Mythopoetics

George Cantor is credited with the conceptual construction called transfinite numbers , an endomorphization of the concept of infinite within the system of the real numbers ( ℝ ). The tool for the construction was the creation of a synthetic representation of the infinite as a whole, familiar to the Platonist Weltanschauung, whose condition of possibility was the natural number, i.e., individuation: infinite is then the result of an endless aggregation. Of course such a representation is not the actual representation of an intuition but the representation of a continuing iterative process, which by its closed condition (the finite character of the algorithm of counting), seems to have a meaning. Once the infinite is an endomorphic concept of the system, any composition with it will be endomorphic, including the notion of transfinite number. Infinite aggregates can be constructed either by endless iterative processes or by the postulation of properties to which infinite extensions ...

In relation to the semantic operator matter/idea, my concern is with the old ontological assumptions that are inherited and assumed unnoticed in its use, its implicit reifications. Physics does not speak anymore about matter. Fermions, the particles which are thought to be matter-like (in opposition to the force carrier bosons) make only sense within the whole system, which implies that matter is not material in the traditional sense, but some sort of symbolic construction that we use to understand an apeironic experience. For instance the Weyl-fermions are massless, which means a massless matter, if such an expression has any meaning at all. In this sense is very different to old Greco-Roman atomic constructions. And things do not get any better if we try to switch the matter representation for the concept of energy. According to Maxwell’s definition: energy is the capacity of a system to perform mechanical work (1891), but in order for the definition to have any meaning we already ...

A. 1    1.  A major objection to materialism: matter is a narrative construction of vital experience. Argument : the changing conception of matter through time. Objection : But today we have the accurate description, and therefore, somehow the description represents a morphism (even isomorphism). Answer : we could not know it, and in any case, it would be a description, i.e., a narrative, for any communicative account is narrative. 2     2.  The concept of matter is conditioned by communicative action. B. 1      1.  A major objection to idealism: ideas are compositions of concepts which have as final referents vital experience. Natural numbers and other basic concepts are basic intuitions of experience (sequence, synthesis, analysis and so on). Argument : the sense of numerosity in animals. The intuitive set theory in the epistemologies of anima mundi (totem thinking is a basic form of set theory). Objection...

The thesis of this lecture is that any historical reflection is an interpretative construction of the experience of the passage of time which is ontoepistemologically conditioned by the determinations of human material existence. Such a construction is an endomorphic process of representation of experience, a metaphorical rendering of the world in familiar terms, a mythologization. This process is not unique to traditional myths and history, but also to science and philosophy, in fact, philosophy of history is a mythologizing action. Let me construct an argument for this thesis.

 The idea of a literary canon is a variation of traditional censorship that makes only sense in the general processes of enculturation and development of narratives of domination. It certainly helps the teacher to reduce the number of candidates to be read on a classroom, but does a poor service to creativity endlessly repeating a transcendental pattern of inspired geniuses giving the law (literary or otherwise) to an ignorant humankind. When some years ago Harold Bloom made his famous top-ten hits in the History of Literature, leaving  Hamlet  and  Don Quixote  to play a very disputed final, after a disqualifying process of other literary works, he was consciously marking a censorship general reference, a  nihil obstat  for future works that creates an unreasonable mortgage for future generations. Media industry (publishing houses and general audiovisual ones) benefits from this trivial pursuit endeavors as much as the lover of literature is impaired...

  My relation to Japanese aesthetics began with a course in Zen that I took at the University of Buffalo, back in another lifetime, in the land of the Tonawandas. The teacher was a Korean ex-monk sent to the West by his master to spread Buddhism. I actually dropped the course during the first week, for the main book was Nature (yes, he wrote it on the board with a capital N), and I believed him. I invited him over for tea and discussed the Capture of the Ox, an allegory of the spiritual quest wonderfully depicted in ancient drawings on a book by Dasetz Suzuki. In those days, I still believed in the idea of finding oneself, as if I was a pair of lost keys in the sands of time, and therefore, in the idea of stages in an imaginary trip to the nowhere land of bliss and truth, precisely the theme of the Ox Hunt. I asked him in which of the 10 stations of the spiritual journey was thriving and answered -to my delight- that sometimes in 5, others in 10, but then again dropping to 1, ...

With this question I do not imply the distinction between  true poem and false poem , for I don’t believe in it, but rather, what properties must have a text to be identified as a poem? It is a subject that I have entertained for long and I would like to open a debate giving some possible answers. Traditionally, it was meter and rhyme, or, in a broader sense, formal properties of sound the reference frame for our qualification. Archaic poetry was still linked to the constraints of memory of oral tradition, and formal properties gave an easy and understandable protocol. Such a categorization opens up a clear understanding of early poetry, its connexion with shaman incantations and  magic , long before writing, in the world of the myths of  anima mundi . But the question became a bit more entangled when philosophy entered the scene. The philosophical poems of Parmenides, Empedocles, and other presocratics had the formal properties of sound of, say, Homer, or Ibicus, but ...

 Over the past century, the performing arts have tried to abandon the traditional social settings in favor of new scenarios for the representation of the work of art. This simple action increases the liminality of performance, for the ritual needs closed and well established scenarios. The resistance to such changes comes mainly from the general public, which needs to identify the performative actions within a mythical-ritual axis in order to give it credit. Such an authority valuates art from the point of view of ancient mythological actions. This produces a curious paradox. On the one hand, the general public desires and looks for the unanimity of criteria in relation to the work of art, it is the desire for a universal law. We need judgments like: “Beethoven's immortal symphonies”, even when we never took the time to listen to all of them in order to justify such a criterion. On the other, we want the artist to be original, which implies the impossibility of a consensus in relat...

  I have heard a peasant calling beautiful the ordered disposition of his farm, or what he called ordered, an invisible pattern of work superimposed to the land, together with its expectancies, projects and dreams. Homer came to mind, calling beautiful the wind when it blew the sail in a propitious manner. How conditioned to our basic emotions our sense of beauty! The best poets have n-arized them so much that they seem new entities. And these entities, when they are related to the social emotions give the ground for our modern sense of beauty. Sexual attraction, the tool for the perpetuation of the species, became the cosmic force of a blessed existence, the rewards of paradise, the inexhaustible fountain of energy and delight. Motherhood, no less divine and beautiful in our songs, gave a model for the understanding of the universe, and we contemplate it through the eyes of art in religious ecstasy, i.e., in a self-reassuring communal action.   What do we mean when we...

Podríamos clasificar las obras musicales en tres grandes grupos conforme a que sus estéticas sean duales, formales, o liminales, que se corresponden, más o menos, con los grupos que Lorca llamara del  ángel , la  musa  y el  duende .

The intuition of the passage of time is linked to the action performed. Physiological actions condition the pacing of the economical actions we perform in the world, actions whose purpose is the homeostasis of the social and individual organism, i.e., to maintain the physiological actions going on. Our sense of time is constituted by the morphisms between our individual physiology (actually, the common physiology we share with the others) and the physiology of the group, which in turn is conditioned by the environment, and therefore, by the astrobiological frame. This basic sense of time is modified by the narratives about time , by the symbolic structures that we construct to evaluate our vital experience, which include either consciously (Überlebenswelt) or unconsciously (Lebenswelt and Unterlebenswelt) notions about time and its intuition. From the point of view of continuous rationality, our formal scientific theories about time are just n-aryzations of our basic emotions and the...

The concept of anima mundi gave the first general epistemological frame to human beings. The world appeared as a representation thanks to the unified image of experience that it allowed, putting a reference frame for our actions. Nevertheless, the concept is loaded with a full set of contradictions, something obvious in the study of the myths of the cold societies. These paradoxes have been overlooked in the construction of the immortality myths of both the plane of the King-God and the universal law, and are responsible not only for misunderstandings about the narratives of the individual but also of all sorts of manipulations and narratives of domination. Here I just mention a few aporiae. In the myths of the anima mundi plane, the soul is a common principle to living and not living beings. In this sense, therefore, is either a property of everything or we can say that everything is soul. If the first case, i.e., the soul is a property, we are implying that there is something el...

  Let me insist on the scope of the concept of individuation , for it is fundamental to understand the structure of myth.  In Agamemnon , Aeschilus expresses, paradoxically, what is probably the first register of the social context of the phenomenon of individuation: I have my own mind, separated from the others . [1] The fact that we understand what he is saying is a proof of its falsity, for an isolated mind could not make itself understood.          1. I cannot think or express my individuation without a language.           2. Languages are group constructions, never individual.                 Therefore, I cannot think or express my individuation with individual terms.                 But when I think or express my individuation, the group does not articulate my voice. The paradox is solved if we understand that identities ...

   In traditional African thinking, time doesn’t move forward, towards a climax or an end of the world, but it rather falls back into the pool of memory. There are two categories of time, Sasa and Zamani, Swahili words for the designation of what seems to be the present and the past. On a closer look, Zamani includes its own past, present and future, so we oversimplify calling it the past. Time moves from Sasa to Zamani, from the present moment of vital experience, to a kind of macrotime of mythical experience, self-contained more than strictly cyclical. Sasa is a lineal microtime based on the experience of economic activities, while Zamani is the narrative time where meaning is created. One could say that the weight of Zamani annihilates Sasa, or better, that Sasa is a mere security buffer where the unpredictability of vital experience is differed until is valuated and interpreted. Myth functions in its more basic levels as a homeostatic force for the individual and the grou...

Carl Kerenyi used the term to designate the common elements in myths belonging to different traditions, like the tales of the Sacred Child, the descent of the hero to the underworld, the marriage of the King-God to the Earth Goddess, and so on. The first question which spontaneously rises is: how can this be? The easiest answer is, well, someone copied it, or it was forced upon on a conquest. Then objections rise: how do we explain that cultures like the Maya and the Egyptian, for instance, have a similar mythologem for the creation of the world through the word of a divine figure, with apparently no cultural contact? At this point, different kinds of transcendentalisms come to the answer. Putting aside extravagant modern speculations of the New Age, like the so-called theory of the ancient astronauts, we are faced with the traditional ontotheologies. They quickly answer that the common element is the existence of a transcendental realm in which human history has its fram...

   If the social persona is a mythical construction of the group, our individuation is a social narrative constructed with some of the personae developed in the economic actions, either of the present or the past. There is no free will  because our psychological will, linked to the basic emotion of vitality (the dopamine system that is in charge of stimulating the individual in its search for whatever is needed to survive), is just like the will of others, a will to power. This does not mean that I cannot choose among different things, but the person who chooses is not more an individual than the narratives that he or she identifies as himself or herself, and choice is always conditioned by basic emotions and their complexification in the mythical actions. Nowadays, the concept of freedom has basically meaning in juridical terms, as a narrative that maximizes the diversity of a group, and therefore, its power for survival. However, few forces are as important to human d...

 Affective neuroscience postulates a neural circuit for the regulation of the mammal emotion of the social bond. [1] Curiously, this circuit is located in the same cerebral areas where the sexual and the maternal emotions are located, and near also to the processing areas of pain. This circuit is responsible for the distress that mammals suffer from separation (especially in the young ones), but its positive function is related to the experience of pleasure in bonding. The process is mediated by endorphins and oxytocin, like in the maternal emotional system, i.e., is a pleasurable experience. Oxytocin is relevant to the formation of group memories [2] , and therefore, to the creation of myths. We are biologically conditioned to be social, as was pointed out by Aristotle in a famous passage of his Politics . In this sense, social media feed upon our needs. They give endorphins and make us addicted to our own opioids and sexual neurotransmitters. But this is not new, is what t...

La semántica mitológica tiene una clara composición metafórica, aspecto que llama la atención desde el punto de vista de los lenguajes filosófico y científico, que buscan la precisión formalizando y protocolizando sus elementos. Sin embargo, si el examen se hace desde la valoración del Lebenswelt, desde el acervo de saber acrítico de una comunidad, que se expresa en todo tipo de imágenes, paralelismos, sustituciones y alegorías, el contenido metafórico es algo común y ordinario. Decir que el mito es metafórico no es caracterizarlo por una diferencia específica: los lenguajes naturales humanos también lo son. Partiendo de esta observación, Ernst Cassirer postuló que mito y lengua han seguido una misma evolución debido a que comparten una misma raíz, el pensamiento metafórico, es más, redujo la caracterización del mito a la dilucidación de una cuestión teórica: determinar si es el habla la que genera el mito debido a su naturaleza original metafórica, como proponía Max Mü...

As it is well known, ἱστoρἱα   means investigation , and presupposes notions such as historical fact and necessary sequence of facts , which are also implied in traditional myth. When we deal with the question of origins, a sequence of facts has a first member which is final or literal, (exomorphical in our notation) say, a creator god, a Demiurgos (or any representation that we choose to be final, beyond which we cannot go). The sequence of facts that form our narrative of how the Demiurgos created the world is not homogeneous, for the necessity of passing from fact 1 to fact 2, is of a different character than the rest of the sequence. The actions of a supposed divinity are not of the same ontological, epistemological, or praxiological order than the human ones, so they do not belong to a critical historical investigation, which needs homogeneous sequences in order to make meaningful narratives. The notion of a sacred history , in the sense of a history as a divine plan, is con...

Myths contain exomorphisms, which determine the limit conditions, the fundamental ontological representations, as well as endomorphisms which develop them in narratives and connect the liminal representations to the everyday acritic knowledge of the community, the Lebenswelt. By mythologization we have described the sequences of exomorphisms and/or endomorphisms, and we have characterized myths by this linguistic action, but there is another linguistic process inverse to mythologization which completes its operations: divinization. Mythologization rendered familiar the unknown. Divinization renders unknown the familiar. The process is specially clear in the social persona of the ancestor, although it can be extended to objects or to the world at large. As time passes, the persona of the ancestor becomes less and less familiar. In the cases where the particular ancestor made a strong imprint in the memory of the group, by means of a successful civilizing action (Maui, Prometheus, Cecro...

   According to Herder, language is a register of the evolution of the human soul, and due to the fact that our first innerization of the world was theological, our dictionaries are pantheons. [1] Let’s put aside for the moment the theological part of the argument, for theological myths are later elaborations of myths of the anima mundi , whose main figure is not the god, but the ancestor, and translate the idea to the theory of morphisms. 1    1.     Our first exomorphisms were in the symbolic spheres of the ancestors, gods and the supernatural. 2    2.   Those exomorphisms were endomorphized, rendered familiar through the use of metaphors. With the example of the eye of Ra.  The sun is exomorphic, belongs to the realm of literal representations of the god Ra, but is vitalized through the metaphor of the eye, and comes closer to our vital experience. Exomorphisms must have a minimal endomorphic connection in order to be refere...

The representations which are the building blocks of a myth can be literal (or final), or a metaphor, i.e., a chain of representations linked to basic cultural referents (those linked to basic emotions). Let’s call exomorphic to the first type and endomorphic to the second. Exomorphic representations or exomorphisms are final ontological declarations, limits for our thinking that function as referents for the linguistic constructions of our communication. Endomorphisms, on the other hand, are familiar renderings of exomorphisms, as well as rendering of other endomorphisms. Exomorphisms change through time, what today is final and literal tomorrow will be a metaphor. With an example. In Egiptian mythology, the sun was called the eye of Ra , and the devotee took it at its face value, literally: Ra sees the world and humans through the sun. For us today is a metaphor, for we have other representations that explain the sun, that endomorphize it, though the representations of particle p...

  De manera provisional, adoptaré las tesis de Durkheim y Habermas que definen el mito a partir de su funcionalidad comunicativa como narraciones fundadoras de la identidad social. Los mitos son acciones comunicativas humanas, y su comprensión supone la elucidación de la funcionalidad del lenguaje humano, aclaración que a su vez remite a algunos otros temas relacionados. Desde una perspectiva antropológica, la problemática sobre el origen del lenguaje requiere una aproximación psicobiológica que incluya un análisis del proceso de comunicación animal y no una mera discusión metafísica, ya sea hecha esta desde los supuestos de alguna ontoteología o de la psicología racional 1 que utilizó la filosofía hasta el siglo XIX. No obstante, considero relevante hacer un boceto, aunque sea rápido, de las tesis más importantes que sobre la relación entre mito y lenguaje se han pensado, ya que ayudará a perfilar mejor la posterior teoría psicolingüística, además de mostrarnos l...

    Does History fulfil today the social function of identity creation which in the past was accomplished by mythology (religious mythology included), as Lévi-Strauss [1] thought? If we observe the relationship between political identity and literary and artistic myths of the 19 th Century in Europe we obtain a few relevant examples to give an answer to this question. In the 19 th Century, with the upsurge of European Nationalisms, history covered to a great extent the gap left by Christian mythology after its collapse due to the subsequent development of positive science and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. The revitalization of the great national poems and the writing of new ones along the 19 th Century in most of Europe, shows a relatively recent example of exclusively endomorphic mythologization, in which new national identities are invented through a process of linguistic fusion of elements of pre-Christian mythology with historical science. We observe h...

Un posible segundo candidato a referente conceptual que nos sirviera para caracterizar los mitos, y explicar su diferencia con la religión y la metafísica, podría ser la estructura ontoepistemológica de los relatos tomada antropológicamente, sin referencia a das Heilige. Si examinamos los relatos sobre los orígenes de las principales mitologías tradicionales del mundo 1 , observamos que todas ellas contienen cuatro elementos básicos: ser humano, dios o ser sobrenatural, naturaleza o mundo, y caos o desorden, los cuales intercambian con gran facilidad sus identidades y se hibridan, siguiendo una clara tendencia antropomórfica. Así por ejemplo, no es raro encontrar seres caóticos que a la vez son elementos de la naturaleza (agua, fuego), y que toman forma animal (algún tipo de ofidio o de monstruo acuático), pero que a la vez son dioses primordiales, o titanes, cuyo comportamiento es humano a nivel emocional, o son incluso reyes demonizados de tribus rivales a las que venc...