Mythopoetics

  Vital actions are fixed in social memory as narrative actions, but this fixation goes beyond our species. Our social memory is the result of evolution, and therefore it is prior to the memory of any particular culture that we can think of, ours or our historical past. When we became aware that we have myths and rituals, we had been in that dynamic for a long time and lived with them, determining our vital actions based on strict emotional ritual protocols, which were passed from generation to generation if they proved their effectiveness to group survival. Our actions were given a meaning, in a continuous cycle of reinterpretation and readjustment of the life processes open to the present, before being human. The emotional structure establishes the interpretive semantics, without which the syntactic actions of life are nothing. Emotions link physiological actions, which follow the syntax of chemical reactions relevant to the organism, in complex units of interaction c...

Our world image is a cognitive-emotional construction based on the evaluations of that which threatens our existence. Modern science is the final result of a process of continuous rationality in which coexist inseparably integrated emotional and logical elements. The very same process of investigation is the development of the emotion of seeking, the resolutory anticipation of existential problems. The myths of humanity gather this cognitive-emotional image of the world, setting it in language and applying to it a social intersubjective content which erroneously and inevitably is adopted as a goal. Neither the thing in itself has an epistemological sense, as it was understood since the Kantian critique (it would never be cognoscible if it did not maintain a minimum relation with the subject), nor is emotionally relevant, unless it may be used as an exomorphic narrative referent, as a social axiom. The world only exists in relation to the social subject’s survival. Mythologies, whethe...

Presently we count with two main groups of contrary hypotheses about the origin of human language in relation to animal communicative forms: the one represented by Chomsky and the linguists of generative grammar, which sustains the discontinuity of the origin of human language in relation to animal proto-languages, and the hypothesis of the continuists, sustained by Bickerton, Pinker and others, who from diverse anthropological, linguistic and neuroscientific points of view, although all of them with a common evolutionary motivation, proposes the gradual development of human language. The theory of emotions as the basic semantics of human language that I have presented here is, clearly, continuist, both in relation to the origin of language as well as with respect to the general cognitive processes of the living beings. From this vantage point, human language is the most evolved result of an animal progressive process of communication which culminates in human symbolization but whic...