Lyrical Citizen

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 the creation of a very unique social persona, depositary of a transcendental and private emotional sphere, that I will call the lyrical citizen.

Transzendentale Schein

  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. 

Indisputable Truths

 

  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 (and not axioms), i.e., that there are other axioms U’, which are not covered by our intuitions and social agreements. The set of meta-axioms U’, being independent of the set of the axioms which form system U, would be independent of experience and intuition, for if they were dependent, they would be part of U, part of our life experience. But how could we think about something which is independent of any action of thinking? Traditionally, this dead-end has been solved calling to the idea of a final ground for thinking beyond human intelligence, a Divine Intelligence, that operates in a wider realm. In any case, since we do not know such axioms neither can we express them in our intuitions (for then they would be reducible to axioms in U), we could never construct a formal system of knowledge of Indisputable truths. Indisputable truths can be constructed only as a narrative of domination, reached by agreements on the existence of an unprovable universal law, or based on human conventions.