Mythopoetics

Most traditional mythologies have equated life to breath. Breath was considered to be something more than respiration, linked -in a tradition that goes back to myths of Anima Mundi- to some sort of universal life. In this context, death was the departure of such transcendental airy entity towards fabulous scenarios of different kinds. The link of breathing and the capacity for speech contributed for a further metaphysical development of the physiological act of oxygenation. The Parmenidean tradition in Greece, but especially the Aristotelian philosophy, linked life more to intelligence than to any other physiological action. In fact, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle declares life to be some sort of intelligence. This double link, to breathe and to intelligence, in their transcendental or materialistic interpretations, gave for centuries a cornerstone for the definitions of life. Even, in the practice of modern medicine up to the 1960’s, it was the loss of the capacity to breathe (toget...

  What is the meaning of the Kantian question in the sphere of the Lyrical Citizen ? Devoid of transcendental meaning, we are talking about ethical action under the narrative of domination of Human Rights. What do I do with my life, today, under the restraints of a wild system of production which leaves no time for personal development beyond the social persona which tradition, luck and effort offers me? In terms of the guilt/debt narrative that we inherited from parents and state, the answer to Kant is: simply pay your dues, be a slave and die (in that order, for suicide is an order disruptor). When you live chained to the inertia of old myths of domination there is no room for the ethical question, in fact, ethics has to be postponed to a future nowhere land of the blessed, whether supernatural or super-historico-materialist. For most, the ethical question is answered in immediate physiological terms of survival, a poor reply, a forgetful automatism. Grounded on our basic emotio...

     Breathing the depth of the starry night is stimulus enough to feel ataraxia . The whirlpool of movement and change in which my thoughts about the apeiron take shape in flowing words and metaphors detains when it encounters its silence. The concept is in Epicurus: mental imperturbability, a general desire for strifeless existence, a deep longing for a permanent homeostasis. I find particularly interesting the poetic and active dimensions of ataraxia , for the passive ones are also produce by morphine, or by any random process which ends up in a discharge of internal opiates, a mere blind experience in which there is not a symbolic creation which pushes life towards new frontiers.   In its endless negantropic fight, life looks for equilibria. To stop mental perturbation is to detain its energy demands: existence’s unceasing fire is temporally mitigated and we feel endorphinic peace. Such a negative liberation- mistaken by a road to immortality - if pursue...

The countercultural movements that have flourished all around the world since 2008 represent a new instance of a very old paradox of political metaphysics: the defense of a private realm of rights within a social structure of stratification. The paradox is produced by the fact that it is precisely the structure of stratification what created the conditions of possibility for the genesis of the private realm represented by the social persona of the citizen, and such structure is not compatible with the implications of those rights. The present formulation of the paradox within the narrative of the human being , an abstract social persona which is the subject of some ideal social rights, is just the latter development of a very old religious story. It is obvious that the root of the paradox intermingles with the roots of social stratification which lies at the foundation of urban settlements, but it is not only explained by this phenomenon, and needs to be understood in relation to t...

  The fact that from the subjective necessity of a certain connection of our concepts we infer an objective necessity of such connection is what Kant calls the transcendental Illusion . From the way we connect things, we deduce how things are in themselves. Traditional myths are good examples of this. Where Kant says transzendentale we could say biological , or neurophysiological .   The fascinating thing about this illusion is that even when you know it you cannot avoid it, for how could we think outside of our biological conditioning? More than a final limit for our knowledge, the transcendental illusion implies the end of the unquestionable character of the myths of the universal law. Contemporary science ignores this limit to the cognitive universality of our theories. 

    Suppose for a moment that we could form a set of propositions that state today’s basic foundational assumptions about ourselves and the cosmos, that we could somehow agree on a set U of indisputable truths, ranging from ethics to physics, from mathematics to psychology and the arts. The P i propositions of U can be dependent or independent among themselves. If all of them were independent, the human experience would be the addition of disconnected actions, but our vital experience, as well as our science, shows us that this is not the case. Then, at least some P i are related. But if there is even one proposition totally independent of the others, such proposition would not be intelligible, for it would not have a referent. All P i are, therefore, somehow related, and the relation is the thinking-living human being. Now, if all P i are related, they could be expressed in terms of some meta-principles or meta-axioms. This would imply that our axioms are not final (...

   La culminación musical de la imitación del ideal griego en música durante el Renacimiento se da en la creación de la ópera. Las exigencias de Vincenzo Galilei -y de los demás miembros de la Camerata del Conde Bardi- de simplicidad matemática para la música, como oposición a la complejidad contrapuntística de la música polifónica precedente, pretende, entre otras cosas, ajustar la música a la palabra,  y así fundar un estilo intermedio entre el canto que melismáticamente distorsiona sílabas y el hablar ordinario. Así surge el llamado  stile-representativo  o  stile-recitativo , que se va a convertir en el vehículo para el drama musical nuevo. La intención expresa de reproducir el drama musical clásico está bien documentada, así como la conciencia de que el intento de revitalizarlo era una tarea totalmente nueva [1] , a la que poetas y músicos se lanzaron con el desarrollado sentido de historicidad que recorrió todo el Renacimiento. El punto de partid...

   Por debajo de todos los conceptos que delimitan el campo de la mímesis -posesión, participación, imitación, variación, expresión, etc.- encontramos de una forma u otra el concepto básico de la repetición. Este concepto ha sido estudiado con detalle por Giles Deleuze, para quien el arte no imita, sino repite, por medio de un poder interno[1]. Una imitación es una copia -argumenta Deleuze- mientras que el arte es simulación, revierte las copias en simulacros[2]. Detrás de esta afirmación hallamos  una clara voluntad de acabar con el concepto mimético de modelo-copia, el modelo básico platónico, y con los modos de pensamiento mimético que ha inspirado. En este sentido está continuando el proyecto nietzscheano de transmutación de los valores de la filosofía occidental. El marco establecido por Platón presenta el escollo teórico de la oposición entre las nociones de la identidad y la diferencia, es decir, se trata de la solución de la dificultad que Schopenhauer destapó...

El dinero  es energía  potencial metafísica , y como tal, es un generador de acciones económicas . En este sentido, es una narración que interpreta los intercambios de energía potencial metafísica en energía económica . Funciona como aglutinante de las acciones económicas  diversas de la ciudad, algo que consigue gracias a su contenido simbólico  puente, gracias al vínculo que establece entre las determinaciones primitivas  y las determinaciones económicas  de la ciudad. A través del mito del dinero, cuantificamos y cualificamos la homeostasis  social valorando el conjunto de nuestras experiencias, reduciendo a la semántica  emocional común las diferentes acciones económicas  y los objetos determinados por ellas, relacionando acciones y objetos a partir de su valor en el conjunto energético del organismo, de manera análoga a cómo operan los protocolos  emocionales . ¿Por qué deshacernos de un mito tan ingenioso que ha permitido una...

Mythopoetics Review: Process of Divinization-Mythologization  More on Mythologization and History .

  We can represent the transformations of the different social personae (Totem Ancestor, Shaman, Sangu, Lugal, Ugula, Ensi , Titan, God, Universal Law, etc.) according to the temporal increase of mythopoetical complexity in the different mythical planes (Plane of the Anima Mundi, Plane of the King-God, Plane of the Universal Law and Plane of the Human Law). This figure is Apendix B of Volume I of Mythopoetics: The Symbolic Construction of Human Identity. 

It took two hundred years for the concept of system to make its way into a science of its own. Curiously enough, if we compare Condillac’s [1798] definition [1] to that of Ackoff [1973], [2] we observe that the general understanding of the concept as a set of interrelated parts is basically the same, furthermore, if we filter out the different precisions made from a wide scope of ontoepistemological stand points, we might conclude that most definitions of system since Condillac share a common conceptual core that since the 1960’s has been formalized in set theoretic terms as: S ⊂ x {V i | i ∈ I}       [Mesarovic, 1972] Where “x” is a Cartesian product, “I” an index set, and V is a set of V i relations . The concept of system grew before Condillac linked to epistemological intuitions in natural philosophy, as we can see en the works of Galileo [3] and Newton [4] in relation to astronomical order and the unity of that order. In this sense, we...

First Act of Intuitionism . Completely separating mathematics from mathematical language and hence from the phenomena of language described by theoretical logic, recognizing that intuitionistic mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind having its origin in the perception of a move of time. This perception of a move of time may be described as the falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, but is retained in memory. If the twoity thus born is divested of all quality, it passes into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities. And it is this common substratum, this empty form, which is the basic intuition of mathematics . [Brouwer. 2011, 44] If we understand Brouwer’s first act of intuitionism devoid of its mystical overtones, propositions such as a basic mind’s intuition of the passage of time , or the passing of twoities into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities, his distinctio...

As noticed by Locke and later on by Keynes, one of the values of money, the value of use, given by the rate of interest, has the same nature as land, for land -once is rented- generates an income. Such an isomorphism gave the first modern metaphysical translation of land into money and vice versa. The high liquidity premiums attached in the past to the ownership of land and in modern times to money, show perfectly that the relation is invariantly isomorphic. During liminal times, i.e., economic crisis, the liquidity premium detaches itself from money and goes back to land (or gold). The isomorphism is an old inheritance from the myths of the King-God , the synthetical unity of his four personae, in this case of the Ensi (Landlord) and the Ugula (Merchant). However, Locke’s equivalence, by leaving outside the metaphysical component of economical valuation gave the ius naturale support to colonization which the manifest destiny politics lacked. The isomorphism land-money in relat...