Intelligence, Consciousness and the Unheimlich

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.