Mythopoetics

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of. One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology...

     The concept of the Unconscious certainly predates Freud. It has been traced back to Paracelsus, but we can find other precursor concepts in the upokeimenon (what lies behind) and in the different formulations of the substance-accident semantic operator used by several philosophers. Advaita Vedanta talks about the formation of waves in the sea, waves that appear and return to the sea without ever ceasing to be the sea. Our most intimate intuitions tell us of a more fundamental reality than those reported by the appearances of consciousness. When I speak here about the unconscious, I do it starting from the theoretical context developed by Carl Jung and Eric Neumann. It is a non-reductionist psychological orientation. Neither is matter reduced to a simple mental or spiritual projection, nor is spirit an emergent property of matter that can be explained in terms of mathematical physics theories. As such, it is in tune with various forms of ontological non...

 According to the proposed thesis of continuous rationality, or if you prefer the Life-Intelligence continuum, psychology cannot be a science in the contemporary sense of that word. Basic emotions provide the semantic basis for our U-L-Ü system of knowledge. Formal logic belongs to the Überlebenswelt, while psychology is rooted in the three subsystems, it belongs to the sphere of neurophysiological conditioning (Unterlebenswelt), to that of the world of life (Lebenswelt) and that of a formalized and specialized language on the set of human experience. All science stands on U-L and constitutes Ü. All science is only science (and not only in the contemporary sense for this word) insofar as it uses logic and is limited by it, by the principle of non-contradiction. The principle of contradiction is the result of a "mineral" type of thinking - if the metaphor may be permitted - with object identities not only perfectly defined in recursive terms, but also fixed and immutable. Sci...

 Is there really a clear line between the so-called dream worlds and the waking world? Isn't wakefulness another form of dream? Isn't waking another form of sleep in the sense that much of our waking life is a life of low consciousness (historical, psychological, epistemological, ethical)? Perhaps we are facing a continuum of experience that only the roughest forms of sensitivity polarize into two well-separated worlds. The aesthetic experience seems to confirm this hypothesis, and it should not surprise us since human beings are symbolic creatures. Only basic emotions are literal insofar as they point to some survival action. The rest is symbol. If we consider reality as a complex symbol, the traditional border of sleep-wake psychology vanishes. And what scene do we have before us then? What is experience? Our experience is a shared myth built from successful survival actions. But beneath these actions is the mystery of life itself, towering over something equally mysterious t...

Open door, threshold, the limen is what is in between, neither one thing nor the other, the place of change and of encounter with the Noumen, with the radical other. On the threshold opens up the chasm, the depth, and the individual sinks into a cosmos without limits or measures. There, space and time relationships are suspended, we are in the territory of dark and uncertain borders, we are on the edge, any form is imaginal and virtual flow. The liminal artist experiences himself at the limit of himself discovers areas that he did not know as his own, and checks how his/her individuality extends in Nature and the Cosmos. He or she opens the incurable wound within his/her community, to expose its members to the convulsion of its main values, a general convulsion of foundations that allows the subsequent growth and evolution. Limits are expanded, new experiences are included and the other, the different, the Noumen found on the threshold is assimilated. Liminality is not the only state o...

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 developm...

  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 ama 1 .(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 sexual 2 . (2) En las obras de Blondel, Gautier d’Epinal, Gillebert de Berneville ...

  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.  Morphis...