Skip to main content

Corpses and other philosophical objects

Anthropology has taught us that early hunter groups burials not only aimed at fabulous trips to other worlds but that they also obeyed to a definite and prosaic fear of the deceased, especially when it was the corpse of a Chieftain or warrior that everyone knew to be of bad temper. They put stones upon the corpse in order to immobilize it and avoid unpleasant visits at night claiming its favorite toys or wives. In this sense, pyramids represent the greatest achievement in anti-zombie technology, disguised as the macro ego-trip of a deluded human being.
Analogously, philosophy has tried to bury the corpse of the metaphysics of the King-God under thousand rocks, but the resilient body keeps coming back to life, annoyingly, embarrassing the philosophical family like a poor and ugly distant relative which appears in the middle of an epistemological party. For the scientific community, the smell is unbearable, though they seem to ignore the annoyance when the mummy presents itself in the party as one of the few chosen priests of the universal law: Isaac, Albert…

The pantheons of philosophy have become the place for field work. Midway between forensic and embalming sciences philosophy feeds on itself, thus reproducing a reification game of transcendental objects which blocks the way for the development of an onto-epistemology based in the human law that at the same time extends into the realm of life. But a wonderful paradox awaits for any adventurous philosophy which steps out of the graveyard looking for fresh air: the transformation of philosophy into natural science only partially buries the corpses of the King-Gods, for in the modern world science has not the liminal character of philosophy, instead, it is central to the mythical axes of Western society, and the proper practice of science requires from the thinker a compulsory belief in Santa Claus, i.e. the naïve psychological constitution of a five year old, otherwise the King will not invest him/her with the wisdom of a Nobel Prize. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions. At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite. Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no re...

What do we marry?

  The narrative tradition of India contains true gems of fantastic literature that give rise to the most entertaining ethical and metaphysical speculations. In the collection of stories from the 11th century Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( The Ocean that Contains Streams of Stories ), which collects traditional stories from India, the loquacious ghost of a corpse taken down from a gallows tells the king who took him off the macabre swing a very interesting tragicomic tale. Two friends undertook a pilgrimage to a sacred spa of the goddess Kali, and there they saw a beautiful girl. One of them fell ill with passion, stopped eating and sleeping, and was sure that he would die unless he could have that girl as his wife. His friend contacted her father and explained the situation. The father, hurriedly, went to the girl's parents in order to organize the wedding. Shortly after the hasty marriage, the young couple and her friend left for her parents' house. On the way, they ca...