Mythopoetics

The future development of Mythico-Ritual axes more complex than those of Human Law (the one we are living in) seems to point to narratives of open identity for different social, individual and collective masks. The history of our myths is the general narrative of the emergence of social personae, their associations and conflicts, in growing circles of action that have given rise to new identity masks. On this journey, Humans cross thresholds of identity transformation, liminal moments in which old identity masks are left behind and replaced by new ones more harmonious with the vital experience of the present. These moments of paleopsychology have been reflected in traditional mythical narratives. A fascinating moment in our development occurred when we stopped sacrificing on the altars of the Gods in search of a more Universal and unified principle on which to base the Universe. In a hymn from the Rigveda (I.170), the god Indra, lord of the storm, dialogues with the r...

When science steps out of isomorphic functions embraces the misty world of metaphors, for its codomains become under-determined by the structure of the domain and the rule which constitutes the function. Codomains are the epistemological pain in the neck. Say that we construct a function, φ , which pairs a theoretical object with an empirical one. Such epistemological function has proven to be surjective, in  simple terms: is what the duality wave-particle shows. Thus, φ has not inverse, ergo there is not an isomorphism between theory and fisis. Physics is nothing but a well-organized (at best) set of metaphors, useful metaphors projected upon an apeiron by the pseudo-subject of our contemporary science.

What is the meaning of being Catalan, or Spanish, or English for that matter? It is evident that the correspondent narratives of political identity express both a particular historical inertia and the very basic need for a group identity in order to function in an economic milieu. Those basic needs have deep roots in human emotional nature and imply old narratives fully equipped with hard metaphysics. And so we heard, in a not too distant past, of a unity of destiny in the universal in relation to Spain, or of a manifest destiny in relation to the British Empire. A nationality expresses, unavoidably, a set of metaphysical beliefs, for the very concept grew up in the middle of a particular European milieu, linked to particular Institutions. To declare oneself Spanish or Catalan, would be merely the expression of a belief in certain Institutions, a rather accidental question related to the place where one happens to be born or live. However, in modern Europe, and even more so in c...

In moments when Europe has its fundamental values tested by the recalcitrant narrowness, cruelty and ignorance of religion, I recall Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as recorded by Thucydides, amazed by its relevance: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality..." (Perseus Project translation of Peloponnesian War ). The barbarians, those that do not believe in the myths of the human law and impose their nightmares to others, are now forcing us to close our borders, and what is worst, to close our minds, and change our beliefs for a dream of security that could never be fully guaranteed. Thus we are caught in a web of terror and lose our identity to a poor and sad trivialization of our democratic political foundations. In liminal times, basic emotions take control over the neocortical enaryzed symbolic constructions that we ...

Es frecuente encontrar en la obra de Lorca alusiones a lo primitivo y arcaico como origen del fundamento, como el lugar donde está depositado el sentido. Bernarda . Los antiguos sabían muchas cosas que hemos olvidado. [1] La sabiduría se encuentra en el pasado y el tiempo la desdibuja en el olvido. Me siento muy lejano de la actual descomposición poética y sueño con un amanecer futuro que tenga la emoción inefable de los cielos primitivos. [2] El presente es vivido como proceso caótico frente al ordenado y armónico pasado, y el futuro alcanza su significado en la medida que repita la emoción original, la única portadora de sentido. La intuición del tiempo como algo que se mueve hacia delante, que progresa y cambia hacia lo distinto y lo nuevo con irrefrenable impulso, que va desde el ayer hasta el hoy para después convertirse en un mañana distinto, corresponde a una cosmovisión humana relativamente moderna. Tal intuición es sólo parcialmente refrendad...

There is an interpretation of the myth of Antigone based on the concept of civil disobedience, i.e. in terms of the tension between myths of the human law and myths of the universal law. Has the universal law or law of the gods (the God) prevalence over human law (civil law)? The question is so confusing that it barely makes sense. Curiously enough the universal law is so embedded in our most basic valuations that we mistake it to express the essential human nature, and feel human law as a mere human all too human appendix of the profane ways of the meaningless modern world. From this point of view, just like Thoreau did by refusing to pay taxes to a Government which condoned slavery, Antigone refused to comply with a law which condemned the corpse of her brother to be the plaything of the crows and a banquet for the dogs. The primitive or metaphysical determination which orders the burial of corpses clashes against the functional or economic determination that denies any ent...

I knew someone who believed that in Rama’s time (if there ever was such a space-time) people were nine meters tall. He also thought that the loquacious snake that talked to Eve in her lost paradise was a mere figment of a poet’s imagination. As a matter of fact there are, full groups, sects, churches and assemblies that would support the literal meaning of one of these myths (usually denying the other). It is difficult to see our beliefs as a myth, easy those of others.   What is there? I mean it in its more general sense, what is there in the universe?, or in front of us? The basic question of ontology will remain a continuous engine of delusions and misunderstandings as long as we hold our naïve conceptions of myth. Giants turn into windmills and these into power generators, machines that deal with electrons, or shall we say fermions of the lepton kind?, or what myth shall we use to express our ignorance?, or is it knowledge? The thinnest razor’s edge separates both, a sh...

A golden sandstorm engulfed the arian chariot opening up the cloud of orange dust on the top of a deep blue hill. Down in the valley, the fighting armies facing each other. Your family and your friends fight in both sides. Arjun wants an explanation for the nonsense of life, of battle. Reality seems simply like a cosmic mistake, an error. What shall we do with our lives? How are we going to live them? Simple basic questions. One direct path is the “Path of Beauty”, to move from fear to wonder, to awe and amazement. Beauty leads the restless and tireless navigator in you to pursue the fugitive horizon, the threshold of Greatness, and leads the horizon to be the rising Light, and answer to the desire to navigate. An arrow might kill us tomorrow, but today we have the wine of love and poems of old epics, when the gods rumbled the earth, Krishna and mighty Vishnu, drunk and starving rishis dreaming the heavens. So pour some more wine from last night and sing for me that...

Old Norse: awe is agi , a feeling of great respect and liking. Let’s add: a sense of expansion and greatness, a blissful state which includes surprise, and the arousal of the will to play, for awe is active…the conscious creation of an identity by expressing objects and actions which produce awe. In the fight for Hastinapura, Prince Arjun transformed fear before Brahman into awe before existence, awe before the experience of the sublime .

 The Kantian way: sublime is the starry night above us, the unending ocean, whatever overcomes our sense of individuation.  Beyond that: “Sublime” is a very complex emotion. It is the experience of dissolution into something greater, ampler, wider, newer, everlasting.  In the Bhagavad-Ghita, the sublime as Brahman, with and without attributes produces the reaction of the deepest fear, the fear of dissolving. But there is also awe and wonder  The experience of the sublime is overwhelming and dissolves the ego, which surrenders before the beauty of the fleeting spring of the rose, the slow streaming strings of Mahler at the end of the summer, the flocks of birds at sunset.  The concept of the “sublime “ is related to traditional religious experiences. Can we free our experience of the sublime from the images of the past? Falling star The frog from the lotus Into the bottomless instant

Samsara, Maya, the illusion, what is not real. There is a non-transcendentalist interpretation of the concept which does not appeal to a substantial reality, or truth, or whatever final and definite referent for things (i.e. an exomorphism ), for the universe, and for us. Samsara is the trivial pursuit and pain of most human lives. Bound to nothing, to empty air, to obsolete myths, withered patterns of emotional protocols that maintain life at the high price of repetitive nothingness and misery. It is not only the trait of modern life, old inertias of transcendental thought carry the same burden, a hunt for phantoms, a feast of crazy magpies stealing the shining shit and thinking it a golden treasure. Heavy human sleepwalking, chained to our physiology and proud of it. Once you see the patterns of the eternal return of the movements of life, the endless repetition, the perennial dreams of choice, then the game is over, and you find yourself out, as good as dead, dead for the others...

   Kant talks about transcendental ideas as cognitions that are taken beyond any possible experience, i.e. beyond the boundaries of empirical knowledge, though still in connection with it. Those ideas are basic epistemological objects of the philosophical traditions of the world (not only Western) which express fundamental ways of the development of the human thinking. Kant noticed that precisely by their distance from experience they become problematic and shaky in their epistemological content. He proved that, in fact, when trying to prove them logically, they produce antinomies. I understand those transcendental objects as conceptual constructions of the Überlebenswelt (the reflexive and formalized knowledge) which use as building blocks intuitions from the Lebenswelt (the knowledge of everyday life) containing at least one undefined concept (exomorphism). An example would be the concept of “implication”, a rather simple and basic intuition which in our everyday life mea...

  Silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by Cage in his wonderful  4’33’’ . Thus, it should make more sense to talk about  silences , in plural, avoiding the common reification of a concept that usually expresses an indefinite absence and metaphysically grows to express a final and pervasive state of the cosmos.  In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. Furthermore, as we read in Berlioz ( Treatise upon Orchestration ), silence can be obtained through orchestration:  With the view of expressinig a lugubrious silence, I have in a cantata divided the double-basses into four parts ; causing them thus to sustain long pianissimo chords, beneath a decrescendo ...

1. We consider that A is the conceptual ground or foundation of B when the cognition of B is impossible without the cognition of A, and A is immediately certain for our intuition. We say that A gives a semantical self-image, for it does not need further explanation, but B cannot produce a semantical self-image. 2. Music Theory has developed since Antiquity with the aid of mathematics, reaching today a fully mathematical status. 3. Mathematics is a formalized symbolic language. 4. Tarski’s theorem states that a formalized language cannot produce a semantical self-image. Therefore, music theory could not be the ground of musical action or of anything else. In fact, music theory -as well as musical action- are based on the social life of the human group, which in turn are based on the homeostatic protocols for survival: emotions. 

A persistent discussion that I used to have with Morton Feldman when I studied composition with him at Buffalo was about the relationship between the music sonic material of a piece and the musical idea for the organization of the work. Feldman always thought that it is the material what determines and conditions a composition, what makes it work for a specific time-span and not for other. His orientation was mainly orchestrational and harmonic, so the material choices would have to do with the right chord orchestration, the appropriate and careful choice of progressions, registers and timbres. My answer was that such choices of orchestration had a double foundation, empirical and conceptual, and that if we separate them we only obtain an incomplete picture of the composition. In fact, I insisted, it is the conceptual part in the choice of the material what gives a link between the microharmony of the chordal progressions and the general structure of the piece (as much in tonal as in ...

Neither our individual destinies, nor our future as species are written in the stars. For the same reasons, there is not a music of the spheres beyond the orbit of the Platonic composer and mathematician. Transcendental idealism is the remnant of the ancient fears and superstitions, not only entertained by the old narratives but also by the not-so-obvious mythologies of the universal law inherited by philosophy and later by modern science. Not all modern science believes in the existence of a  universal law , but its Queen, theoretical physics, worships such hypostasized order of the universe, giving the norm for how we should think about the cosmos, and defining reality disregarding the serious epistemological problems of completeness faced by formal systems after Gödel, expensively selling their tale about the universe in tune with the most careless medieval metaphysics. This scientific mess, poorly balanced by the advances of life sciences, helps very little to the development ...

The prevention and treatment of illnesses is conditioned not only by our biological knowledge but also by the effective integration that we have of other sciences and our control of the physical environment. Medicine is obviously linked to the rest of human knowledge but, being the science of human life, is also determined by the particular social forms in which our life develops, by the economical conditionings in which health and sickness find an additional restriction. In this sense, medicine is a social science and a social action, not a mere biological knowledge of the physiological functions of the human body. The social action of medicine, the self-care and self-preservation performed by human societies, is not the result of the efforts and ideas of a single generation but a vast cultural endeavor. For that reason, it cannot come as a surprise that beyond the evident success of our survival as species, the accomplishments and failures of the medical practice have not been mea...

Let us examine the problem from the point of view of rational ethics based on anthropological grounds. By  rational , I mean a discourse whose statements are not contradictory among themselves, and by  anthropological grounds,  I mean a non-transcendental valuation of life, a human axiology. Particularly, I will use two anthropological ethic principles: P.1  Principle of life preservation : We have to preserve human life. P.2  Principle of primacy of the public interest : the life of the group has preference over the life of the individual. Human individual life is conditioned by the life of the group and subsumed to its needs. Not only my actions are rightful when they do not imply any sort of harm to others, but they cannot be autonomous when there is an urgent need of the society: we work and die for the group whenever is needed. And since the needs of society are always urgent, life preservation is limited by public interest, as has always been the...

In the Samoan myths of the afterlife, the soul of the poor is food for the soul of the noble and rich [Frazer, 1922]. Are we living in the Samoan afterlife? Well, for some of our unfortunate contemporaries the situation is not so different. Simon Rippon has discussed the issue in an interesting paper on the Journal of Medical Ethics, where he analyzes the thesis of the moral and economic benefits for the poor which provides the free market of live donor organs. He expresses the thesis of the Laissez-Choisir  (LC) argument in three premises. P1. People in poverty who would choose to sell their organs if a free market existed must regard all other options open to them as worse. P2. If we take away what some regard as their best option, we thereby make them worse off, at least from their own perspective. P3. If a policy makes some worse off from their own perspective, it would be paternalistic for us to judge otherwise and to implement the policy on their behalf. We o...

Bennet and Hacker [2003] have discussed at large the regrettable state of the relationship between philosophy and neuroscience after Crick, Edelman and Zeki expressed, in different terms, their reticence to grant philosophy any competence in questions about consciousness . While Edelman [2001,208] proposed the grounding of epistemology in neuroscience, Zeki [Bennet and Hacker, 2003, 398] went as far as to say that neuroscience will solve the problems of philosophy. Unfortunately, neuroscience has not been able to fulfill such an ambitious program, but its contributions to epistemology are certainly elucidating areas that for long remained obscure and contradictory. A polemical situation like this is not new for the philosophy of science. The epistemological discussions raised by the Vienna Circle and their extensions and developments well through the XX century met similar objections, especially among physicists. But the problem has even deeper roots, and goes back to the distinc...