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.