Oblivion and History
“A slow awakening after so many metempsychoses:
things will never be the same as they once were”
–Verlain
Human thought has been torn apart for millennia, since its earliest beginnings, between dichotomous thoughts: Parmenidean Being and Heraclitean Becoming, Memory and Oblivion, Truth and Falsehood, Good and Evil, Kantian critical dualism of “phenomenon” and “thing-in-itself” (noumenon), Religion and Science, Intuition and Concept (Bergson), Authentic and Inauthentic in Heidegger, Mind and Body in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, antiquity and modernity, transcendence and immanence, old values and new values. .. and so on in a list of irreconcilable antithetical concepts. The dichotomy that governs thought therefore appears dualistic: one thesis excludes the other, one statement opposed to the other.
A careful reader has already noticed that to expose the conceptual premise of this paper in describing such dualisms “conjunction” has been used and not “disjunction” .
In Logic, the two logical connectives that describe such “operations” on statements are represented by convention with the symbols “∨” ( disjunction “or”, from the Latin vel, a less inflexible form of aut) and “∧” ( conjunction “and”, a symbol also graphically opposite to disjunction). It was not written “Good or Evil” but “Good and Evil”: this is the way in Western thought to confront as the first instinctive approach to these dualisms, so they all write and talk about them, with a conjunction and not with a disjunction as it would be “logical”.
An interpretation can be found in the so-called “circular”or “cyclical” thinking. The cyclic conception corresponds to the way in which archaic civilizations used to perceive time. From one season follows another and then another until you return to the first, which will be the same apparently different, forever: the Eternal Return. All “circular ontologies” from the Stoics to Friedrich Nietzsche perceive time and existence as a finite system within an infinite time, in which each combination can repeat itself an infinite number of times. Cyclicality of time, of nature, palingenesis and the wheel turns again.
A vision of existence enclosed in the dualism Circularity – Linearity. Because it seemed to someone that time was not circular but a concatenation of events on a straight line, where a previous event is the cause of the next. Principle of causality, becoming: everything flows, all is change and “You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on river” (Heraclitus).
The Eternal Return is the rejection and defeat of the feeling and of the constructive and planning function of History, of memory, of remembering.
What makes us think about the re-proposition in modernity of the circular ontology is that this was outlined ten years before (in 1872) Nietzsche by the French socialist revolutionary Auguste Blanqui in his work L’eternité par les astres (Eternity through the stars). A work written during the last period of his detention at the Fort du Taureau penitentiary. The existential situation in which the work was developed and the themes discussed in it (obviously tending to affirm the eternal return of the finite to the infinite) on a psychological level outline a clinical picture, let’s say pathological and disturbing: when the human being loses his rational, relational, planning capacity, as the creator of History, both personal and collective, there comes the surrender to the uselessness of action, the scission of the personality, the perception of himself “alienated” (concept in another context developed by Marx but connected to this speech to some degree and with due “distinguo”); the individual splits and looks at himself no longer in reality, which can also contain dreams, but in reality transformed into theoretical and practical hallucination where reality is alchemically transmuted into alienating dream and not perceived as such, a pathological déjà vu. Everything becomes “permanent” denying the infinite change of facts and things, all events return the same, the impulse towards existence and its complex fullness is killed.
Even in literature in that period authors such as Baudelaire have expressed themselves with literary and poetic concepts framed in the eternal return. Baudelaire in particular described with cruel effectiveness the urban reality in which the nineteenth-century subject was immersed, the “mass”, the “crowd”, “la folla”( in Italian language), a term that recalls so much in the Italian language “la follia” ( the meaning of which is the “madness”) intended as loss of reason and inability to capture the truth. A crowd that produces that “false antagonist” of itself, the flaneur, the one who walks through the crowd, in the streets unaware of the passage of time and living only the moment; he is Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” who finds the meaning of his existence in mingling among the people, without a goal, without an end, without himself, completely estranged and alienating.
In that World one does not “become” but one “mixes”, no longer able to communicate, to interrelate: words break down into noise, into chatter, eliminating memory, communication of it, planning of an authentic life.
It is sad to see that this situation has been expanded in the times we live in today: noise, commotion, “overdose” of manipulated and even false information, fake news. not music but “rappers”, not poetry but discomposed screams, not dialectical confrontation but vulgar clash. All that was yesterday is outdated, it is useless: only today, only the instant, only the moment are important, the television apparition, the success of the crowd delivered to those who belong to the crowd, without a past and lacking of interest for the past and for the future and therefore lacking in historical events, roles and meanings.
The Becoming is History and it is memory, it is aletheia, the Truth of the Greeks, which, through the alpha privative literally means “non-forgetfulness”, the privation of the Lethe, that chthonian river that sanctions the erasure of memories to the soul that “obligatorily” drinks from it before metempsychosis. History is Memory, “not-lethe”. “aletheia” and therefore it is Truth founded on Memory and nourished by it.
Lethe is Oblivion, Aletheia is Memory, Truth, History.
But our time holds the Moment, the Instant, the Point on the line of Time.
When humanity crystallizes in the Moment, reality is mistaken for hallucination, past and present merge, memory is cancelled in déjà vu, it is annihilated, there is a separation from the recourse to the real perception of things, it abdicates the attention to reality vanishing in an abyss without purpose and planning.
Oblivion is masked and tricks us: you have no future, the past does not exist, you are crystallized in the moment without hope. Everything has already been, everything is already lived, illusory Future, you are a slave to the present, the instant, the moment. Psychopathology of Existence: this is the World in which we live heir of pathological “philosophies” and what frightens is that someone perhaps intentionally has forged this World in such a way to “manage” it to his liking and laid interest.
The loss of sense of the World and its meanings, the loss of the sense of the Sacred, the crystallization in the Instant, made an infernal parody of the Eternal, all this prevents humanity from appropriating reality with all its contradictions, from placing disjunction and not conjunction in dualisms; all this prevents of serenely accepting the dialectic of antinomic existence, so overcoming the moment and progressing with respectful memory towards a future project that no one has yet written, that has never been written in the book of History, thus re-founding the role of Man as an active protagonist of the dialectic of existence. Paradoxically, Oblivion generates Darkness, Shadow, Night and itself is generated in turn by its own children in an infinite diabolic circularity that dissolves in the Moment suspended over Nothingness.
The Night no longer allows us to know where we are, it cancels our space-time relationships; the Shadow is that of the Marabar caves of Forsterian memory where reason is annihilated in the shameful darkness where everything becomes unresolved guilt and sin in search of a scapegoat; Darkness is the Abyss in which one sinks, in which the proper to humanity attitude of “choice”, the awakening of the conscience to the diversity of the possible are cancelled and annihilated in the silence and in the moaning without an expressive and communicative language.
The Light no longer belongs to the actual World but to the Afterlife, an “above” outside Time, dystopian and utopian at the same time; it belongs only to the some unknown Gods, placed precisely above humanity and their decisions: Man now leaves the Decision, the “Crisis” ( its meaning in the greek term) to the unknown and dark Gods.
From “Crisis” as a decision of the Gods, a concept inherited from the ancient Greeks, semantically in our World act the two concepts of Criticism and Crisis. The surrender to such a decision about one’s destiny is paradoxically the abdication of the human being to his critical judgment, to his decision, to his “nomos”.
Man, seeking the Light for fear of Darkness, sinks into Darkness, leaves the “rudder” of his existence; in search of a misunderstanding sense of Sacred he loses the real sacredness of his own existence. Invocation and sacrifices to the Gods do not establish relationships with the unknown gods but only blind obscure subjection and obedience to a dangerous hidden Evil. The power of Prayer is twisted and parodied in Invocation and Evocation, in rituals and magical rituals.
An authentic relationship with the feeling of the divine is distorted into magical formulas, into Hocus Pocus, into a language evocative of the divine but not participatory in the soul of the individual and authentically communicative with the divine and the sacred. Evocation and Prayer: another dualism in the background of the opposition between Darkness and Light.
In his fall into the abyss, man evokes more and more darkness in his soul and stands up to God, to legislator, to regulator of human destinies, defines and / or redefines the borders of the sacred and permissible, in a pathological mania for control of everything and everyone. Sophocles’ Antigone is the milestone in describing and reflecting on this degeneration of humanity.
In the first Stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone, which is followed by the central episode of the drama, namely the “agon”, the “fight” between Antigone and Creon, the poet develops an intense reflection on the condition of man; admirable verses in which the chorus expresses the wonder and dismay of man in the face of the mystery of his very being.
Creon, tyrant of Thebes, refuses burial to Polynices, brother of Antigone, guilty of being considered a betrayer. In doing so, it enters on a collision course with the so-called “agrapta nomina”, the divine and customary laws believed to be of divine origin and defended by Antigone ( which already in the etymology of her name represents the contrast between the laws of the “family” opposed to those of the State). Why does Creon do it? Why does he bury Eteocles and not Polynices? Because Polynices is considered a betrayer and had no right to be buried in his homeland. But Creon goes further: he does not grant any kind of burial to Polynices: he wants to leave him to the public ridicule and contempt of his fellow citizens.
Creon applies the nòmos (in contrast to the agrapta nomina) and violates it at the same time, so committing an execrable act: by preventing a proper burial to Polynices, Creon commits hybris, a sin of hubris and appealing to the good of the state crosses the threshold of the adynaton, of the impossible, so drawing on himself the wrath of the Gods, as Tiresias the diviner (he is an archetypical character too) will remind him, the one who is in simultaneous contact with the two Worlds, that of Antigone and that of Creon. Antigone is opposed to Creon, to his concept that “the city belongs to those who command it” (thus placing Creon even beyond the nomos, the law of men), respects the agrapta nomina appointment in opposition to the nomos and the “tyrannical” violation even of the same nomos: she buries her brother, so in turn being condemned by Creon to be buried alive in a cave, where she will find death, committing suicide. Creon is insulting the Gods, he is insulting Justice, the Dike (the name of Justice of the Greeks, she is a Goddess too!), he is insulting the nomos. The established order of the polis is delegitimized by Creon and by the proud opposition of Antigone, who claims a whole world of divine and familiar, human and customary laws opposed not only to the nomos but to its degeneration into an arbitrary exercise of despotic power by the tyrant Creon.
Antigone is all that exists in the intersection of the two Worlds.
An unknowable, ineffable world, which accesses the World made of principles, nourisheing the World of Creon and speaking to the same of customs, of the unwritten or written laws (such as the Constitutions in our days) but inspired by all that world inaccessible logically but only emotionally, through symbols, by means of archetypes, in an unconscious way, diving into the ancestral human condition: full of Light, Memory and Truth.
The first stasimon of Antigone, the “stationary song”, the stasimon melos of the Chorus (reproduced below in my english translation) is an immortal masterpiece of human ingenuity, something unsurpassable and that must be kept in mind by all men,even when they believe in their arrogance to be able to harness all the actual or possible Worlds in a “formula”, in some kind of “law”, in a “judgment” and maybe even violate them, deluding themselves into thinking they can avoid the wrath of the Gods that are prayed to and not invoked; Gods who still inhabit our souls, as James Hillman wrote ( read James Hillman : “On Paranoia. On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Ananke and Athena” ):
“CHORUS: Many powers are tremendous but none more so than man. He beyond the canute sea proceeds in the winter storm through the billows that break around him. He with an inconsumable and indefatigable work faces vigorously even the supreme goddess among all the gods, Gaia, year after year with the plows pulled by the equine lineage. He is who catches the winged-minded birds and the wild beasts and the animals of the sea with knotted nets. He harnesses the maned horse and the strong bull. He has learned speech and thought like a fast wind and the impulse that leads to law and to escape the terrible arrows of the uninhabitable frost beneath the open sky.Wherever the road opens up, he stops at nothing. So he faces the future. From Hades alone, the god of the dead, he has not escaped, no matter how many remedies he has invented to incurable evils. Beyond all hope and expectation, he knows, makes, invents, sometimes turning to evil, sometimes to good. If he accords with the laws of his land and the sworn justice of the gods, he sits high in the city; but if he is guilty of wicked acts and impudent bravery, he is not even part of the city.Never I will be his commensal, never I will have an understanding and sympathetic soul with one who acts in this way. But here is happening something unheard of, which disturbs me. How can I doubt that the young woman I see is Antigone? O unfortunate daughter of Oedipus, what is happening? Are you not the one they drag, after having captured you while, mad, you disobeyed the royal decrees?” .
More than four hundred years before Christ a man, a poet, spoke to us with an immortal poetry and still speaks to us through the centuries. Antigone and Creon represent the conflict of two Worlds, one Actual and one Possible would have said Leibniz. Actual is the World of Creon, a dark and obscure World crystallized and crystallizing the Becoming as well as despising the Complexities of the human being and his condition. The other, that of Antigone, is the Possible World generating possibilities, careful to Memory, to traditions, to unwritten norms, to all the luminous richness of human existence, when it lights a lamp in the night and waits for the day to “continue”, to “go on” and not to “repeat” the same thimgs, not letting itself be overwhelmed by darkness. Antigone’s story also makes us reflect on the so-called “human justice” as opposed to the shining one with a capital “J”: here too it is a struggle between Worlds and devastating dualisms.
In Kafka’s novel “The Trial” at one point the protagonist has a dialogue with a priest:
-No-, said the priest, – one should not take everything for true, one should take it only as necessary-.
-This is a very sad opinion-, said K. -Lies are elevated to the order of the world-.”
That exchange of words between the protagonist Mr. K and the priest inside a sacred place happens after the priest has just told a story such as parable to the protagonist of the novel. The parable is famous and Orson Wells, when he made a movie about the novel in 1962, put it at the beginning of his work, almost as an interpretative key.
It tells of a man who approaches the “gates of the Law” and finds a Guardian stopping him from entering.
The man spends his life in front of the access of the Law without ever penetrating it, prevented by the Guardian who tells him “I am powerful. And I am but the last of the guardians. From room to room, however, there are other guardians, one more powerful than the other. Already by the third one I can no longer stand the sight either”.
The man waits in vain all his life for permission to enter, begging the Guardian and even trying to bribe him in vain. The Guardian replies after the offers of gifts: “I accept only because you don’t think you have missed anything”. But the man does not enter. And when he is about to die before the door of access to the Law, he asks the Guardian: “Everyone would like access to the Law,” says the man, “how is it possible that in all these years no one has asked to be admitted besides me?”.
The Guardian answers him: “Here no one else could obtain admission, because this entrance was intended only for you. Now I am going to close it.”
Reams of paper have been written to interpret this parable, and I would like to have my say too in according to the preceding reflections.
If we make an extensive interpretation of the word “Law” used by Kafka, translating it with “Justice”, the parable takes on clearer meaning (isn’t it common for the majority of human beings to use Law and Justice indiscriminately as synonyms?). Justice and a trial are a unique procedure that concern each time only a single “man”, his “World”. The gateway cannot be crossed by anyone but only by the “possible world” of that single man.Law and Justice are abstractions, a World that becomes accessible only from a possible World that intersects with another possible World, the one of Justice, creating the actual World that allows the implementation of the law, the implementation of justice (here I have used lower case letters because they are no longer abstractions). There can be no possible excuse, prayer or subterfuge.
Who ” bribes” someone in first denies himself access to Justice.
He’ll “get away with it” (maybe) , He’ll “win the case” (probably), confusing Justice with a betting room, but he lives and dies outside of Justice. We are the only ones who are mistaken in our attitude towards Law and Justice, when we flood this World with Darkness. Our singularity, our intellectual honesty, clarity and logic are the key to access; the logical translation of our requests is the key , the “magical word” that allows access to the building of Justice and Law; the inner chambers of Justice will be accessible and the Guardians will kneel as we pass. No one wins or loses: everyone contributes to the success of Justice, to its actual implementation.
The priest claims that “one should not take everything for true, one should take it only as necessary”. K replies that therefore “Lies are elevated to the order of the world”. K is wrong and incorrectly put himself in front of Justice.
He does not understand that “quid est veritas?” is an unanswered question in the World of Justice and in the present World (and not only), it is a gnoseological void with which we have to live: we can only say that “necessarily” World A and World B will have a verdict that will be the best in all possible worlds at that moment, that will solve that particular judicial case, but it will not be an absolute and eternal Truth.
It is enough if the verdict will be “right” in that single case.
Human beings try to relate with the Universe, to dialogue, to give order to the chaos and not for this Newton must be considered a liar or a stupid after Einstein and successors: the Truth is a research and what we find is only our needy outlook in that moment, the best possible in all accessible Worlds in that moment.
This does not mean that we live in a lie. We live our time and the possible World (that of Antigone, of the Gods, of the Unconscious, of the ineffable) the soul of the human being will never be bridled in any law and in any verdict. Only Tiresia, the diviner, the artist will be able to “communicate” with those worlds at the same time and evoke them from the depths: “the rest is silence”, the English bard would have said through the mouth of Hamlet. A fruitful silence, luminous, creative and respectful of the human being so inclined to the mastery of his destiny, with the need to pray and not to evoke, with the need for Truth and not Lies.
Now someone will begin to understand that Pilate’s question to Jesus (“quid est veritas ?” see John’s Gospel, the founding question of any discourse on Logic) was not a “logical-conceptual” problem but a “lexical” and “conceptual” one: the ancient Romans did not use “abstract concepts” (the Truth for them was expressed by saying “the true thing”, i. e. the “verum”, in concrete and limited to a case without abstractions of any kind) and did not have in their vocabulary the word and the concept of Veritas, a term replaced in medieval and Scholastic Latin (in a theological and philosophical sense).
In other words, Pilate is as if he had asked Jesus Christ: “What are you saying? I don’t understand you!”: because Pilate barely spoke Hebrew and Jesus spoke Aramaic, it is believed that at that meeting there was also a “translator” who is suspected to have been “fired” shortly thereafter (and let’s not investigate the method of dismissal!). This also explains Pilate’s attitude, who left “without waiting for Jesus’ answer”: it is not that Jesus did not know how to answer, but if anything he “could not” answer a question that only denoted “linguistic-conceptual misunderstanding”, “incommunicability” between the protagonists and not the beginning of a “logical-philosophical debate”. By now, logicians use that question to discuss and/or introduce the debate of and about logical Truth.
Well the concept of logical Truth is very limited compared to the Truth spoken of in this work.
All of the previous description could also be a “cumulus” of falsehoods and delirious idiocies, but in the propositional logic the “cumulus” would find its “blessing” with Wittgenstein’s Tables of Truth: all tautologies that are true “on paper”, all are well formed formulas but useless in reality: the tables of truth, the tautologies, do not help us to answer the question “quid est veritas ?”. Tautologies are the structure of logical laws and do not have the same meaning that can be given by limiting themselves to rhetoric, where “tautological” indicates only “inconclusiveness”, “redundancy” of concepts and expressions that do not add anything to what has already been said. A logical law, tautological law , assures the logician that the pattern of reasoning is correct and that the truth values assigned to the individual “components” are correct. The truth or falsehood value assigned to individual statements do not correspond to Truth.
For example, going back to Justice, Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens (they are two logical laws) are used both by lawyers in proposing their defensive theses and by the judge in the verdicts, hoping that the solution of the real case is “right at that moment”, in that particular present World. In the Middle Ages it was lawful to burn an alleged “witch” accused of “crimen magiae”, today no: two worlds that when compared come into conflict but if analyzed in the historical context of belonging are fully justified and confirm that the Becoming is the engine of human history and not the immutable Parmenidean Being without critical judgment reserved only for the “crisis” of Gods supernal, touchy, vengeful and spiteful.
Perhaps a careful reader will have guessed that the search for Truth as opposed to Oblivion should be sought through so-called “modal” logics.
Modal logic: the logician who best defined it was Kriepke. Modal logic is the logic that formalizes and operates on statements such as ‘it is possible that’ and ‘it is necessary that’; besides taking into account what in natural language (the language we use to communicate with each other) is marked by a multitude of expressions such as adverbs, verb modes and enunciative operators: ‘you can…’, you must…’, ‘to have the ability’, ‘to have the opportunity’, ‘possibly’, ‘dutifully’, etc. Modalities of necessity and possibility are called alethic modalities and now you begin to understand my reference to Aletheia in the preceding paragraphs.
Modal logic introduces two more logical connectives :
BOX means “it is necessary that”
◊ DIAMOND means “it is probably that”.
These modal connectives introduce us into a particular semantics: that I mentioned above of the “possible Worlds”.
The above modal operators are not definable in terms of the other logical operators of propositional calculus (such as the double implication “↔”biconditional logic connective “if and only if”,a statement of material equivalence) and we are therefore forced to introduce them and operate with and on them as new objects. We briefly view their main properties:
- modal operators are not “truth-functional” operators, i.e. they cannot be “truth-functions”; in other words it is not possible to construct a truth-table for φ and for ◊ φ. Why ?
- The answer is the second property of modal operators: modal operators tell us what the truth value of a formula is given the way things are in other possible Worlds, i.e. to account for the meaning of a modal statement we need to consider representations that not only specify how the real, actual World must be made, but also how other possible Worlds must be made.
So you will have :
- “It is necessary that A” be true (in the actual world) if and only if A is true in all the possible worlds (with reference to the current).
- “It is possible for A” to be true (in the actual world) if and only if A is at least true in a possible world (with respect to the actual world).
In modal logic an interpretation tells us not only how things are in the current World, but also how things might be in other Worlds, and to do this, in modal logic, it is sufficient to indicate the truth value that an statement has in all Worlds. The modal logics and the systems derived from the same ones are not other that relational semantics that depend on the relationships that the various possible and actual Worlds have between them.
Logical connectives, modal logic (rectius: modal logics), Logic as the Science of reasoning are the only chance contemporary man has to get out of the sloth of acting, reflecting on his own existence in the World, comparing himself with the possibilities and needs of his World and of the other possible Worlds: perhaps he will not find Justice with a capital “J”, he will not untie all the knots that degrade some of the manifestations of our existence, but he will try to do so with lucidity and effort.
The motionless and static Being, with the Destiny written by others will be defeated, abandoned at the margins of the irrational darkness and humanity will have a light on its existence. He will go out of his “sphere” and admire “other spheres”, other worlds and he will confronting himself with them, he will accessimg them so he will be enriched by these experiences, by these “communications”. The solipsistic and nihilistic world will open up to new accessible human and social relations, to new individual and collective subjectivities without pain, without revolutions, without violence and oppression: only by reasoning and understanding.
The main social structures of our society will undergoing a change, a genetic mutation from Logic alone applied with historical and philosophical feeling to all social manifestations and human thought.
Logic is the Science of reasoning: mathematical, juridical, medical, legislative, political, of any form of reasoning. Relying and committing ourselves to logically rewrite our current world is and should be our Commitment.
Truth, History…Commitment: this is what someone has taken away from humanity in the actual World; the strength and certainty of Commitment has been stolen and prevented from the human being so degrading existence to a living for its own sake, for profit and personal gain or for ephemeral and narcissistic successes.
The flowing of the river of Time is frightening and pathologically the human soul tends to an “Identical Matter”, to a “Freezed life” so hopening to escape the Becoming that is perceived as destructive, as if it would make vain the efforts of man, on the opposite paradoxically thwarting in the “here and now”, in the immobility and repetition of time the genuine substance of existence immersed in the flowing of Time and Truth, leaning towards the “Possible”, being free from chains imposed by the Night of Thought. On the other way, it is precisely the painful and tiring Commitment that in an exhausting way unchains us from the inanity of existence, from that feeling of wrong delirious abdication to the abyss of Oblivion and sublimates us in History; man becomes History, becomes demiurge of History and events so becoming the only one responsible for the Now, the After, the Here and the Elsewhere. The discrete quantities on the straight line of the Becoming are united in a continuum and the straight line of time will change through human effort, becoming multidimensional and man, who crushed by dualisms, will stands up from “flatland”, becoming master of himself and his destiny. The connective of the mentioned above “conjunction” no longer will becomes pathological or the result of ancestral and erroneous conceptions of the relationship between Man-Existence-Time, it will no longer lead to the ignorance of Becoming, but on the opposite it will exalts Man by transform him in History, in Memory,in Truth. Conjunction/Disjunction (the two logical connectives) become dialectical tension of thought and human action and they will transmute themselvess into logical “Implication”, into the hypothetical period of “if…then”, where the hypothesis opens human thought to the future, it plans the future on the experience of the past: it will reason on experience, it will make History, it will write Philosophy, recovering a lost dignity.
Negation, Conjunction, Disjunction and Implication, the logical connectives placed by the Stoics (in particular by the Stoic Chrysippus) as the foundations of logical science and confirmed two thousand years later by the logical Post, are the bricks that help Man to get out of the Absurd and the inconsistency of his logical-existential short circuits: four symbols that represent (like adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine) the building blocks of the DNA of human thought.
From these basic logical connectives all thought, all human reflection develops; man can generalize his thoughts and discoveries with the connective ” “universal quantifier”; he can affirm the existence and the belonging of any object of thought with the connective $ “existential quantifier” to which is added = the connective “identity relation” meaning the relation that an object of logical reflection has only with itself. We have seen the modal connectives box and diamond and many other logical operators have been elaborated in the philosophical-existential tension of committing ourselves to become the authors of our destiny, to be the authors of that book we call Life.
We will never again drink the water of the river Lethe because we will not have to reincarnate in the immutable and recursive world of Oblivion but we must to become History to live the Truth, to be the Truth, with logical lucidness. Our Finitude is our Eternity, our Commitment is the Pen writing our Destiny that no one else has ever written. If one day we suddenly feel that we have already lived something, we will no longer be afraid of being prisoners of time, but we will be happy because that brief vertigo will remind us that we have already loved and lived the beauty of existence as a project or as a dream.
References
Auguste Blanqui L’eternité par les astres ( Ed. presses Electroniques de France 2013)
E.Hughes, M.J.Cresswell A New Introduction to Modal Logic (1996)
Mircea Eliade Le mythe de l’éternel retour-Archétipes et répétition ( The Myth of the Eternal Return), 1st edition Paris, Gallimard, 1949
James Frazer The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1915
James Hillman On Paranoia. On the Necessity of Abnormal Psychology: Ananke and Athena
Franz Kafka The Trial ( first publication 1925 – english edition by Victor Gollancz publisher 1937)
Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1892)
V. Quine The Philosophy of Logic: Second Edition (1986)
Peter Smith An Introduction to Formal Logic (2003)
Sophocles Antigone (441 BC)- Cambridge greek and latin classics, edited by Mark Griffith in 1999
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