Where are we going?

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 rishi Agastya, and reproaches him for his intention of going beyond him, of not considering him as the final exomorphic representation of the Universe: the Supramental Intellect. It is a reflection on the limits of the King-God narratives, and the symbolic need to construct increasingly more complex myths, in this case, those of Universal Law, in order to give meaning to the experience of the Universe. The hymn expresses deep epistemological content from the start. The God Indra speaks:

Why, O my brother Agastya, art thou my friend, yet settest thy thought beyond me? For well do I know how to us thou willest not to give thy mind. (Mandala I.170)

The text has different layers of interpretation. I am not going to analyze here the epistemological reason for Indra's reproach, but only to show the threshold that the seer Agastya crosses from the anthropological point of view. The steps towards a materialization of human life, a final grounding in the physical human experience, follow the path towards the monism of the Universal Law that will open up the way to philosophy first and then to science. Indra asks Agastya why does he want to beyond him, beyond the Old Pantheon that proved to be so fruitful. The social context is the power dispute between the priestly and warrior castes in the first Vedic period (beginning in India around 1500 BC), when royal power begins to establish itself. The old myths are insufficient to organize the new economic actions that the Aryans carry out in the Gangetic plain, for which a more universal principle is needed but mantaining the basic social structures in order to avoid chaos.

The pastoral myths of Indra in the Rigveda do not include agrarian rebirth, and only later, with the Upanishads, will an ethical theory of dharma and reincarnation be developed that unifies the moral and natural order. The emergence of Universal Law, which absorbs the myth of Indra and the storm gods into a more complex symbolic representation, as at the time the myths of the creator-king-god absorbed the emotional constructions of meaning elaborated in the narrative planes of the anima mundi, meant the emergence of a semantic reference on which new, more complex forms of mythical axes were based. However the turbulent threshold of change threatens to produce a collapse.

In the Hymn of the Rigveda, Agastya finally understands that he cannot dismiss the past as an error at a stroke and agrees to continue on the path of Swar, an intellect that balances the world of life experience on earth and the world of the unintelligible and unknown that represents the principle that exists beyond the Gods, Brahman.

Seen from our historical moment, it is a story of identity transformation that sheds light upon our own liminal time. We cannot forget what we have been, nor simply despise the errors and miseries of yesterday, without producing a nihilistic, schizoid and self-repressed person, confronted with life. This type of priestly social person or social mask has already been constructed by the great religions in the figure of the sinful debtor, and proved to be a neurotic mythopoetics. However a total rupture of identity entails a danger of psychological disintegration, at the individual and collective level.

The anima mundi, the gods, universal law, human law, any of these narratives can claim a preferential position within mythopoetic evolution. The totems that populate the animated forests or the prairies, the gods of any of the pantheons that have reigned over the great civilizations, the theorems of mathematics that mimicked the abstract way of being of something invisible, the human will to establish from the earth The conditions of life, with their irrepressible desire to awaken to their own identity, can claim for themselves, as they have, to constitute the greatest achievement of our checkered history. To do so, they have to subordinate or deny the other mythical planes through a narrative of domination directed towards other axes. But in doing so, in separating themselves from the mythopoetic process with absolute determination, they reduce themselves to being no more than a partial achievement. As an alternative we could try something not yet done: a myth of open identity, voluntarily settled in our liminal condition: we are the soul of the world, and the gods themselves - in our best ideals and our darkest nightmares of domination -, and we are the thought of a cosmic order, as well as the desire of the free anthropos who designs his existence with the traces of a human science and an art overflowing with life. The narrative of continuous rationality does not stop at the mythical plane of human law: it opens backwards to common life with other species, and forwards to the semantic emergence of increasingly complex vital scenarios. This continuous process was never up to us, if by us we understand the narrative we have constructed of homo sapiens. It does not seem risky to affirm that if we disappeared as a species, life would once again find paths towards intelligence. In any case, we can contribute with some verses to the poem that life writes about stellar magma, to this action whose blind movements end up generating self-contained fleeting identities, immersed in a deep nostalgia for the Unknown.

Physics and Metaphor

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.

The Spanish Narrative of Identity

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 contemporary EU, the notion of the distinct and unique identity of the people living in one of its territories fails to make sense beyond  local gastronomical variations, and even that has disappeared in the cities. The question of the linguistic differences simply veils the common roots of most of its languages and what is more important, the common roots of its main myths and economic actions both in the European continent and abroad.

The freedom to choose a political identity is a corollary of the Human Rights Declaration. Such statement implies that, somehow, the one that makes the choice has a definite identity previous to the choice, something which in turn implies that there is a unity in such identity, but this is senseless in political terms, and can only be derived from the imposition of a political majority to the rest of a society. Thus, the independence obtained by secession can never be more than an act of violence, and the minority forced to independence is the victim of such aggression. On the other hand, if political unity can only be achieved at the price of repressing the will for a metaphysical self-determination, such unity will be weak and unstable, furthermore will violate fundamental principles of Human Rights.

Will Spain be able to elaborate a new narrative of collective identity that could include the metaphysical aspirations of its different people?  Despite the fact that the EU is failing as a political project, the people of Europe (and Spaniards and Catalans certainly are Europeans) are condemned to understand each other or to succumb to Asia’s momentum.

The Strength of Freedom

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 made with those basic protocols of survival.

The strength of democracy is based on the ideal of freedom. Freedom has not only a transcendental meaning, but is the possibility for the construction of any human meaning for our life. It is related to ends and goals, but not limited by them, for freedom has an instantaneous dimension, a here and now nature which does not postpone, which escapes from the delays of vacant promises. Freedom is thus inextricably related to creation, to poiesis, of the individual and of the social persona of the group, and for that reason is felt strongly in relation to art. However, the creations of freedom are not related to a this or a that, but are instead the processes of unfoldment of our life awareness, the awareness of its limited span and the need for an instantaneous fulfillment of its potentialities, the extension of our individuation into the complete movement of life on earth.

In this fight, psychological individuation is at stake, together with our ideal of a society founded on human law. We cannot have one without the other. Let’s then hold to our ideal of Liberty (political and juridical freedom) for there lies our strength. Our European wealth is not measured by mere physical standards of living, those are the symptoms of a society involved in the transformation of the material milieu, but by the political liberties which allow the grounds for our personal human freedom, our dearest narrative of identity. This means, as Pericles knew, that we have more to lose than our barbarian enemies, and thus, that our involvement in the fighting will not be small.

Fuente Primitiva, Fuente de la Verdad

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 refrendada por la física contemporánea, que sobrecargada por la ontología atemporal de la matemática no se decide a declarar en todos los ámbitos de la realidad natural la imagen del tiempo como una flecha irreversible que surca y atraviesa la vida y el universo de parte a parte. Nuestra percepción personal corrobora el cambio y el deterioro, la fugitiva naturaleza del acontecer vital, a la par que notamos el carácter cíclico en el que la línea del tiempo se inscribe, constituyendo una espiral en la que cada ciclo supone una variación de lo anterior, por muy mecánica e ínfima que esta pueda llegar a ser. La idea de ciclo resulta confusa: la repetición difumina el presente, que sólo puede ser entendido desde el pasado. En este sentido, los ciclos se vuelven sobre el pasado, gravitan hacia el ayer, se retiran hacia el depósito de la memoria, no como una flecha temporal inversa, sino como una prolongación indefinida del pasado en el presente y el futuro, como si presente y futuro sólo tuviesen sentido en el pasado. Es interesante observar cómo esta mitologización del tiempo es común a las llamadas sociedades frías[3]. Como fósil epistemológico ha sido recogido por la lengua swahili en sus conceptos de Sasa y Zamani.

En principio, el concepto de Sasa, parecería equivaler al nuestro de presente como lugar donde acontece la experiencia, si bien, se trata de una experiencia no acabada y fijada pues no conlleva aún una valoración, es una experiencia que no ha sido inscrita en la narrativa mítica grupal generadora de sentido. El tiempo se mueve dentro de esta cosmovisión desde el imperfecto Sasa hacia el Zamani, el pasado, si bien un pasado autocontenido que incluye sus propios momentos pasados, presentes y futuros. Sasa es un tiempo microlineal basado en la intuición de cambio producida por la experiencia de las acciones económicas cotidianas, mientras que Zamani es el tiempo narrativo o tiempo mítico en el que surgió el significado para la experiencia. Sasa no sólo está condicionado por, sino que queda aniquilado en el Zamani: lo que acontece en el presente no es sino una mera propuesta de significado, una hipótesis de acción a la espera de ser corroborada y validada por la tradición interpretativa mítica. Hasta cierto punto, Sasa funciona como un buffer de seguridad en el que el carácter impredecible de la experiencia es diferido para su ulterior valoración. Zamani es la temporalidad mítica, una construcción valorativa autocontenida en la que se genera la realidad social y se crean los criterios de verdad. Es en este sentido como creo que debe interpretarse la afirmación lorquiana.

En las poéticas de las sociedades frías, el tiempo mítico de Zamani dinamiza una peculiar concepción espacial y material que unifica el mundo bajo el abarcante concepto de anima, de una fuerza vital que sostiene a todos los seres animados e inanimados, que los produce como particularizaciones suyas. Lorca llamó –confusamente- panteísmo al anima mundi, reconociéndolo como voz fundamental de la poesía arcaica, cuyo arquetipo él cree encontrar en el cante jondo, al cual considera el primitivo canto andaluz.

El cante jondo se acerca al trino del pájaro, al canto del gallo y a las músicas naturales del bosque y la fuente.[4]

Todos los poemas del cante jondo son de un magnífico panteísmo, consulta al aire, a la tierra, al mar, a la luna, a cosas tan sencillas como el romero, la violeta y el pájaro. Todos los objetos exteriores toman una aguda personalidad y llegan a plasmarse hasta tomar parte activa en la acción lírica. [5]

El anima mundi no es una concepción panteísta, al contrario, se trata de un antropomorfismo cósmico como el que encontramos en los mitos de Purusha, Ymir o el Adam Cadmon en el que el universo es visto como un gran ser humano. La consulta de la que habla Lorca es siempre un diálogo con la objetivación humana del universo, hecha posible a partir de la idea de un anima mundi que sintetiza como vida lo orgánico y lo inorgánico en un único movimiento existencial. Como primer eslabón de la cadena generatriz de los seres se encuentra el antepasado-tótem, un primer ser humano andrógino que animó creativamente todos sus vástagos, humanos, animales, plantas, orografía y orbes estelares. El antepasado-tótem, luego identificado con la figura del rey-civilizador, es el que Lorca representa trágicamente en su poema El rey de Harlem, travestido con su traje de conserje, despojado de la dignidad de antepasado, y esclavo en la farsa de la ciudad blanca, una ciudad de violines sin cuerda para un rey de escarchada cabeza que se encuentra atrapado en el Sasa con su tosca cuchara de cocinero.

No obstante, la primitiva fuente, el Zamani que rigen los ritmos de los antepasados, no es en Lorca tanto un objeto de anima mundi como una proyección panteísta, más estética que teológica, que el arte europeo practicó desde finales del siglo XIX sobre los mitos de los pueblos no europeos. Se trata de una estética impregnada de una clara conciencia histórica con pensamiento lineal que nada tiene que ver con el Zamani, aunque mantiene la mística del antepasado-tótem como generador de sentido.

Lorca, siguiendo las ideas de Falla y Pedrell, hará una mitologización del flamenco como antiguo canto andaluz similar en muchos aspectos a la de Yeats, inventando una identidad lírica andaluza que va más allá de las raíces de Al-Andalus para perderse en un pasado meramente mítico. Lorca ve Andalucía como el resultado de un difícil equilibrio entre un Oriente fabuloso y una geometría romana no menos imaginada[6]. El concepto de Volk, traducido por “lo popular” y aplicado directamente a la realidad andaluza, aparece en Lorca importado directamente de Alemania a través de Robert Schumann, vía Falla, si bien en una reconstrucción un tanto alucinada en la que Lorca hace que el compositor ruso Mihail Glinka beba en el sur de España la sabiduría oriental que habrá de cambiar la escena musical europea de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX. El concepto de lo popular aplicado a Andalucía como lo hace Lorca presupone una identidad inmutable que procede por debajo de las culturas que han poblado el territorio del sur de España, una raíz más profunda que las lenguas que se han ido superponiendo sobre tal identidad. El sinsentido es tan patente como en el caso alemán, y expresa una ontología esencialista de corte transcendentalista común a las diferentes variantes de los nacionalismos europeos.

La mitologización del primitivismo obedece sin embargo a una queja contra el ultracivilizado y demasiado consciente arte europeo que busca en otras formas compositivas, teóricamente más simples, un ideal de pureza, de vitalidad y de instinto creador perdido, estancados en la densa estructura social que hacía posible el grandilocuente arte europeo. Sin embargo no podemos pensar que se trata simplemente de la vieja disputa sobre el papel de la inteligencia en el arte (que podría ser trazada hasta Platón), en la que la componente de experiencia mística de la estética reclama su autonomía con respecto a la crítica. Lo primitivo, erróneamente pensado como lo popular, o mejor, mitologizado como "lo popular" se convierte en el elemento necesario sobre el que se pretenden fundamentar identidades políticas y económicas nuevas. La fascinación por el arte primitivo no europeo simplemente muestra la exportación de la categoría estético-política, la necesidad de insuflar no sólo al arte sino a la vida social en su conjunto una nueva sabia conceptual vestida de supuestas identidades ancestrales, pero en ningún caso hay una vuelta a un pensar temporal del Zamani.

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[1] La casa de Bernarda Alba. Acto 3. O.C.A.II.p.1049.

[2] Carta a Melchor Fernández Almagro.Número 6. O.C.A.III. p.716.

[3] Término de Levi-Strauss.

[4] El cante jondo. O.C.A. III. P.197.

[5] Ibid.209.

[6] Como expresa en su Lectura “Romancero Gitano”. OC:A:III p.342.

Antigone

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 entity and identity to the enemies of the city, of the group. Very often ethical problems have no consistent solutions since, like old cities, gather within their walls contradictory codes for action corresponding to different space-time scenarios of the life of the group. And so, Creon and Antigone count both with arguments in favor of their actions.

The myth of the Oedipus saga expresses better than any other Greek myth the implications and contradictions of the narratives of immortality which started under the mythico-ritual axes of the universal law. They are today completely relevant, for the individuation problem has been barely understood. Antigone and her family are the living examples of the precarious nature of individuation, the fragility of the more basic social persona, father, mother, son, etc. which can be tangled in the most confusing way when the dice of the gods rumble freely over the table of the world. Antigone wants for Polyneices, and for herself, the narrative of an identity, only complete and closed at death, but at a meaningful death, a death with a tomb, and a name, a death which fades an existence in the short vibration of the social memory. Tebas wants to dissolve the memory of the Oedipus family in the womb of the earth burying Antigone alive in a cave, where she faces the liminal nature of life: existing betwixt and between light and darkness, flower of one day, a mystery for itself, deprived of a narrative beyond the basic and blind impulses of the animal emotions.

Giants turning into Windmills

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 shade-like filament projected over our minds by the same mysterious object in different moments of our fuzzy and presumptuous history.

Kurukshetra: the battlefield of life

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 immortal song of the war between the Kurus and the Pandavas.

What could be awed?

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.

What is 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

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. How to live then? For what purpose? Out of compassion for the sleepers? There is not a general valid answer for these questions. You have to find out for yourself, i.e. die many times, and resurrect. How hard are the ways of Zoe, Life-Intelligence, how precarious our shelters: broken hearts are the only secure way to yonder shores. For a broken heart is silence, and at every instant from silence spontaneously springs a pristine renewed Life-Intelligence, without purpose, or its equivalent, with infinite purposes.

Transcendental Objects

   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 means a relation between two things, one following the other which ultimately points out to a basic intuition of sequence, i.e. of time. We could hardly go in our explanations beyond such intuitional sequence, and in this sense, we say that is an exomorphism, a non-definable. Logic, as an Überleneswelt construction takes that concept as undefined and uses it to construct its scientific edifice.

   The first two Kantian antinomies use as basic objects two pairs of opposites: limited/unlimited and simple/complex. They correspond to basic intuitions of our thinking in everyday life. They are two of the opposites discussed by the Pythagorean School, the second one expressed in its equivalent form of the opposition one/many. They both work as basic determinations of life processes but when we project them beyond organic life we are just playing with old metaphysics.

   The other two antinomies deal with another opposition necessity/freedom and then with the idea of a necessary referent conceived as a chain of conditions which proceed from the unconditioned. The old chain of Ananke is an old philosophical monster which has its roots deeply grounded in our cognitive processes. Modern physics has finished with these ways of thinking although it is difficult to stop its inertia when thinking cosmological questions. On the other hand, the notion of freedom does not correspond to the same cognitive level, for it is a moral concept that cannot be put at the level of "necessity". Freedom is an ideal that has its grounds in our capacity for symbolical thinking. The n-aryzed symbolic worlds advance from the ludic buffers of thinking to a demand of autonomy for the full emotional world, a demand of the process of continuous rationality. It is linked to the development of the lyrical citizen.

Silence

 

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 of all the rest of the orchestra. In fact, if Berlioz’s treatise is to be taken as relevant to traditional orchestration, we find several places in the work where the concept of silence plays a clear and conscious orchestrational function.

 There are also contrapuntal silences, related to texture as well, but performing a more basic determination of lines. These are silences which give time location and shape the musical discourse.

  A third type of silence is the harmonic absence, which, like the orchestrational silence, can only be understood as a choice for no action. For instance, a plagal cadence could be understood as the absence of a tonic chord, and in general, any play with harmonic sequences which frustrates expectations is the construction of a silence. This kind of silence is even easier to notice than the orchestrational, for in tonal music we expect particular cadences in particular locations of the piece, while the orchestrational choices of color have a wider range of possibilities. In serial music the silence-absence occurs in relation to the structure of the given series of the piece and its traditional transformations.

 Silence is also a religious concept, complementing and making meaningful the myth of the primordial sound, a favorite myth among musicians. Sound and silence together have given a rich spectra of metaphors for the expression of life’s persistent mystery, furthermore, they conform a full mythology in which the musician can express a wide variety of cognitive and social emotions. Toru Takemitsu has put it in terms of the modern musical religious experience: Confronting silence by uttering a sound is nothing but verifying one’s own existence.

 There is a further dimension of musical silence which can be extended to any epistemological experience. Through the action of memory (Mnemosine), silence extends and transforms sound on the inner dimension of the listener-composer. The piece of music extends beyond its sound parameters into the realm of the listener particular connections. The semantics of the piece build upon basic emotions and memories, complexifying the original input. Silence is needed to make the piece intelligible, to give it a meaning. Silence becomes a receptacle for musical reverberation both of the physical sound and of the psychological process initiated by the music. There are a number of Bach pieces (see the Ricercare of The Art of the Fugue, or the Contrapuntus X of the Musical Offering, etc.), Brahms, Mahler, and many others, which include this kind of silences. For instance, he writes at the end of the piece a white note and right after a silence of white (instead of writing a whole note) in which the piece gains an extra time for its processing, both at the acoustic and the psychological level. When not in the score, this kind of silence is spontaneously produced at the end of a performance, sometimes unfortunately broken by an insensitive rush for thunderous applause.

The Foundation of Musical Action Cannot be Music Theory

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. 

Music Material and Music Idea

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 atonal music). My arguments never convinced him and he kept composing in his wonderful Bergsonian way, but the discussion has helped me, through the years, to better understand my own expectations about the compositional action.

The tension between the sonic-perceptual and the structural-conceptual part of a composition is better understood in a general epistemological frame. Put in Kantian terms (First Critique. A51): our conceptions and musical ideas without music material are empty, and our sonic constructions without a conceptual frame are blind.

What kind of morphisms can we establish between ideas and sonic materials? The most common are those given by our traditions: instrumental sounds and contrapuntal and harmonic structures to organize them according to different theoretical principles, going from the empirical to the conceptual. But also, there have been morphisms which gave a sonic material to a particular conceptual structure, going from the conceptual to the empirical. These morphisms make our concepts audible, they give an aural intuition to something which is not perceptible through the senses. Examples of these morphisms are found in Dufay’s Nuper Rosarum Flores, which reproduces the form of the Cathedral of Florence in the structure of the piece, or the adaptation that Lejaren Hiller made for computer of a piece of Johannes Kepler based on the proportions of the planets of the solar system, or, say, a piece that would use the pattern of reproduction of cells and bacteria and assign them to two durational patterns for a percussion duet. In this second category of pieces, we obtain new perceptual objects which render abstract ideas into intuitions expanding the world of sonic materials beyond our more spontaneous ways of creating them. Another question is the aesthetical interest of those new objects.

The Socio-Epistemological Dimension of Music Composition

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 of a musical practice based on our human law, i.e., in our neurophysiological limitations.

Music composition is mathematical inasmuch mathematics (remember that the Greek root of the word is related to knowledge) represents basic epistemological actions of the living beings (not only humans), as Changeaux and Dehaene have shown through neuroscientific experimentation. Music composition, like math, is an epistemological action which establishes spatio-temporal relationships among objects, a cognitive multidimensional process which creates life experiences, ordering life accordingly. As any syntactic algebra, it can be interpreted (modelized) in many different reference frames, assigning object-values to its constructions, whether sounds, colors, space-extensions, emotions, poetic meanings, etc. In this sense, music composition goes beyond not only mathematics but also beyond what our traditions (including the avant-garde) have passed down to us as art of sounds. I remember, quite some time ago, a conversation with Iannis Xenakis at the Viitasaari New Music Festival (August, 8^th, 1986) in which I objected to his Parmenidean exposition the importance of aesthetic decisions in composing, not as much in terms of the choice of beautiful sound objects as in terms of the role played by freedom in the determination of a piece, which an exclusively mathematical orientation in composing seemed to deny. His answer was that he valuated music in terms of the intelligence used to manufacture a piece, understanding intelligence in mathematical terms, i.e., according to a mythology of the universal law in which there is a unique truth and a right way to express it, in his case, an interpretation of the Markovian algebra for complexity. But intelligence is not just a question of syntactical complexity reducible to the algebra of thermodynamics, for there is an emergent semantical complexity in life which in fact does not fit very well into the traditional mathematical thinking, whether stochastic or not: the complexity of bio-social phenomena defy the simplicity of our formalized conceptual models. Music composition is a social phenomenon and can only be understood encompassing a wider realm of symbolic constructions, which are also the frame for mathematics (despite the vehement denial of the recalcitrant Platonists) and for any human action.

At the same time, the acknowledgement of the socio-epistemological dimension of music frees composition of the conditionings of music industry, the concert hall, or the world of art, which today tame creative action under the whip of old social inertias (the genius religions), for the epistemological value of composition, its applicability in many different reference frames, makes it a tool for the general symbolical development of the human being. The extraordinary vitality of the music composition of the XX century grew in part out of the daring of the avant-garde movement, but also out of its uncompromising attitude in relation to its social status (sometimes too messianically expressed) as a realm for free aesthetical action, a play proposal to break social and individual ancient shackles.

Medical Ethics

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 measured with an identical rod, and the very same biological actions of life and death have been ethically valuated differently according to diverse axiological systems. Medical actions have not a simple biological valuation but a symbolically complexified domain which gives them a particular axiological tension. Such encounter of disparate forces –common to other life sciences- demands from medicine a continuous critical thinking in which theoretical reflections cannot lose sight of its everyday praxis, the resolution –urgent most of the times- of cases in which a concrete human being fights with death in unbearable pain. Medical ethics is the result of this critical thinking, covering a wide domain of problems, from the moral decisions of the clinical practice to the questioning of concepts like health, sickness, person, life and death, providing philosophical frames for their definitions. On the other hand, medical ethics examines critically the cutting edge research of the biological sciences, taking care that the main international political and ethical agreements are honored, and that the human being is treated within the ideals of respect, equality and dignity.

Medical ethics, like any other ethical action, is a ground for continuous disagreements and conflict at the individual and collective level. The differences of ethical codes are founded on different metaphysical values linked to ways of life, leaving little room for philosophical argumentation. Today, human ethical valuations range from those of the Anima Mundi groups and nations, to mixtures of different kind of universalisms of the laws and gods, passing through the materialistic valuations of modern science. In this global milieu, if there is going to be any general reference frame for ethics it has to be the consensual international conventions and declarations where the social person of the human being is put, at least ideally, at the center of any medical action. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, the Conventionfor the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950, the Conventionon the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989, are today the pillars for any medical ethics, not as a final charts, but as starting points for further development.

When we talk about medical ethics we are therefore talking about a praxiological action (ethical and political) with epistemological consequences. The definitions of life, death, person, human being, sickness, health, pain, individual consciousness, etc., -according to our present knowledge of the universe- determine intellectual frames of reference that will produce new emotional and cognitive horizons. Such an expansion is not ethically easy. Medical ethics needs to be expressed through non-contradictory critical argumentations and not simply by sterile appeals to religious or political authority. To this methodological axiom, I would add the inspiring role of two ethical values which underlie not only the Hippocratic Oath, but also Aristotle’s works on ethics: love for life and valor. 

What is the purpose of prolonging life in painful terminal diseases?

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 case with wars.

In relation to our question, we can imagine, at least, the following scenarios for a dying patient in pain:

1   I.  The patient is sustained by public funds.      

           a. Society denies further sustenance for it is an incurable disease and cannot benefit from the situation. 

      b. Society agrees to sustain the patient despite the non-economic benefits of the situation.

1.   The community wants the person to live longer in pain.

2.  The community wants the person to live longer but not in pain.

3.  The community leaves the choice to the individual.

2      II.  The patient is self-sustained.

a.   Still the society wants to exercise control.

1.    Society wants the individual to suffer.

2.    Society wants the individual to live longer but not to suffer.

b.  Society declares the case to be a private choice.

In case I.a, when the patient is sustained by private funds and society denies further sustenance, we are dealing with a rational choice according to principles 1 and 2, for P1 cannot be enacted (is a terminal disease), and there is nothing positive for the patient (supposing that s/he is driven by the principle of avoiding pain) in the situation. The rational action is assisted death.

The second choice (I.b) has, in turn, three scenarios. The first one, I.b.1 is not as rare as it would seem. Such is the case with criminals or by religious motives in which the valuation of pain extends beyond this life to other worlds. There are religious ethical values that consider suffering as a way for purgation in the context of otherworld scenarios. In this case, is not the principle of life preservation that is at work, but a principle of punishments and rewards on a transmundane scale. This is contrary both to any anthropological principles and to the structure of most of our legal systems. Since this punishment does not serve any practical purpose for the community, beyond sadistic morbid satisfaction, it obeys only non-rational valuations, therefore are not part of rational ethics.

The second scenario of the second choice, I.b.2, when the community wants the person to live his/her final days without pain, does not affect the principle of life preservation, for life cannot be preserved in this case, and also conforms to the public interest principle, which in this case is to alleviate the patient’s pain. The rational action is the alleviation of pain whether by the increase of medication for relief or by the shortening of the condition of pain. If pain cannot be alleviated, the rational outcome of the scenario is assisted death, for since P1 cannot be accomplished and the choice is not to suffer, it can only be obtained by shortening the duration of pain.

The third scenario, I.b.3, is to leave the choice to the patient, which will decide therefore either to continue his/her suffering to the very end or to suicide. None of these decisions is contrary to the ethical principle of life preservation nor to the one of public interest, for life cannot be prolonged and the community has passed the choice to the patient, i.e., has given the ownership of life to the individual. This case is equivalent to II.2.b, and both are rational actions.

Case II.a. 1, when the patient is self-sustained and society still wants to control the life of the individual for it wants him to suffer (for whatever ethical or metaphysical reasons) is equivalent to the 1.b.1, and therefore, is not a choice of rational ethics. On the other hand, case 2.a.2, is analogous to 1.b.2, and represents a choice of rational ethics which developed to its consequences leads to assisted death.

Therefore, pain can only be prolonged in terminal disease cases under non-rational ethical principles, whether those corresponding to the personal choice of the individual or the group.

Feeding the gods: the market of human organs

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 ought not to be paternalistic in this way. Therefore, we ought not to prohibit organ markets for the supposed good of those in poverty who would choose to sell their organs if a free market existed.

LC has been subscribed by Julian Savulescu [2003] and by Gerald Dworkin [1994] on the grounds of the freedom of choice of the sellers and the paternalism of any attempt to regulate the market. Janet Radcliffe Richards [Radcliffe et al.,1998], on the other hand, has subscribed LC on the grounds of a worse scenario if the prohibition is reinforced. Rippon’s paper refutes LC's claims on the grounds that sometimes you may hurt people by giving them an option that they would be better off taking: the addition of the option makes it more difficult or costly to perform the reasoning necessary to reach the best decision. His argumentation refutes P2, but fails to address what from my point of view is at the center of this moral problem: hypocrisy, or put in ethical terms, the inconsistency between the moral values of society and its actions.

The appeals to freedom of choice are a mockery: freedom of choice is always limited by initial conditions and only possible in a system with perfect flow of information, i.e., is just an ideal condition, a convenient narrative of domination which justifies many abuses. The sellers of organs do not know the full scenario but simply get into further trouble, buying themselves, at best, some extra-time: we are offering to the person a floating device so s/he can be saved to be properly eaten lately by the sharks. When we appeal for the freedom to decide upon our own body, we forget that such a right is denied at large throughout the world, as we see in the relation to the free use of drugs, or in war situations, or in terminal diseases: the restrictions on the freedom of choice for the individual in these three scenarios is inconsistent with the approval of a free live donor market. We have to decide, the body belongs to the individual or it does not. But even if we reach the civilized point of letting the individual decide upon his (her) life and body, the idea of a free market does not necessarily follows. Why should there be market conditions for human transplanting? The still on-going belief on the supernatural capacities of the invisible hand of the market, the old Laissez Faire, is an old superstition linked to other supernatural beliefs and has no grounds on economic data: market crisis are paid by the population at large through public funds.

There are not easy and straightforward rational solutions when ontologies are involved, especially when those are otherworld valuations. The live donor market problem has, nonetheless a solution based on human valuations. If we value life and freedom of choice we cannot interfere in the free donation of organs, but it seems rather perverse and human degrading the idea of solving (or even alleviating) poverty through merchandizing human body parts. Although prostitution reaches beyond the sex domain into realms of manipulation and domination, when we are dealing with body parts, nobody would sell a part of his/her body if the need for survival was not urgent. The control of the organ market by society will force other solutions for poverty, more permanent and consistent with the values that we are teaching to our children and write in our Constitutions, the values that can hold a community as a human social contract. From my point of view, our own life cannot be maintained at any price. We have reached to this point of social evolution precisely by standing against barbarisms and abuses. The ridicule and shallow proposals for a human life based only on money valuations, are an insult against intelligence, and therefore, against life.

References

Dworkin G. [1994]Markets and Morals. In: Dworkin G, ed. Morality, Harm and the Law.

Oxford: Westview. 1994. 155–61.

Frazer, James. [1922]. The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead. Vol. 2.  MacMillan and Co., London.

Radcliffe Richards J, Daar A, Guttmann R, et al. [1998] The case for allowing kidney sales. Lancet. 1998. 351:1950–2.

Rippon, Simon. [2012] Imposing options on people in poverty: the harm of a live donor organ market. JME. Med Ethics 2014;40:145–150.

Savulescu J.[2003] Is the sale of body parts wrong? JME 2003;29:138–9.

Constructive Neurophilosophy

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 distinction between philosophy and natural philosophy, or put in epistemological terms, the distinction between a philosophy based on metaphysical assumptions and which proceed exclusively by inference from those assumptions (pretty much like axiomatic mathematics, or like theology, or rational ethics), and an inductive philosophy based on experience and contrast of hypothesis by experiment. The monolithic concept of philosophy and philosophical argumentations used by Edelman and Zeki does not apply to philosophy more that it would apply to mathematics.

From a constructive point of view, mathematics and the rest of our epistemological thinking has its roots on biological grounds, a postulate that, although expressed by Kronecker [Bishop, 2012,2],  it took till the experimentations of Changeaux [Changeaux and Connes, 1995] and Dehaene [2001] to be widely accepted, and only among the different epistemological branches that spread from Brouwer’s intuitionism. If we understand by biology only neuroscience, Edelman’s thesis would be right, but it seems too narrow a definition, and highly imprecise, for not only neuroscience, but biology itself seems to be only understandable in a wider astrobiological conceptual frame. Such a frame has to include also the anthropological system, the emergent buffer introduced by human societies, so we find ourselves in a much more complex situation than the one devised by naïve neuroscience.

No doubt, neuroscience has very much to say in the psychological processes of the ego formation and the question of consciousness (and Edelman’s theory of global mappings is a proof of that), but its language lacks the expressive means to address it in a critically manner, i.e., neuroscience has not the means to investigate its own methodologies (ontoepistemological bases of the scientific method, protocols of valuation, etc.), and therefore, to give a meaningful theory of the processes of life. On the other hand, if neuroscience adopts other languages (like the language of epistemology) to express their theories and expand them in wider conceptual realms, such action would be philosophical, and the parochial distinctions of Crick, Edelman and Zeki would no longer have any meaning.

The epistemological reductionist seems to ignore the semantical implications of Tarski’s theorem, i.e., it ignores the notion of emergence of meaning. Theoretical terms do not have necesarilly the same meaning in theories which are sintactically reducible among them. To reduce one theory to another is to find a common symbolical representation for both of them, and that implies that both have the same capabilities of expression, and therefore that we are expressing basically the same thing in both theories, a realist ontology which ignores the historical dimension of our theories and which implies the belief in an underlying reality beyond human symbolization.

It does not have to be called philosophy, let us call it constructive neurophilosophy or systems biology, or any other name, but the epistemological work has to be done if we want to have meaningful argumentations. The process is double: axiomatic critique (of the principles and of the methods) and theoretical construction. The results and postulates of neuroscience are needed at both levels.

References

Bennet, M.R and Hacker, P.M.S. [2003]. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell Publishing. Malden, (MA-USA), Oxford (G.B) and Victoria (AUS).

Bishop, Errett. [2012] Foundations of Constructive Analysis. Ishi Press International. New York an Tokio.

Changeaux, J.P. and Connes, A. [1995] Conversations on Mind, Matter and Mathematics. Princeton University Press.

Dehaene, Stanislas.[2001]. The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Oxford University Press. New York.

Edelman, Gerald M., and Tononi, Giulio. [2001]. Consciousness. Penguin Books. London et alliae.