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, mira...

 I proposed this question to my students. Let's take a trip to a parallel Universe. Suppose for a moment that since the fifth century before the Christian Era (about 2,500 years ago), human beings had achieved gender equality.  What science and what technology would we have today?   A possible answer. Gender equality implies class equality. Otherwise, a slave woman would not have gender equality in relation to a free man, nor would a slave man have gender equality in relation to a free woman. Since there is only one class in the world, there would be neither rich nor poor people. As there are neither rich nor poor, capital gains would not be generated based on slave labor or underpaid labor. The trade would be fair, with minimal margins of capital gains, the equivalent to whatever the average wage would be. Furthermore, human communities would not have capital gains to generate industries beyond non-slave handicrafts. By having equality worldwide, there would be no wars, ...

  The Anima is a general social person that encompasses all others: it includes humans and animals, of both genders and all ages, living and dead. As a general concept, it is not the result of an economic determination, but rather a process of primitive interpretation, a self-reflective explanation of life itself as a phenomenon that includes the phenomenon of death, a concept produced by the repeated observation of cycles and actions, and the permanence of intangible linguistic elements in the group's experience. The Anima is a simple hypothesis that explains at once the persistence of the memory of the dead, the world of dreams, and an intangible element, or better, fuzzy assessment of nature, by which we understand it and we feel ourselves to be part of it. Once the Anima is accepted in that triple dimension, the distinction between natural and supernatural beings is a superfluous classification, since the soul person establishes the bridge and the continuity between the scenari...

  Social persons or social masks are narratives of primitive determination elaborated by a human group in relation to the function and valuation of its individuals in social life. As we know, primitive determinations are developed after economic determinations, so we will find different persons according to the degree of complexification of a particular society. The simplest forms of social masks are those that appear in the narratives of Anima Mundi societies (cold societies), such as those of the Blackfoot myth, whose three characters, the old man, the woman and the child, delimit the population by gender and age. The double opposition between men-women and young-old (the latter opposition that can be given by the categorization into three ages, child, young-old) operates both in human communities and (in its male-female variant) between the great apes and group mammals. The distinction is completely relevant from an emotional point of view. In archaic human groups, the oppositio...

  The history of ontology, known under the unfortunate name of  "metaphysics", has become an annoying witness to the evolution of philosophical thought, since it is a written document not only of the simplicities of our past, but also of its profound imbecility, ignorance, arrogance, violence and contradictory intentions. These blunders are not part of any cosmic evil, but the sum of the actions of the group's life, which in its conflicts and harmonies adjusts to the emotional conditioning of our species, as well as to the restrictions imposed by a simple struggle for survival that goes far beyond the survival needs that an intellectual capacity like ours would require. Traditionally considered the heart of philosophy, ontology has been the field of dispute and disagreement among philosophers for two and a half millennia. Its decline from the dawn of modern science, paralleling the decline of Christianity in the West, and its final rejection in the nineteenth...

  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...

 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...

What is the meaning of being Catalan, or Spanish, or English for that matter? It is evident that the correspondent narratives of political identity express both a particular historical inertia and the very basic need for a group identity in order to function in an economic milieu. Those basic needs have deep roots in human emotional nature and imply old narratives fully equipped with hard metaphysics. And so we heard, in a not too distant past, of a unity of destiny in the universal in relation to Spain, or of a manifest destiny in relation to the British Empire. A nationality expresses, unavoidably, a set of metaphysical beliefs, for the very concept grew up in the middle of a particular European milieu, linked to particular Institutions. To declare oneself Spanish or Catalan, would be merely the expression of a belief in certain Institutions, a rather accidental question related to the place where one happens to be born or live. However, in modern Europe, and even more so in c...

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 ...

Most traditional mythologies have equated life to breath. Breath was considered to be something more than respiration, linked -in a tradition that goes back to myths of Anima Mundi- to some sort of universal life. In this context, death was the departure of such transcendental airy entity towards fabulous scenarios of different kinds. The link of breathing and the capacity for speech contributed for a further metaphysical development of the physiological act of oxygenation. The Parmenidean tradition in Greece, but especially the Aristotelian philosophy, linked life more to intelligence than to any other physiological action. In fact, in the Metaphysics, Aristotle declares life to be some sort of intelligence. This double link, to breathe and to intelligence, in their transcendental or materialistic interpretations, gave for centuries a cornerstone for the definitions of life. Even, in the practice of modern medicine up to the 1960’s, it was the loss of the capacity to breathe (toget...

The countercultural movements that have flourished all around the world since 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 what 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. The present formulation of the paradox within the narrative of the human being , an abstract social persona which 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 t...

El dinero  es energía  potencial metafísica , y como tal, es un generador de acciones económicas . En este sentido, es una narración que interpreta los intercambios de energía potencial metafísica en energía económica . Funciona como aglutinante de las acciones económicas  diversas de la ciudad, algo que consigue gracias a su contenido simbólico  puente, gracias al vínculo que establece entre las determinaciones primitivas  y las determinaciones económicas  de la ciudad. A través del mito del dinero, cuantificamos y cualificamos la homeostasis  social valorando el conjunto de nuestras experiencias, reduciendo a la semántica  emocional común las diferentes acciones económicas  y los objetos determinados por ellas, relacionando acciones y objetos a partir de su valor en el conjunto energético del organismo, de manera análoga a cómo operan los protocolos  emocionales . ¿Por qué deshacernos de un mito tan ingenioso que ha permitido una...

First Act of Intuitionism . Completely separating mathematics from mathematical language and hence from the phenomena of language described by theoretical logic, recognizing that intuitionistic mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind having its origin in the perception of a move of time. This perception of a move of time may be described as the falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, but is retained in memory. If the twoity thus born is divested of all quality, it passes into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities. And it is this common substratum, this empty form, which is the basic intuition of mathematics . [Brouwer. 2011, 44] If we understand Brouwer’s first act of intuitionism devoid of its mystical overtones, propositions such as a basic mind’s intuition of the passage of time , or the passing of twoities into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities, his distinctio...

As noticed by Locke and later on by Keynes, one of the values of money, the value of use, given by the rate of interest, has the same nature as land, for land -once is rented- generates an income. Such an isomorphism gave the first modern metaphysical translation of land into money and vice versa. The high liquidity premiums attached in the past to the ownership of land and in modern times to money, show perfectly that the relation is invariantly isomorphic. During liminal times, i.e., economic crisis, the liquidity premium detaches itself from money and goes back to land (or gold). The isomorphism is an old inheritance from the myths of the King-God , the synthetical unity of his four personae, in this case of the Ensi (Landlord) and the Ugula (Merchant). However, Locke’s equivalence, by leaving outside the metaphysical component of economical valuation gave the ius naturale support to colonization which the manifest destiny politics lacked. The isomorphism land-money in relat...

The genesis of monarchies in Ancient Mesopotamia offers a clarifying picture of the different economical and ideological narrative forces which form the social persona of the King-God. The King-God is the synthesis of the Sangu, or spiritual leader, the Lugal, or military leader, the Ensi, or landlord, and the Ugula or great merchant. The Sangu is the evolution of the personae of the Shaman and the priest. It is the mediator with the ancestors and the unknown forces of life. It is the royal persona with higher prestige and the unquestionable figure which controls the basic narratives of life and death, the giver of the referential valuation for social action, a valuation which has its roots in successful economic actions of the past. The persona of the Lugal emerges out of the needs of war. It is an active extension of the Sangu, and only the Sangu can justify and support ideologically his performance. Lugal and Sangu represent also two different ways of ascension to power. Th...