1. The less I use my general symbolic capacities, the less individual I am, unable to establish my differences from others.
But also,
2. The more I use my general symbolic capacities, the less individual I am since differences are expressed and thought in terms of a language that I have not created, but others.
We can then infer:
1. I cannot express or think about the individuation of my mind without a language.
2. Language is a group construction, not an individual one.
Therefore:
I cannot express or think about individuation from individual terms, without introducing transcendental propositions whose content has to be assumed as a belief.
So: Individuation is only thinkable in social terms, or what is equivalent, individual identity is a matter of communication and social action.
This is the starting point of the theory of personality development in relation to social structure, as it was treated by Durkheim, Mead, Parsons, or Habermas. We can include his theories in two groups. In the first, there are Durkheim and Habermas, for whom the "I" although part of society conserves different elements, while for Mead and Parsons, these elements are non-existent outside the communicative function.
Durkheim: The I-Other difference is the body. The common thing is the social ones.
Habermas: The communicative action of the subject generates the social person in the field of symbolic content and historical time.
Mead: the I is a reflection of the group, a mimetic communicative construction.
Parsons: The Ego is the result of maternal social communication, a communication that begins with the maternal relationship.
In any case, these two options illustrate two fundamental ontological positions in relation to the social constitution of the self. One of the intersections of two entities with independent elements, either in the more materialistic versions of Habermas and Durkheim or in religious transcendentalisms, and another that reduces the person of the self to a mere social creation.
But the I-Other difference is subsumed under a more basic form: that which occurs within a human group due to the tension between economic actions and actions of primitive or basic identity. These actions can be reduced to their communicative form, that is, narrative (insofar as sequentiality is the necessary condition of communication). According to the postulates of social theories of personality, we could then say that group and individual identity is the result of the interaction of narratives of economic determination and narratives of primitive determination. Mythical actions are, then, the set of narrative actions and human rituals, of functional determination and primitive determination, that mimetically interpret the life experience of a human group based on protocols based on human emotions. The mythical actions of a specific community form its mythical-ritual axis, which represents a complex dynamic structure of narrative interaction that functions as a reference of meaning for that community.
Although the difference between a social and an individual dimension of the person is today a fact of daily experience, an analysis of mythical traditions shows us that it was not always the case, nor did it always take the same form. In narrative terms, we can speak of four great periods.
| Mythical Plane | Narrative tension of the identity of social persons | Forms of Tension |
Anima Mundi | Totemic | The one that occurs between the totem and the rest of the social people |
King-God | Slavery | For the king and the elites: the tension between mortality and immortality. For servants and slaves: The impossibility of self-narrative |
Universal Law | Citizen | The tension between mortality and immortality. And between the universal and the individual |
Human Law | Ludic-Critical | The tension that occurs between established social narratives and the creation of narratives compatible with those. |
The mythical plane of the anima mundi is that of the narratives of cold or non-stratified societies. The subjects of the narratives of this plane are not individuals but types of "social person", economic gender, kinship, age, or social persons who, like the totem, give the general identity of the group. Thus, for example, in the cosmogonic myth of the Blackfoot, the three fundamental characters are the Old Man, the Woman and the Child, they delimit the population by gender and age, in addition to the numerous examples of primordial couples in multiple traditions.
From a narrative point of view, human societies are not limited to their living individuals. The survival of the ancestors in dream experiences as well as in mythical-ritual narratives and ceremonies extends the active personal community to the world of the dead, present in social life, explicitly remembered or implicitly incorporated into the memory of the group through the stories and rituals that were passed on to the new generations. The linguistic dimension of the ancestor-totem and the world are the foundation of the soul concept. 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 soul 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, badly verbalizable, an assessment of nature, through which we understand it and we feel like part of it.
The concept of the individual person appears linked to that of the soul as a transpersonal entity, as a substrate of economic actions and the social persons derived from economic actions linked to them. Intuitively, the accident of the narrative of economic identity is assigned to the substance of the soul, of narrative origin, an addition that experience seems to support from the individuation of the body and the permanence of the identity derived from economic action in the memory. The presence of a physical body isolated from the others, which is identified with a set of basic group identity narratives, is hypostatized, as in the case of Aeschylus, in a transcendental narrative environment. The identity tension here is then totemic, it is the difference between the identity inherited from the totem and the social persons acted out by the individual, an irrelevant tension, since the identity signs of the totem are not different from those of economic persons: the professional hunter identity, for example, is not different from that of the totem that determines the characteristics of his soul.
However, the same is not the case in stratified urban societies. In the most archaic forms of these, those that follow the mythological patterns of the God-king, the temple cities, and later the city-states (which in the Middle East are exemplified by Ur, Uruk, Kish, Eshunna, Memphis, and Heliopolis) for the most part of its individuals it has a servile or slave profession from which an obvious identity tension derives. In the Ur-Nammu Code, we see the legal subsumption of all social persons of the city under only two categories, free and slaves, although then a second categorization is applied for the free according to their economic person, now subsumed under the concept of caste. We can understand castes as a complexification of the totem under the pressure of the stratification required by the urban division of labor, which later becomes a metaphysical narrative of identity that justifies domination. For those who belonged to an elite caste, the identity tension between a personal individual dimension and a social dimension given by the caste would be obviously problematic, contrary to the social order that provides them with their positions of advantage. That is why the form that this narrative tension takes is that which occurs in relation to narratives of immortality, the extension of the profession of dominion and lordship indefinitely as we see in the examples provided by the classical studies of James Frazer. Of course, the idea of the individual soul of kings is basically a contradiction in terms, since the term soul inherited from the anima mundi narrations refers to the most general, while its simultaneous assignment to an individual body takes the most particular as a reference. and it reproduces a well-known paradox of set theory.
The partial resolution (never completely soluble) of this paradox is only feasible from the myths of universal law, the narratives in which the individuality of the king and his soul is meta personal, and differentiates between the individual person, who acts economically, and the universal, which lives eternally in a blissful way a non-biological existence. The narratives elaborated in this sense by the priests of Osiris of the 16th century BC are especially influential in the New Kingdom, after the convulsion of the Hycso interregnum, narratives of immortality that served as a paradigm for most of those that followed. Obviously, for each relative gain of serf and slave in immortality, the ruling elites constructed more complex and sophisticated afterlife narratives for themselves. If the general population is immortal, the state derived from it is transhistorical and transpersonal, not in the sense that it derives from god-kings who are timeless and then become stars, but in an economic sense in which Debt-guilt has the counterpart of an inalienable right: eternal life. When only the elites were immortal, the masses were irrelevant in the civilizational drama. Immortality brings to the masses the status of members of an ideal stable community, since it supposes the creation of a person - a complex symbolic variant of the anima mundi - that underlies its active social-economic persons, and that to the extent that it is none of the others, but is a mere metaphysical narrative of identity, is relatively independent of general mythic-ritual actions and has a private sphere of action.
The political extension of these ideas will not be made until the limitation of national identities brought about by Alexander's Greek-Persian synthesis. The cynics contribute to them with their critique of the social order and the desecration of the territory, which paved the way for the Stoic ideology of the universalism of the law. The differences between local law and universal law are due to the ignorance of the legislator, not because there is an internal conflict. The solution to the discrepancies between universal moral law and natural law is given, as in Confucianism, by appealing to a common substratum, in the Greek case, to an intelligence that underlies everything, the Logos. The universality of the Logos is not limited to the law but the human being, barbarian or Greek, slave or free, is the possessor of this logos. As Marco Aurelio expresses, the community of Logos and the law among men makes them participants in the same citizenship, in which the entire human race participates. However, it is not only through the narration of philosophy and its influence on the arts that this identity is generated, but also from a general economic practice such as that facilitated by the Roman Empire, with the concessions of citizenship. to the conquered peoples, something that Alexander had already tried by mixing Macedonians, Greeks, Persians, and other ethnic groups in his empire. For its part, Christianity takes from Stoicism, among other things, the redefinition of the citizen's person in specific non-territorial terms, now emphasizing a communal out of this world component.
The contribution of the religions of the Book to the narration of the person of the human being will not be practical, it does not imply the definition of an economic identity, but transcendental. This transcendentalism is common to all identity narratives, as it is found on the mythical plane of the anima mundi from which they all evolved. Buddhism itself, whose proposals are basically those of an atheistic transcendentalism, recognizes a Buddha-nature in all humans and living beings in general, a nature that, within the contradictions of Buddhist metaphysics, is both empty and sacred. The Buddha-nature, such as the Atman, or the Christ within, or the Nur Muhamad, or the Osiris, or the Logos, or any of the equivalent narratives of human identity with a supernatural principle common to all men, underlie the conception of the human being that is expressed in the 1948 Declaration signed as an ideal by most of the nations.
The individual soul, the narrative of the individual, will acquire a practical legal dimension only in republican communities in which the universal rule of law exists over the person who effectively holds the government, but not without the restrictions imposed by other social persons. An example is provided by Athens itself, where the Eleusinian rites of immortality were open to women and slaves, while the constitution denied them the right to be citizens, something that will be repeated in the Western empires of the modern world.
The transcendental dimension of personal identity derived from the stories of immortality was completed with the development made by the lyric of the sphere thus inaugurated. The translation of the narratives of the fertility rites (which contain the immortality intuitions of urban communities) to a more closed court environment, where the models of ritual epitalamies, such as the Mesopotamians of Dumuzi and Inana, will derive into the "poetry-loving courtesan citizen" in which an enarization of ritual emotions is expressed. The process crystallizes in the lyrical expression of a private dimension of life, made at first in poetic erotic terms, or familiar epistolary, or in the Mesopotamian theodicy mentioned above, written that towards the twelfth century BC. they are already a widespread practice in the Middle East. In China, it is observable in the poetry of the Chou period, in the Classic of Poetry or Book of Odes (Shijing) that collects poems from the 11th-8th centuries BC in which, together with the most ritual songs, the birth of a characteristic lyrical voice is observed that, as in the case of the Middle East, is linked to the courts. This process is even clearer in the birth of the Greek lyric of the 7th century, where the passage of the lyrical voice from the noble citizen to the common is appreciated. Alcman, Ibicus, Alcaeus, Sapho, and many other poets now enliven the emotions of myths and rituals in a reflection on human existence made from the perspective of the common citizen, whose emotional private sphere, a transformation from that offered by the mystery rites, is declared and claimed as the nucleus of an individual person.
Although the contents of the first personal lyric of the elites will be similar to those of ordinary citizens, such as those we find in Greek lyric, or later in Chinese poetry of the time of the Six Dynasties (222-589 AD), between the great Han and Tang dynasties, it is nothing but the perspective of the common citizen, not linked to a caste, which can give the universal perspective that characterizes the lyric (universality of privacy) as an expression of a social person independent of the structures of the god-king. Curiously, this perspective of the private emotional sphere, when separating from the mythical-ritual axis, and achieving self-consciousness in this difference, although arising from the possibility that immortality gave of a non-economic, merely metaphysical person, does not necessarily reveal itself as a narrative of immortality, an enary social emotion, but precariously anchored to its narrative individuation, to the transience and futility of that individuation. Immortality will be for the lyrical citizen an ideal requirement of the transpersonality of his self-conscious emotion, of his identification with broader life cycles, with the transpersonal symbolic constructions on which his enary emotions hypostasize, and which he calls the individual soul. This autonarrative tension between the universal and the transitory, the group and the individual, immortality and individual death will run through the lyric from its origins as its reason for being6, a tension that expresses a specific social person whom today we identify with the individual. human. The lyric includes the tie of the citizen structure, its link to some social-economic person within a mythical-ritual framework, and will seek an area in which their emotional personal individuation can flourish, an area that cannot be other than an image that makes of nature as the opposite of the city, a place of stratification and of economic people who deny the intimate and lyrical voice. From Hesiod and Virgil, to Whitman, through Tao Chien, Li Po, Garcilaso, Schiller or Juan Ramón, the lyrics have given voice to this inescapable constitutive paradox of the lyric that leads the citizen to not want the city, idealizing a nature that he considers his genuine home, and self-proclaims as a private person on whom the universe is centered, a person who seems to be universal and independent of mythical-ritual constructions.
The central person of the mythical plane of human law is the social person of the human being, a complex narrative that is the evolutionary result of social persons of different mythical planes. As we understand it today in a text such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 19487, it is the evolutionary result of the fusion of the person of the lyrical citizen - the narrative author of the emotional private sphere - with that of the cosmopolitan citizen of Hellenism. (determined by the multicultural scenarios of natural law), as well as with elements of the transnational person of the Christian, based on a transmundane lineage common to all human beings, to which some components of the Enlightenment narrative have been added (especially those of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen that the French Revolution published in 1789) as well as some corollaries of the theory of evolution that reinforce liberal economic principles.
The metaphysical content of the mixture is explosive in contradictions. Two masks are built, between which total identity is proclaimed: the human being, and the person who acts these rights, and who is subject to the obligations that those imply. Most of the articles of the Declaration begin with the formula Every person ..., or, Every human being ..., that is, the Declaration as such is the identity narration of this subject, a transnational and transtemporal identity that began with the fusion of the narrative of the lyrical citizen and the cosmopolitan metaphysics of Hellenism. In fact, identity tension has had a clear narrative linguistic component since its inception.
The identity tension has an insurmountable linguistic component: the difference between a mythical identity not limited to individuation and a restrictive economic action. According to this postulate, it is not a question of defining ourselves with respect to any particular narrative, but in relation to the open process of symbolization, and to understand the dynamics of complexity that is evident in the growing number of social personalities that our development as a species has produced. . The most complex axes, those that belong to the plane of human law, show a greater number of social persons due to the greater diversity of economic actions, in response to the organizational needs of increasingly numerous human groups. It is interesting, however, that within these axes, some activities that previously had an exclusively recreational scope have proliferated as independent economic actions subject to monetary dynamics.
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