Mythopoetics

   Kant talks about transcendental ideas as cognitions that are taken beyond any possible experience, i.e. beyond the boundaries of empirical knowledge, though still in connection with it. Those ideas are basic epistemological objects of the philosophical traditions of the world (not only Western) which express fundamental ways of the development of the human thinking. Kant noticed that precisely by their distance from experience they become problematic and shaky in their epistemological content. He proved that, in fact, when trying to prove them logically, they produce antinomies. I understand those transcendental objects as conceptual constructions of the Überlebenswelt (the reflexive and formalized knowledge) which use as building blocks intuitions from the Lebenswelt (the knowledge of everyday life) containing at least one undefined concept (exomorphism). An example would be the concept of “implication”, a rather simple and basic intuition which in our everyday life mea...

  Silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by Cage in his wonderful  4’33’’ . Thus, it should make more sense to talk about  silences , in plural, avoiding the common reification of a concept that usually expresses an indefinite absence and metaphysically grows to express a final and pervasive state of the cosmos.  In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. Furthermore, as we read in Berlioz ( Treatise upon Orchestration ), silence can be obtained through orchestration:  With the view of expressinig a lugubrious silence, I have in a cantata divided the double-basses into four parts ; causing them thus to sustain long pianissimo chords, beneath a decrescendo ...

1. We consider that A is the conceptual ground or foundation of B when the cognition of B is impossible without the cognition of A, and A is immediately certain for our intuition. We say that A gives a semantical self-image, for it does not need further explanation, but B cannot produce a semantical self-image. 2. Music Theory has developed since Antiquity with the aid of mathematics, reaching today a fully mathematical status. 3. Mathematics is a formalized symbolic language. 4. Tarski’s theorem states that a formalized language cannot produce a semantical self-image. Therefore, music theory could not be the ground of musical action or of anything else. In fact, music theory -as well as musical action- are based on the social life of the human group, which in turn are based on the homeostatic protocols for survival: emotions. 

A persistent discussion that I used to have with Morton Feldman when I studied composition with him at Buffalo was about the relationship between the music sonic material of a piece and the musical idea for the organization of the work. Feldman always thought that it is the material what determines and conditions a composition, what makes it work for a specific time-span and not for other. His orientation was mainly orchestrational and harmonic, so the material choices would have to do with the right chord orchestration, the appropriate and careful choice of progressions, registers and timbres. My answer was that such choices of orchestration had a double foundation, empirical and conceptual, and that if we separate them we only obtain an incomplete picture of the composition. In fact, I insisted, it is the conceptual part in the choice of the material what gives a link between the microharmony of the chordal progressions and the general structure of the piece (as much in tonal as in ...

Neither our individual destinies, nor our future as species are written in the stars. For the same reasons, there is not a music of the spheres beyond the orbit of the Platonic composer and mathematician. Transcendental idealism is the remnant of the ancient fears and superstitions, not only entertained by the old narratives but also by the not-so-obvious mythologies of the universal law inherited by philosophy and later by modern science. Not all modern science believes in the existence of a  universal law , but its Queen, theoretical physics, worships such hypostasized order of the universe, giving the norm for how we should think about the cosmos, and defining reality disregarding the serious epistemological problems of completeness faced by formal systems after Gödel, expensively selling their tale about the universe in tune with the most careless medieval metaphysics. This scientific mess, poorly balanced by the advances of life sciences, helps very little to the development ...

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...