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.