Mythopoetics

George Cantor is credited with the conceptual construction called transfinite numbers , an endomorphization of the concept of infinite within the system of the real numbers ( ℝ ). The tool for the construction was the creation of a synthetic representation of the infinite as a whole, familiar to the Platonist Weltanschauung, whose condition of possibility was the natural number, i.e., individuation: infinite is then the result of an endless aggregation. Of course such a representation is not the actual representation of an intuition but the representation of a continuing iterative process, which by its closed condition (the finite character of the algorithm of counting), seems to have a meaning. Once the infinite is an endomorphic concept of the system, any composition with it will be endomorphic, including the notion of transfinite number. Infinite aggregates can be constructed either by endless iterative processes or by the postulation of properties to which infinite extensions ...

In relation to the semantic operator matter/idea, my concern is with the old ontological assumptions that are inherited and assumed unnoticed in its use, its implicit reifications. Physics does not speak anymore about matter. Fermions, the particles which are thought to be matter-like (in opposition to the force carrier bosons) make only sense within the whole system, which implies that matter is not material in the traditional sense, but some sort of symbolic construction that we use to understand an apeironic experience. For instance the Weyl-fermions are massless, which means a massless matter, if such an expression has any meaning at all. In this sense is very different to old Greco-Roman atomic constructions. And things do not get any better if we try to switch the matter representation for the concept of energy. According to Maxwell’s definition: energy is the capacity of a system to perform mechanical work (1891), but in order for the definition to have any meaning we already ...

A. 1    1.  A major objection to materialism: matter is a narrative construction of vital experience. Argument : the changing conception of matter through time. Objection : But today we have the accurate description, and therefore, somehow the description represents a morphism (even isomorphism). Answer : we could not know it, and in any case, it would be a description, i.e., a narrative, for any communicative account is narrative. 2     2.  The concept of matter is conditioned by communicative action. B. 1      1.  A major objection to idealism: ideas are compositions of concepts which have as final referents vital experience. Natural numbers and other basic concepts are basic intuitions of experience (sequence, synthesis, analysis and so on). Argument : the sense of numerosity in animals. The intuitive set theory in the epistemologies of anima mundi (totem thinking is a basic form of set theory). Objection...

The thesis of this lecture is that any historical reflection is an interpretative construction of the experience of the passage of time which is ontoepistemologically conditioned by the determinations of human material existence. Such a construction is an endomorphic process of representation of experience, a metaphorical rendering of the world in familiar terms, a mythologization. This process is not unique to traditional myths and history, but also to science and philosophy, in fact, philosophy of history is a mythologizing action. Let me construct an argument for this thesis.

 The idea of a literary canon is a variation of traditional censorship that makes only sense in the general processes of enculturation and development of narratives of domination. It certainly helps the teacher to reduce the number of candidates to be read on a classroom, but does a poor service to creativity endlessly repeating a transcendental pattern of inspired geniuses giving the law (literary or otherwise) to an ignorant humankind. When some years ago Harold Bloom made his famous top-ten hits in the History of Literature, leaving  Hamlet  and  Don Quixote  to play a very disputed final, after a disqualifying process of other literary works, he was consciously marking a censorship general reference, a  nihil obstat  for future works that creates an unreasonable mortgage for future generations. Media industry (publishing houses and general audiovisual ones) benefits from this trivial pursuit endeavors as much as the lover of literature is impaired...

  My relation to Japanese aesthetics began with a course in Zen that I took at the University of Buffalo, back in another lifetime, in the land of the Tonawandas. The teacher was a Korean ex-monk sent to the West by his master to spread Buddhism. I actually dropped the course during the first week, for the main book was Nature (yes, he wrote it on the board with a capital N), and I believed him. I invited him over for tea and discussed the Capture of the Ox, an allegory of the spiritual quest wonderfully depicted in ancient drawings on a book by Dasetz Suzuki. In those days, I still believed in the idea of finding oneself, as if I was a pair of lost keys in the sands of time, and therefore, in the idea of stages in an imaginary trip to the nowhere land of bliss and truth, precisely the theme of the Ox Hunt. I asked him in which of the 10 stations of the spiritual journey was thriving and answered -to my delight- that sometimes in 5, others in 10, but then again dropping to 1, ...

With this question I do not imply the distinction between  true poem and false poem , for I don’t believe in it, but rather, what properties must have a text to be identified as a poem? It is a subject that I have entertained for long and I would like to open a debate giving some possible answers. Traditionally, it was meter and rhyme, or, in a broader sense, formal properties of sound the reference frame for our qualification. Archaic poetry was still linked to the constraints of memory of oral tradition, and formal properties gave an easy and understandable protocol. Such a categorization opens up a clear understanding of early poetry, its connexion with shaman incantations and  magic , long before writing, in the world of the myths of  anima mundi . But the question became a bit more entangled when philosophy entered the scene. The philosophical poems of Parmenides, Empedocles, and other presocratics had the formal properties of sound of, say, Homer, or Ibicus, but ...