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.