Considerations on the relationship between the Unpredictable and the Inapparent: Aesopus' monkey and the unpredictable past

HERNÁN INVERSO

Riyadh

Congreso; Riyadh conference; 2021

King Fahad National Library

Aesop wrote a famous fable in which he told the story of a monkey who had given birth to two sons at once. The mother cherished and fed one with tender care, whereas she despised and neglected the other. So it happened that, by divine fate, the little one that the mother took care of with love and clasped in her arms was suffocated by her, and the one she neglects reached perfect maturity. The moral says that "this fable shows that chance is more powerful than forethought". The semantic density of the Greek terms is challenging. Tykhe refers to chance, the pure chaos of the surrounding world, but it is also the divine fate, the expression of a force that exceeds us. At the same time, the limits of pronoia show what cannot be grasped in advance, what escapes our power, and therefore it is unforeseeable and unpredictable. It is beyond the three elements of truth: reality, thought and language. Indeed, unpredictability is an inseparable feature of human experience. It has gone hand in hand with philosophical reflection since the beginning with the firm mark of inapparency, that is, what escapes phenomenalisation. However, it shows itself with the patency of evidence at the same time.Let us take a closer look. What is the unpredictable element in this story, which could be the story of any of us, since the fables talk, in fact, of human beings? And what it can tell us about this issue? At the level of the natural attitude, she had terrible luck because often things go otherwise, or perhaps she paid for the guilt of having cared for their sons so differently. In this case, it occurred to her the same that had happened to many others. Or maybe it was something extraordinary, or any other explanation emerged from the inferences about the surrounding world typical of the natural attitude. If we ask the science, most disciplines will have something to say, from the biological conditionings to psychology, passing through sociology, economy, etc. Each one focuses on a sector of the phenomenon to bring to light its regularities without ever exhausting its unpredictability. If we go beyond this limit and enter into phenomenology, the static level will give us the first kind of description of the phenomenon. The genetic level, on its part, will consider the constitutive aspects. For instance, what happens with her consciousness and those of her children. Even beyond that, at the level of generativity, historicity underlines their traditions and the culture they live in and bequeath to posterity, opening the field of exceedance.