Skip to main content

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 (verse 757), Aeschylus expresses, paradoxically, what is 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 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 narrative (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 of individuation in social terms, or, with other words, individual identity is a question of communication and social action.



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

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rhapsodies of Anima Mundi: Fear of Death

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shamans and the development of Social Masks

  The growing dissociation of new social persons (social masks) from a single primitive mask that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions. From the mask of the shaman, compatible with the masks of man or woman, but not with the child mask, unfold the social masks of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king. The shamanic powers are either the result of a search or of a spontaneous happening within a human lineage, which from the point of view of the professionalism of the economic action of shamanism is irrelevant, since it is the work of a specialist for communication with the Anima Mundi. In fact, the lineage transmission of social persons is not exclusive to shamanic professional practice. The shaman is not an individual person any more than the social person of the old man can be. I...
Post a Comment
Read more