Sacredness and the basic social emotion

 

Modern democracies are not the government of the majority, but the government of any elite that controls the means of production and is capable of satisfying the emotional needs of the majority through a mythical- ritual axis that can be ratified in full electoral rituals  in which the subversion of order (at least as a possibility) is considered as a ceremonial principle. This principle, as we have already seen, has been in force since at least the plane of the King-God in Akitu . Obviously, the degree of anomie is reduced by the liminoid exposure of the risk in a controlled space-time . In postmodern democratic electoral campaigns , the liminoid critical opening functions as a justifying principle of the process, in which any center of power, public or private, is exposed to criticism and is held accountable. Democracy, as a narrative of the identity of human law , is measurable by the degree of openness of the liminoid space that is enabled for the representation of anomie, of the narratives that contradict it. And it is in this test where the majority of the liberal, Marxist and fundamentalist democracies of the present fail . The emotional needs of the majority are well served by whatever axis in which social emotions are properly channeled. The mythico-ritual configurations of Marxism , liberal democracy, Fascism or Religious Fundamentalisms, satisfy the needs of social emotions in an analogous way, regardless of the coherence with the economic determinations offered in each case, then, in fact, all these political forms place the social group (even that of the elite) at the center of the representation of meaning. The divergences occur with respect to the channeling of the emotion of the Seeking, in its economic facet and critical identity, as we see in the different dynamics of social flexibility and freedom of expression. Freedom of expression and flexibility for social action constitute the dynamics of the formation of social persons , and therefore, of new identity narratives that complicate the mythical-ritual axes and transform them. Resistance to such transformation gives us the degree of linkage of an axis to the principles of universal law, resistance that, due to the paradox of modernity , can come both from the theoretical soil of the great religions and from merely humanist postulates. Any ideological system that does not operate internally through a critical principle is equivalent in its operation to a religious myth . In this sense, most of the political and social institutions of today follow religious principles, however profane their interests may be. 

The identity narrative of liberal democracy separates itself from the identity determinations of the great religions , to establish in its place the will of the majority, the group emotion of unity in its most basic form, aspiring to subsume under its mythical representation- ritual any of the representations of the previous mythical planes, however, its ritual procedure (inherited from one of those traditions) as well as the myths that it needs about the person of the human being as the foundation of political power, are already impregnated by metaphysics of the planes that it subsumes, with the result of a sacralization of democracy that revitalizes, in general, the narratives of das Heilige (the Sacred), generating double mythical-ritual axes in which a space is left for a private psychological sphere, in which to give meaning to the social person of the individual that justifies the economic determinations of the axis, but without posing a threat. 

As Walt Whitman understood , the survival of liberal democracy goes hand in hand with its sacralization, with its integration with the rest of the myths that constitute the axis of the society in which it occurs, although more than an integration it is about its ability to show itself as the continuation of those other myths and determinations of the past. It implies coming to terms with them and guaranteeing a space in which they can be continued, in a liminoid manner , and without interfering with the mythical- ritual axis of the city . Athenian democracy derived its sacredness from the narrative of the free citizen no less than liberal democracy from that of the human being. In both cases, it is about a sacredness that refers not so much to individuation and individual freedom as to the social emotion (a basic neural system) that backs up human communities. From this point of view, the demos of Athens, the Volk of Nazism, or the communist proletariat, express the same basic emotion that can be articulated in different mythico-ritual axes.

Corporations as social persons

 

Although the person of the human being serves as a fundamental narrative reference, it has not been the most active economically in this mythical plane , a role that has corresponded to the legal person of commercial, industrial and financial companies, which we could group under the general term of corporations , a metaphor that suggests the formation of a physical body to which to attribute a set of economic activities. Of course, since corporations are groups of human beings, the actions of corporations are carried out by men, as is the case with collective social persons (tribes, villages, cities, states), but corporations are more active than other social persons from the moment they determine the economic order in a way that the individual subject cannot. Its modern legal origin occurs in the fictional person, which appears in the 13th century (in the ecclesiastical sphere) with different forms of non-individual social grouping  (collegium, universitas). Precedents can be found in the commercial functioning of city-states, ruled by an elite who used the city as a whole, as a platform, much in the way that, for example, the British East India Company used British society  for its economic control over India . 

Despite their fictional origins, corporations are not fictional social persons any more than other social persons may be. Their identity narratives are inextricably linked to mythical-ritual axes and their economic actions are perfectly congruent with those of other social persons. 

Corporations , like any other social person, cannot construct their own mythical- ritual axis , but rather define their personal narrative based on the economic and primitive relationships in which they find themselves, in a complex mimetic relationship . The corporate citizen narrative, which now presents them as a member committed to the welfare their society, has emerged not from the legal actions they carry out within a mythical-ritual axis (litigating, paying taxes), but only from those more general actions, linked to the most basic emotions and that allow easy harmonization with different axes, in order to be transnational. Thus, for example, corporations that in the West maintain a narrative of gender equality and freedom , cannot base their identity merely on such a narrative if they want to act in societies whose mythical-ritual axes exclude the equality and freedom of the gender person (including homosexual persons, and the different combinations and varieties of sexual orientation), in which these narratives are openly denied, and even punishable by law. The minimal narrative of transnational identity is the narrative of globalization, whose economic foundation is the same as the expansion that led cities to become states, analogous to that of any biological population, from bacteria to mammals, and whose primitive determinations are the narratives of the universality of human political law .

The social person "human being"

 

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  1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 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. The 1948 Declaration shows the paradox of the universalization of human law described above, universalization that is carried out by building the corresponding social person. In fact, two people are built, among 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. Greek cosmopolitanism is the result of skepticism regarding national identity narratives brought about by the end of Alexander the Great's empire . The cynics contribute to them with their criticism of the social order and the desecration of the territory which paved the way for the Stoic ideology of law universalism. 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 partakers of the same citizenship, which the whole human race enjoys. However, it is not only through the narrative 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 transmundane component that was already seminally present in the Egyptian immortality narratives of the New Kingdom (a from the 16th century BC) made by the priests of Osiris . The common citizenship is that of the Celestial Jerusalem , a story initiated by the prophecy of Ezekiel in the 6th century BC in the context of the Babylonian captivity of Israel, which then receives a stoic, and later, mystical reinterpretation, in the Apocalypse of John.

The contribution of Christianity 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 rather transcendental . Christianity, no less than Judaism before, or Islam afterwards, has no problem with slavery, and does not construct economic determinations beyond the narratives of the King-God plane , which are the ones that best integrate with his narratives of primitive determination , inheritors of the harvest rites. But the transcendentalist elements of the person of the human being are not limited to the narratives of the religions of the Book . This transcendentalism is common to all identity narratives, since 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. Its ideal content has precisely that foundation, and for this reason the identity proposal is compatible with a political and economic practice in the societies that approve it that contradicts the Declaration itself, so its content is absorbed in the mythical- ritual axis as an ideal substrate, metaphysical, as an orientation to action , functioning at the same time as an active element of new narratives of domination.

The 1948 Declaration continues to function as an ideal regulative principle, and it will continue to do so as long as the primitive determinations postulate equality for the most basic social persons (those of the Anima Mundi plane) but not for the economic persons of the most complex mythical planes. Economic equality, that would imply a more homogeneous distribution of property, is contrary to the system of accumulation of surpluses in cities.

Schizophrenia and the plane of Human Law

 

The psychology of the plane of Human Law, contemporary scientific psychology, continues to be incapable of creating integrated meaning for human life, nor of developing alternative narratives of immortality, a mythical-ritual space that is partly covered by monetary metaphysics , which finds in the old accounts of debt and guilt a perfect complement to their general transactional postulates. The revitalization produced follows more the cosmopolitan model of Hellenism, in which mysteries and private cults flourished, a slightly more lyrical dimension of the old metaphysical stories of immortality in which less personal forms of divinity are adopted, whether they are Platonic, pantheists, or Anima Mundi, more compatible with the degree of symbolic abstraction of scientific physical determinations, with which a partial harmonization is sought. However, such harmonization is only feasible at the price of schizophrenia , with a separation of the realms of economic and primitive determinations that can only be mediated monetarily. Whereas the primitive determinations of the mixed axes of postmodernism resolve the meaning of human life again in a transcendental ideal environment, science offers a primitive determination of the physical environment openly contradictory in traditional emotional terms, in which the cosmos is, at the same time, a hostile nature and an orderly place. Physics represents a universe that does not favor the formation and permanence of complex life, as we observe in the Standard Model, but at the same time, it is a universe that follows a more or less mysterious law (that physics is always about to finally unravel), from which we hope to obtain corollaries that reaffirm our general economic identity narratives. This ambiguous representation is congruent and consistent with the more archaic blueprints of the King-God and universal law, in which salvation (the creation of meaning for existence) depends on the revelation and grace of this power in which we have hypostatized. our fears and symbolic limitations.

Critical thinking and the plane of the Human Law

 

The mythical plane of human law is the field of critical narratives, understood as a reflective discourse about the relations of a mythical-ritual system, not merely the set of narratives for the transformation and dissolution of theology in anthropology. Criticism of religion is not the basis of all criticism since the proto-forms of critical thinking appeared within the King-God's own systems , with the priestly reflections on the universal law that the Mes suppose . Even so, the critique of religion, and in a broader sense, of the onto-theological systems of universal law, is the origin of critical anthropological thought. The contents of these narratives, which in some cases are more than twenty-five centuries old, are modern, since it is precisely critical thinking that we call modernity . When Euripides in his tragedies gives a voice to women, and to those who have been defeated at war, questioning the intellectually all-powerful Athens , when Epicurus or Lucretius question the gods , when Hsün Tzu (as Whitman will also say much later) argues that any man in the street can being the legendary Yü, we hear the voice of modernity, the proposal of a human foundation for the law, and such foundation is the need to review the fundamentals. Modernity, as a constant questioning of ideas and forms of organization, that is, of the mythico-ritual axes , is a narrative that declares itself absolute in its global critical activity while admitting the inconclusive character of its results. Marxism inherited this inconclusiveness from the dialectical understanding of Hegelian history, and mature capitalism  from the ideology of social Darwinism, although, in both cases, the absolutist content of criticism, the conviction that the revision of mythical structures is a never ending task, obstruct the homeostasis that primitive determinations have to produce, then, critical thinking becomes an incessant search activity (dopamine neural system) that can be destructive and chaotic. The modernity of human law thus tends towards self-destruction.

Modernity demands that social revolution fulfill the Tablets of a new destiny that establishes science (an idea of ​​universal science) as law at the same time human and universal, a neutral universality, not dependent on a capricious and incomprehensible god. Although once the objective is achieved, any extra criticism can only be counter-revolutionary , a criticism that will be necessary if the principle of modernity is to continue to be maintained, but which is unsustainable from the emotional point of view of the homeostasis of the group. The mythical-ritual axes of the different Marxist revolutions cease to be modern the very moment they are established. Although a principle of human law is maintained , stability itself demands an auxiliary narrative of universal law, and steps are taken back on the mythical planes that revert it even to the grossest forms of the King-God. Modernity, which supposed the triumph of reason , has to destroy critical thought to survive, and this is done simply by dogmatizing it, creating with critical a museum of criticism: a history of philosophy. Capitalism integrates the dopamine need for incessant criticism through a liminoid simulacrum , which has been called postmodernity. Postmodernism supposes the protocolization of modern criticism, devoid of its liminal content, within the mythico-ritual axis of capitalism after the Wars of the 20th century. Inevitably, by proclaiming itself as the end of history, as a universal state of humanity that can only progress from technological revolutions, it proclaims science as a universal religion , but it revitalizes universalist forms in general, especially those of traditional religions. settled in the last two thousand years. Postmodernism is, in this sense, a mixed matrix of universal law and human law , or a mythical-double axis in which the primitive psychological determinations are those of religion, and the physical ones, those of science, while the economic determinations  are constituted by the narratives of monetary metaphysics that serves as the final emotional referent of vital praxis.

The impulse to revise the fundamentals incessantly, already adopted as a sign of identity, as a primitive narrative  of the axis of the human law, is dispersed and dissolved in the set of consumer economic actions, whose scenarios present the consumer choice of one product or another as equivalent to a democratic vote , a kind of effective judgment mediated by money that gives or takes away its support for a specific economic action or its linked object. 

Voting and consumption presuppose an action of choice (when buying something we vote, in a certain sense, for the company that produces such merchandise), although it would be wrong to think that freedom of choice implies the exercise of critical capacity. The value judgments that are presented this way do not suppose any review of the foundations of the mythical plane, but rather a self-satisfied look at the mythical axis from which the anomies will be judged in crime narratives,  and the verdicts channeled towards the only positively sanctioned social actions along the postmodern axis: voting and consumption. The model is a variant of the spectacular one that was established in Eleusis and the Athenian democracy , since it is the one that best adapts to the concurrence of interests in economically complex societies, in which there are a high number of valid social persons. The modern democratic vote quantifies and qualifies the permitted economic criticism, which the social media will transform into an identity narrative to generate group homeostasis. Consumer action and voting supplant critical action, which is not a mere choice, but a  choice based in critical onto-epistemological foundations expressed in an argumentative process, something that, as was already the case in Athens , implies the democratization of argumentation, which is contrary to the stratification of the economic actions of the city .

Valid criticism is not carried out by individual social persons, who are the ones who vote and buy, but by legal social persons, associations, political parties, media corporations , which are the major recognized actors of criticism, but at this level of interaction we already find class struggle, clans, lobbies, and in general, power groups. The encounters between these factions are far from being critical encounters in a philosophical sense, that is, they reproduce pre-modern war situations directed by the simplest mechanisms of the will to power.

Science and Human Law

 

The transcendental and sacred dimension of knowledge continues to be necessary, as a more or less conscious psychological incentive of scientific practice, as well as a functional element linking scientific priestly action with the mythical- ritual axis that finances it, and above all, as a necessity symbolic of covering an onto-theological scope that supports a mixed mythical-ritual structure between universal and human law, such as that presented by contemporary societies. Science is sustained in this way, with an aura of transcendentality and divinity inherited from the myths of universal law due to the humanist failure of philosophy.  For this reason, it cannot be surprising that the human masses today look to science, with a clear theological attitude: science, just like previously religion, is the evidence of a perfection and an order that confirms the meaning of the universe. Outside the scientific communities, the general public shows little interest in theories of nature (cosmological theories, evolutionism and others), it is as secondary as it was in the Middle Ages although for different reasons. In the same way that in the Middle Ages the main interest in natural facts was their ability to provide symbols for moral realities, his interest today is also moral, obeys the same practical requirement, but in reference to the possibilities of vital improvement in this world. And something similar happens in relation to the general epistemological plane of science, linked to the needs of primitive determination , since science is required to have the same capacity to corroborate group identity as was required at the time of the religion.

It would be a mistake to limit scientific narratives to the formal works that have flourished in the last hundred years and that have culminated in the specialized and protocolized languages ​​of the essays authorized by the canon of a group of institutions. Formalization closes scientific languages ​​to any discussion not limited by its own principles, which makes theoretical and observational propositions not exportable outside of a very narrow framework of argumentation, to the point, as in the case of contemporary physics, that they do not have semantic content within the scene of everyday experience. But scientific theories are accompanied by a host of additional narratives, corresponding to the determinations of a specific mythic- ritual axis , which make them intelligible and integrable in the Lebenswelt (World of Life, or everyday life). Such narratives are not those that appear in the specialized press or scientific publications, although they are the ones that articulate them and create their conditions of possibility. I am referring to the narratives formed by the archaeological remains of the universal law that constitute the uncritical knowledge of the group in relation to concepts such as truth , reality , everything , unity of knowledge , possibility of an objective and independent knowledge of the human , possibility of explanation and prediction , and some others more, all of them linked to each other in the mythical-ritual structures that were derived from the narrations of the king-god . Concepts such as those named have entered the mythical plane of universal law as pre-valuations corroborated by the millennia of positive civilizing experience (in the sense that certain human groups prevailed) in a totally uncritical way (how could it be otherwise) and they go unnoticed. In Edmund Halley's preface to Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Principa Mathematica , we are told that Newton has opened the closed chest of truth , a truth that, as we read in the scholium of the definitions of the work, distinguishes false concepts and appearances used by the common people, of those other mathematical concepts that serve as absolute referents, a truth that is in itself , and without relation to something external (absolute time and space).

Scientific onto-theology , heir to the social functionality of the narratives of religious myths, has thus become the major obstacle to the full development of humanist narratives. The nucleus most reluctant to change is the physicist-mathematician, in whose formulations is irrefutable metaphysics by experience. However, the myth that the priests of physics so jealously monopolize cannot go beyond the language in which it is formulated without entering into clear contradictions. The most obvious has been produced as a result of Gödel's theorems : if physics is formulated in the language of mathematics , and mathematics is an incomplete system , physics does not have a method to prove its most basic propositions, let alone, their theories. Physics has defended itself with respect to Gödel's theorems by means of arguments in which it claims the right not to be a consistent system, protecting with great zeal the closed preserve of its priestly wisdom: the proofs are for the theorems of mathematics, while in physics the evidence for any particular result is unquestionable to those who understand it. These puerile defenses of a metaphysical creed on the part of science, already denounced forty years ago by Paul Feyerabend , are but a sign of the epistemological weakness in which these theories move. Today we cannot know if the propositions of the most general models of physics (those that claim a unified description of the universe ) really express universal laws. Physics argues that the test of theory is the experimental result, its predictive capacity, but it is a circular argument, since the theories had an origin in human experience (otherwise they would not say anything with meaning to man), and they find in the experiment the human regularities that had already been introduced into it. This is not the case with the theories of quantum physics , which have proceeded from mathematical formalism to experience, but as they are a mathematical formalism, they have the problem of incompleteness. In both cases, the alleged universal law of physics is compromised.

Origins of the Plane of the Human Law

 

The origin of the humanist mythic-ritual axes is traceable in a double and independent way in the Greek and Chinese tradition, in both cases around the 6th century BC, in a timid outbreak that is the result of the maturity of the narratives of the universal law , from which the myths of human law will emerge as an appendix. For a moment, supernatural beings are insufficient to account for the universal law, to which they themselves seem to be subject, at the same time that they are openly indifferent in relation to the practical questions of the city. The gods become idle in relation to the primitive determinations of the physical origin of the universe , which begins to be explained in naturalistic terms, and above all, in relation to political praxis , where the laws take the form given to them by men, in a double action of pacts and competitions in which the wills of power and domination of some elites over the community in general are expressed. 

The idea of ​​the Greek anthropos takes in China the form of the concept of Jen , humanity , which Confucius elaborated with hardly any support from tradition. However, the semantic field of the term is restricted in relation to that of anthropos , since it only connotes the benevolence of a ruler with respect to his subjects, which makes it more the human principle of justification of the aristocracy than a general concept that qualifies humanity. Jen is an attribute of the ideal human being , of the superior man, the chün-tzu , which is characterized by a set of traditional virtues, such as filial piety, respect for tradition and rituals, benevolence towards others and fulfillment of  social duties. According to Confucius, these ideals are natural insofar as they express the Course of Heaven (Tien-Tao ), also called the Principle of Heaven (Tien-Li ) or Nature . With Confucius, the so-called Lord on High (Shang-Ti), a traditional celestial divinity (such as those found in the shamanic cultures of Manchuria, Mongolia and Siberia) becomes an abstract and relatively idle principle. It is in the shadow of this idleness, similar to the idleness of Epicurus’ gods, that Jen can thrive and makes sense as an ethical model. The god is progressively replaced by an abstract moral principle that operates by itself almost mechanically. Nature does not have an independent development of the human being, but through the moral programming of the universe there is celestial harmony between the principle and the lives of men. 

In addition to the two societies mentioned, we find human law proposals in the Roman world, especially in Lucretius , as well as in the Hindu philosophy of Lokayata. But it is always a marginal position that does not completely affect the Mythico- Ritual axis . However, humanism dissipated in Greece with the arrival of Alexander, who returns directly to the mythical plane of the King-God, and in China with the strong transcendentalist contents of the Han dynasty that displaced the ideas of Hsün Tzu that operated under the Chin dynasty

The triumph of the plane of human law did not occur until the 18th and 19th centuries, as a development of the Epicurean model continued by Holbach , Feuerbach and Marxism, a scheme in which the physis (Nature) was the condition of the moral world . Thus, in Holbach's philosophy , physics is the only rational science of matter, and morality is an applied physics, since it considered that matter possesses both extension and movement, as well as sensitivity, and human thought is nothing but a modification of such property. The general framework of Holbach's thought is the elimination of any reification of universal law, the treatment of nature and morality under merely human assumptions knowable by reason . The error of the human being has been fourfold: the renunciation of experience and the testimony of the senses, the renunciation of the correct reason, the letting go of the imagination , and the nefarious influence of authority. This form of naturalism , which supposes an inversion of the Confucianist system (whose physics was determined by moral principles), will be the one adopted by Marxist onto-epistemology, albeit substituting the mechanistic paradigm for an emergentism.evolutionist . No less than Feuerbach's materialist theses, Marxism will take advantage of the nineteenth-century revolution in life sciences to develop a more sophisticated conception of the concept of matter. Dialectical materialism begins as a psycho-sociological interpretation of historical processes based on human tensions caused by property differences, to end up becoming a mythical-ritual system capable of organizing the entire existence of human communities from exclusively natural points of view.

The Rise of Philosophy

 

The beginning of philosophy is onto-theological, although with a different character from that of the old mythical traditions, with postulates related to the abstract principles of the metadivinities of universal law. According to Plato, laws are the most divine things we possess and they are powerful and valid in this world and the next, given directly by the gods, and about which young people should not dispute or criticize deciding which one is fair and which is not. The laws are the foundation of the city, and in Greece, as in the theocratic societies of the Middle East, their criticism, even their mere treatment, will be easily branded as impiety, and transgressors severely punished, such as Socrates or Protagoras. The independence of universal law with respect to the gods will only be achieved at the price of making the law objective and immutable, in a long process that will give birth to modern science in the seventeenth century AD, although the process has its origin in the ambiguous birth of philosophy. Philosophy emerges as a hybrid of traditional priestly speculations and the political praxis of democracy. Where there is no democracy, the philosopher does not surpass the traditional priest, and in this sense, Plato is only a philosopher when he goes beyond his aristocratic program, and exposes, even if it is to criticize them, the conceptions that deny divine foundation to the laws and they anchor them in the praxis of economic determinations. The Athenian praxis of philosophy will be the origin of the mythical plane of human law, a plane that is initially expressed as critical action to universal law, a reactive form that the narratives of human law have not yet managed to get rid of. The priestly part of the philosophy takes a form of new narration that, although it is not homogeneous in its form, since there are poems, proems, dialogues, aphorisms or apodictic narration, it does present unity of content: the treatment of moral and natural laws as something that obeys a necessary foundation, a tekmor or purpose, an ananké or necessity. As Aristotle understands, the knowledge of what is accidental, what happens sporadically and unpredictably, is not even possible, which implies an implicit link, which philosophy will ignore, from the concept of necessity to our perception of phenomena already the conception of these in theories. In fact, necessity is completely removed from the field of subjectivity and biology even by Aristotle, who detaches it from compulsive and animal aspects, from everything that has to do with physiological regularities, to link it to logic, to ideal of a thought that proceeds apodictically. Logical necessity is established as a narrative principle of philosophy, as it will immediately afterwards be done with geometry, in an undeclared isomorphism between our thought and universal law. Again, the matches obtained are the ones that we had already inadvertently put in from the beginning. On the one hand, our thinking has emerged in a process of continuous rationality from life experience and its protocolization in emotions. On the other hand, the universal law, as the Mes show, is a process of abstraction of the laws of everyday life in the city.

Philosophy is heir to the narratives of universal law, as a meta-theoretical discourse that transforms myth into history and integrates the different knowledge, technologies and traditional identity narratives under a structure no longer dependent on the will of the king- God. From the priestly caste thus broke away a specialized meta-theoretical group whose objective is the validation and care of physical and moral laws: the social person of the philosopher.

Philosophical narratives, however, were unable to construct stable narratives that would replace the idea of ​​a universal law linked to the gods, and merely helped to settle, around the principle of a law that does not depend on a human social person, the idea of a unique god who is in charge, above the kings, the order of the universe and the city. Its failure stems from the inability to elaborate psychological narratives independent of the old onto-theological scenarios, a problem that will drag down modern science again two thousand years later.

The mythical plane of universal law is determined by the relative tension between the traditional stories of the King-God and the new narratives about the independence of the law, by the contradictions and synergies that exist between the narratives of the agrarian rites and the narratives of disintegrating universality, which favor territorial expansion but expose the figure of the King-God to the limitations of his identity myth. Philosophy functions legitimizing this new discourse, and proposes a technique of argumentation and thought for the administration of the law in an urban environment in which the different social persons are not only subjects of a king, but citizens before the law.

The reversion to the mythical plane of the King-God, in which the citizen returns to being a Babylonian black head, occurs, however, with extraordinary frequency, as we see in the Achaemenid Empire, that of Alexander (and those resulting from its fragmentation), the Mauryan Empire, the Chinese or the Roman Empire, whose contacts with philosophical thought did not alter the inertia of millenary social homeostasis. In any case, the absorption of philosophical narratives in the general sphere of narratives on this plane will transform the structures of ancient myths into compact theological constructions that will later sustain monotheisms.

Technology of civilization: the Mes (Divine Ordinances)

We could define the Mes as an inventory of physical and conceptual objects, as well as actions, with which a civilization technology can be built. In mythopoetic terms, they are nothing but the economic and primitive determinations of the Mesopotamian peoples of five thousand years ago. The Mes offer a human self-representation already different from that of the Anima Mundi, a general and vague idea of ​​civilization that is inextricably linked to the figure of a King-God within an agricultural mythic-ritual axis. The Mes do not, however, offer a self-representation of themselves, since for this it is necessary to contrast with other categorizations of the primitive determinations that they suppose, a contrast from which the verification of invariance and the first forms of universalizing generalization derives. Even so, within the local mythic-ritual axes, the Mes have totalizing rank, and their effectiveness is unquestionable. When the Goddess Inana (Love and War) asks God Enlil (Wind) about the Mes that constitute the city and make it great, it is not a question of choosing a matrix of economic and primitive determinations against other possible ones, such as those of Egypt, for example, but of importing the Eridu's infallible civilizing formula, sealed by the gods, whose success is already in the memory and is the result of a very long process that has culminated in priestly reflection that explicitly narrates the categories contained in myths and rites. What is sealed by the Tablets of Destiny is the very authority of priestly reflection that has made the Mes explicit, a new form of consciousness that legitimizes the order of the King-God and in this process shows the force of law as the culminating human thought, although it will not be until the weakening of the person of the King-God that this new form of continuous rationality will take the path of its own development, fostering a new mythical plane.

The Mes began as the valuation core of everyday life. As a nucleus, it acts metonymically as a representation of the mythical-ritual axis, up to the point of replacing it in the priestly reflexive meta-narratives. Therefore, whoever has the law of the Tables dominates the social group, since it contains his actions in a scheme. The law, as a set of the Mes, not merely as legal norm regulating socio-economic transactions, closes the mythical-ritual game in a perfectly manipulable and organized linguistic simulacrum, it is a simplification invested with the authority of the totality to which represents: the process of social hierarchization had, in fact, followed a similar epistemological action to order the increasing complexity of social persons and actions. What is not collected by the Mes does not constitute an essential assessment, it is secondary and dispensable, or that, in any case, must be submitted to the value hierarchy of the law.

The economic and primitive determinations that establish the Mes linked social processes to universal processes: the laws that make the sun move across the sky with apparently different speeds according to the time of year, are in the Mesopotamian mind linked to the social events. The physical law does not have an isolated representation of the moral law, since the physical, from the movements of clouds and meteors to navigation or metallurgy techniques, through flooding and irrigation of the fields, are defined from the determinations primitive identity, are the actions of divine powers. The Mes give formal unity to the world, and for the first time a general representation of control is generated by the knowledge of the mechanisms of interaction of things.

The Mes are expanded to principles of order more general than those of the city in which they arose. They are no longer just representations of the physical and abstract civilizing objects, of the actions that guaranteed the success of the stratified and triumphant society over the biophysical environment, but they represent a deeper order of existence, of which the Mes themselves are only an image.

The loss of “aura” of the King-God

 

The discrediting of the person of the King-God was a gradual process and, from the point of view of the effectiveness of his power, something very relative. In China and Japan, the figure of the King-God will remain until the twentieth century of our era, and today, the United Kingdom maintains a royal-priestly figure as head of the State, as is also the case in several Asian countries. However, the exposure of the King-God to the government's own vicissitudes causes his mana, the aura, in Benjaminian (Walter Benjamin) terms, to decrease and his link with the divinity will no longer be that of the avatar, but that of a vicar who receives power. of the god, though divine enough for the dominated classes. The mythical plane of universal law is the result of a progressive development of more and more abstract divine persons from the epistemological and moral attributes of the King-God, as we saw in the case of Maat and Ra, or in the story of Marduk. and the Tablets of Destiny, in this case, an attribute usurped from his predecessor Kingu, who in turn had stolen it from Enlil. In the myth of Ra, it is the personification of an attribute, while the Babylonian narrative presents us with an objectification, a talisman or magical object of power. The Tables contain written information on the laws of the universe, Mes, but they are also a document that confer on the bearer the legitimacy in the exercise of power, previously conferred on the gods Enlil and Enki, gods-kings prior to Marduk of an agricultural and civilizing nature. The Babylonian objectification of the law is associated with writing, and this is sanctioned by a seal that confirms it as Me, as truth, virtue and wisdom. The Sumerian concept of Me is not limited to these three, in fact, the Mes are the final evolution of a process of abstraction that began in a more pragmatic way. As we read in “Enki and the order of the world”, the Mes are actions that entail order and abundance, in relation to livestock, irrigation, harvest and trade, as well as in relation to the passing of the months of the year and the order of the heavens. In the Poem of Inana and Enki (Water), which narrates the transfer of the powers of civilization from Eridu to Uruk, we find listed the actions that constitute the Mes: the arts of wood, metallurgy, writing, the construction of baskets, houses, but also institutions, concepts and objects, such as the lordship, the divinity, the monarchy, the scepter, the herding of elites, the royalty of certain people, the many priestly positions, the truth, the descent into hell and the return, sexuality and prostitution, the legal language and that of libel, art, music and musical instruments, heroism, judgment, decision, and a few more.