Some thoughts on 'natural' and 'cultural' ideality

Let us say that there are two kinds of ideality, natural and cultural. ‘Natural’ ideality consists essentially of natural kinds, for example, chemical elements or molecules, biological species, et al. These forms are not immediately dependent upon cognition for their being. Thus, e.g., animal species reproduce themselves, and chemical processes are highly predictable based upon the substances involved. ‘Cultural’ ideality, however, is cognitively and, in particular, linguistically mediated, forming a kind of second nature dependent upon a natural base and not self-constituting or self-reproducing, or at least not in the same way as the former. Examples of cultural ideality are all reified (reflected) social structures and abstract ideas. (For simplicity, let’s disregard right now the culturally mediated fashion in which ‘natural’ ideality is alone available to us.)

 

The emergence of cultural ideality as a mode of ideality alongside of and in some fashion comparable to natural ideality is the subject of certain myths, one of the most salient of which being the myth of Osiris, Isis and Horus. This account is particularly salient because it recognizes this process as essentially a transmutation of mortality.

 

Osiris represents all mortal beings qua mortal, their mortality given by the fact that they are instances of natural forms. (Osiris himself is not, of course, an instance of a natural form, but that is because he is causative for this structure of being.) Under the regime of natural ideality alone, the individual is virtually wholly subordinated to the universal. An exceptional individual, it is true, may affect the flow of a natural form of which they are an instance; an example would be a case of advantageous mutation. This is, however, as the saying goes, the exception proving the rule. (It should be noted, however, in this respect, that natural forms exist as characteristic flows, and not as the fixed eternal essences they were sometimes conceived as in premodern thought about the natural world.)

 

The elevation of Horus to the sovereignty marks the accession of cultural ideality to a status analogous to that of the natural ideality embodied in the order and regularity of the cosmos. This essentially involves the transmutation of mortality, inasmuch as the products of mortal cognition, which can have no direct effect on the physical world—hence the relative ‘weakness’ of Horus as compared with Seth, the principle of natural vitality—must somehow overcome their essential finitude to become akin to the self-reproducing natural forms; that is, they must achieve their own special kind of eternity. This is the role of language, in the form of ‘effective utterance’ or heka, in the operation performed by Isis to conceive Horus posthumously, distilling from the very essence of mortality the immortality peculiar to culture and civilization.

 

This operation has the corollary of making the individual discernible alongside the universal, the proper name alongside the name of the species, type or kind. As such, analogous myths in other cultures are frequently those pertaining to initiations of a peculiarly individuating character (i.e., not those pertaining indifferently to an age-grade).