Paradoxes of the Concept of Soul

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 else which is not the soul and which is, somehow, more simple, something that can have or not the property. If it had always the property, then it wouldn’t  be a property, but part of its definition. What could be such a simple monad of which the soul is a property?

On the other hand, if everything is soul, the individual or monad (not in Leibnizian terms, but simply as the idea of a conceptual unit for reasoning, like natural numbers) would be a property of the soul, and therefore, would not be a monad (for properties are second or n-ary determinations).

Aeschilus Paradox

  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 are narrations. My individual body is a narration (just have a look to the narratives of Anima Mundi about the human body, and compare it with those of molecular biology), and the identities of my group and my persona, are narrations.

We can only think individuation in social terms, or, with other words: individual identity is a question of communication and social action.

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[1] Verse 757. Aeschilus Tragedies. Harvard-Heineman. London and Cambridge (Mass.) 1983. P.165.

Sasa, Zamani and Financial Markets

   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 group, closing and objectifying human experience into language.

  We literally live in the past. As Gerald Edelman said in relation to our neural mappings, we remember the present. In Swahili terms, we place Sasa experience within a narrative frame work of Zamani. This is not exclusive of mythologies of the plane of the anima mundi. Even the narratives of the plane of human law of the present (well not all narratives of the present are of human law) play on that edge of time. Financial markets valuate constantly future economic scenarios, in fact, they never live in the present but create a narrative, with a past, a present and a future that are projected forward, where the meaning for the unintelligible and escaping economical present will be unveiled. Both the idea of a meaning in the future and the idea of a meaning in the past have an equivalent mythical homeostatic function. Our images of the future are as self-deceiving as those of the past. They are both memory variations for the generation of social order.

What is a Mythologem?

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 frame. This would imply the existence of a metareligión in which particular religions would play a kind of cosmic role. Schelling was the first one to propose such a system. Religions would not be allegories of something else but rather tautegories of the unfolding of the divine according to the conditions of the different stages in the development of humankind. The common elements of the mythologems would then be simply concordances on the different spatio-temporal actualizations of the plan. A similar point of view was also sustained by the writers of the Eranos Group of last century, Eliade, Kerenyi, Jung, Campbell, Schrödinger, Corbin and others, with the apparent corroboration of the worldwide common patterns of mythology that the first map of human myth brought about. But these theses did not prove anything that was not already assumed in the ontoepistemology of departure: the idea of a divine element at work in the universe.

Life is a mystery in the full noon sun. The concept of "the divine" has been so clumsy manipulated that we must be careful in its use. Immanence and transcendence go hand in hand in our life experiences. We can try explanations that give a little more credit to the actions of life, to what transpires behind what appears, using an expression from Ibn Arabi. We share mythologems in many cases by mere contact and cultural communication, and we are ready to incorporate them because we understand them and make sense to us, for they are based on a common psycho-physiological constitution of human beings. When there was no apparent contact, like in the example of Mesoamerica and the Middle East, the mythologems are similar because we solve the same problems of survival with similar tools, psychological and material, and if we say that Hurakan or Ptah created the world with the word, like the ancestors of the Australian aboriginal people did in their primordial Walkabout, we are stating the importance that language had for all humans, and how language fixes and objectifies experience, valuating and interpreting life. The fundamental semantics for communication is given by the emotional protocols, in fact, we basically communicate emotions in different degrees of n-aryzation: they are the content of the ancient myths, which we elaborate in ever more complex ways of symbolization. However, the mystery remains, the Noumen. The very fact of human emotions developed from these vital movements, the perspectives that open to something other than the material environment in which they take their form, is something as fascinating as it is mysterious. On the basis of the vital, something else stands out, opening up a form of Reality that cannot be explained merely in material or vital terms.

Free Will

   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 development as freedom. Freedom and the human project, still so precarious today, go hand in hand. 

Social Media and Endorphins

 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 the group always did, although implies a displacement of the formation of memories and myths from the traditional settings of the geographical city, to an eclectic virtual market realm whose narratives of identity are conditioned by the economy of globalization, which is establishing a mythical–ritual axis with more elements of the plane of the universal law than with those of the plane of the human law, resembling more some sort of new traditional religion: the psychological problems of immortality are left to the old traditions and money regulates the rest of the emotional realm, while the problems of material origins are passed to science.

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[1] See, for instance, Jakk Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. New York 1998. p.p.262-274.

[2] Panksepp, Ibid.p.272-273.

Metáfora y literalidad de los mitos

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 Müller, o si, por el contrario, es el mito el que ha dotado a la lengua de su carácter metafórico, como proponían Herder y Schelling¹.

Sacred History

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 contradictory, for the sacred excludes the critical thinking. On the other hand, history cannot go back beyond fact 2 of any narrative account of the past: in fact, historical writing has only sense when it includes just endomorphisms.

Divinization

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, Cecrops, Yao, Manu, etc.), he becomes progressively a hero, semi-god, a god, a supreme god, and finally a Deus Otiosus (as Eliade call them). These two processes are at work in myth, and are simply expressions of the active interpretation of life experience (mythologization), and the work of oblivion (or entropy) which is divinization, a return to the unfocused, to apeiron. 

Dictionaries and Pantheons

   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 referents at all.

3    3.  With the passage of time they become completely endomorphic and acritic concepts, id est, part of a dictionary.

   Our dictionaries are not strictly pantheons, neither geological strata of the process of mythologization, for languages have a shorter life span than the mythologization process (as we see in Christianism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism), but are simply a web of endomorphisms.

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[1] See Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. Christian Friedrich Boss. Berlin . 1770. p.44.

Morphisms and the process of Mythologization

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 physics, bosons and fermions (the constituents of the sun and of all matter) are taken at face value. In both cases we project a linguistic system upon experience (what we call nature) and find referents that we consider final, we build a linguistic exomorphism, a translation of meaning which expresses a conceptual ontological framework. A process of mythologization is a double symbolic action of interpretation of experience in terms of exomorphisms and endomorphisms.

The ever expanding process of exomorphism is the ever expanding process of symbolization of life-intelligence.

Origen del lenguaje y la mitología

 

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 racional¹ 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 los condicionamientos teóricos de los que partió la mitología.

Mythical Construction of National Identities.

    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 how communities without national political identity and without territory, like Finland, resort to the compilation of popular legends to create with them myths about the origins, which are inserted without solution of continuity inside the historical thinking of the epoch, and are manipulated with political ends. This mythology, as it happens in the case of Lönnrot’s Kalevala, did not need to be read or understood in order to perform its function as original referent to the community. The Kalevala, written in a Karelian dialect which was not understood by the majority of Finns, functioned as a symbol of mythological identity stronger than Bible itself, whose myths, linked to the Middle East, were of little use to construct a different identity to the Swedish or the Russian. In a Christian Europe, the specific difference in national identities could only be given by pre-Christian myths, and for these to have ontoepistemological credibility and be something more than simple tales of barbaric hoaxes, it was necessary that a philosophy of mythology such as the Schellingian, would elevate them to signs of a wider meta-historical scope. Even so, as the remains of these mythologies were found buried into popular culture, where they had survived thanks to a Christianism prone to syncretism by way of the saints’ figures, it was necessary to create a new concept of community, of a trans-political content, applicable to the idealized primitive communities from which the myths purportedly were derived as well as to the medieval and modern communities, a concept that could function as the kernel of an historical identity that, in fact, was weakly based on a common literature or a political union.

      The problem of Kalevala’s language, in another dimension, was applicable to Germanic myths, because the further the regression in time the bigger the discontinuity of the language, not to mention the problems which the complete disappearance of literature itself from an historical given moment supposed, in which, nonetheless, the group’s identity was persistently maintained based on principles of metaphysical essentiality of the race. German identity, as the Finnish, appealed to myths, and consequently to language, to the basic way of thinking of a human group which allegedly had maintained a continuity of identity, even though to the German the Christian identity and Latin were superimposed. Such kernel of identity, theoretically facilitated by Hegel’s concept of people (Volk), grounded in turn on that of the absolute Geist,^[2] finds a simpler and more usable definition for political praxis in the variation that Wagner makes of it. Starting from the substantiality that the Hegelian absolute spirit bestows to the human community, Wagner will hypostatize a Germanic linguistic community which has lived on under different historical configurations maintaining an essential identity, designed by the concept of Volk. The Volk is a human group that acts through a common collective desire whose actions are always right and appropriate to the necessity of the moment, a group to whom it corresponds the authorship of myths, or more precisely, of the substance out of which the individual poet, who communions with the Volk, will create the myths.^[3] Popular myths then express eternal truths -Wagner^[4] will say- a principle which is generally assumed by all the poets and musicians that work with Volk elements in the European 19^th Century to fuse myth, history and nation, be it in the mystical chants of mother Russia of Mussorski’s Boris Godunov, or in the Wagnerian sacramental dramas where the poet presents the myth as a way of knowing through feeling, a superior form of knowledge than that of historical knowledge.^[5] From this approach it is derived that history should retreat in the face of the immediate truth that the myth entails, an epistemology of emotion in which the myth provides history with the elements that this one lacks in order to be a complete mythology, since the popular tale is also included into an operatic ritual. In a first step, mythology becomes history, it is retrieved from the popular heritage in a process of reinvention, to be inserted in the historical chain as original link, not in an absolute sense, but as the origin of an specific people, to later, mythologize history by way of endomorphic representations of these myths about the origin, projected over historical time, and especially, over the present. Bourgeois art takes charge of carrying out the process with the historical novel, as well as through opera and theatre.^[6]

   The mythologization of history and the historization of myth is not, however, a new process of 19^th Century nationalisms. Since the beginnings of theatre in Athens, drama had worked as a ritual in which the identity of the city was mythologized and recreated in a more or less critical manner, dealing with stories of a distant past.^[7] Shakespearian theatre itself mythologizes in its time the story of the kings of England inventing the Elizabethan identity, no less than it will be done later by the theatre of the Maoist revolution in China with the revolutionary dramas, whose characters are revolutionary soldiers, peasants and workers.^[8] That which is characteristic of the European 19^th Century are the processes of refounding the identity for those countries that already have one, and of creating a new one for those which have not yet achieved it, that may fit into the new political framework defined by colonialism. Therefore, for instance, Tennyson reuses the Arthurian myths in England as a whole purported symbol of both British tradition and the human epic. With a Christianism of pantheistic trait -synthesizing Celtic and Roman traditions- Tennyson proposes Arthur as the symbol of the human soul in its vital fight to maintain ethical ideals and aspirations, with an alleged universal validity.^[9] The poems of Tennyson’s Arthurian cycle, which enjoyed a great diffusion and prestige in the aristocratic and bourgeois society of Great Britain, more than an allegory of the human being, as its author intends, show the idealization that Britain’s ruling class had of itself as an elite which directs the fate of the world, a self-legitimation of their right to dominate based on the belief that their moral values are the ideal values of the whole humanity. In Great Britain, the concept of Volk is unthinkable, since it contradicts the political structure of the nation itself, formed by several people that could claim their own separate identity.

  Without the conceptual tapestry of German idealism, the construction of the concept of Volk (or an equivalent one) is not such a simple thing, as it is proven by the difficulties that the formation of the Irish identity has had. As it was seen in the performances of the Irish national theatre founded at the beginning of the 20^th Century,^[10] it was easier to elaborate a magical identity from old popular legends than to establish a modern one with differential traits, over which, to begin with, there was not any consensus beyond a shared emotion of difference in relation to the English. And it was even more complicated to establish a relation of continuity between the old myths and the modern identity. Yeats had done it by linking the myths of the Faeries to rural Ireland, which in an industrial moment as the beginnings of the 20^th Century it implied the proposal of a political pathway with a difficult exit.^[11]

       The mythopoetics of European national identities in the 20^th Century, just as we observe in these examples, justifies Leví-Strauss’ affirmation that history has inherited the social functions of myths, and it shows something more: that in the reflective process of historicity, the relationship between myth and vital experience is more complex than the one which distinguishes between history as the sphere of the real and myth as the sphere of the imaginary. 

(This is a frgament of Chapter 3.2 Historical Consciousness and Mythologization. Part I of Mythopoetics. p.p.98-102 of the Spanish Edition)

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[1] See Claude Lévi-Strauss. When Myth Becomes History. In Myth and Meaning. Routledge. London and New York 2009. p.36.

[2] The Volk to Hegel is the real susbstance of the absolute spirit, from which the citizen is its consciousness. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel. Fenomenología del Espíritu. Translated into Spanish by Wenceslao Roces. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Madrid. 1982. p.262-263.

[3] Cf. Richard Wagner. On Music and Drama. The Greek Ideal. Trans. H. Ashton Ellis. University of Nebraska Press. Lincoln and London. 1992. p.p.83-92.

[4] Ibid.

[5] The essence of drama, Wagner will say, is to know through feeling. Richard Wagner. Ibid. p.p. 188-189.

[6] Apart from Wagner’s Works, European opera (when it is something more than operetta) places on stage the historical dramas of Schiller or Pushkin (with the melodramatic taste of the epoch), and in the cases where there is not an invention of a Volk identity, as in the Italian opera, political allegories are constructed in which the fight for freedom and independence is expressed, being these concepts understood from a nineteenth-century bourgeois and nationalist point of view.

[7] In particular, Euripides develops a critic of Athens through the tragedies of Trojan topic, composed in a time when the city is in an imperial expansion.

[8]The Red Lantern, is one of the most notable examples of a model opera, where the ethical patterns to adopt by the citizens are represented and a new identity is redefined. The plot and characters which appeared in the traditional Chinese opera were changed. In The Red Lantern, a railway worker who joins in the decade of the 30s the underground communist movement, is recruited to fight in the war against Japan.

[9] Cf. F.E.L. Priestley. Tennyson’s Idylls. In Tennyson’s Poetry. W.W. Norton and Company. New York. 1971. p.p.634-648.

[10] The Abbey Theatre of Dublin, founded in 1904 and which served as the ritual stage of the Irish nationalism.

[11] Unlike what happens in the German case, the continuity of identity between the old Ireland and the modern is only achieved as an explicit belief, just as it is laid down in relation to the people of Faery, the other people, or the faeries, the people from yonder times, the ancient Ireland of the druids which only presents itself to the one who believes in it. See William Butler Yeats. Mythologies. Specially the Celtic Twilight, in the tratment of the ideas if belief and non-belief in the supernatural world. Collier Books. Macmillan Publishing Company. New York. 1969. And the poem of Yeats. To Ireland in the Coming Times. The Collected Poems. Scribner Paperback Poetry. New York. 1996.p.50-51.