Preface

 Preface to the Book of Mythopoetics and to this Blog

 

I understand philosophical action as a dual process of axiomatic criticism and theoretical construction. When this action is applied to the symbolic constructions of our identity, I call it mythopoetics. For obvious reasons this book cannot but aspire to be a big-scale sketch of an epistemological map of human identity narratives, a schema which I have divided into three parts. In the first two, I define the conceptual structure which will be used in the third to develop a theory of mythical action. The first is a general introduction to the problems of mythology such as they have been dealt with from the point of view of philosophy of religion, linguistics, history, aesthetics and epistemology, merging them all into a more general concept of philosophical anthropology. The second part focuses on the definition of emotions and on the understanding of their centrality in relation to rationality and the structure of myths. From the process of the semantic emotional development of language, I construct a theory of continuous rationality in which animal rituals are understood as protomyths, and human rituals and myths as an n-ary symbolic development of some survival protocols. Both parts are, therefore, a discussion about the necessary conceptual elements needed to understand mythico-ritual structures, defined and dealt with in the third part, where I define the properties of interpretative mimetic actions, or mythical actions, and examine the different configurations they have taken along our symbolic development. The book concludes with an analysis of the general conditionings for the development of future mythical structures.

My ontoepistemological starting point is evolutionist, emergentist and constructivist, a stance which is better expressed by the continuous rationality or emotional continuum theory, of Aristotelian inspiration, which assumes that vital processes display –in different stages of complexity- the property of intelligence.

The book and the Blog, although they try to give a human image from the point of view of immanence, contain elements of transcendental idealism, not only in the line of Immanuel Kant but also in those of Advaita Vedanta of the Hindu Tradition, whose parallels in the tradition Western could be found in Plato and Orphism. The theses of mythical transpersonality correspond to the theses of transpersonality of the psyche and are developed in my book "Path of Beauty."