Mythopoetics

  Mi abuelo paterno, ciclista amater por la montañas de Ávila, soldado en la Guerra de Marruecos, después mecánico de locomotoras de Renfe y siempre un hombre bueno en el mejor sentido de la palabra, trabajó 12 horas al día toda su vida, librando un domingo de cada dos, hasta que la gangrena le deboró una pierna y tres dedos del pie de la otra. Su salario apenas sirvió para dar de comer a su familia lo que hizo que mi abuela tuviera que regentar una tienda de ultramarinos en la Calle de la Toledana, tienda adjunta a la casa en la que pasé mágicas temporadas de mis vacaciones infantiles, días fabulosos que me reviven con su recuerdo, las horas en las que disfruté de su compañia con la veneración del niño que se siente en presencia de un héroe legendario y amoroso. Estas líneas son en su memoria. Cada generación se yergue sobre los hombres y mujeres de las generaciones previas, sobre hombros de gigantes sin duda alguna, aquellos benignos titanes que nos han permitido tomar aire, mirar al

 Human existence is complex, turbulent, sloppy, and tragic, and it only supports systematic thought with violence - almost always with poor results. When we do not proceed systematically, it is even worse. I understand philosophical thought as the result of a passionate process of mythologization, theoretical creation, and critical interpretation of the experience of life. From my humanity, from the consciousness of this idea that our species has forged in its evolution, and bringing together diverse perspectives in the changing unity of my person, I look at the past and my own time as the heir to a vast estate whose beauty runs hand in hand with its monsters. Amid so much deed and action, heroic songs, and long laments, I recognize my humanity in the life of anyone else, fearing tomorrow and the present, building new forms for life, ideals, and symbolic forms that conjure up the inevitable uncertainties. In many moments, I have wanted to be a foreigner on this planet, I have looked at

 The link between monetary debt and sin is found in the Rigveda, or in the Bible, but in one way or another, we find the idea expressed in all mythological traditions: the life created by divinity implies a debt to supernatural powers, or, in terms of mythopoetics, a permanent debt to the group, to which the lives of its individuals literally belong. Sin is going against the will of the group, and not recognizing subordination to authority. The debt is paid with one's life, either a miserable existence as a slave or by losing it all at once in a ritual public execution. Monetary myths are fundamental to the exchanges that constitute the city, and the city, as it extends beyond its borders, has to universalize the concept of debt to include new client- citizens, either as slaves or as relatively free men. Behind the idea of debt, we find the centrality of the social emotion of solidarity, but its complex elaborations entail the mixture of the different “wills to power” of the subgro

Un proceso de valoración de un escenario vital, ya sea hecho de manera inconsciente por un protocolo emocional, o conscientemente, mediante una elaboración discursiva lingüística, adquiere unidad en el proceso de su realización. En los casos en los que la valoración es automática, la semántica de un proceso queda reducida a un enlace sintáctico, como cuando, por ejemplo, el organismo valora una situación de peligro con la emoción del miedo y la respuesta es la huida. En este sentido, podemos entender la sintaxis de un proceso de categorización como una asignación de valor meramente secuencial: el mapeo de un signo con una posición dentro de una secuencia. La semántica, por el contrario, es multidimensional, vincula posiciones secuenciales múltiples y las mapea entre sí, pero de forma sintética, como unidad de conjunto emergente, para después operar con valor secuencial y mecanizarse. De esta manera el organismo se protocoliza en estados de complejidad creciente. En los e

An ethical code is like the tip of an iceberg which represents the conscious acknowledgment of the valuations made by a human group. The underwater part has its roots in those emotional valuations that were successful in the process of survival during a specific period of the life of the group. These hidden valuations are basically encoded at a deeper level in the social actions, and thus, in the group’s communications, i.e. in its mythico-ritual axis. A common characteristic to all ethical codes is their pretension of universal validity, for they express the way things are. Contemporary Western codes base their valuations in a mythico-ritual axis which is a mixture of myths of universal law and myths of the human law, but could we formulate ethical principles which follow exclusively principles of human law, putting aside gods and the supernatural, or even materialist reifications (and transcendentalizations ) of the own human being? This is a small collection of ethical axioms

  Dizziness in front of an empty canvas. Death is an empty canvas that we could never fill, fathomless non-existence free of will and mistake. Biology displays a representation of life as a sequence of chance, trial and error, but what kind of knowledge do we gain from it? What is the meaning of chance, or of error? Maybe they are just ways of understanding the all too simple straight ways of our will, life’s will, that produce a thin shadow of fleeting security, a brick house resembling shelter in the middle of the ongoing storm… We are precariously sheltered.   How to begin a painting? Robert Motherwell said that he began with a series of mistakes that were later corrected by feeling. Old metaphysics to face the unheimlich. I recall Robert Mussil: it does not matter what you do, but what you do next. And then, when to stop? Are we to stop simply by dopamine exhaustion, or by any random feeling of fulfillment, when we arbitrarily think that nothing is left to tell and the instan

  According to Shinichi Hisamatsu, philosopher and tea ceremony master, there are seven principles that govern Zen art: asymmetry, simplicity, austere sublimity, naturalness, profound subtlety, freedom from attachment and tranquility. A piece of Zen art should have all of them, producing the characteristic serene aesthetical impression that we associate with it. Hisamatsu gives a few examples of particular works of art which have them all: a Raku ware teabowl named Masu, Muchi’s Chinese painting of persimmons, the stone garden of Ryojan-ji… Compared to the strident grandiloquence of contemporary art the perspective of such an experience is both soothing and appealing, though the proposed way is not free from contradictions.   Zen aesthetics cannot be separated from its ethics, whose goal is satori through self-awareness, and these seven principles are tools for such awareness through aesthetical action. The action has to be asymmetrical, for in asymmetry there is incompleteness a

   La tradición narrativa de la India contiene verdaderas joyas de literatura fantástica que dan pie a las más divertidas especulaciones éticas y metafísicas. En la colección de historias del Katha-Sarit-Sagara ( El Océano que contiene Corrientes de Historias ), del siglo XI, en el que se recogen historias tradicionales de la India, el locuaz fantasma de un cadáver bajado de una horca, le cuenta al rey que le descolgó del macabro columpio un cuento tragicómico muy interesante. Dos amigos emprendieron un peregrinaje a un balneario sagrado de la diosa Kali, y allí vieron una hermosa muchacha. Uno de ellos enfermó de pasión amorosa, dejó de comer y dormir, y estaba seguro de que moriría salvo que pudiese obtener a la muchacha como esposa. Su amigo se puso en contacto con su padre y le explicó la situación, por lo que este, a toda prisa, se dirigió a los padres del chico enemorado con el fin de organizar la boda. Poco después de la precipitada boda la joven pareja y el a

In moments when Europe has its fundamental values tested by the recalcitrant narrowness, cruelty and ignorance of religion, I recall Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as recorded by Thucydides, amazed by its relevance: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality..." (Perseus Project translation of Peloponnesian War ). The barbarians, those that do not believe in the myths of the human law and impose their nightmares to others, are now forcing us to close our borders, and what is worst, to close our minds, and change our beliefs for a dream of security that could never be fully guaranteed. Thus we are caught in a web of terror and lose our identity to a poor and sad trivialization of our democratic political foundations. In liminal times, basic emotions take control over the neocortical enaryzed symbolic constructions that we

There is an interpretation of the myth of Antigone based on the concept of civil disobedience, i.e. in terms of the tension between myths of the human law and myths of the universal law. Has the universal law or law of the gods (the God) prevalence over human law (civil law)? The question is so confusing that it barely makes sense. Curiously enough the universal law is so embedded in our most basic valuations that we mistake it to express the essential human nature, and feel human law as a mere human all too human appendix of the profane ways of the meaningless modern world. From this point of view, just like Thoreau did by refusing to pay taxes to a Government which condoned slavery, Antigone refused to comply with a law which condemned the corpse of her brother to be the plaything of the crows and a banquet for the dogs. The primitive or metaphysical determination which orders the burial of corpses clashes against the functional or economic determination that denies any entity

The prevention and treatment of illnesses is conditioned not only by our biological knowledge but also by the effective integration that we have of other sciences and our control of the physical environment. Medicine is obviously linked to the rest of human knowledge but, being the science of human life, is also determined by the particular social forms in which our life develops, by the economical conditionings in which health and sickness find an additional restriction. In this sense, medicine is a social science and a social action, not a mere biological knowledge of the physiological functions of the human body. The social action of medicine, the self-care and self-preservation performed by human societies, is not the result of the efforts and ideas of a single generation but a vast cultural endeavor. For that reason, it cannot come as a surprise that beyond the evident success of our survival as species, the accomplishments and failures of the medical practice have not been mea

Let us examine the problem from the point of view of rational ethics based on anthropological grounds. By  rational , I mean a discourse whose statements are not contradictory among themselves, and by  anthropological grounds,  I mean a non-transcendental valuation of life, a human axiology. Particularly, I will use two anthropological ethic principles: P.1  Principle of life preservation : We have to preserve human life. P.2  Principle of primacy of the public interest : the life of the group has preference over the life of the individual. Human individual life is conditioned by the life of the group and subsumed to its needs. Not only my actions are rightful when they do not imply any sort of harm to others, but they cannot be autonomous when there is an urgent need of the society: we work and die for the group whenever is needed. And since the needs of society are always urgent, life preservation is limited by public interest, as has always been the case with wars.

In the Samoan myths of the afterlife, the soul of the poor is food for the soul of the noble and rich [Frazer, 1922]. Are we living in the Samoan afterlife? Well, for some of our unfortunate contemporaries the situation is not so different. Simon Rippon has discussed the issue in an interesting paper on the Journal of Medical Ethics, where he analyzes the thesis of the moral and economic benefits for the poor which provides the free market of live donor organs. He expresses the thesis of the Laissez-Choisir  (LC) argument in three premises. P1. People in poverty who would choose to sell their organs if a free market existed must regard all other options open to them as worse. P2. If we take away what some regard as their best option, we thereby make them worse off, at least from their own perspective. P3. If a policy makes some worse off from their own perspective, it would be paternalistic for us to judge otherwise and to implement the policy on their behalf. We ought