The construction of our myths, whether
traditional or modern (scientific), did not follow a cosmic plan of progressive
unfoldment. They are not, as Schelling thought, tautegoric expressions of an
extra-human force wrapped around itself which becomes self-evident and acting
in the course of time, knowing itself in the process, expressing itself through
the physical means available and formed at that particular time. They are
neither, as less pantheistically inclined minds thought, metaphors of an
analogous extra-human reality, shadows of a true essence which convey reflected
meanings which our petty minds can hardly understand, though we benefit from
their eternal radiance in the filtered versions given to us by officials and
priests. In order to have a metaphor, we need something which is not a metaphor
to relate it to, a referent whose ontic nature is independent. Even if there
was such a thing we could never tell, for its independence would make it
independent from us, and therefore, unthinkable. Our common metaphors work as
endomorphisms, in which both ends of the transformations are clear and given by
language tradition, but we could not apply them when one of the extremes is made
of exomorphic representations of gods,
meanings of the universe, etc.
Myths are grounded in our economic actions of
survival, enarized in different degrees of complexity through cumulative
processes of choices and filtering out from the ocean of life experience,
picking particularly what helps and contributes to the life of the human group.
This process of experience and memory filtering transforms, as Feuerbach
noticed,
what is unheimlich into heimlich, changing what is foreign to our Lebenswelt
into common language and practice, another object for our mind home. The result
of the process is myth, representations of the unheimlich which show ways to
cope with it, and how to combine sequences of meaning which will end up
flourishing in conscious thinking. The apeiron is given shape and linguistic
form, determining what is not our human house and purpose. What gives shape to
the apeiron is what I call intelligence,
or life-intelligence, an autopoietic action
which gives form to the world at the same time that it shapes itself (what
could be called a mimetic process).
To be conscious, in human terms (beyond simple body consciousness), is the
power to elaborate a narrative which can be understood by our human group, but
is a different process to the process of intelligence. We call self-consciousness to a particular myth
which relates our body individuation to a Weltanschauung myth, i.e. a myth of
individuation in relation to a community myth. In this sense,
self-consciousness will always be an ethical myth, whose roots grow deeply in
the Unterlebenswelt of emotional protocols, shared with the rest of life forms
in different degrees.
Consciousness is therefore a result of
intelligence’s workings, a strategy for taming the unheimlich aspect of life,
but its efficiency is only guaranteed only inasmuch we move within outside
liminal experience. Consciousness is a liminoid construction, a myth built upon
the abyss of vital actions, and can only work as a barrier against unheimlich
experiences under mechanized narrative protocols, i.e. consciousness can only
work as a ready-made or frozen intelligence, which is to say, as a limitation
of life-intelligence: as death or fisis.
