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Kant’s Challenge: selection from WHEE
By admin | September 2, 2008
Here’s a selection from World History And The Eonic Effect
Kant’s Challenge
Our framework is complete, but it is useful, and appropriate, seeing the resemblance to transcendental idealism, to connect our model with a classic theme of the philosophy of history, in the title of this chapter, in the process solving one of the classic difficulties in this subject. One of the deepest currents of modern thought, beside the rise of theories of evolution, lies in the heritage of the philosophy of history, whose existence is justified by default in the failure to find a ‘science of history’. No use complaining that science has replaced philosophy or that Darwin explains everything. Our simple model with its eonic mainline and discrete freedom sequence stages a lightweight transition through this terrain. Strictly speaking our model based on a stream and sequence contrast, but then in this chapter has annexed the ideas of ‘causality and freedom’ as an adjunct, which requires explanation in the imperfect match. It is also empirical and can’t be used for complex secondary deductions, but we can manage a few hunches with our historical black box, and the embedded freedom sequence tweaks the issues very directly.
We have found a solution to the paradox of causal determinism and the emergence of freedom in history: we see a macro oscillator shifting gears in its dialectic of ‘degrees of freedom’. Beautiful. We should tip our hat to Hegel, who first sensed this ‘evolution of freedom’, and then pass on from his flounderings in a design argument. Our model reverts to Kant, and blends in with a classic thematic of the philosophy of history seen in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, with its discussion of the various antinomies of reason, the so-called Third Antinomy being the key to our eonic logic. However, Kant’s philosophy is beset with an inability to resolve the contradiction between social conflict, what he calls ‘asocial sociability’, and the teleological implications of his system. Here the eonic model can help.
This legacy of philosophic history, like a stream flowing into a greater current, yet with deep roots in antiquity, casts an ambiguous glance at the sacred lore from which it is spawned, yet accompanies the secular music as a leitmotiv of modernism, despite an ambiguous status on the boundary of metaphysics. Challenged in the mood of science, yet still unchallenged by any science of history, it endures in parallel to the claims against philosophy made by the tide of empirical research. Rising in tandem with all things modern and the pandemonium of a new era of world history, its antiquated reputation is belied by its persistent echo in the mind of the historian, and its eternal smile as the masthead to all ideas of evolution.
The onset of positivism is itself graced with the metaphysical historicism of epochs codified in the philosopher of history, Comte. But if Comte is just such a philosopher of history and all his epigones are shipwrecked trying to do a science of history in the age of Positivism, we should backtrack to the source of the stream to see where we went wrong. Scientists tend to be unconscious Comtean historicists, and assume the epochal scientific revolution will overtake history. The future is unknown, but if that means that unrestricted Newtonianism as total causal explanation will suffice, failure is likely, as we can see already. The Darwin debate shows the train wreck coming. The work of Kant produced a means to mediate this problem, without derailing into anti-science. It is no accident our ‘system-agent’ two-level discourse has a family resemblance to the Kantian rubric.
As we move to examine theories of evolution we find the philosophy of history’s seemingly outdated, almost archaic, charm resurfacing as a renewed challenge, and an obstacle to their completion. If a theory of evolution moves to enlarge its domain to include the whole, then it is forced to reckon with the self-reference of the thinker pondering his own evolution. No other grounds are required for the persistence of this mode. The idea of evolution is a feckless giant, and we should propose, in a gesture more than humor, a comeback of philosophical history, a nimble rascal, to leap and ride piggyback, wishing to direct traffic, to the consternation of proponents of post-philosophical science. Indeed, we should notice at once that the philosophy of history is itself a part of our universal evolution, as is the idea of evolution, that is, the evolution of the idea of evolution.
Displaced in the rise of the positive sciences by the idea of evolution, the philosophy of history becomes one of its first passengers. For the philosophy of history is the history of philosophy, and this shows the signature of its own (eonic) evolution. We can offer no real differentiation, then, of the two subjects, or any decisive means of marking the transition between boundaries of rival disciplines. If Darwinism is free of metaphysics, then let it be science. But we have seen that it fails three times, in the classic antinomies given from Kantian Dialectic. Our discussion of historicism leads us back to a classic essay of the philosopher Kant.
We will keep the Kantian system intact from our model, and touch it at a tangent with one paragraph from his essay on history. Then we will see that the appearance of Kant himself and Classical Germany philosophy is itself an eonic emergent clustered at the divide of our third transition, most remarkable. The philosophy of history is born, reborn, at the dawn of modernity as a fellow traveler, becoming visible as early as the sixteenth century and finds its classic realization in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his essay Idea For A Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View:
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]
This hope is confirmed by the pattern we can exhibit, and we can easily claim the eonic effect a resolution of Kant’s Challenge, in the process exposing a difficulty in Kant’s own analysis. We could derive the eonic effect from this paragraph. Our approach is that of our eonic model, rather than the philosophy of history, but in many ways Kant’s formulation is perfect, with his own post-Newtonian model. The inherent contradiction in this paragraph does indeed generate its own historical dynamic. And the eonic effect answers at once to the question asked. Kant’s language seems a little historicist, but his thinking contains ample depth to deal with the issue of ‘historical laws’. In many ways, it is Kant himself who is the source, almost simultaneously, of the key avenue to the philosophy of history, and the critique of historicism.
[i] Hans Reisss, Kant’s Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 41.
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