The main mythico-ritual action of the King-God Plane

 The mythical-ritual actions that center the order of the city on this mythical plane are those of the agrarian festivals, which cover the extension of the astronomical year and follow a triple cyclical pattern based on the birth of the divine child-king, his subsequent nuptials as an adult, and his death and resurrection. It is a staging, which can be complex and sophisticated, of something whose emotional content is extremely simple, a simplicity from which its effectiveness derives. Its extreme simplicity has saturated the possible additional interpretations, in fact, the pre-valuation of these actions, their understanding at a perfectly delimited prehuman level and conditioned by their evolutionary success, makes their symbolic expressions redundant, although it is precisely through this redundancy (that myths and art produce over and over again) how these representations reach their status as the center of social meaning, a position that is guaranteed by their basic emotional content. The tireless repetition of what has formed our identity, the formation of the simplest and most basic social persons, the child, the pregnant woman, the dead warrior, the ancestor, take on the masks of the relationship between the King-God and the fertility Goddess to represent the tragedy of personal mortality and the continuity of life. The fertility myths seek a symbolic confirmation of what our emotions had previously hidden in them, the fundamental evaluations of social emotions. The confirmation is produced by the ritual, which shows the meaning of life in the city, transforming the obviousness of life and death into a cosmic representation: the human community does what the gods and the entire universe have always done. It is the cosmic game of the city, whose order is a revelation, in the person and the life of the King-God, with respect to the chaos of the previous human habitats and the social order of the nomadic and barbarian people. 

Three generations of Gods

 On the mythical plane of the King-God, we witness the deliberate creation of the social persons of the gods, whereas the divinities and supernatural beings in general of the Anima Mundi (First Generation Gods), were the result of spontaneous evolutions of the metaphysics of the totems (an evolution that in some cases led these beings to the posterior category of city founding gods) and of the very foundations of the narrative of Anima Mundi. In the Rigveda, we observe the line that begins with Dyaus-Pitar (“The Sky Father”, First Generation God) and continues through Varuna and Indra (Second Generation God), a line that the Mahabharata continues to Krishna (Vishnu, Second Generation God) in creating a full mythology. Other gods, however, are the conscious and deliberate creation of new social persons, linked to new activities or new moral and epistemological concepts (Third Generation Gods) produced by the new social relationships. It would be tedious to list all the variety of priestly created gods and goddesses. In fact, the question of the exact number of gods is irrelevant, as is a misinterpretation (by hypostasis) of what the person of a god is supposed to be. A god can be assigned to every object we can think of, just as we can pair up the elements of any two sets. The most relevant issue in relation to the gods of this plane, apart from the person of the King-God who gives the reference or fundamental primitive determination, will be their evolution towards gods that express reflexively developed, epistemological enary emotions (gods of writing, of mathematics, astronomy, wisdom, etc.), morals (gods of virtue, perfection, purity, etc.), as well as the enary synthesis of these two emotional groups (the gods of truth, of destiny and those of the law). From this tertiary generation of gods, the mythical plane of Universal Law will evolve, gods that will end up being attributes or representations of such law. An interesting example of this deity is found in the Egyptian goddess of truth Maat, who began as (as one might expect) a daughter of Ra, emerged from the abyss of the waters at the same time as him, to develop into an independent principle of more active character than Ra himself. 

Slavery as dependence in relation to a mythico-ritual axis

 It is very likely that the legal idea of ​​belonging to a person, slavery, developed in small steps of administration of the most basic social persons within other more complex collectives: those of gender, totem, or caste. In fact, it does not seem that until today there has been a single human society in which the subject, in any of its social persons, has not been considered as conditioned to the will of the group, as an object owned by the community, with an independent life only as long as there is no group urgency, or only in moments when the social function is not active. And this dependence reaches the kings themselves and the gods. Dependency within cold societies occurred reciprocally, and as a need based on basic social emotion: the individual cannot be without the group. However, in complex urban societies, although the same emotional system operates, the group is divided into subgroups with dominance conflicts between them, so the dependence of one caste on another, and in general, on a person with respect to another, comes from subordination with respect to a mythical-ritual structure. The king of Babylon could not exercise his power outside the mythical structure of the city: he depends on Marduk, and his subjects as subjects of Marduk, and obedience to his person is given to the extent that he assumes and interprets within a few rules, the person of the king. Thus, for example, the fact that during the Akitu there was a moment in which the king was publicly humiliated, did not imply the humiliation of Marduk, but the reversion to a mythical order prior to the city, emotionally more basic, in which neither the person of the king nor that of the priests made sense neither those of the rest of the urban people, a reversal towards the genre and age persons, expression of the more basic individuations of the members of the group. When the king returns to his royal person, he becomes immediately the representative (most of the time as a son or alter ego) of the mythical God of the city (traditionally a God of the Storm). In the same way, the power of the priests and nobles over others was a function of their performance in the social drama and not the cause of direct dependencies (asymmetrically reciprocal) with respect to slaves and serfs. The dependency is not in relation to a city-state, it is not the dependency with respect to a geographical location, nor with respect to the figure of the god or the king, but in relation to a mythico-ritual structure, and more specifically, with respect to the economic success of this structure, that is, its ability to solve nutritional, environmental and war threats. 

Within the social persona of the gods, we observe a minimum of two divine generations within this mythical plane. The gods of the Anima Mundi were the great civilizing ancestors, fused with a totem, either animal or vegetable, or a meteorological or natural force. With the passage of time, the human character of the ancestor is lost in stereotyped narratives linked to specific rites and economic actions, it is transformed into a collective person that functions in a transgenerational way, to which the representations elaborated by the priestly caste based on the complexity of the new urban communities, which include the economic actions of mythical-ritual agricultural schemes. This first generation of gods is challenged by the appearance of external demographic pressures, which produce readjustments of their personalities or directly their destruction. The stories of this mythical plane have a clear cosmogonic character, narratives of heroic struggles and events, of changes of order. The battles for economic determinations are related to primitive determinations. Historical enemies are also mythical, in a type of narrative that, to this day, has not abandoned us at all. The war to expel the Hyksos, worshipers of Seth, the enemy brother of Osiris, from the delta of the Nile, is the earthly performance of the cosmic battle of the Osiris myth, as had been the founding fight of Babylon on the part of Marduk, as will be the dynastic succession of the Mahabharata between Kurus and Pandavas in the struggle for the city of discernment, Hastinapura (City of Elephants), in a cosmic cycle of battles between good and evil, as will be the war narratives against Nazi power on the part of the allied forces, or that of Islam against the demonized West that the fundamentalisms of our day proclaim.

Castes and the Social Body

 The image of the State as a body made up of castes has both a dimension of euphemism of a narrative slavery technique of domination, and of genuine metaphysical belief. In Jainism, the cosmic system is organized according to a reincarnation plan that places each monad (Atman) in its rightful place in the Great Man within a supposed order, a primitive determination that served to structure the empire of Chandragupta Maurya. The genuine belief in a metaphysical system based on the corporation of the castes is perfectly understandable for the case of dominant social persons: the faith in the divine right to the dominion of others unites the caste and its actions. But the exercise of the domination of caste is also perfectly compatible from pragmatic and more or less disbelieving positions, as we read in the Artha Sastra. Its author, Kautilya, minister of the first Mauryan emperor, reconciles, without any problem, the primitive determinations of Jainism with a pragmatic approach to politics that anticipates Machiavelli by more than a thousand years. The religious vows of a king are his preparation for action, his sacrifices and ablutions are the distribution of offices, and his attention to the interests of the kingdom. In his analysis of the functioning of the ideal government, Kautilya offers a philosophical view of the structure of society in his time. His narration takes place at a time when Indian society is changing from the mythical-ritual narratives of the King-God to those of the plane of universal law, in which kings, as will be the case of Ashoka Maurya, are administrators of an objective order that has not been created by them and of which they are not their direct, but spiritual heirs. Kautilya's position epitomizes the priestly caste (to which he belonged) of service to the body of the State, in which gods, holy books, and rites, are but the mythical instruments for the technology of domination. The Artha Sastra takes the primitive determinations as parameters, that can be changed by other equivalents at a given moment, since the end of life is wealth, Artha, and the so-called spiritual and artistic ends are dependent on this economic foundation. The sense of Artha is equivalent to that of the will to power, exercised in all its power by the king and to a lesser extent, and as long as it does not unbalance the building of the State, by nobles and other free citizens. The good king makes his wishes coincide with those of his people (meaning people the three upper castes: priests, warriors and merchants), and not with his own wishes. The motive for action is not the moral principles of charity and love of the people, but the greater stability of such a form of government. In the Artha Sastra, we can observe the tension between the pragmatic needs of community organization and the economic burden that the otherworldliness of primitive determinations imposed on the development of more complex societies.

The importance of primitive determinations in explaining the formation of stratified societies

 The importance of primitive determinations in explaining the formation of stratified societies has only been recognized in anthropology relatively recently in the works of Carneiro, Kolata, Demarest, and some others, although it is implicit in the work of Durkheim, and previously, in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Ideology is not a superstructure added to the economic infrastructure (forces and relations of production), but the fixing of economic relations in identity narratives, their evaluative interpretation, from which the different social persons and the actions of the group arise. Narratives of primitive determination, or ideology, can be protocolized into effective techniques for identity control, but they are not for this reason something secondary, an epiphenomenon of an imaginary nature added to the reality of economic relations: there cannot be stable economic determinations without a primitive determination that interprets them, however basic it may be, however, close it may be to the system of primary emotions.

The four social persons that make the King-God

 To the figures of the Sangu and the Lugal must be added those of the Ensi, or king consort of the goddess, and the Ugula, a later Assyrian denomination to designate the commercial representative of a city. The Ensi figure seems to have been linked to that of the agricultural administrator and designated the ruler of a single city, which implies that it is not a position related to war, but something like a governor under the orders of a Lugal. These distinctions are relevant to understanding the two fundamental lines of formation of the person of kings. The later fusion of the Lugal and the Sangu, the general and the priest, is not done equally in all societies, but we can say, from a good number of examples provided by history, that the stability of a ruling group depends on its ability to generate prestige as Sangu, and such prestige is not a mere question of ability to coordinate the group in war, because in order to unite the power of the community around a mythical-ritual axis it is necessary to also dominate the powers of the ancestors, in addition to explaining and predicting the economic actions of the group and the development of events.

The Sangu bases all his prestige and his power on the irreversibility of death and the afterlife, of which he is the creator in his schizophrenic visions. , in addition to those collected in the tradition of his caste. The Sangu monopolizes the other world but charges it in this, both in offerings and tributes to the temple (later in taxes), as well as administering the laws to obtain the ownership of the land, or establishing the exchange rates between grain and metals, and in generally obtain the positions of advantage and power in all economic activities. Priests, as controllers and creators of primitive determinations, are always one step behind economic vital action, although the latter does not reach its meaning except when it is interpreted in relation to the mythic-ritual set, an interpretation that is precisely in the power of the priest. The great joint creation of the priest and the warrior king, of the Sangu and the Lugal, is the State, whose purpose is always pastoral, of exploitation of the mass, of the economic people, the peasant, and the artisan, but also of the gender and kinship. All the deployment of new social persons is due to the specialization required for the control of the masses of various cities and their unification under a single power. Diversification occurs among the ruling elite much more than among serfs and slaves, who made up more than ninety percent of the population, and whose productive activities were primarily agrarian. The technological innovations of this mythical plane, as we observe in Mesopotamia and Egypt, come directly from the control of new economic activities, and not from the terrain of the Sangu, the other world, and identity narratives. The writing, apart from the descriptions of its divine origin, obeys pragmatic questions of organization, as well as the first mathematics. 

How is the King-God social person formed?

 The theory of great men that 20th Century anthropology has used to explain the origin of kings, has in its favor the fact that it is a simple hypothesis and that it seems to agree with experience as we see it operating in our lives. The thesis, in the form that is presented in anthropology more or less explicitly, says that the history of humanity is basically the history of a few great men who have been able to promote the development of the whole group. From this point of view, the kings would be the first great men who, spontaneously, were emerging with the specialization of the work of the Neolithic revolution. The thesis, supported by philosophers such as Hegel, Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Spencer, and endorsed by the masses in different traditional theological forms, as well as by the practice of the artistic theory of genius, and it is validated within the social Darwinism of corporate and state capitalism (contemporary China) of the XX and XXI centuries, as well as among the Marxist ideas of the “enlightened elite” that leads revolutions. 

The problem with this explanation is that it already assumes the existence of the figure of the great man, a figure that is observed in the shamans, caciques, and heads of cold societies, to explain the emergence of the figure of the king. In all cases, these are male social persons, although later a very small group of women were incorporated, which, if we take the matter to the level of basic emotions, tells us that it is a question of leadership analogous to animals in which a dominant male ensures the transmission of his genes and controls the sustenance of the group and the security. The first caciques, as anthropological studies of cold societies show us, were characterized by being great providers of the community, something like promoters of collective actions capable of obtaining followers from more or less immediate prizes. At different levels of scale and complexity, this occurs among great apes, so it is not risky to see in this polarization of economic people merely the work of the mammalian emotional system.

However, the social differences that we are talking about occur with the change in economic activity, specifically with the surplus that occurs with agriculture, whose redistribution is no longer egalitarian, and a group of subjects generates social persons that legitimize the difference and inequality. The generation of wealth in the first societies could only be through domestic agricultural and artisan production, or through the external activities of trade and war. The processes of accumulation through the internal generation of wealth are slow compared to those that allow war, and trade in some cases, which points to a possible double formation of leadership. The first would be the one that comes from a progressive and slow warming up of the community from the differences in the productive capacities of its members, an accumulation of small differences with a generational multiplicative effect. In these cases, the differences in production capacities are linked to the differences in the numbers of the clans and the available technology, both in the economic fields and in the general epistemological (of explanation and prediction of vital actions), as well as the use in the actions of primitive determination of an ideological technology to establish and justify a social order. These capacities found the prestige of the figure of the leading shaman-priest, someone who controls the technology of the rain, since he speaks with the gods, and who knows the plants and the identity narratives that allow the group of totems to function with a minimum unification. In already stratified societies, such as some cities of the early dynastic period of Mesopotamia (XXVIII BC), this type of leader, who came from the extension of priestly power, was called Sangu, who was distinguished from the leader of other cities that he had risen to power by warlike methods, the Lugal. 

The King-God as shepherd of men

 Since the earliest written testimonies, kings have presented themselves as shepherds of men, and the difference in the hierarchy is literal. We have examples in the Gilgamesh, the hero is the shepherd of Uruk, in the Enuma Elish, in the myths of the shepherd King-God Dumuzi, in the introduction to the Code of Hammurabi, in the texts of Ashurnasirpal II, in the myths of Krishna, in the Bible in relation to David and in other myths from the Middle East to India in which the King-God legitimizes himself as a caring force for the group. But herding is nothing more than a more stable and evolved form of hunting, and the predatory descent of the shepherd over the herd weighs on this rhetoric of power. The narratives often combine the benefit that cattle derive from being cared for, their livelihood, with total dependence and submission to the will of the shepherd. In these myths, there are not even slave images as they would be understood in the modern world, but rather proclamations of difference of species that are put into practice in the organization of the city: on the one side the gods (or their representatives) and on the other, the “blackheads”, an Akkadian metaphor to designate common men. The first temple-cities of Mesopotamia are literally dairy farms, with stables next to the temples and the residences of the priests, responsible for milking the sacred cows with the same attitude with which the population of servants and slaves are exploited.

The rhetoric of pastoral power, as Michel Foucault called it, supposes the creation of myths that function as a technology of power, as protocolized primitive determinations that stabilize economic relations, legitimizing them in the figure of a King-God creator of the world and the city, who governs it as a benign figure for those who submit, and terrible for those who oppose his will, identified with the universal order. The city wall protects from the enemy and prevents the flight of the slave and the cattle. It is interesting to note that the first temple cities of the Middle East and Mesoamerica arose in closed habitats, in river and mountain valleys, from which it was difficult to escape.

The person of the slave

 Slavery is already an institution in Sumer, although the phenomenon is possibly more than a hundred centuries old, coming from the first Neolithic. If we observe the Ur-Nammu Code we see the legal subsumption of all the social persons of the city under only two categories, freemen and slaves, although then a second categorization is applied for the freemen according to their economic person. The Code is presented as an advance in justice compared to previous moments: at this time, the orphan is no longer handed over to the rich as a slave, nor the widow to the powerful, nor the one who owns a cent (shekel) who owns a thousand (mina). The text implies that these actions that were carried out before are unfair, but not because the Code expresses opinions contrary to the institution of slavery, on which the entire order of the city rested, but because being an orphan, a widow, or a poor person, all of them, social persons defined with respect to a third party (father, husband, rich man), is not considered in this Code as a sufficient condition for slavery, although it was considered so at other previous times. The social persons of the orphan and the widow are not treated as a gender person, but as economic potentialities, and like the poor, as labor, and for that reason they are cited in the same paragraph, as belonging to the slave context. As these people are not self-sufficient, the discussion is the way in which they will become dependent on others, their degree of servitude. 

Sumerian laws allowed parents to sell their children as slaves, and later, in Babylon, the poor could sell themselves as slaves to ensure a livelihood for themselves and their family which meant that, after the captives of war, economic debts were the most important source of these dependency relationships. Slavery has an obvious economic foundation, but its dual source, war and debt, seems to require a different metaphysical foundation to justify it. In the texts of the military campaigns of Tuthmosis III (1490-1436 BC), the loot and looting lists include slaves as one more property, a custom also from Mesopotamia that will be observed in the war incursions of all world cultures up to a much more recent time than our ideas on human rights would like to admit. In this case, the enemy slaves are guaranteed by a divine right that is legitimized by force: it is the triumphant god, and his representative on earth, the King-God, who by winning shows that he complies with what is prescribed in the Tables of Fate, like when Marduk defeats Kingu.

The debt is here from the lowest to the highest, in a very crude sense of the food chain, as when among the Tongan the souls of the poor are enslaved to those of the nobles for eternity, or as when among the Samoans poor people are directly the food of the noble in the other world. The right to life is not considered as something equal for everyone: the people who create order and prosperity, the nobles and kings, are creditors of the rest of the group, and their survival against other clans of kings and nobles of other cities proclaims them leaders in accordance with divine laws. Kings and noblemen are seen as rulers of the universe, although subsumed to the will of the King-God creator of such order. In this sense, the foundation of external slavery (prisoners of war) is not, as it seemed, different from that of the internal one: the debt of the social body with respect to the thinking and organizing head of the city. Slavery expresses in this mythico-ritual plane the way things are, kings are the gods or their heirs, and in the same way that men are slaves of the gods, the kings are the lords of their representatives, those who establish the norms of social functioning as an image of the functioning of the heavens. The debt to the King-God is paid with a life of submission to work, as stipulated by divine laws. Any deviation from these myths produces the moral object of guilt and deserves the retribution of punishment, psychophysical in this world, and metaphysical in relation to larger cycles of existence. The social person is due to the King-God, lord of the city, whom he cares for like a shepherd who cares for inferior beings.

Rise of the functional person within the King-God plane

 The second mythical plane, which we can call the King-God corresponds to the complete social development of the temple cities and their subsequent transformation into city-states, such as Ur, Uruk, Kish, Eshunna, Memphis, or Heliopolis. The limits of this mythical plane are more easily understood from a mythopoetic point of view than from historical urban examples, since the passage to the next mythical plane, that of universal law, such as the one that opens in Babylon and continues in Luoyang or in Rome is more visible in economic and primitive narratives, especially the latter, than in aspects of urban or imperial configuration. The economic specialization implicit in the figure of the shaman germinated in the different social people that it effectively synthesized. This mythical plane could be called the “functional person plane”, thereby emphasizing the explosion of new economic persons brought about by urban complexification, although the functional person designation may be misleading because the social persons of the previous mythical plane also have a functional origin, are the result of economic activities. However, the specific difference given by the Anima person, from which an epistemological superclass was derived that gave synthetic unity to the narrative of the identity of the human and the world, was possible not by an economic action, but by the construction of primitive determination that made the linguistic person of the ancestor a social person. 

The conceptual unity that allowed the Anima person gave the conditions of possibility for the development of complex social structures, the totems, which, in turn, under the pressure of new economic actions, underwent a transformation in the direction of the creation of a functional or caste person. In the caste, the psychological elements of the identity of the totem are incorporated, as well as the general implicit idea of ​​a division of the vital actions according to the abilities and according to the needs. The totem is an intuitive understanding of the force of the variety within the group. The complexity reached by human societies is due to a process of interaction of economic and primitive determinations that have a mimetic relationship with each other and with the environment. For their part, narratives of primitive determination develop inertia of resistance to change, the weight of the past, which can result, in contrast to the economic actions that serve as a reference, mythical-ritual ideological structures whose representations about the world and the human are contradictory with the vital processes.

Social stratification came about from the unequal distribution of the surplus generated by the division of labor. In Karl Marx's terms, this primitive accumulation was nothing other than the historical process of divorce between the producer and the means of production, which implies that at some point they were “married”, and gives a wrong image of the actors of cold societies. The social person who produces in archaic societies is not the same person who later, in agricultural cultures, is deprived of the means of production in whose process he is involved. The producers in the mythical plane of the Anima Mundi are the people of the economic genre, hunters, gatherers, or small seasonal planters (tasks carried out by men and women). The fundamental production of these groups is food and human beings, and both their production and the subjects themselves belong to the clan, the phratry, or the tribe; in fact, that is the basis of solidarity of the totem, solidarity that extends beyond the human race, which makes even the hunter-gatherer production subsumed under the Anima Mundi law. However, in the planting communities, we witness a rupture of solidarity due to the predominant effective action of some social persons over others, a rupture of identity (to which the same totems gave rise) that made a large community function as a multiple organism. In times of technique as basic as that of the Neolithic, production capacity depended fundamentally on labor, so that the differences in wealth between communities were directly proportional to the population. 

Economic and primitive determinations in Anima Mundi mithico-ritual planes

 The mythical plane that determines the Anima person arises in hunter-gatherer and proto-agrarian economies, which coalesce around identity stories based on solidarity between living beings and their environment. We can characterize the mythical plane of Anima Mundi from a progressive differentiation of social people due to the complexity of economic actions of a human group due to environmental stress in relation to resources. The homeostatic balances of older populations are fed back by the new opportunities offered by specialization, the constitution of an increasingly complex social organism that dominates the animal and plant world in the competition for life. The narratives of knowledge of the environment and economic activity, hunting for men, motherhood for women, are narrated with an epistemological, educational nature, in mythical-ritual protocols of rites of passage, narrations, and performances that provide the basis for the identity of different simple people, based on gender, age and kinship, narrations that, being common, produce a collective identity.

In these narratives, identity and economy are inseparable, which is why two of the fundamental people are given by animals and plants. The Anima person is the superclass to which all other people belong, the one that makes possible a vital continuum (of which the members of the community are part), already extended to the scenes and to the forces of nature (the rest of the actors), and which offers the first human self-representation as one more element of an Anima Mundi. People who are formed from the division of the group into genders can be separated into two groups, one economic and the other related to kinship. As economic persons that are formed from the division into genders, we have the group of hunters of large and dangerous animals, composed in almost all cases by men and that of small animals, carried out by women, although it is probable that in more archaic societies, and depending on the type of animals, women participated more actively in all hunting. In any case, there was a progressive specialization that separated the economic tasks of men and women from the demands of motherhood, the longest-lasting emotion in mammals, and a conditioner of group homeostasis - giving rise to different social persons.

We can distinguish at least fifteen basic classes of people that appear in the narratives of the mythical plane of the Anima Mundi: the collective person, people of gender in livelihood activities, people of gender in kinship actions, people formed by the age, the ancestor, the animal, the plant, the soul person, the animal divinity, the natural divinity, the memory-preserving shaman (the narrator of identity), the shaman-psychopomps (the one who gives meaning to death), the shaman-doctor (the one who gives meaning to life), the shaman-controller of forces (the one who predicts the future), and the priest-leader shaman, as a later development that brings together at least one of the previous shaman classes within general narratives of the explicit constitution of mythical-ritual structures. The communicative actions between these basic people could be categorized, based on the difference that we have established between mythical actions of economic (or functional) determination and those of primitive narration, into two subgroups for each of them. Thus, we would have praxiological and epistemological actions of economic determination, and identity actions and metanarratives of primitive determination. Praxiological narrative actions would be those of group order, hunting and gathering, agricultural, non-food reproductive, habitat, commercial, economic action evaluations (quantifying exchanges), community services, military, and the playful ones. Epistemological narratives would be those developed in the technologies of control of space-time and the physical environment, general symbolic narratives, and playful narrations with epistemological content.

Among the narratives of primitive determination of the identity subcategory, we would find those that establish the personal-group relationship (an enary symbolic development of the group's totemic order narratives), the gender narratives, those of group bonding, those of death and death. immortality, those of control of social order, those of cosmogony, those of solidarity, and those of general ritual enculturation. Finally, we can speak of a type of meta-narration, which already occurs in the third form of shamanic mimesis, which serves as a narrative of domination. These categories of actions will be the fundamental ones for the other mythical planes, although, in each one of them a narrative transformation takes place that gives rise to different mythical scenes and objects

The narratives of connection of the members of the group are at the Anima Mundi level the kinship group relations, which include the fundamental rules of filiation, whether they are cognatic or unilinear, according to the degree of complexity of society. As a vast anthropological literature shows, kinship relationships are far from being simple or universal, despite the fact that they are nothing more than the particular way in which a human group orders sexual, maternal and social emotions.

Shamans and the development of social persons

 The growing dissociation of new social persons from a single primitive that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions, in which the information and/or work required to reach their state of operational optimization when they are made by a larger number of people. From the person of the shaman, compatible with the persons of man or woman, but not with the child, the social persons of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king. 

In this second case, the shamanic powers are either the result of a search or spontaneous, which from the point of view of the professionalism of the economic action of shamanism is irrelevant, since it is the work of a specialist for communication with the Anima Mundi. In fact, the hereditary transmission of social persons is not exclusive to shamanic professional practice. The shaman is not an individual person any more than the social person of the old man can be. In the case of the shaman, the effectiveness of his arts depends precisely on not being individual, on his belonging to an oral tradition that contains specific information, both economic and of primitive determination, which has grown in many generations, accumulating knowledge about plants, the seasons, animals, and in general, about everything that the life of the tribe needs. The shaman is the creator of the specific form that narratives of primitive determination take, which link human experience with the representation of life and the world that arises from the unity of the Anima person, but does not do so as an individual, but as a multiple personality in a double sense: as heir to some narratives that have been synthesized by the different people in the group, shamans and non-shamans, and as a ritual setting for dialogues with the spiritual people of the group.

As heir and reproducer of the identity narratives, he handles a much broader vocabulary than the rest of his community, a vocabulary that, precisely for the reason of not being fully shared, is not suitable for ordinary communication, and has a ritual and specialized use, which supposes a radical break between the social person of the shaman in ritual actions and the actions of daily life. Being the ritual scene of conversations with people from the mythical plane of the Anima Mundi, the shaman is a person split into many others, of ancestors, animals, or gods. A symptom of this schizophrenia, sought after and desired as well as forced by the shamanic activity itself, are the epileptic episodes that frequently occur in the shamanic world. The link between shamanism and epilepsy (considered in antiquity as a sacred disease) has been established since the first European studies on the phenomenon, although only recently has neurology linked epilepsy with schizophrenia in both senses.

What is a totem?

 Totems are emblems of identity in human groups that bring together narratives of economic and primitive determination and interact in a hierarchical way to form mythical-ritual structures. Most of the totems have names of animals or plants, the rest being climatological, or the seasons, orography, or celestial names. In addition to the identity function, the totem system allows a fairly complex ordering of social relationships that avoids, through a system of membership rules, perfectly intuitively understandable, incest and systems of links that are too genetically close. The totem system can be understood as an extension of general social persons to larger communities, a system that ab initio incorporates the concept of the Anima person as a link with the rest of living beings and ancestors, which supposes that it is a further development of a simpler form of organization. A society governed by this system makes explicit a range of persons that the same individual can act according to the occasion. Thus, for example, among totemic Australians, to the male person is added that of old man, but also that of the kangaroo clan (which belongs to a phratry with another totem), and to that the person of the married class X of that phratry. The continuity of human persons and animals is not yet, as it may be in later more elaborate mythological forms, a relative zoolatry, but rather ties of the same level, a brotherhood that allows the concept of anima. The most relevant thing about the totemic system, as Durkheim understood, is that it allows a systematic classification of all nature, and it has been done in cultures as distant as the Port-Mackey tribe in Queensland, or the Zuñi of New Mexico, or the Omaha from Nebraska. Totems are founded on the Anima person and organize the Anima Mundi narratives.

The totem and its generalization, the Anima Mundi, have produced the first general epistemological system based on the evolution of the structures fostered by basic emotions, kinship, and group membership. The belonging relationship, made dynamic by the passage of time, in conjunction with the persistence in memory of the ancestors, reified the image of the Anima as a superclass under which the set of living beings was subsumed, but above all, whose linguistic property of being subject to the action of classification and thought, as part of life scenarios, was added, for it included them in the same epistemological synthesis. From the totem come the first classifying actions that allowed the conceptual synthesis of the experience from which we obtained our first representation of the world. Moreover, the magical or formal causality that operates on this mythical plane is possible from the Anima person who, as an all-embracing referent, gives the link between the different scenarios of experience, in a way analogous to the formal causality of science.

The social person “Anima”

 The Anima is a general social person that encompasses all others: it includes humans and animals, of both genders and all ages, living and dead. As a general concept, it is not the result of an economic determination, but rather a process of primitive interpretation, a self-reflective explanation of life itself as a phenomenon that includes the phenomenon of death, a concept produced by the repeated observation of cycles and actions, and the permanence of intangible linguistic elements in the group's experience. The Anima is a simple hypothesis that explains at once the persistence of the memory of the dead, the world of dreams, and an intangible element, or better, fuzzy assessment of nature, by which we understand it and we feel ourselves to be part of it. Once the Anima is accepted in that triple dimension, the distinction between natural and supernatural beings is a superfluous classification, since the soul person establishes the bridge and the continuity between the scenarios where it acts, a triple topology, supra world, underworld, and world of the living, which is united by the concept and has an effective application in vital action.

The idea of Anima is the condition of possibility of the communicative narratives of archaic societies, a concept of primitive determination that turns the economic or functional actions of the group into a meaningful whole: the action of the hunter and the woman in labor make sense, the death in the jaws of animals and by old age, it makes sense, the incomprehensible nature, the body, and the scenarios that surround us, are part of a vital emotional framework that emotions interpret automatically, but with the help of the concept of the soul seem to reveal a more fundamental substratum, a unitary representation of meaning. With the idea of ​​person-anima, the first self-image of life takes shape and does so as a general person from his own emotional experience, from the actions of group integration, from the reproductive and sustenance program, towards the synthesis of a principle regulatory staff. With the Anima, natural actions are objectified in a unified narrative that allows integrating economic narratives in an abstractive synthesis of great epistemological power: for the first time, a symbol is built that accounts for appearances as a whole, in fact, it is in that moment and from the generality of an Anima person who narrates it, that the world appears before the human being as a representation.

The concept of "social person" or "social mask"

 Social persons or social masks are narratives of primitive determination elaborated by a human group in relation to the function and valuation of its individuals in social life. As we know, primitive determinations are developed after economic determinations, so we will find different persons according to the degree of complexification of a particular society.

The simplest forms of social masks are those that appear in the narratives of Anima Mundi societies (cold societies), such as those of the Blackfoot myth, whose three characters, the old man, the woman and the child, delimit the population by gender and age. The double opposition between men-women and young-old (the latter opposition that can be given by the categorization into three ages, child, young-old) operates both in human communities and (in its male-female variant) between the great apes and group mammals. The distinction is completely relevant from an emotional point of view. In archaic human groups, the opposition between men and women is seen in secret societies with initiatory content, in which the most basic biological actions are worshiped, and the first epistemological models based on reproduction are developed.

In these mythico-ritual settings, the separation between the genders is radical, and different forms of violence are exercised against those who cross the ceremonial limits, a system of punishments by which the valuation of the ritual is perfectly explicit. The initiation rites of cold societies, the so-called rites of passage, do not only imply an action of the reproductive physiological elements (in the case of women) or of those corresponding to the dopamine system for hunting (in men), but that a new psychological person is built: children, abandon a social person, die to their childhood, to become adults, with different emotions

The new social mask has responsibilities, a set of functional actions that are typified in the general accounts of the group and, in particular, in the mythical-ritual actions that are performed in the passing ceremony. The male-female opposition is fixed, in fact, these are the two fundamental social persons, while the other persons (adult and elder) are the ones that arise in temporal development, and as such are vital self-consciousness engines, especially when being performed in an initiatory ritual setting. The line of personal temporal transformations for men and women leads to the projection of a person for the dead. The same previous initiations are a form of death, and continuity is guaranteed by the particular characteristics of the linguistic phenomenon. In a group with a small number of social persons, what characterizes one individual, except for some phenotypic traits, is equivalent to what characterizes another.

Mythico-Ritual Planes

 In anthropological terms, we can speak of four great narrative periods according to the symbolic complexity of communications: the Anima Mundi plane, that of the King-God, that of Universal Law, and that of Human Law. 

The mythical plane of the anima mundi, which begins with the Middle-Upper Paleolithic, is made up of the narratives of the so-called cold societies, linked to hunter-gatherer economies. In the Neolithic, the narrative plane of the King-God arises with the narratives of the harvest and the myths of the city. For its part, the plane of Universal Law, which begins with the progressive independence of the law with respect to the figure of the King-God, arises after the 16th century BC, approximately after the Hycso interregnum in Egypt, and is made up of the narratives of the state religions that reify an objective order of the universe, from which the transcendentalist narratives of the first philosophy will be derived. Finally, the narrative plane of Human Law, which begins towards the 6th century BC, is made up of the humanist narratives of science and anthropological philosophy. This mythical evolution is not a linear phenomenon, since the new plane absorbs the old one, although not all the elements of the old one remain. Several planes can coexist at the same time in different places, human cultures have evolved without spatial homogeneity.

The Aristotelian notion of mimetic instinct

Always fabulous his fine psychological observations, close to life.

Poetry in general seems to have arisen from two causes, each deeply rooted in our nature. The first is the instinct for imitation, implanted in man since childhood, with the difference with respect to other animals that man is the most imitative living creature, and that through imitation he learns the first lessons from him; and no less universal is the pleasure obtained from imitated things. (Aristóteles. Poética. 1448b.4.Ed.Cit.15-15.)

The union of instinct with pleasure occurs in an epistemological environment, mimesis fulfills a cognitive function, first of all, it is something necessary in the way of being of all living beings, with the particularity that it is in the human where it reaches its higher levels of perfection. In addition, mimesis is such a necessary and complex natural function that it can derive its pleasure from the mimetic action itself without the need for knowledge of the original, since the pleasure of learning is obtained equally from the execution as such, from its interpretive colorism.

The epistemological dimension of mimesis was already implicit in the participation of Platonic forms, although Aristotle seems to place the mimetic instinct at the very base of all knowledge. However, the qualitative leap has been immense, mimesis does not obtain its discursive legitimation in another world but its operations are related to it, they are in the fabric of nature and mimesis is one of the main forces if we have to judge by its character of cognitive necessity. Mimesis, in short, becomes fully philosophical. On the other hand, the independence of mimesis with respect to the original is what gives it its autonomous character as a force of nature. Participation in the forms of Plato's mimetic theory caused the relationship between model and participant to be established by the divine craftsman. For Aristotle, the craftsman is the participant himself, since it is his nature that he will imitate, and not only the model but any copy that passes in front of him. The Platonic objection about the copy of the copy is irrelevant in the new natural context. Independence with respect to the other shamanic world allows a theory of mimesis and the mimetic arts based on things and knowledge that are only on the side of the logos of the living. 

Esquema de Acciones de Mitologización

 

Recursive Rationality

 The theory of emotions presented here starts from the evaluative character of the processes of primary consciousness, from the ordering of homeostatic processes based on survival criteria. But such a statement is valid for processes simpler than those associated with primary consciousness, since, in general, for the living organism, vital processes make sense by reference to survival actions. The value systems for a particular species are determined by evolutionary selection. Endpoints are displayed in the brain in the regions that control internal homeostasis (pulse, respiration, endocrine functions, autonomic responses) and relationships with the environment, emotional systems. Value systems act by restricting the domains of categorization to functions that have been evolutionarily reaffirmed. The biological value is produced by the biochemical rewards or punishments that the neurotransmitters produced by the brain nuclei provide to the cells. Physiological value is then a substitute for physiological efficiency, since the primitive function of the assessment processes is to ensure that the physiological tissue is within a homeostatic interval in which it can survive, for which it carries out continuous monitoring of the corresponding parameters through non-conscious devices, and when they deviate from the homeostatic interval, corrective mechanisms are put into place1. The simplest assessments are those associated with pleasure and pain, which provide a basic semantics for categorization processes, but the ultimate reference for pleasure and pain remains survival. The basic emotions use the pleasure and pain circuits as their own constituents. Furthermore, the social-emotional systems, especially motherhood and sociability, seem to be evolutionary developments of general pain systems. We can speak of a general recursive process of semantic ascension that coincides with the process of increasing complexity that we call organic evolution. Here I understand the term semantics more broadly than in its use in linguistic science or psychology. While the linguistic notion refers to the connotative-denotative sense of human languages, and the psychological to the so-called explicit semantic or factual memory (knowledge of the world2), by semantics I understand the interpretation of a system, that is, any mapping or assignment of identity between the elements of two sets. Such an identity assignment, which in Russell's logic was called definition, corresponds to a principle of economy by which some processes (physiological or otherwise) can be synthesized in others, in an ascending way. The protein system is interpreted in terms of cellular functioning, which respects molecular laws, but synthesizes processes of emergent complexity that have their own syntax, and similarly occurs with the organic structures that form cells, and the following structures in complexity, until reaching levels of explicit interpretation for the regulation of homeostasis that lead me, for example, to semanticize a slight discomfort such as thirst, and to take the necessary measures to solve it. When I pick up a glass to drink water, I do not interpret the action in relation to biochemical deficiencies, not even in terms of homeostasis (unless I am in an emergency situation), but from a social point of view, as one more action of my life interpreted in a given environment, and I will look for water, or another drink according to the environment in which I find myself.

What would be degree one of the recursion? It is difficult to answer this mythological question. The determination that seems most consistent with the current state of knowledge would be that of the first life forms, the ancestor of eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells that originated some three and a half billion years ago. Although it may seem absurd to propose a recursive function of rationality that begins in bacteria, if we understand them as an ordered system that complies with the conditioning of their DNA, we cannot help but see simple forms of intelligence in them. The corollary of the proposal is that life, being order, is intelligence, a proposal that, in a different formulation, we can already find in Aristotle's metaphysics. For our purpose of understanding the origin of emotions and rational thinking, it is enough to start the recursion in the global mappings as they have been defined by the theory of neural Darwinism.

Undecidability

 Let us construct a symbolic formal system with the following elements.

    1. An arbitrary axiomatic system which contains Gödel’s axiomatic system together with its rules of inference (Ga)

    2. The functions and relations of the system are recursively defined and free from contradiction.

    3. We construct an isomorphic representation of the subsystem of non-numerical symbols by a system of positive integers, ascribing natural numbers to the symbols. Therefore, we can express any formula in numerical terms (particularly as a sequence of primes), and proofs as sequences of positive integers.

    4. We construct a set of formulas F which are directly deducible within the system and which represent common expressions of our calculus.

For every formula fi ∈ F, there is a numerical formula pi ∈ P, for P⊂ F, such that Ga ⊢ pi. 

Construct a fj which expresses “this formula is not deducible”, a valid and meaningful expression of our calculus. Therefore, there is a pj numerical formula that corresponds to fj.

The undecidability theorem says that pj is undecidable. Suppose pj is true. Then pj is not deducible, but pj ∈ F, set of directly deducible formulas, so there is a contradiction. Suppose pj is false. Then ¬ pj is true, id est, pj is deducible, but pj says that it is not deducible, so there is a contradiction.

Ga is not complete.

Sets and specific differences

 

Brouwer’s understanding of language uniquely on human terms justifies his separation between language and mathematics but does not make any psycho-biological sense. The act of distinction which characterizes the intuition of time in Brouwer’s sense precedes the use of our human languages but not of languages in general, i.e., of communication among living creatures. A twoity, therefore, precedes also the linguistic construction that we call number -even the concept of numerosity- and denotes an action of separation. For this reason I will call merisma (part), to such an action of distinction. A merisma  is a precondition for any action, no matter whether such distinction is accompanied by second-order distinctions in relation to the cognitive actor. A merisma has the irreversible character of the intuition of time, of life experience, and therefore, implies a fundamental or primitive determination for later distinctions. We can notate this primitive merisma by ‘≠’.

The communicative expression which iterates the primitive merisma is a primitive sequence. When we cannot apply ‘≠’ among two instances (parts) of the iteration, we say that those instances are equal. The double composition of  ‘≠’ and ‘=’ over a primitive sequence could be called fundamental morphism. A fundamental morphism is therefore, an action of identification. Two fundamental morphisms are different when we can express a merisma with their composition: such distinctiveness is called a specific difference. 

A set is an algorithm (procedure) for the construction of a specific difference. We could also understand it as a finite semantical action for the synthetic construction of a specific difference. The synthetic representation of the algorithm under the concept of set adds an epistemological content of totality which is not necessarily implied in the constructive process, and which, in fact, hypostasizes a transcendental property. An object ‘s’ belongs to a set S, notated s ∈ S, when the set generator algorithm, or inclusion map, can be performed with ‘s’. The void subset is a rather serious ontological problem. Constructivist definitions, like Bishop’s, appeal to the idea of a set whose construction produces a contradiction, or whose inclusion map is identical to the inclusion map of its set. But a contradictory construction is not an algorithm, therefore, there is not such a thing as an empty set. However, we can produce an object called empty set as the result of the operation of extracting one element in a subset of precisely one element. But what is the meaning of such set? It is an operational structure which simplifies the manipulation of sets. 

A relation is an algorithm for the construction of a specific difference pairing two given sets.

We can speak of specific differences of specific differences, and so on, but we do not have a set unless we have an algorithm for their construction, unless we have inclusion maps. The postulate of an algorithm that generates any other algorithm is equivalent to a postulate of omniscience, inconsistent with our psychobiological conditionings and constructively meaningless. This postulate implies that the axiom of choice would be meaningless.

Ontology and Axis Mundi

 

The history of ontology, known under the unfortunate name of  "metaphysics", has become an annoying witness to the evolution of philosophical thought, since it is a written document not only of the simplicities of our past, but also of its profound imbecility, ignorance, arrogance, violence and contradictory intentions. These blunders are not part of any cosmic evil, but the sum of the actions of the group's life, which in its conflicts and harmonies adjusts to the emotional conditioning of our species, as well as to the restrictions imposed by a simple struggle for survival that goes far beyond the survival needs that an intellectual capacity like ours would require. Traditionally considered the heart of philosophy, ontology has been the field of dispute and disagreement among philosophers for two and a half millennia. Its decline from the dawn of modern science, paralleling the decline of Christianity in the West, and its final rejection in the nineteenth century, an almost general abandonment from a wide spectrum of philosophical positions, coincides with the proclamation of epistemology as the new queen of knowledge. The first Kantian Critique was his coup de grace, although it will not be until after Nietzsche that the corpse is not badly buried. That today it survives as a zombie in the narratives of domination, is due to the roots with which we live our superstitions, sunk deep into what neuroscience calls our dopamine neural system.

With the philosophical collapse of Western ontology, there was a double form of subversion of Christian values ​​that, nevertheless, continued to operate as socio-political referents. On the one hand, there is the subversion made by the predatory aristocratic moral Darwinism, which retained enough of Christianity to use it as a weapon in its narratives of domination (a dam against revolutions). In their moral excuses of competition and survival of the fittest, not only the ruling classes, but the new scientific-priestly elites still take refuge today, a point that is observed in the messianic impulse of positivism that pervades science since the end of the nineteenth century. . On the other hand, socialist dialectical materialism not only shared the revolutionary messianic fervor of early Christianity, but its very hierarchical structures resembled those of the traditional Church. However, despite these diffuse heritages, Christian myths, capable only of giving a negative and nihilistic meaning to the world (considering it always subject to another reality), collapsed in the face of scientific vitalism, which approached nature with the same epistemological ambition of the Greek world, and offered visible results in everyday life. In practice, Christianity succumbed thanks to the access of the masses to consumption in the Second Industrial Revolution, not because of the arguments of philosophy that urged to reject the absurdities and abuses of the sacred empires of the West. With a better standard of living, the other world began to be further away and unreal, both in its torments and its joys.

The fall of ontological Christianity has not, however, been equal to that of the monarchies and states that were and are supported by it. The power of kings and rulers, which in Europe since Boniface VIII (Bull Unam Sanctam of 1302) was exercised with the permission of Christian priests, can be based on any ontological principle capable of guaranteeing a minimum social cohesion and order. Just as the Maurian Empire of India was able to change its ontology from Jainism to Buddhism without interruption, or that the Roman Empire changed the classical pantheons for the Christians, or that Confucianism and Taoism were replaced by Buddhism in the dynasty Tang of China (and back later with the Song dynasty), or that the Persian Zoroastrianism of the elites becomes Islam, Western civilization has transformed its Christian ontology without cracking the fundamental structures of power. One ontological axis mundi is replaced by another, which entails a temporary convulsion that is resolved in a political structure analogous to the previous one in its functioning of social stratification, although not necessarily in its moral principles.

Contemporary societies maintain more than one axis mundi within them. On the one hand, they profess a scientific ontology, supported by academic and research institutions, with specialized languages, and on the other, they maintain old belief systems that cover some basic yearnings of the human psyche, a bastion of the ancient forms of exploitation that is being held, like a formidable column on sand, by the majority of mankind. In the Western World, this second psychological axis mundi continues to be Christianity, even among the most materialistic positions, since our fundamental psychological myths are permeated with Christian elements. The end result is the coexistence of two valuation systems, that of science and that of everyday life. It is true that through technology, scientific ontology is more and more widespread among the general population, but both in social and personal relationships, we make use of myths older than those provided by the cosmology of membranes or the metaphysics of possible multiverses. In a certain sense, the state of religion in the Western World resembles Hellenism, when the cults took on a more mistical and personal character, according to the uses of a great universal city that houses multiple mythologies in its constitution. Our moment sees Christianity reduce its numbers in favor of atheism, but especially in favor of alternative cults and esoteric spiritual paths, any myth that gives meaning to life.

This double type of axis mundi is not unique to our civilization. It was also in force, for example, in the Hittite empire, with Aryan gods for the nobility (Alalu for the priests and Teshub, the hero of the storm, for the military elite) and Chthonic for the peasant classes, as we see in the myth of Shanska, the goddess of fertility. The synthesis of both axes is found in the hieros gamos of Teshub with Shanska, a double pillar of the social structure. There are other examples in the Mali Empire, under Prince Sundiata, where the court was Muslim while the people continued with cereal rites, or in Rome, where patricians and commoners practiced different cults.

The double axis mundi, which began as the result of the mythological fusion of different tribes in the Sumerian-Akkadian city (as we observed in the Marduk myth), continued to be fundamental in the constitution of the universal cities of empires such as Rome, China or Persia. The priests, and the military and bureaucratic elite developed a more abstract ontology than the peasant and artisan populations. The more imperial and diverse a city is, the greater its ontological fragmentation, although there is always a value system that brings together the others, and that is, precisely, that of the dominant social group. Such a system must be capable of making the city function in all its economic dimensions, that is, of clearly defining the functions of each social group. Until the appearance of modern science, the values ​​of the priestly elite maintained ontologies compatible with those of the people, since mythical contradictions were harmoniously resolved on their common theistic bases, on the shared mythological roots of myths with supreme gods, whether they were Uranic or Chthonic.

However, in our Global City, the double axis is made up of two incompatible myths, the ontological-scientific and the psychological, an eclectic myth  that badly fuses elements of traditional transcendental psychology, popular psychology and elements of scientific psychology. The difficult meeting point of both axes occurs in the mythology of money, which allows a total rationalization of economic and social actions in terms of basic emotions. Money enters psychology as a metaphor for energy, and connects at a more basic level with our cellular conditioning, running through a wide range of basic impulses that have to do with the perpetuation of the species. As a perverse effect, the ontologization of money generates new, volatile, violent psychological worlds without political will, which destabilize social functioning (a phenomenon already observable in the old agricultural empires of antiquity): the fabric of the city unravels under the weight of the centrifugal commercial ontology that maintains it. Thus, in the Global City, decentralized economic activity requires a reformulation of the concepts of territoriality and authority adaptable to a global market, a cosmopolitan redefinition that values ​​existence in the rational terms of money. Curiously, the decentralization of economic activity has not been coupled with a decentralization of benefits, which are still managed by the monetary elites of a few cities that control the movements of the markets. On the one hand, the global city extends beyond its territorial borders through a computer network that unites its monetary axis, making the nationalities built from the universal city myths obsolete. On the other, the Global City requires national armies, financed by the bulk of the community, to serve as a political instrument for its interests. The global city is international in its desire to exploit resources, but not in its administration. Ontologies do not require internal consistency, but it is enough that they are capable of founding values ​​that perpetuate the order of the group.

The traditional ontologies of the mythical axes of universal law have always shown a predilection for topics that we could call discussions about the sex of angels. When we remove the intuitive referents and formally close the semanticity of a language, the syntactic precision of the calculation that we thus form is done at the cost of meaning. All non-constructive mathematics is proof of this, or physics that surpasses its empirical foundations and sets out to build unprovable theories about the origin of the universe, the definitive formulation of which is pending a new, more expensive and more powerful particle accelerator, or simply accepting a new scientific atomism. While the priests discuss their scientific myths, the bulk of the population lives anchored in the old beliefs, be they animists, those of the great religions, or the various forms of doctrinal atheism among the more educated sectors of society. The priests of the Global City have their gods, the mathematical theories of reality, as in their time were the theological theories of the constitution of the heavens. The people also have their own theories, more concrete, capable of guiding daily economic actions and comforting fears. In the old times, those were the rites of the Great Mother, now, equivalent communal actions that are uncritically interpreted in postmodern narratives, always a Lebenswelt that brings together inconsistencies under the congruent cloak of basic emotions that only pursue the continuity of the group.

In that tiny plot in which the ontologies of the universal city were dethroned in favor of epistemology, by the joint work of philosophy and science,  on the campuses of some Western universities, such a useful ontological fragmentation has taken place in the respective epistemological developments of the different studies, as restrictive in relation to a possible interaction of science with other areas of human experience (and even for a flexible collaboration between the various new fields that science is tracing along its path). The fragmentation is not due to any attempt to establish human law. Thus, we find micro-ontologies that reproduce old patterns (basically Platonisms and materialisms) sustained by the same old unquestionable beliefs, now entrenched behind the superstitious respectability that modern science enjoys. Ontotheology continues, inadvertently, old metaphysics packed in postmodern ideology.

The traditional ontological question has been "what is there?", A question that we must undoubtedly ask ourselves at some point in our lives, as well as those that usually accompany it, such as "why is there something instead of nothing?" or "what is reality?", which are variations on the same theme. Each generation asks the question again, and each time it must be answered anew. If this does not happen, philosophy gives way to theology, no matter how much it masquerades as science. Of course, one could give the same answer today given two thousand years ago, even using new intellectual tools. The previous ontologies are not necessarily surpassed, as shown by the survival of religious ontologies, or Platonism, or atomist and Spinozist materialism, since there is no evidence capable of settling the disputes about what there is, however surprising this is to us. Our ontologies have too often tended to go beyond the framework of life experience. The path initiated by the pre-Socratic philosophers in which theological myths were replaced by the new naturalistic myths did not produce worldviews closer to ordinary experience: the Heracleitean logos, the atoms of Democritus were no closer to the experience of the individual than they did. the gods of the Olympian pantheon could be. Comparatively, the physical pre-Socratic method was clearer than its psychological mystery precedent, as that of contemporary physics is with respect to that of those first attempts at natural philosophy, but the ontological frameworks proposed in all cases present similar uncertainties and difficulties, and they bring up the importance of epistemology when it comes to unraveling what there is. Clarity demands simplicity, few principles from which to build the edifice of reality, foundations from which to derive our knowledge in a demonstrative way. If there were no such derivation, the number of principles would multiply without being able to integrate the information effectively for vital action. We might think that geometry or logic offer the best paradigm for the purpose, but by thinking like this we would be making an ontological assumption derived from the apodictic method. Assuming the beautiful axiomatic method as an ontological principle implies believing in the inferential structure of the universe, and that a persevering human intellect can understand it, that is, it implies Platonism and transcendentality. The optimism of the assumption is as naive as it is enviable, but by failing to differentiate between the usefulness of the regulative principle of clarity and simplicity and the ontological reification of that principle. Ontology became hopelessly entangled in the theological fabric from which it started. However, as an alternative, we could assume the need for clarity and simplicity in neurophysiological terms: the universe does not have an inferential structure based on eternal truths (axioms), but our emotional vital activation system  operates constructively by deriving your decisions from those successful survival experiences. 

Ontology, like any other human activity is not understandable outside the anthropological field in which it arises, its fundamental dimension is vital, it is an activity of the human bios that tries to establish a center of the universe, a referential framework for meaning, and is embedded in experience, both ordinary and liminal. Ontology and epistemology form an inseparable whole, a unit that could only become evident with the maturity of epistemological thought, when it achieved independence from the myths of universal law. The ontoepistemological determinations that a non-transcendentalist philosophy elaborates are not, therefore, a purely legal question that decides, a la Kant, which constructions conform to a pretended architectural reason and which do not. Reason is an open life process. The rationality of life is continuous and mutable, and our referents (from the most basic of temporal intuition that arithmetic gathers) are constructions of limited scope. By this, I do not mean that philosophy can renounce its critical action, but that it must be deliberately complemented with an action of theoretical construction: philosophy is a mythopoetic action.

Acciones míticas Australianas y Polinesias

 

Acciones Míticas en Budismo y Jainismo

 

Theory of mythical actions

Mythical actions are narrative actions that encode either points of origin or economic actions. This encoding allows multiple decoding.

They can be understood as functional information processes whose data has three basic structures: dramatis personae, objects and narratives.

 Dramatis Personae: men, gods, animals, plants, inorganic beings. They are not mutually exclusive categories. They are the input and output of the functions.

Objects: non-personal material elements (OM), scenes (OE). They are not inputting if they are not accompanied by a person, they are the output of the functions.

Narration: Sequence of functions

Primary actions. x, y, z structures, <a1>, ... <an> actions

    1. Determinative.

X <Det> X, ¬X

    2. Substitute. Change one structure or one function for another.

X <Sust> y

    3. Associative. Between people and objects. Formation of a set of outputs from n inputs.

x1, x2, ... xi <Asoc> (x1, x2,… xi)

    4. Inverse. Take another action as an argument and change input to output

    5. Generative or categorizing. Define or create a structure, by composing two or more actions. The generated structure inherits information from its input.

a1, (a2, a3),… an <Gen> x [a1, a2, a3… an]

    6. Interpretive. Evaluate another function. Its argument is either a structure or another action. Output 1.0

    7. Recursive. It takes itself as an argument.

    8. Noise. Produces random errors in action outputs.

Secondary actions

    1. Dissociative. It is the inverse of the associative.

(x1, x2,… xi) <Disoc> x1, x2,… xi

    2. Traslocative. Dissociate a pair of structures and associate one of them with another space-time scenario of n dimensions.

(x, y) <After> (x, z)

    3. Memory. Recategorization action

    4. Regulations. Denies a set of actions.

    5. Logic.

Could we reduce these 13? Yes: 9th determination, 8th association

Composite:

Ex: Number = Memory * recursive

Ex: Normative * Destructive = Transgressive

Ursprache and Poetry

 The notion of Ursprache, a primordial language that supposedly spoke human beings, presupposes a monogenesis of the different languages ​​of our species. This unity of origin hides the communicative plurality on which animal emotional communication is based. Only if we think that what the first human beings spoke is the result of a divine gift that established a discontinuity in the communications of life with life, would such a monogenesis be of interest to philosophical study. Otherwise, that first human language would be just one more element in a sequence of events that led and continues to lead to increasingly complex forms of human communication and psychological development.

The basic emotions would then be a proto-Ursprache, which could, in turn, be referred to more basic forms of organic and cellular communication. We communicate emotions, and not only between organisms of our species: life is understood with life through basic emotions, and they are a fundamental tool for the organism's relationship with the group, and the group with the environment.

Poetry is born from this vital communicative need, as a vehicle that perfects it through rhythm and form, thus connecting with the cyclical processes of the organism and memory. More complex and content-rich communications outlined the basic images of survival in new molds until they became something else, an emerging abstract emotional object in which our psyche found new fields for its development. Over the centuries, old emotions were chained into increasingly sophisticated emotional sequences, which not only reflected our life as humans but also expanded and created it: life itself began to imitate poetry, to believe in its worlds. and bring them into everyday life, updating potential emotion models.

The chaining of emotional sequences has led to the creation of condensed melodies that involve the subtle construction of experiential objects, or if you prefer, emotional landscapes in whose harmonic richness of sophisticated relationships entire generations of human beings resonate, bringing together the various particular languages ​​thanks to the emotional artistic construction of poetry, making all the others that were ever spoken fractally resonate in a single language.

The path from the ecstasies of the shaman, through the old Dionysian Evohé and other lyrical outbursts of divine enthusiasm decanted in the journey of the ages, is nothing more than a section of a path that literally sinks its roots in the language of life conquering its own medium among the stars. The poetic sequences of our time have been condensed according to the awareness of this development, and today the human voice is the fruit of a long and painful awakening to an identity yet to be made, like that of the universe itself. An unfathomable river pushes the soul of unfading life towards its feat: the vitalization of the inert. A new kind of poetry, always waiting to be done, proclaims its ancestral right to be its tool.

Why write philosophy?

 Human existence is complex, turbulent, sloppy, and tragic, and it only supports systematic thought with violence - almost always with poor results. When we do not proceed systematically, it is even worse. I understand philosophical thought as the result of a passionate process of mythologization, theoretical creation, and critical interpretation of the experience of life. From my humanity, from the consciousness of this idea that our species has forged in its evolution, and bringing together diverse perspectives in the changing unity of my person, I look at the past and my own time as the heir to a vast estate whose beauty runs hand in hand with its monsters. Amid so much deed and action, heroic songs, and long laments, I recognize my humanity in the life of anyone else, fearing tomorrow and the present, building new forms for life, ideals, and symbolic forms that conjure up the inevitable uncertainties.

In many moments, I have wanted to be a foreigner on this planet, I have looked at our history, our present, with horror, and I have wanted to flee to some better no-place, far from the barbarism and the exploitation of some humans by others. I cannot say that the feeling has completely disappeared, although I have chosen to come to terms with what I am, as an individual being and as a species, and I understand myself as a never-finished symbolic process, precariously sheltered in the middle of a storm, and that amidst great difficulties, tries to build itself on impossible foundations. For this reason, I always understand philosophy as philosophical anthropology, an anthropology that expresses at the same time a fundamental form of nudity. For me, there is no reality or truth in the cosmos outside of the life-intelligence process. I do not see the universe as a great human being, it is not some primordial Purusha (as Hindu mythology would say) from which gods and creatures have arisen, nor the work of a form of self-conscious intelligence that executes its theorems. I do not believe that -as the Kabbalah says- the human being is the final purpose of creation or that the perfection of the worlds and of the Supreme Being depends on us. If there were other higher forms of life-intelligence in the universe, we could only understand them in relation to our way of being and the way of being of life on this planet: our myths would be the measuring rod for any "first contact". My generation has grown up looking at the stars. I myself was a member of the Planetary Society chaired by Carl Sagan in my teens, and we looked into space expecting to hear sequences of prime numbers that promised to end the local red neck behavior, but the logic of military domination finally imposed its trumpets on the telescopes. In fact, trumpets always dominated, but my youthful musical Pythagoreanism wanted to dream something else.

After many failures, I have awakened somewhat dazed in the house of life, discovering, as the Sufis said, that I have been knocking on doors with the intention of entering without realizing that I was already inside. Man is not the measure of all things, but life is: of those that are insofar as they are, and of those that are not insofar as they are not. What we say that there is in the universe, as well as what we say that there is not, only makes sense in reference to life-intelligence, and in particular, to the symbolic forms developed by the human being. The sun, which we invariably see crossing the sky, is not understood in the same way today as it was three thousand years ago, a representation that does not coincide with that of the animals and plants that surround us. 

It is as difficult as it is undesirable to develop a single way of thinking and living in the world, although not all worldviews have the same validity, because while some favor life, others gallop towards self-destruction. The very concept of the world, or nature, or objective reality outside the human being is nothing but the biologically necessary form of the representational synthesis that our sensitive intuition adopts, that is, the determination of the sensory impulses that our psychobiological system (developed in long periods of time)  as not-me, survival processes that go beyond our species. However, the necessary form of such representations is a set of concepts that admit various combinations and interpretations: the necessary form of our intuition is a matrix of multiple possible determinations. The evolutionary trajectory of human communities shows that such determinations of worldview experience have become increasingly complex.

Philosophy demands effort, the tension that comes from making your own path, no matter that we carry a good load of provisions with the thoughts of those who preceded us. Nothing assures us that we will get somewhere, or that even if we do, we will like what we find there. Why then do philosophy? The question implies that we have a choice and that there is some way to justify it. Yes, there is a choice, and it is an evolutionary choice. If we look at our past, we see that we did not always do philosophy. Philosophy is a mythology of universal law that began to be practiced about 2,500 years ago in Greece and is now in clear decline. Its very name is restrictive since the concept of wisdom presupposes the objectivity of the world (a true way of being of things) that no longer makes much sense. Philosophy is characterized by thinking, or more precisely, by an attitude of permanently living, thinking critically, questioning, constructing, disassembling, and undoing when necessary, that is, philosophy develops a non-automatic, liminal life. Let's call this activity what we want. Why do it? Because it is an evolutionary prow.

Are the propositions of arithmetic "synthetic a priori" ?

 If the Kantian criterion that distinguishes synthetic from analytic propositions, whether they are axioms or postulates, is the non-inclusion of the synthetic ones versus the inclusion in the subject of the analytic propositions, an analytic proposition could not be reduced or transformed to a synthetic one, nor vice versa, since something is or is not included in something else. Well, the very concept of inclusion is not exactly clear, modern set theory has opted for an extensional definition, that is, giving a list of the things that are included in another given. Inclusion thus conceived is less problematic, although it is not without paradoxes. Let's skip this for a moment and focus on the Kantian distinction.

   Kant gives us his well-known example of a priori synthetic proposition, capable of giving us knowledge independently of experience:

7+5=12

But we can transform this equality into this other:

7=12-5

And then into:

7=7

That is an analytical proposition.

And conversely, from 

7=7

We can construct:

7+5=7+5

by the second Euclidean axiom (analytic), and from there, by means of a change of analytical notation (that is, we put in a compact form -which is not a conceptual unification- and in base 10 the fifth successor of 7), we go to:

7+5=12

We have gone so from synthetic to analytical propositions (and back) using only arithmetic rules.

Can we then exchange synthetic for analytical propositions? In what sense can a numeric predicate be included or not included in a number? Is 12 a unification of the numbers 7 and 5 -as Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason (B15)? But we can obtain the number 12 by adding infinitely many whole numbers (that is, adding negatives and positives), does this mean that in the number 12 those infinite numbers are unified? And if they were unified, does an infinite synthesis have something to do with intuition? According to what Kant proposes, in 1 + 1 = 2, the two ones would unify in the two, but how could the ones unify? Are they not rather de-unified to be two? What do these questions mean? We enter very swampy metaphysical terrain.

This does not make any sense, not even within the Kantian system. Doesn't arithmetic depend on the counting process, an algorithm that, although based on the internal sense, requires the analytical concept of a number without a predecessor? A sum, such as 7 + 5, or 22 + (- 10), is an algorithm, that is, a procedure. Such an algorithm is not a process of unification but of determination: through a systematic process, we establish the relationships between three numerical signs. None of them is thought of separately, but rather as part of a single numerical system that has historically been developed with great difficulties.

  Contrary to what Kant thought, it is precisely the sum of large numbers, as Frege already noted, which shows that arithmetic generates analytical propositions. In the sum:

123.456.789 + 213.456.789 = 336.913.578

we can know that the proposition is true without needing any intuition about any of the numbers. However, and contrary to what Frege thought, they are not a priori propositions (not a posteriori either) but formal systemic propositions, the result of a conceptual elaboration in which elements of everyday experience and analytically defined elements intervene. What makes a mathematical proposition is its possibility of inclusion in a system of generalization of its results. Mathematics, as Stanislav Dehaene's research seems to corroborate, has its roots in animal biology, in our neurophysiological structure, but on that basis, it has later been constructed according to both analytical and synthetic principles until reaching the formal constructions of science. which is today. The impossibility of a total formalization, proved by Gödel's theorems, is nothing but a reference to its intuitive, animal basis, which is conditioned by the way in which we experience space-time.

Emotions, meaning and narrative actions

 

Vital actions are fixed in social memory as narrative actions, but this fixation goes beyond our species. Our social memory is the result of evolution, and therefore it is prior to the memory of any particular culture that we can think of, ours or our historical past. When we became aware that we have myths and rituals, we had been in that dynamic for a long time and lived with them, determining our vital actions based on strict emotional ritual protocols, which were passed from generation to generation if they proved their effectiveness to group survival. Our actions were given a meaning, in a continuous cycle of reinterpretation and readjustment of the life processes open to the present, before being human. The emotional structure establishes the interpretive semantics, without which the syntactic actions of life are nothing. Emotions link physiological actions, which follow the syntax of chemical reactions relevant to the organism, in complex units of interaction capable of an integrated synthetic functioning in which the relationships of the simplest rank structures are sustained from more complex structures, in turn, dependent on the former. Physiological processes differ or delay the action of the environment, so that life, from its first self- replication, interposes itself against the environment, creates a buffer of inertial processes or memories from which it approaches its environment. The world and human existence have only meaning as a symbol, as an interpretive narrative of identity.