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 pursued by itself, generates only
nihilistic values for our existence, which becomes then a mere being for death, or a bad night at a bad inn. The concept of imperturbability as an
ethical end produces only absurd behavior and pathologies, like the ones that
we find in the ascetic mystical traditions. Take for instance the idea that a
realized being, according to the vedanta and yogic traditions of India, can
hear the news of the death of a son in complete ataraxia, a behavior which expresses only a serious pathology or dysfunction
of the neural systems of pain, self-induced by hypnotic meditation. The ataraxia proposed by these mystical traditions
show a desire of involution to life forms previous to the development of a
nervous system. The liminal character of ataraxia
has to be tempered with eudaimonic
actions: the normal and moderate use of our biological functions. Ataraxia per se implies the destruction
of the ethical person and the end of any project for improving our human
groups, but when led by eudaimonia it
becomes a solid ground for the construction of our social personae.
Human
immortality is not an endless continuation of our petty personalities, the feeble
constructions that we make combining a few social personae inherited from our
tradition. Our concept of immortality is a symbolic construction which
expresses the deep longing force of life-intelligence. It is meaningless if it
is not completed by the human ethical action of liberty and by the autonomy of
our symbolical constructions: immortality has only meaning in the symbolic context
of human freedom as an emergence of life-intelligence. Both finitude and infinite are concepts which form a semantic operator for the mythical
rendering of our intuitions of space-time: our personae, our masks, our psychological dimension is neither finite nor infinite,
but liminal autopoietical action, communication… canto.
