Casting a wide net for Art-Psychology

The artist Joseph Beuys defined art as the science of freedom  [What is Art? J.Beuys. Clairview. 2007]. Since freedom is an essential matter for the human being, the artwork and the artistic actions are anthropological primary productions, actually, the underlying production for everything else. The Romantic program resounds in his words, especially, Schiller’s “Uber die Asthetische Erziehung des  Menchen” (On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind”).

Art is not only the science of freedom but the school o freedom, the place to learn and to practice freedom for oneself and for “the others”, the “I” and the “thou” among “the others”. Freedom is not to be understood in negative terms: we are not talking about freedom from the chains of necessity, the iron chain of “Agnanke”, the goddess “Necessity” of Ancient Times. We are talking about freedom in its positive unstoppable sense of “initial movement” both in the realms of active thinking and active feeling in relation to the development of an inner life harmoniously established in Nature. Nature comes into the picture again, especially today. Well, it never was out of it, we just obviated her presence, ended up forgetting about her, about ourselves. The Romantics talked profusely about Nature and Spirit, and here we go again, now a rather stressful relationship, but happily retaken over by the will of freedom. Freedom in Nature, through art and Nature, with us as Nature, an ample movement to be lived from a deeper understanding than the one procured for us by contemporary science, that mechanistic mode of our brain functioning stiff as a mineral.

Becoming free is not an easy process. The process itself changes us, but it is not the end of the road: once freedom is gained, we have to live freely. For that kind of living, valor is needed. Art insufflates in us the required valor. We can sense that freedom is already here and now, sometimes in a fuzzy dream-like picture, sometimes as the real meaning for our living. Human life is meant to thrive in the fathomless ocean of freedom, for freedom is our nature and we can imprint it in our surroundings. There we cast our Art-Psychology nets.

Mimesis Alquímica de los Trovadores

 La relación mimética arte-naturaleza alcanza una nueva configuración teórica a partir de la praxis trovadoresca de los siglos XII y XIII. La relación ahora se va a fundamentar en el amor, en una forma de amor desconocida hasta la fecha en Occidente.Podemos encontrar precedentes en Safo de Lesbos:

Algunos piensan que es la flota, o la caballería o la infantería, la visión más bella en el mundo; mas yo digo que es aquello que uno ama¹.(1)

Pero aunque estos versos sean quizá el primer ejemplo de la belleza como sentimiento amoroso, la idea alcanza una configuración única en el momento histórico de los trovadores. En las obras musicales de los poetas de amor cortés asistimos a la fundación del culto amoroso que hace de la mujer centro de la creación. Se trata de un amor razonador y proporcionado, más una tendencia de la razón hacia lo bueno y bello -en sus acepciones más neoplatónicas- que un impulso sexual². (2) En las obras de Blondel, Gautier d’Epinal, Gillebert de Berneville y tantos otros, se proclama el sufrimiento amoroso como fuente de toda bondad y virtud en un tono que disuelve la barrera entre lo sagrado y lo profano, o si se prefiere, que sacraliza a la dama y con ella resacraliza toda la existencia, si bien en una síntesis nueva. Los cantos a Notre Dame se convierten en un canto general a la dama como símbolo, a la puerta del cielo que es lo femenino (3)³ ante la que el poeta entona el conjuro del verso. La dama es símbolo de la naturaleza entera, que se comprende como un Eterno Femenino en el que el poeta busca su propia imagen y se interroga⁴. (4)

¿Qué puede haber en este mundo que pueda darse a un hombre más placentero que el amor de una mujer deseable?⁵. (5)

El precedente más directo de este sentimiento se encuentra en Europa en la obra de los poetas arábigo-andaluces, y con particular énfasis hay que destacar el tratado poético de filosofía amorosa del cordobés Ibn Hazm, quien a principios del siglo XI sembraba así el terreno para los trovadores:

Yo que he gustado los más diversos placeres y he alcanzado las más diversas fortunas, digo que ni el favor del sultán, ni las ventajas del dinero, ni el ser algo tras no ser nada, ni el retorno después de una larga expatriación, ni la seguridad después del temor y de la falta de todo refugio tienen sobre el alma la misma influencia que la unión amorosa, sobre todo si la han precedido largos desabrimientos y ásperos desdenes que han encendido la pasión, alimentando la llama del deseo y atizado la hoguera de la esperanza⁶(6).

El arte de los trovadores, como ha señalado Méla, es un arte análogo al de la alquimia en el que las materias se transmutan unas en otras con una abolición total de las fronteras entre arte y naturaleza, ambos trabajan en una misma dirección:

Con la complicidad de la lengua, el poeta sugiere que su arte se parece más a los poderes de la Naturaleza que lo que el topos del arte mimético deja suponer, pues su arte es un arte de otro orden, propiamente alquímico, ya que implica la verdad. (7)⁷

Bajo el pretexto de haber encontrado las palabras que pintan los ojos de la amada, el poeta la recrea, la inventa en un juego de reflejos que hace imposible decidir cúal es el original, pues arte y naturaleza son la transmutación de una misma sustancia. Tanto la rosa como la dama son los símbolos de esta alquimia, intercambiables entre sí, metáforas y metonimias del proceso de generación y destrucción en el que se encuentra el mundo. Al contemplarlas se hace imposible detener los ojos en un límite, pues su belleza es creciente e inagotable (8)⁸ -como canta el poeta cordobés- lo que presupone una experiencia extática de disolución de la personalidad en una personalidad de alcance mayor.

Es preciso destacar el hecho de que con los trovadores se establecen los precedentes de un proceso que culminará a principios del siglo XVII en el que se va a invertir la relación mimética del arte y la naturaleza. En la obra de los trovadores, comienza a ser patente que es el arte el creador de lo natural y que sólo desde el arte puede comprenderse. El poeta se descubre a sí mismo en el proceso creativo, se encuentra inventando los ojos de su dama, su propio espejo. Como dice el enigma: no soy casi nada y soy todas las cosas⁹, (9) es el espejo doble de Narciso que la dama tiende al poeta ofreciéndole una nueva visión sobre el mundo y sí mismo. La belleza de la dama es la pulcritud del espejo que permite el reflejo, y con el reflejo, el dardo que acaba con la imagen propia propiciando el renacimiento en lo otro, en la naturaleza general que representa la dama. La comprensión de la alquimia conduce a la inmortalidad, Isis-naturaleza queda desvelada como un proceso de cambio continuo de perpetua destrucción y nacimiento, y lo primero que sufre el proceso de cambio es el yo del poeta, quien muere a su propio ser para renacer en el ser sublimado que proyecta sobre su amada.

La mímesis alquímica de los trovadores puede ser comprendida como un impulso hacia lo inexistente, algo así como la voluntad girada sobre sí misma en un acto autoconstitutivo. Es un proceso de expresión de lo que queda fuera del yo con el afán de apropiarlo en una operación constitutiva de un yo de más alcance. La dama del trovador es la dama ausente por excelencia que vive en su corazón y crece con un verbo que manifiesta la clara voluntad de crecer. El trovador encuentra en sí mismo eso que busca y lo recrea, lo hace florecer en su deseo:

Quiero aquello que no puedo tener(10)¹⁰

es decir, quiero mi propio afán de querer. Las reminiscencias del Banquete platónico son claras, aunque hay elementos nuevos. El amor se plantea por un lado como un deseo de lo que nos falta, tal como Aristófanes lo presenta en el Banquete y es también un amor que se conjuga con el deseo de lo idéntico que se daba en las exposiciones de Fedro y Pausanias¹¹, (11)pero la fusión de lo idéntico y lo distinto al poeta se da ahora en la figura de la dama. El amor trovadoresco no es en absoluto homosexual y, de hecho, la mímesis alquímica que desarrolla se da por la fusión de opuestos: la dama es espejo y lugar de transmutación, al imitar su ser se recrean todas las cosas. Además de esto hay otra diferencia radical: el amor de los trovadores no aspira a la posesión de la amada para siempre, como Diotima de Mantinea cuenta a Sócrates que hace siempre el amor¹², sino que por el contrario el trovador renuncia a tener la amada para convertirla ya en otra cosa, en el motor de una transformación interna. El poeta quiere lo que no puede tener porque lo que persigue no es algo que pueda tenerse, no es un objeto, sino su propio deseo de llegar a ser todas las cosas. Se ama lo que no se tiene porque se aspira a no ser ya uno mismo, sino una continuidad con todo lo demás, continuidad que se pretende a partir de la identificación con la fuerza transformadora de las cosas: el amor.(12)

Tanto tengo mi corazón lleno de alegría que todo cambia ante mis ojos de naturaleza (13)¹³

Pero también se notan en la mímesis alquímica elementos de la filosofía tantra, que muy probablemente llegaran hasta los trovadores a través del catarismo -relaciones que han sido investigadas por Falvy (14)¹⁴- o simplemente por el contacto de las cortes del Sur de Francia con el mundo musulmán peninsular.

La filosofía amorosa de los poetas andaluces ha sido inscrita dentro del llamado amor Bagdadí (15)¹⁵, el que sin duda parece ser una variante del Oriente Medio sobre la escuela filosófica hindú (y tibetana) del tantra. El tantra es una disciplina espiritual que cuenta con una doctrina y una práctica milenarias encaminadas a la unión con la divinidad basadas en el kalachakra yoga. Las prácticas pretenden la experiencia de la no dualidad esencial del ser humano, la experiencia de la Shakti mediante el despertar de las energías psíquicas llamadas Kundalini, para lo que se ponen en funcionamiento diversas formas de energía física del individuo, incluídas las sexuales, con el fin de redirigirlas en un proceso de meditación. Durante este proceso se producen transformaciones de la conciencia del participante capaces de modificar de manera más o menos permanente su conducta cotidiana¹⁶. (16) En las prácticas de tantra el ego es sentido como una ilusión, maya, que es superada por la comprensión del tejido de la realidad. Se trata de un proceso de reabsorción en un principio superior transpersonal, semejante al de la experiencia chamánica. La iniciación de la que Diotima habla en el Banquete, en la que se procede a una progresiva universalización-abstracción del sentimiento de la belleza, está en esta línea¹⁷. (17) El tantra mantiene la faceta apolínea junto a una buena dosis de dionisismo. Para el practicante masculino la divinidad por la que pretende ser poseído es femenina, es el principio femenino de la naturaleza que experimenta a través de su Gurú, quien tiene que ser del sexo opuesto y con quien mantiene relaciones místico-sexuales, llevando a cabo una adoración de todo lo femenino que mantiene un tono bastante similar al que se observa en el amor bagdadí: el acólito canta y reza a su diosa con las misma palabras que el poeta celebra a su amada (18)¹⁸, y con el mismo propósito de unirse con ella y diluir su propia identidad.

¿Cuál es entonces la diferencia específica de la síntesis alquímica alcanzada por los trovadores con respecto al Tantra? Una mayor presencia apolínea en la música trovadoresca, que se traduce en la mayor importancia del yo histórico de los trovadores, así como una mayor personalización histórica del principio femenino, es decir, una mayor relevancia de la dama específica y de su única personalidad. La participación así reconoce lo divino en lo particular, lo que años más tarde dará lugar al canto con nombre humano propio: Laura en Petrarca, Beatriz en Dante o Camila en Garcilaso. En el trovadorismo el poeta es más consciente de la mujer a través de la que experimenta el principio de mímesis alquímica, mientras que en el tantrismo, desde un primer momento se trata con la Shakti, la divinidad femenina más general sin resquicios para la mujer individual o para el hombre individual. Por otro lado, la práctica sexual del tantra queda sublimada en el trovadorismo y la mímesis alquímica que produce el amor es tan sólo experimentada en un nivel intelectual, por contraposicón con las prácticas físicas del Tantra. El episodio de Francesca en la Divina Comedia es de hecho una declaración explícita sobre los límites del amor cortés. Paolo y Francesca- como nos cuenta Dante en el canto V-, leyendo sobre cómo el amor hirió a Lanzarote, cruzan el umbral de lo literario y completan el deseo, quedando aprisionados eternamente en el infierno de una pasión sin descanso y sin finalidad (17)¹⁹. Pero quizá la diferencia mayor viene dada por el carácter poético-musical radical del trovadorismo frente a las prácticas del tantra. La recreación no sólo de la dama sino de todo su entorno, del mundo en el que se mueve, mediante el canto hace al arte demiurgo de la naturaleza. La fuerza capaz de las transmutaciones es el hilo de oro del logos-amor que permite encontrar el orden en el laberinto de la existencia, un logos capaz de convertirse en lo que no es por pura voluntad. El marco alquímico es la propia literatura, el lugar en el que desarrollará sus prácticas mágicas a partir de ahora gran parte de lírica occidental. Con Robert Graves, podríamos decir que la tradición poética occidental está basada en principios mágicos cuyos rudimentos fueron un hermético secreto religioso durante siglos, pero que después, una vez que dichos secretos salieron a la luz y se desacreditaron, se olvidaron sus orígenes (19).²⁰ Un vistazo a la producción poético musical de Occidente basta para que esta forma de mímesis -con mayor o menor conocimiento de todas sus implicaciones y sus fuentes históricas- sea tenida por uno de los motores principales estéticos.

1Safo.Fragmento 16. En Greek Lyric Poetry. Edited by M.L.West.Oxford University Press. Oxford and New

 York.1994.p.37.

2Cf. Pierre Aubry. Trouvéres et Troubadours. Georg Olms Verlag. Hildesheim and New York 1981. p. 98.

3Verso éste Gautier de Coinci. Citado por Aubry en la Ed. cit. p. 115

4Cf. Charles Mela. Le Beau Tronné. Etudes de theorie et de critique litteraires sur l’art des trouveurs au Mogen Age.

 Paradigme Ed. Caen 1993 p. 214, en ensayo: Le Miroir Perrilleux on l’alchimie de la Rose.

5Andrea Capellanus. De Amore. Libro II. Capt.6.p.239. Duckworth. London 1982.

6Ibn Hazm de Córdoba. El collar de la paloma. Alianza Editorial. Madrid 1985.p.p.181-182.

7Charles Méla.Le Miroir Perilleux ou l’Alchimie de la Rose.Ed.Cit.p. 212.

8Cf. Ibn Hazm.Ibid.Ed.cit.p.190.

9Cf. Méla.Ibid.Ed.Cit.p. 217.

10Guillaume IX de Poitiers. Chanson VII. En Aimer son Désir: L’Amour Courtois.En Charles Mela.Ed. Cit. p. 258.

11Por la defensa del Eros homosexual.

12Cf.Platón.Banquete.204D - 205A.Collected Dialogues. Ed.Cit.p.p.556-557.

13Bernard de Ventadour. V.1-4. En Charles Mela: Aimer son Désir.Ed.Cit. p. 261.

14Según Zoltan Falvy hay evidencias de los vínculos cercanos entre trovadores y cátaros, y ambas ideologías fueron

 perseguidas por la Iglesia, que con la espada del Papa Inocencio III mató 20.000 cátaros en Bezier dispersand

o así el movimiento trovadoresco. Véase Zoltan Falby Medieval Heresies and the Troubadours en Mediterranean culture and

 Troubadour Music. Akademiai Kiadó. Budapest 1986. p. 46 y s.s.

15Cf.José Ortega y Gasset. Prólogo al Collar de la Paloma. En Ed.cit. del libro de Ibn Hazm.p.26.

16Hay un excelente estudio de Heinrich Zimmer, The significance of the tantric Yoga. En Spiritual Disciplines. Princeton

 University Press. Princeton 1985.p.p.3-58. Otro texto interesante es The practice of the Kalachakra de Glenn H. Mullin,

 Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, New York 1991. En este libro se incluyen textos del Kalachakra Tantra.

17Véase Platón, El Banquete 210A-212A.

18Platón nos da una magnífica descripición del delirio que produce el sentimiento del amor o la popsesión afrodítica en

Fedro 250E-252B, que concuerda perfectamente con los éxtasis del amor bagdadí.

19La frontera que lleva de la perfección del amor cortés, sublimación del tantrismo, a la desaprobación cristiana las

 practicas sexuales es ténue. Dante nos dice: Cuántos dulces pensamientos, cuántos deseos llevaron a estos al doloroso

 trance! (Divina Comedia. Canto V. versos 113-114.Obras Completas de Dante Aligheri B.A.C. Madrid. 1980.p.45.), dando a

 entender la proximidad del cielo con respecto a la realización espiritual y el infierno del fracaso. El poeta se desvanece

 después de escuchar el relato de Francesca.

20Cf.Robert Graves. The Whithe Goddess. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York 1994. p. 17.

Variaciones Klee

 Tema: El arte no reproduce lo visible. El arte hace visible. (Paul Klee)

Variación 1. El arte no reproduce lo sensible. El arte hace sensible.

Variación 2. El arte no reproduce lo sensible. El arte da sentido a lo sensible.

Variación 3: El arte hace inteligible lo sensible y sensible lo inteligible.

Variación 4: El arte no reproduce lo visible. El arte muestra lo oculto en lo visible.

Variación 5: El arte muestra lo oculto en lo visible transformándolo en símbolo.

Variación 6: El arte transforma lo oculto en sensible e inteligible.

Variación 7: El arte transforma lo sensible e inteligible en vida.

Variación 8: El arte transforma la vida en símbolo y el símbolo en vida.

Variación 9: El arte transforma la identidad vital en identidad inteligible.

Variación 10: El arte transforma la identidad vital en una identidad más amplia que la que puede

 procesar la mente.

Variación 11: El arte transforma la identidad fragmentada de la vida en identidad de Vida-Inteligencia.

 Morphism:  Googling into English.

Theme: Art does not reproduce the visible. Art makes visible. (Paul Klee)

Variation 12: Art does not reproduce the sensible. Art makes sensitive.

Variation 13: Art does not reproduce the sensible. Art gives meaning to the sensible.

Variation 14: Art makes the sensible intelligible and the intelligible sensible.

Variation 15: Art does not reproduce the visible. Art shows the hidden in the visible.

Variation 16: Art shows the hidden in the visible, transforming it into a symbol.

Variation 17: Art transforms the hidden into sensible and intelligible.

Variation 18: Art transforms the sensible and intelligible into life.

Variation 19: Art transforms life into a symbol and a symbol into life.

Variation 20: Art transforms vital identity into intelligible identity.

Variation 21: Art transforms vital identity into a broader identity than it can process

 the mind.

Variation 22: Art transforms the fragmented identity of life into the identity of Life-Intelligence.

 "Sensible" is a false cognate, so we just have stepped into interesting territory. Let expand this

 ambiguity through morphisms.

Google into German:

Variante 12. Kunst reproduziert nicht das Sinnliche. Kunst macht sensibel.

Variante 13. Kunst reproduziert nicht das Sinnliche. Kunst gibt dem Sinnlichen einen Sinn.

Variante 14: Kunst macht das Sinnliche verständlich und das Intelligible sensibel.

Variante 15: Kunst reproduziert nicht das Sichtbare. Kunst zeigt das Verborgene im Sichtbaren.

Variante 16: Kunst zeigt das Verborgene im Sichtbaren und verwandelt es in ein Symbol.

Variante 17: Kunst verwandelt das Verborgene in Sinnvolles und Verständliches.

Variante 18: Kunst verwandelt das Sinnliche und Verständliche in Leben.

Variante 19: Kunst verwandelt Leben in ein Symbol und ein Symbol in Leben.

Variante 20: Kunst verwandelt vitale Identität in verständliche Identität.

Variante 21: Kunst verwandelt vitale Identität in eine breitere Identität, als sie verarbeiten kann

  der Verstand.

Variation 22: Kunst verwandelt die fragmentierte Identität des Lebens in die Identität der

 Lebensintelligenz.

Google into Arab.

التباين 12. الفن لا يعيد إنتاج الحسية. الفن يجعلك حساسًا.

التباين 13. الفن لا يعيد إنتاج الحواس. الفن يعطي معنى للحواس.

البديل 14: الفن يجعل المعقول الحسي مفهومًا ومعقولًا.

الشكل 15: الفن لا يعيد إنتاج ما هو مرئي. يظهر الفن المخفي في المرئي.

الشكل 16: الفن يظهر المخفي في المرئي ويحوله إلى رمز.

البديل 17: الفن يحول المخفي إلى معنى ومفهوم.

البديل 18: الفن يحول الحسي والمفهوم إلى حياة.

صيغة 19: الفن يحول الحياة إلى رمز ورمز في الحياة.

البديل 20: الفن يحول الهوية الحيوية إلى هوية مفهومة.

البديل 21: الفن يحول الهوية الحيوية إلى هوية أوسع مما يمكنه معالجتها.

    العقل.

الشكل 22: الفن يحول الهوية المجزأة للحياة إلى هوية الذكاء الحيوي.

Google into Chinese

對比 12. 藝術不會再現性感。藝術讓你敏感。

對比 13. 藝術不再現感官。藝術賦予感官以意義。

備選方案 14：藝術使感性變得可理解和合理。

圖 15：藝術不會再現可見的東西。隱藏的藝術出現在可見中。

圖 16：藝術展示了隱藏在可見中的東西並將其變成了符號。

選擇 17：藝術將隱藏的事物轉化為意義和概念。

選擇18：藝術將感性和概念轉化為生活。

公式19：藝術將生活轉化為像徵，成為生活中的象徵。

備選方案 20：藝術將重要的身份轉變為可理解的身份。

備選方案 21：藝術將一個重要的身份轉變為一個比它可以處理的更廣泛的身份。

    頭腦。

圖 22：藝術將生活的碎片化身份轉化為生命智慧的身份。

Google into Maori

Whakataurite 12. Kaore te toi e whakaputa uri. Ma te mahi toi koe e aro.

Whakataurite 13. Kaore te Toi e whakaputa uri i nga kare a roto. Ma te Toi e whai kiko ai nga

 maaramatanga.

Kōwhiringa 14: Ma te Toi e maarama ai, e whaitake ai hoki.

Whakaatu 15: Kaore te Toi e whakaputa uri i nga mea e kitea ana. Ko nga toi huna ka kitea i nga mea e

 kitea ana.

Whakaatu 16: Ka whakaatuhia e Toi nga mea e huna ana ki te kitea ka huri hei tohu.

Kōwhiringa 17: Ko te Toi e huri ana i nga mea huna ki te tikanga me nga kaupapa.

Kōwhiringa 18: Ka huri te toi i te maaramatanga me nga kaupapa ki te koiora.

Tātai 19: Ko te Toi ka huri i te koiora ki te whakaahua ka waiho hei tohu mo te koiora.

Kōwhiringa 20: Ko te toi ka huri i nga tuakiri nui hei tuakiri maarama.

Kōwhiringa 21: Ko te Toi ka huri i tetahi tuakiri nui ki te tuakiri whanui atu i te mea ka taea e ia.

     hinengaro

Whakaahua 22: Ko te Toi ka huri i te tuakiritanga o te koiora ki te tuakiri o te koiora ora.

Google into Hindi:

तुलना करें 12. कला पुनरुत्पादित नहीं करती है। कला आपका ध्यान खींचेगी।

तुलना 13. कला आंतरिक भावनाओं को पुन: पेश नहीं करती है। कला अंतर्दृष्टि को सार्थक बनाती है।

विकल्प 14: कला इसे स्पष्ट और प्रासंगिक बनाती है।

चित्र 15: जो देखा जाता है उसे कला पुनरुत्पादित नहीं करती है। दृश्य में छिपी हुई कलाओं को देखा जा सकता है।

चित्र 16: टोई प्रकट करता है कि क्या पाया जाना छिपा है और एक प्रतीक में बदल जाता है।

विकल्प 17: कला रहस्यों को अर्थ और विषयों में बदल देती है।

विकल्प 18: कला समझ और विषयों को जीव विज्ञान में बदल देती है।

फॉर्मूला 19: कला जीव विज्ञान को फोटोग्राफी में बदल देती है और जीव विज्ञान का प्रतीक बन जाती है।

विकल्प 20: कला महत्वपूर्ण पहचानों को उज्ज्वल पहचानों में बदल देती है।

विकल्प 21: कला एक बड़ी पहचान को एक व्यापक पहचान में बदल देती है, जितना वह संभाल सकती है।

     मन

चित्र 22: कला एक जीवित प्राणी की पहचान को एक जीवित प्राणी की पहचान में बदल देती है।

Google into Spanish:

Compárese con 12. El arte no se reproduce. El arte llamará tu atención.

Compárese 13. El arte no reproduce sentimientos internos. El arte hace que la comprensión valga la

 pena.

Opción 14: El arte lo deja claro y relevante.

Figura 15: El arte no reproduce lo que se ve. Las artes ocultas se pueden ver en la escena.

Figura 16: Toei revela lo que está oculto para ser encontrado y se convierte en un símbolo.

Opción 17: El arte convierte los misterios en significados y sujetos.

Opción 18: El arte transforma la comprensión y las materias en biología.

Fórmula 19: El arte convierte la biología en fotografía y se convierte en símbolo de la biología.

Opción 20: El arte convierte las identidades críticas en identidades brillantes.

Opción 21: El arte convierte una identidad más grande en una identidad más amplia de la que puede

 manejar.

     Mente

Figura 22: El arte transforma la identidad de un ser vivo en la identidad de un ser vivo.

Google into English:

Compare 12. Art is not reproduced. The art will catch your eye.

Compare 13. Art does not reproduce inner feelings. Art makes understanding worthwhile.

Option 14: The art makes it clear and relevant.

Figure 15: Art does not reproduce what is seen. The occult arts can be seen in the scene.

Figure 16: Toei reveals what is hidden to be found and becomes a symbol.

Option 17: Art turns mysteries into meanings and subjects.

Option 18: Art transforms understanding and subjects into biology.

Formula 19: Art turns biology into photography and becomes a symbol of biology.

Option 20: Art turns critical identities into brilliant identities.

Option 21: Art turns a larger identity into a larger identity than it can handle.

      Mind

Figure 22: Art transforms the identity of a living being into the identity of a living being.

Let's consider Figure 16: Toei reveals what is hidden to be found and becomes a symbol.

Toei or Tui in Maori is a bird. Let's draw it.

New set for further variations:

Figure 16: Toei reveals what is hidden to be found and becomes a symbol.

Option 17: Art turns mysteries into meanings and subjects.

Option 20: Art turns critical identities into brilliant identities.

Option 21: Art turns a larger identity into a larger identity than it can handle.

 

Mind

Figure 22: Art transforms the identity of a living being into the identity of a living being

Lyrical Citizen and Individuation

The counter-cultural movements that flourished all around the world after 2008 represent a new instance of a very old paradox of political metaphysics: the defense of a private realm of rights within a social structure of stratification. The paradox is produced by the fact that it is precisely the structure of stratification that created the conditions of possibility for the genesis of the private realm represented by the social persona of the citizen, and such structure is not compatible with the implications of those rights. Nowadays, the 2020 Covid pandemic has reopened that very same scenario in a very dramatic way. The tension between the spheres of the individual citizen and those of the social group as a whole, the tension between a “res privata” and a “res publica”, is at the very base of the social structure. It is a tension that was perfectly treated and dealt with in the old Eleusinian mysteries and the ancient Greek Theater. The core of the tension is the individuation process in the first sense used by Carl Jung, individuation as a process of self-development of biological and psychological individuality.

The present formulation of the paradox within the narrative of the human being, an abstract social persona that is the subject of some ideal social rights, is just the latter development of a very old religious story. It is obvious that the root of the paradox intermingles with the roots of social stratification which lies at the foundation of urban settlements, but it is not only explained by this phenomenon, and needs to be understood in relation to the creation of a very unique social persona, endowed with a “transcendental” and private emotional sphere, that I will call the lyrical citizen.

In a passage from Aeschylus’s Oresteia [1983, 65] we find what may probably be the first register of the psychological condition of individuation in social terms: I hold my own mind and think apart from other men. It is not surprising that such a proclamation appears within the religious context of Attic theater, for it is the harmonization of the tension between the social personae, the regulation of social homeostasis, that drives Mythico-Ritual performances. The fact that we can understand the sentence of Aeschylus shows that its content is false because a mind isolated from the others could not make itself understood. This is the paradox:

1. I cannot think or express my individuation without a language.

2. Language is the construction of a historical group, not an individual.

Therefore, I cannot express my individuation on individual terms (unless -of course- I introduce transcendental postulates, which, as we will see, has been the case). Furthermore, individuation is only thinkable in social terms, or what is equivalent: individual identity is a question of communication and social action.

Such paradox was the point of departure for the theory of the development of personality in relation to social structure, as treated by Durkheim [1964], Mead [1934], Parsons [1964], or Habermas [2010]. Composing their conclusions in terms of contemporary affective neuroscience [Panksepp, 1998] we could say that the individual person is the result of the particular set of ideas developed by a human group [Durkheim,1964], acted through the body individuation as a reply to the expectations of social behavior that are generalized through linguistic interchange and serve to the purpose of social homeostasis. Social personae are created in these communicative actions [Habermas, 2010] through mimetic narrative processes conditioned by the particular economic action which constitutes the homeostatic structure of the community.

The person of the lyrical citizen, or the individual persona, is the result of the intersection of the narratives of the economic actions of the ancient city with the ideological development of the narratives of immortality in the direction of an individual soul. The concept of individual persona appeared linked to that of anima as a transpersonal entity, as an explanatory substratum for the economic actions and of the social personae that are derived from it. It has its source in the pre-urban, or anima mundi societies, whose personae differentiation is still pre-individual, a tension between the individual body and the collective narrative, for there is not yet a difference between the economic identity of the subject -whether mother, hunter or any other group persona- and a private identity beyond the one given by the community and the particular economical action. The personae of the narratives of the anima mundi are not individuals as much as types, whether economical, of kinship, of age or, like the totem-ancestor, linguistic and metaphysical. The survival of the ancestors in oneiric experiences as well as in the narratives and Mythico-Ritual ceremonies extends the active personal community to the world of the dead, which is present in social life, explicitly remembered and implicitly incorporated in the memory of the group through the narratives and rituals that passed on to the new generations. The linguistic hypostatic dimension of both the ancestor-totem and the world of dreams give the grounds for the concept of anima. As a general concept, it is not the direct result of an economic determination, but of a self-reflective explanation of life that includes in its bosom the phenomenon of death. The soul is a simple hypothesis that explains at the same time the persistence of the memory of the dead, the world of dreams, and a spontaneous valuation upon nature by which we are able to understand it immediately and feel part of it. The core of the concept is rooted in Life-Intelligence, it is an intuition so primary and direct that its intellectual elaboration can only provide information about the cultural point of view from which we elaborate this understanding of human life experience.

The notion of an individual anima implies a contradiction of terms, for the concept anima, inherited from the narratives of the anima mundi, refers to the most general apprehension of life, whereas its simultaneous assignation to an individual body takes as a referent the most particular, for the very notion of “individual” is poorly determined. The concept is therefore always fuzzily understood but draws its praxiological meaning from the individuation of the body acting semantically as a synonymous for individual life. However, an individual life does not express a private realm of emotions, for these are general protocols of mammal behavior for survival and communication developed during evolution, not individual traits. Since our emotional life is organized around the basic social emotions [Panksepp], a private emotional realm could only be the result of an extra-life development, as a dissociation of the economic life of the individual in relation to the group and a hypothetical existence beyond the economic activities. In anima mundi societies, such dissociation does not even exist, for their mild (or non-existent) stratification harmonizes the economic and the transcendental social personae, but urban societies, with their division between rulers and ruled, favor the development of transcendental personae. The rupture had a double engine, for the transcendental development of the anima mundi figure of the ancestor went hand in hand with the economic developments of the city which created the conditions for leisure (non-economical) time of the citizen. The concept of the immortality of the totem-ancestor once applied to the early kings and the noble introduced a double realm of experience which provided the suitable conditions for the progressive weakening of the actual life experience in favor of another world. As we can observe in the examples provided by the classical studies of James Frazer,[1] in the early stratified societies, immortality was a privilege of the rulers, but the conditions of possibility for an emotional realm beyond life experience were solidly founded. The dimension of the transcendental was in its first formulations a poor sketch in which the human being projected his economic actions and his cultural structures.

The generalized narratives of immortality will not take place until the development of the myths of the universal law [Munoz, 2013]. Particularly influential were those elaborated by the Osiris’ priests of the 17^th-16^th Century previous to our Era, during the New Kingdom, following the convulsion of the Hyksos interregnum, narratives of immortality that served as a paradigm for those which came after them, not only in the form of the cults but in the extension of immortality to ordinary men [Edwards, Gadd, Hammond, 2008]. It is interesting to notice that the progressive ascension of Osiris to the Egyptian pantheon at the end of the Old Kingdom (XXII b.z.) was parallel to the development of the secular literature (in the Middle Egyptian dialect) during the period of the IX-XII dynasties (2160-1800 b.z. approx.). It also coincides with the appearance of some sort of Egyptian middle class formed by craftsmen, tradesmen, and small farmers [Edwards, Gadd, and Hammond. 2008, 506], that had the time for the development of a private realm of emotions. We read in the text Dispute of a Man with his Soul, the dialog of a man weary of life with the full-blown persona of his soul in which otherworld considerations condition human emotional life, n-aryzing at the same time the basic emotions. It seems reasonable to think that in uncertain times, in liminal situations, the Osiris myths of the afterlife would find a more receptive audience that under steady periods of changeless social order. The weakening of the authority of the King produced the strengthening (and progressive independence) of the universal law that he was supposed to represent, and especially, of the priestly caste that controlled the techniques of such law (the techniques of civilization) as well as the emergent metaphysical knowledge of the narratives of identity, and which included the myths of immortality.

The transcendental dimension of the personal identity derived from the tales of immortality was completed with the development that lyric made of the psychological sphere thus inaugurated. In early Babylonian literature (2120-1800 b.z), in the works of king Shulgi, the son of Ur-Nammu, we see how the development of the private realm occurred first among the noblemen. The Kings and the Noble, the rulers of Mesopotamia (the Anunaki that we read in the Enuma Elish), experienced the tension between their social-economic persona and the ideological one which resulted from their mythical role. It was in the liminal realm between ritual poetry and its courtly developments where germinated the notion of a private citizen. The shift from the public narratives of the fertility rites (which contained the immortality intuitions of urban communities) to a narrower courtesan sphere turned the models of the ritual Epithalamion (like the Mesopotamian of Dumuzi and Inanna[2]) into courtesan love poetry. Ritual emotions were thus enaryzed (made n-ary), and then enaryzed further in the lyrical expression of this new private emotional dimension made by the middle classes of Egypt and Mesopotamia, writings that towards the 12^th Century b.z. were already a widespread practice in the Middle East.

On the other hand, if we observe Chinese poetry of the Chou period, in the Classic of Poetry or The Book of Odes (Shijing) that collects poems of the 11^th to the 8^th Centuries b.z.we do not find the voice of a lyrical citizen, but rather group emotions. In ode 27, we read: I think of the ancient men, and then truly I find my heart [Karlgreen,1950,16)] a declaration which implies that the meaning is in the past, not in the idea of the unique present of the poet where the lyrical epiphany takes place. We observe throughout the whole book an analogous absence of the private realm found in Mesopotamia: the descriptions and observations of economic and aesthetical nature are protocolized in the manner of proverbs, with a moral content which is always in relation to the group customs, to the economic action of economic personae. China had a middle class of merchants equivalent to the Mesopotamian one (especially in the Spring and Autumn Period (722-481 b.z.), but lacked the myths of immortality for the general population of Egypt, or the immortal Anunaki persona of the Mesopotamian cities. In fact, we have to wait until Qu Yuan’s poetry in IV b.z., to hear the voice of a lyrical citizen, fully blossomed in the narratives of immortality of Taoism. Something similar happened with the birth of Greek lyric in the 7^th Century b.z., when the emotions expressed in the myths and rituals were redirected towards a reflection about human existence from the perspective of the common citizen, whose emotional private sphere, a transformation of the type offered by mysteric rites (Orphic, Eleusinian, etc.), was declared and reclaimed as the kernel of an individual persona.

If the general population is immortal, the political State that is derived from it is trans-historical and trans-personal in a very concrete economic sense: the debt-guilt (in relation to civilization) over which the power of the elites was built has the counterpart of an inalienable right, eternal life. When only the elites were immortal, the masses (including any possible middle class) were irrelevant in the civilizing drama. The notion of immortality makes the masses members of a stable ideal community, for it implies the creation of a persona –a symbolic complexified variant of the anima mundi- which underlies their active economic social personae and, to the extent that it is none of the others (but a mere metaphysical narrative of identity), a persona which is relatively independent of the general Mythico-Ritual actions, and has a private sphere of action. The political expansion of these ideas will not take place until the limitation of national identities that resulted from the Greek-Persian synthesis of Alexander. The Cynics contributed to create them with their critique of the social order and the desacralization of the territory, something which prepared the terrain for the Stoic ideology of the universalism of the law, whose foundation is the universalism of the Logos.

Even though the contents of the elites’ first personal lyric will be similar to the lyrical compositions of the common citizens, like the ones we find in Greek poetry, or later on in China of the time of the Six Dynasties (222-589 a.z.),[3] it will be the perspective of the common citizen, not bound to any caste, the one capable of providing a dimension of universality that characterizes the lyric (a universality of privacy) as the expression of a social persona independent of the structures of the king-god.[4] Curiously enough, this perspective of the private emotional sphere, by being severed from the Mythico-Ritual axis where it belonged, achieved self-consciousness through this difference, although it did not discover itself as a narrative of immortality but precariously anchored to the transience and futility of individuation. Immortality will be for the lyrical citizen an ideal requirement of the trans-personality of his emotion, of a form of self-consciousness for which he identifies himself with wider life cycles, with the trans-personal symbolic construction of the individual soul. This self-narrative tension between the universal and the transitory, the group and the individual, the immortality and the individual death, will traverse lyric poetry from its origins to our days as its reason for being. Such tension constructs the specific social persona that today we call the human individual. The lyrical person understands the tie of civic structure, his link to some economic social persona within the Mythico-Ritual web, and will search for a sphere in which his personal emotive individuation may be able to prosper, a domain that could be no other than an idealized image of nature as that which is opposed to the city, the place of stratification and of the economic personae that negates the intimate and lyrical voice. From Virgil to the Green utopias of today, passing through the final dreams of Alonso Quijano or the healthy mindedness of Whitman’s outdoors, the lyrical citizen wishes to wander, like Wang Wei, in the blue lights of ideal and eternal mountains, away from a foreign and imposed stratification alien to its inner emotional realm.

The creation of the lyrical citizen gave the conditions of possibility for the invention of the Greek political citizen which culminated in the Hellenistic idea of cosmopolitanism. The individual was thus created in paradoxical terms as a consequence of the universalism of a law of human immortality, which in economic terms was expressed in the notion of a ius naturale, which was always more the pragmatical setting of a political scenario for the ruling of vast empires than a fact which established equivalence among Mythico-Ritual axes and equality in the control of the means of production. In this sense, it was always a narrative of domination, which reached its climax in the Christian metaphysical narratives of a Celestial Jerusalem, an imaginary transnational and transcendental community whose doors were jealously guarded by the political elite of the Terrestrial Jerusalem.

The narrative of the human being of the revolutions of the 18^th Century A.Z. will emerge[5] out of the fusion of the cosmopolitan and transcendental elements of Antiquity with the humanist elements of the Enlightenment. In the 19^th Century, the scientific humanism of evolutionism will be added to these previous elements to later culminate the process in the narrative found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.[6] The cosmopolitan Greek narratives -as those recovered by the philosophy of the Enlightenment- and the scientific materialism, introduced a critical element that will reproduce the old paradoxical tensions between economic and metaphysical actions present at the heart of the lyrical citizen narratives. The tension between the legal and the lyrical citizen is today a tension that occurs between the narrative of the human being, inheritor of transcendental myths, and the economical legal citizen, or professional citizen, a pawn in the structures of stratification. The contemporary picture is completed when we add the narratives developed after the second industrial revolution, with the developments of the meta-theoretical personality favored by the philosophy of the late 19^th Century, and then by psychoanalysis and the avant-garde movements, which produced two new epistemological narratives of identity: the ludic-aesthetic ones and those of the meta-theoretical identity of gender.

The tension of identity of the social persona is, therefore, the result of a progressive unfoldment of paradoxes, linguistic and metaphysical, and of metaphysical tensions of political narrative. The linguistic metaphysical tension between the individual body and the collective narrative expresses the basic form of the paradox of communication, due to the individual centralization of something common. From this paradox was derived the linguistic trans-personality and the basic representations of the immortality of the communal persona, the totem, and later those of the specific ritual figures (like the shaman and later the king and the elites). The narratives of immortality transform the paradox of communication into the paradox of the immortality of the individual soul. This last paradox, expressed in the metaphysical terms of the universal law is the already mentioned paradox of Aeschylus, whereas in the economic terms of this very same universal law it is the paradox of the lyrical citizen: the proclamation of a transcendental identity non-economical, non-civic when it was this civic economical persona the one who generated the conditions of possibility for the lyrical citizen. The narratives of transcendentalism took the shape of the narratives of the Homo sapiens in the plane of the human law, from which the paradox of the universality of the human was derived.

The confusion of a deep physical and psychological individuation such as that assumed by the lyrical citizen with spiritual individuation has occurred by confusing myth and mythologeme, by confusing the specific form of a myth (the mask), with the expressed Life-Intelligence form in that myth. Not all art has worked with the transformation of individuation at a transcendental level. To put it in terms of one of the Mahavakyas of the Upanishads, not all art has developed along the line of unifying the Atman with Brahman. The traditional art of the masses, which is collected in and constitutes the great Mythico-Ritual axes, is an art that reaches up to the person of the lyrical citizen, never beyond, it is the person-reference that bridges the gap between the social and the cosmos, but it is never an art that opens up the radical liminality of the spiritual realm.

References

Aeschylus. Aeschylus tragedies. (London and Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard-Heinemann. 1983)

Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Trans. Joseph Ward Swain, (London: Geoge Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964).

Edwards, I.E.S., Gadd, C.J., Hammond, N.G.L. eds. The Cambridge Ancient History. Volume I. Part 2. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Habermas, Jürgen, Teoría de la acción comunicativa. Trad. Manuel Jiménez Redondo. (Madrid: Editorial Trotta. 2010)

Karlgreen, Bernhard. Translator and Editor. The Book of Odes. (Stockholm. The Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. 1950)

Lawall, Sarah, and Mack Maynard, Editors. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Volume B. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. 2002)

Meade, George, Mind, Self and Society. Edited by Charles Morris. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press.1934)

Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1998)

Parsons, Talcott. Social Structure and Personality. (New York: Collier Macmillan Company. 1964)

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[1] See Frazer, for example among the Tonga, who maintain aristocratic ideas of immortality, for only the chiefs are immortal (and later gods), whereas the tooas, the common persona, has a perishable soul. Ibid. p.p. 79-84.

[2] Texts directly related to the divine figures or linked to them, such as Love in the Gipar, The Ecstasy of Love, The Bliss of the Wedding Night. See these text in The Ancient Near East. Vol. II. Ed. Cit. p.p. 195-199.

[3] Between the Han and the Tang great Dynasties.

[4] Expressed through some verses of Tao Chien (365-427 A.Z.): No use discussing immortality /When just to keep alive is hard enough. /Of course I want to roam in paradise, /But it’s a long way there and the road is lost. (Substance, Shadow, Spirit. In Lawall, Sarah, and Mack Maynard, Editors. The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Volume B. W.W. Norton & Company. New York and London. 2002. p.p. 1363-1364.)

[5]The Declaration if the Human and Citizen Rights that the French Revolution published in 1789.

[6] Adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10^th 1948.