Mythopoetics

According to Kant the concept of genius has only validity in the artistic realm, not in the scientific. We can reach the immaculate intellectual heights of Saint Einstein of Princeton [he uses the example of another father of the Church of Geniuses (Saint Newton), although it works for our purposes] by simply reasoning orderly and hard enough, but we could never reach the heights of the artistic geniuses, for they are nature’s voice transmitting a transcendental message. Today we have extended the adjective not only to scientists, but also to race horses, as Robert Musil noticed in his wonderful book. Life is intelligence (adaptation and overcoming   of problems) as much in the bacteria as in our more complex symbolic creations. The narrative of the genius is no more that the modern myth to justify priestly beliefs of social stratification, old schemes in new disguises. In order to maintain the ideal of arête (excellence) (we are symbolic creatures and need a continuous pro...

According to Putnam’s Platonic ontology, reality is not a part of human mind, rather the human mind is a part -and a small part at that- of reality . [1] It is fascinating to see how the ancient proclamations of a universal and transcendental law keep still all their strength in our society. Ontological assumptions cannot be discussed in terms of formal logic, for they are the very grounds of any possible discussion. Concepts such as whole , part , reality , are pre-valued in our acritical Lebenswelt knowledge, and even at a more basic neurophysiological level. It is obvious that we are a small piece within a huge scenario, but the cosmos is not something independent of our thinking: if it were we could not place ourselves in any relation to it. When we read Putnam’s words, we confound the experience of our life in an historical community (with a given scientific knowledge) with the concept of reality, as he himself does. In fact, such a proposal pretends to be a declaration of soun...

  Suppose for a second that we were to prove that mystic visions and religious revelations are just a question of neurotransmitter imbalances. Could our social order withstand such a postulate? Taken literally, it would mean that the narratives of our past are invalid to justify Kings , Churches and all traditional political orders, together with their claims of rights and properties. But would this mean that our history is just the expression of a mistake, that our existence as species is the grandiloquent and violent narrative of an error?  We do not need a nihilist answer to this question. We could neither construct a meaningful present denying the new realm of experience provided by the modern myth of science.   There is a rather vast neuroscientific literature that links high levels of dopamine with religious experience.

Paper Presented at the  Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies. December 2013. 1     Introduction. In the foreword to his seminal work, Das Heilige , Rudolf Otto advised the reader not to venture in the investigation of the Numen Ineffabile before having devoted assiduous and serious study to the Ratio Aeterna. [1] Such recommendation advances the proposal stated at full length in chapter XIV of the book: the sacred (or the Holy) is an a priori category in the Kantian sense with both rational and irrational content. [2] With this thesis, Otto was reopening an old philosophical problem -which goes back to early Greek philosophy- about the rational or irrational nature of the Divine. In the VI century B.C., Xenophanes of Colophon noticed the inconsistencies of an ethic based on the amoral behavior of the Olympian gods, a theoretical question that shook the foundations of the Greek Polis and that was finally solved with the progressive and steady grounding...