Kant’s Challenge

There are essentially two discoveries/gateways to ‘transcendental idealism’, that of Kant, and that of Schopenhauer. The study of the ‘eonic effect’ provides a third independent means, crude but effective, to arrive at this revolutionary framework. It does this without philosophic analysis, instead using direct pointing to a space-time framework of historical evolution. It also does this without trying, as a side effect of an altogether different pursuit and question. That makes it especially useful as a way to ‘get a glimpse’ of the definite constellation of ideas, phenomenon and noumenon, that go by the name of this ‘ism’.

There are a lot of problems with the terms ‘transcendental’ and ‘idealism’, which are misleading, at first, to those coming on the subject for the first time. And the term ‘transcendental idealism’ in the tradition shifts its significance in some of Kant’s successors, such as Fichte and Schelling. But the basic framework of Kant/Schopenhauer is what is indicated here. A first operational definition of ‘transcendental idealism’ might be, ‘kludge to rescue Newtonian maidens in distress from the implications of causal mechanics without an idea of freedom’. That will suffice until we roll up our sleeves to embark on spit-and-polish Kant-studien. Newton, at least, was well aware of the problem, long before the emergence of ‘scientism’, and should be considered the first primitive ur-Kantian.

The ‘eonic effect‘ is simply a pattern in world history arrived at by periodization analysis. This pattern takes on a dynamical significance as ‘evolution’ in a newly defined sense, and provides a way to assess what we mean by the phrase the ‘evolution of freedom’. This formula requires a new way to approach the ‘science of history’ with the ideas of causality and freedom taken in tandem in a new style of historical modeling. This model instantly runs afoul of the paradoxes, or antinomies, of causality and freedom, in a classic Kantian echo of the famous Third Antinomy. The model resolves the antinomy by taking the ‘causal’ and ‘free action’ components of the contradiction together as a dynamic pair.

The analogy to a computer and a user with a mouse might clarify this: we have a deterministic machine and an agent with an input device, able to interact with the machine. The two together, machine and user, comprise a distinct system of two components. The agent is ‘free’ in some sense to choose his input, whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will.

A larger generalization of this type of situation can be constructed to match the data of the eonic effect in an elegant model with a Kantian flavor.

The eonic model, remarkably, derives almost automatically a basic framework of transcendental idealism, but only in an empirical demonstration. It does this within its own limits, and does it without any explicit statements about our ‘representations’, although this is implicitly built in to the construct. It is thus useful as a way to temporarily bypass the immense complications that stand at the beginning of the first critique. This gateway to transcendental idealism via the Dialectic rather than the Analytic has its own limitations, but might assist those who become stuck on the considerable confusions that attend discussion of the phenomenal/noumenal question, along with the ‘thing in itself’.

Kant’s systematics is immensely complex, and yet the issue of transcendental idealism should be a simple matter like learning how to swim: you get the knack and then the other complicated details can be addressed in a more productive study.
The first paragraph of Kant’s essay on history ironically summarizes this kind of situation, almost without trying.

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.[i]