the thought focused and the world emerged. Just like the child, the group awoke within the narrative of its own identity, a tale that was first a rather automatic animal action, to later advance towards more reflective processes. However, its awakening was not like the child’s, into a closed and playful environment, but it occurred entirely inside the uncertainty of life. It was an active awakening, involved in a humanity that was already in progress, living and dying, who interpreted their actions according to their limited means, thinking after their small scenarios that which experience was showing to them, and projecting it over the horizon of their ignorance. The tales that remained, that endured the abyss of time, became fixed: if they had served to interpret existence up to that point and to survive according to those values, the conformity with the world proved their validity, and as an extra-cellular DNA its repetition was protocolled in the group’s customs by all possible means, universalizing its contents as the way of things.

Our everyday contact with myths makes them unproblematic cultural objects, although the transparency is lost when we closely examine their connotations and denotations. For this reason, it is indispensable to establish a basic terminology and an historical context for mythology as a philosophical problem. I will begin by delimiting the mythic domain from the points of view by which it has been addressed in philosophy of religion and anthropology. To this end, I will examine the ontological dimension of the different mythological traditions and the hierarchies that are established among the entities of myths. Secondly, I will ponder on myth from a linguistic vantage point, revising the most relevant theses postulated in relation to its metaphorical dimension, and proposing a simple model concerning the linguistico-epistemological function of determination of experience that myths gather. I will next move on to consider the relations between myth and history, examining the scope of myth’s traditional domain within fields that are considered historical. I will finish by discussing myth in relation to its composition, that is, from the point of view of the mimesis, a process in which, from the narrative action, the subject as well as the object and the scenarios of its experience are determined. The purpose of this argumentative line of thought is to obtain a preliminary definition of the mythic domain, as well as of the different concepts that are included in the definition."

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Saturday, February 4, 2023

An Epistemological Perspective of Individuation


         For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life.
A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of.
One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology in general is still today the one that establishes the Conscious/Unconscious (C/I) opposition. Furthermore, the different psychoanalytic buildings that the Western psychological tradition has built stand on this opposition. The term or operator C/I, as used by Carl Jung, determines the psychic space from a direct intuition of the vital experience of the adult: the unit of apperception of the environment and of basic cognitive continuity that designates the pronoun "I", or "ego."
For Jung, the ego is the complex factor that functions as a referent for both physical and psychic content. Ego and C/I are understood together: consciousness is the function or activity that maintains the relationship of psychic content with respect to the ego. . In this sense, the egoic function gives its shape to the psychic contents of consciousness. According to Jung, the ego is at the center of conscious activity, although the fact that the specific difference between Consciousness and Unconscious is the ego would imply that the ego occupies a rather liminal position between both concepts: the ego is a indexing frontier of psychic activities that have reached a certain formal coherence in relation to memory, it is a psychic function that sinks its roots in its border with the unconscious. But let us leave aside for the moment memory, Mnemosyne, the function that acts as a substrate for the unit of intuitive apperception from which the egoic function arises, in order to establish the basic topology of psychic space. The psychic space is made explicit in Jungian terms as in the graph: the dotted lines define the egoic function in a liminal way.

 

 According to the given definition of consciousness, the unconscious would be the psychic activity whose contents do not have the term of the ego as a referent. But this is not so, since a semantic term like the one used C/I, is built on a semantic opposition that implies a mutual determination. The Unconscious remains captured as meaning in its determination as non-ego, it then appears to us as a direct non-apperception of ourselves that acts contiguously with consciousness, and whose nature presents continuity with consciousness. The Unconscious then reveals itself to us as a place of relative ignorance, and the conscious as the place of relative knowledge. Since we started from the fact that the ego centers the physical contents as well as the psychic ones, cognitive relativity also extends to the knowledge of the physis, and invalidates any absolute value of the representations of science, since they are always those of an ego that is unknown. and its references cannot but be contingent and conditioned to such self-knowledge.
In this way, the unit of direct and intuitive apperception of the Ego that knows its limitation (although it does not know its limits), becomes the basis of all vital human experience, as well as the motor for its development. The ignorant ego is a dissatisfied ego that seeks its perfection in an asymptotic expansion of its liminal border with the Unconscious, a dynamic unity that appears to it as an integration that does not seem like a process that it can direct from its own cognitive precariousness. Thus, we see that the foundation of Jungian psychology -like that of so many psychologies that have emerged from the perennial philosophy- is epistemological, and that an ontology of cognitive action is derived from it: "what is" is revealed in a process of self-knowledge, or said with a metaphor, in a journey of luminous self-manifestation.

 


 

 

Saturday, October 22, 2022

Trabajar con sentido

 Mi abuelo paterno, ciclista amater por la montañas de Ávila, soldado en la Guerra de Marruecos, después mecánico de locomotoras de Renfe y siempre un hombre bueno en el mejor sentido de la palabra, trabajó 12 horas al día toda su vida, librando un domingo de cada dos, hasta que la gangrena le deboró una pierna y tres dedos del pie de la otra. Su salario apenas sirvió para dar de comer a su familia lo que hizo que mi abuela tuviera que regentar una tienda de ultramarinos en la Calle de la Toledana, tienda adjunta a la casa en la que pasé mágicas temporadas de mis vacaciones infantiles, días fabulosos que me reviven con su recuerdo, las horas en las que disfruté de su compañia con la veneración del niño que se siente en presencia de un héroe legendario y amoroso. Estas líneas son en su memoria.

Cada generación se yergue sobre los hombres y mujeres de las generaciones previas, sobre hombros de gigantes sin duda alguna, aquellos benignos titanes que nos han permitido tomar aire, mirar al sol de frente y tener la posibilidad de una vida regalada y libre. La gratitud hacia ellos es eterna, y a pesar de que su sacrificio se pierda en nuestra corta memoria, permanecerá como parte inseparable de nuesta identidad humana. Es pensando en todos ellos que se levanta en mis oídos un clamor apasionado, demanda acuciante que transmito en un momento más de la triste cadena de despropósitos que ayer estranguló nuestro futuro.  La pasada asfixia nos deja hoy en un presente yermo y cruel en el que de nuevo tenemos que alzar las voces contra las nuevas tiranías y la esclavitud, tan hijas de los miedos más crudos e ignorantes como de una autocomplacencia animal que está echando por la borda con desprecio el sacrificio de nuestros mayores. No nos esclavizan las máquinas con todas sus alienantes demandas y la estrechez de sus horizontes, sino la maquinalidad de nuestra inconciencia, nuestra apatía y nuestra abulia unidas al parasitarismo inculto, soez y apremiante, al que nos lanzan a la par el miedo a la vida y el miedo a la muerte. Para satisfacer esas precariedades trabajamos cada vez más, y con pobreza creciente, una insaluble rutina demoledora que reduce nuestra alma a un simulacro animal, una burla a la grandeza del Espíritu Humano, una mueca desfigurada de la vida cabal que hunde sus raíces en la triste historia de las masas desde el mismo origen de nuestras ciudades.

Hay tres líneas argumentales que deberían impulsar nuestras acciones a reconsiderar un cambio radical y urgente con respecto a nuestra actitud en relación al trabajo y nuestras formas de vida. La primera de ellas es antropológica. Un análisis del desarrollo de nuestras construcciones simbólicas como seres humanos muestra la vinculación que se da en todas las diferentes culturas entre las acciones económicas de sustento y organización del grupo con las acciones valorativas. Nuestras primeras valoraciones humanas se fundamentan en la semántica proporcionada por las emociones básicas de la especie. Las jerarquías de valores tienen en cuenta las acciones que llevan a un sustento adecuado, y son esas acciones uno de los polos fundamentales entorno al cual se entretejen los mitos, como vemos en el caso del polinesio Maui en las formas paleolíticas sociales, o en los mitos del cereal de las primeras ciudades, y en general en todos los mitos que recogen la acción de algún antepasado o dios civilizador. La acción económica está cargada de significado y en ningún caso se trata de un trabajo alienante o de una actividad contraria a los intereses personales o grupales. Un trabajo significativo, un trabajo con sentido es la primera aproximación espontánea que hemos dado a la acción de sustento, y el entramado social, la actividad más cotidiana depende de que tal sentido se de de manera acrítica. Se ha convertido en una reflexión consciente cuando el sentido desapareció, bien por la explotación esclavista, bien por el sinsentido general de trabajos alienantes y desconectados de los objetivos que impulsan la vida de todo ser humano individual: la subsistencia plena de contenido simbólico.

La segunda argumentación es sociológica y tiene que ver con los equilibrios homeostáticos sociales. El equilibrio homesotático de la sociedad depende de manera crítica de la integración armónica de las acciones económicas y las acciones narrativas ideológicas. Cuando estos dos bloques de acciones sociales no proceden de un mismo tronco simbólico común, las sociedades colapsan.  Los desequilibrios pueden venir por un cambio ecológico que al cambiar las acciones económicas no ofrezca una respuesta mitológica capaz de dar sentido social al cambio, o meramente la acumulación de explotación de la mayoría de la población que hace perder el sentido de la vida para la mayoría y por tanto la sociedad entra en una espiral de nihilismo y final barbarie. Panem et circenses es insuficiente para producir equilibrios homeostáticos. La drogadicción de la población con respecto a sus propios neurotransmisores prepara condiciones para catástrofes sociales a partir de cualquier "efecto mariposa".

La tercera argumentación es ética. El trabajo sin sentido no sólo hace entrar individuo y sociedad en desequilibrios que sólo se resuelven catastróficamente, sino que son un paso atrás en la evolución ética de nuestra especie. El ser humano es el ser éticamente libre. Deseamos libertad, expresamos libertad y nada que no incluya la libertad es  suficiente para nosotros. La voluntad de poder de nuestra especie sólo se lleva a cabo a través de la libertad de poder de todos sus miembros. No se puede ser libre sin querer la libertad de todos los demás seres. La afirmación de mi voluntad a costa de la voluntad de los demás no expresa ninguna forma de libertad, sino un mero instinto de supervivencia animal mal comprendido. De igual forma, una comunidad que impone sus criterios por la fuerza no puede nunca producir individuos libres, y genera sociedades inestables y catastróficas a la larga. La petición de trabajo con sentido ético es la propuesta ideal de un trabajo que garantiza la libertad del grupo y del individuo. El ideal simbólico es el motor de fuerza. Descartarlo por consideraciones prácticas es la sempiterna abulia y miedo de los "realismos alucinados" que dirigen nuestras comunidades y nuestras vidas carentes de sentido, "realismos alucinados" con sus pies "muy bien puestos sobre la tierra"... una tierra que gira flotando en el espacio de una inmensa galaxia. 

Un trabajo sin sentido para la vida en este mundo es un insulto a la dignidad humana y la causa desequilibrante del desastre de todas las civilizaciones ciudadanas que hemos planteado hasta ahora.