Mythopoetics

 If the Kantian criterion that distinguishes synthetic from analytic propositions, whether they are axioms or postulates, is the non-inclusion of the synthetic ones versus the inclusion in the subject of the analytic propositions, an analytic proposition could not be reduced or transformed to a synthetic one, nor vice versa, since something is or is not included in something else. Well, the very concept of inclusion is not exactly clear, modern set theory has opted for an extensional definition, that is, giving a list of the things that are included in another given. Inclusion thus conceived is less problematic, although it is not without paradoxes. Let's skip this for a moment and focus on the Kantian distinction.    Kant gives us his well-known example of a priori synthetic proposition, capable of giving us knowledge independently of experience: 7+5=12 But we can transform this equality into this other: 7=12-5 And then into: 7=7 That is an analytical proposition. And co...

  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...

 The I-Thou recognition is the action of life-intelligence that we call "nature". It is first objectified as a "we", this pronoun being the transcendental subject of any speech. The economic action that leads to the social person is built on the pole of "us". When we think we speak, the present group and the ancestors speak through our mouth. This "we" is a projection of the I-Thou, and I-Thou is the autopoiesis of the I am. Nature is then an action of reproduction in self-recognition, a self-recognition that feeds off and sustains the epistemological relationship between the "us" and the Apeiron through which we represent the objectification of life-intelligence. The phantasmagoria of nature is produced by the fictional character of the transcendental subject "we", whose wishes-questions made by "we" are relative to a specific Spatio-temporal configuration of life-intelligence, that is, they are relative to a partic...

  When I look at another human being, I make an object of him/her, and I only know him/her as the object that I make, a representation on which I project my psychological self. However, there is a form of cognition that occurs outside the purely mental, psychological, and transcendental dimensions: there is an identity-based recognition of the Atman, of "I am." Regardless of the social person that I can share with that person (the fact of being parents, or citizens, or any other social character), there is a connection in the here and now that leads me to understand that there is a continuity of my Atman in his/her Atman. I understand that just as I am not one of the social persons that I act, that other individual is not one of the social objectifications that act, but that "I am" applies to both my psychophysiological identity and his/her. "I am" is then also "Thou are", and I understand that I-Thou is a single pronoun and that it i...

  Desire without an object, as a form of basic attention, of initial movement, has at the mental level the form of the question. It is the origin of the process of knowing, but its roots are in the process of being, they are prior to a nervous system, it is a more basic autopoetic will, present at the cellular level, and even simpler, such a spontaneous and direct impulse, so unique, which does not presuppose or admit a contrary movement. When it develops on a mental level, the desire-question surprises us with that non-duality: a question is neither true nor false. Although the contents of the question belong to duality, due to the semanticity of its terms, the synthesis they form expresses something unquestionable, a creative drive that opens what is already thought to what is not thought. What is "already thought", the past, can only lead to a projection of itself: this projection meets the non-dual environment of the question, and desire, as doubt, as dissati...

  We look for a permanent term, something to hold on to, that serves as a reference when the whirlwind of becoming is no longer valid as a reliable explanation and everyday experience says nothing about our identity. There is nothing anywhere that tells us that such a foundation makes sense, just a basic intuition about something genuine in our existence that seems to suggest the concept of something fundamental and permanent. Different mythical traditions offered a wide variety of possible terms that exhausted the senses of the concept of divinity. The last of these, that of contemporary science, loses itself in the inherent limitations of the paradoxical logic that it uses, and in exchange for the toys of technology, it keeps the promises of a scientific foundation for existence that is merely a metaphysical phantasmagoria. We then return to the subject that we think we are, disenchanted with the objects that satisfied our childish curiosity, and by doing this we rea...