Churches of Universal Law: The Genius Narrative

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 process of symbolic superation), we do not need the Church of Geniuses, or any other concept of the mythical plane of the universal law. In fact, the superstitious idea of the genius justifies all sorts of moral abuses, like those we see in the markets of art or those performed as well by the scientific experts from its omnipotent institutions. What we call human knowledge and human stupidity, the genius and the moron, go hand in hand, there is no need to sanctify any of them, and we usually do it with both.

The Aporiae of Platonism

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 soundness of mind: is it not evident that we are but a small part? But human mind is not a part in a whole, but the condition of possibility for the concepts of part, whole, reality and many more.

Platonism is utterly nihilistic and aporetical, for if our mind is such a small part, our concepts cannot grasp reality [using Platonic (Cantorian) set theory], any finite set of true sentences is negligible in an infinite set of sentences which express transcendental wisdom], so why bother?

We do not need to sink anymore in man-made cosmic oceans. We do not need anymore philosophies  of the universal law which confound linguistic operations, such as the construction of general concepts (cosmos, reality, god, etc.) with mythological beings independent of our thinking. The whole cosmos fits in one single of our thoughts, needs our thoughts to be a cosmos.

---

[1] Hilary Putnam. Mathematics , Matter and Method. Cambridge University Press 1980. p.vii.

Dopamine and Mystic Visions

  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.

On the Philosophical Validity of the Concept of "the Sacred"

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 of religion on rational philosophical bases. Moral consistency came with a price: the traditional social praxis of the cults, and religious experience in general, became little more than old superstitions of the ignorant masses. The tension was unsolved, and there was little need to solve it in a society which got progressively more complex and could function with a split religious axis in which the intellectual elites held a philosophical metaphysics, and the masses the old agrarian cults. We find in other traditions equivalent theological tensions, like the one between philosophical and devotional Taoism,[3] or between the Vedanta philosophical religion -developed by Sankaracharia from the Upanishads- and different traditional cults linked to the agrarian cycle,[4] or again, in the European milieu, between the Medieval theological systems and the religious popular festivals and pilgrimages. The mysterious and irrational, the Numinous at the base of mythological narratives and rituals throughout the world, has never been reduced to the rational constraints of philosophy: the peasant nor less than the citizen needs a well structured calendar of ceremonies and rites, but the drive for these is not exactly the need for apodictical argumentation. Devotional and popular cult ideas show a clear difference in relation to the postulates on the Divine expressed through philosophical rationality. However, if in theological ontologies the measure for all things is God, as Plato sustained in the Laws (716.c), and therefore is the principle of order and ground for rationality, all things, including non-rational religious elements, somehow should be explained by philosophical rationality.