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.