Our crude widget model has stumbled onto something remarkable, a resemblance to so-called ‘transcendental idealism’, a scheme tailor-made to rescue Newtonians in distress, but considered now to be an outmoded form of thought. Almost against our will our model forces this on us, due to the two levels it generates in its analysis, and the stunning match to the discrete freedom sequence. Remarkably we have an ‘off the shelf’ philosophic software for just this situation, the critical system of Kant. We tie together all the loose threads of our discussion with a look at his thinking in the endnote section.

Our data has, at first, a strangeness to it in the way it treats discontinuity, jumps between periods and regions, and operates on fuzzy intervals. In fact, it is a consequence of the data we are confronted with, no way around it, and is not indulgence in the fantastic. Examine the data of the Axial Age, for example. Fantastic or not, the data speaks for itself. There is no ‘flat history’ solution to the strange properties we discover there. One reason we are about to discover for this initial sense of oddity is that we may be detecting a system operating behind the scenes, and perhaps one that is beyond the matrix of space and time. Although we can’t establish this formally, we should launch a preemptive strike against the suddenly metaphysical speculations that will arise here, and that will provoke some metaphysical spree on the subject of history and eternity. The latter concept has no scientific foundation, and is speculative, period. That doesn’t mean it is wrong, only metaphysical. Transcendental idealism is the ony way to both embrace and yet discipline this kind of ‘ran off the meter’ once we attempt to include anti-causal thinking in our model.

In a nutshell, there is, as yet, no methodologically sound basis for a theory of evolution. That’s a surprising statement, but the point will become obvious as we look at the gray area between history and evolution. We should recall the reservations of Kant, as to the hope ‘that one day there would arise a second Newton who would make intelligible the production of a single blade of grass in accordance with the laws of nature the mutual relations of which were not arranged by some intention’. Darwin’s theory, at least, does not resolve such doubt.

The metaphysics of evolution The philosophy of Kant offers a useful benchmark for the examination of evolutionary theories as these impinge on the intractable issues of metaphysics. Questions, he warns, of god, soul or self, and free will are destined to exhibit antinomies that will haunt any universal generalization. We have the Darwin debate in a nutshell, and can see at once that Darwinian natural selection, used as the universal talisman of metaphysical reduction, presumes judgment on unobserved totalities, and is troubled on each of these questions. Questions of divinity founder in the design debate, of soul in the basic definition of self and organism, and free will in the attempts to reduce moral action to the mechanization of adaptationism. Current biology lacks so much as a basic definition of the organism.

A clue to the problem lies in the failure to produce a science of history, where the facts are visible, even as Darwinists claim a science of evolution, where the facts are not visible. And at what point do we divide history from evolution? This situation is altogether odd, and we left suspicious Darwinism is failing a photo finish test. Not a single hard result has ever been achieved for a science of history. That should make us suspicious of Darwinian claims at the onset. We indulge in far too much idle talk about evolutionary theory in the abstract. These discussions are impoverished, but brilliant sounding speculations about something we never observe. It’s time to take a long, slow motion look at the one good data set that we have, world history. We will soon be cured of Darwinian fantasies. The scale of evolution is tremendous. Even the record of world history, five thousand years over the whole surface of a planet, is nothing compared to deep time. That is a reality check. We see at once the fallacy of throwing generalizations at such a complex system. It is primitive behavior.

Here is a quote on this from the book:

What would “bridging nature and freedom” mean outside of politics? For Kant the big questions are nearly always epistemological: thus, bridging freedom and nature might mean specifying the conditions under which investigators of the empirical world (scientists) are able to find evidence of spontaneity in the physical world (that is, of freedom’s causality). Either freedom and nature are strictly alternative perspectives on the same set of empirical occurrences, or there are some things in the world that can only be explained according to freedom (in other words, the second alternative posits empirical evidence that some thing has no antecedent cause). I am not the first person to point out that it is not an easy thing empirical evidence of a lack of a cause. Kant himself assumes that a good scientist will operate under the presumption that absent natural causes may eventually be discovered.

This question of freedom’s causality is discussed in the reviewer’s World History And The Eonic Effect (Amazon) where the paradox of freedom’s causality is demonstrated with a new type of history model

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It is remarkable that just at the modern divide appears German classical philosophy. Its philosophies of freedom are themselves a part of the discrete freedom sequence! Furthermore we see that the eonic effect contains an expression of Kant’s Third Antinomy in its actual structure, a remarkable discovery. Kant’s system is quite difficult, but his essay expresses the crux of the philosophy of history, and the problems of almost all methodologies. Kant performs a kind of duet with Newton, and makes sense especially to a modeler, as the progression from mechanical to ethical, then esthetic/teleological modes arises from dealing with our data.

A Science of History? What is the relation of our method to Kant’s actual system? There is a direct one in his so-called Third Antinomy.

“Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.” Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”

We confront the enigma of the thesis, that freedom generation and physical causality somehow are both the case. The dilemma is immediate from the periodization of our model, remembering that this is only an empirical discovery, not a deduction.

Kant’s Third Antinomy is reflected in our pattern, but on such a large scale, and such a different mode, that we must proceed with caution. From the way we set up our model (for another purpose) we can see how the stream of history seems interrupted by a second different ‘causal initialization’ that has no continuous lead up or antecedents. Our transitions are formally analogous to the noumenon, but quite different. They stand in conjunction to the limits of historical representation.

Nature and freedom We need to be careful here since we are dealing with history. We have retreated from the use of the term ‘causality’, and, further, the term ‘causality of freedom’ might involve us in the famous ‘double affection’ problem that arose in the classic post-Kantian debate. This criticism denies the use of the term ‘causality’ to the different aspect of the noumenal. In our model, we need hardly worry about this confusing, yet apt, objection. We can replace ‘causality (of freedom)’ with ‘noumenal blank X’, temporalizing as, indeed, some sort of ‘causality’ of freedom in the phenomenal zone.

But, despite the many disputes on such issues, the general point is clear as crystal, in terms of our model, a remarkable concordance. Our finite transition intervals stage a ‘relative transform of freedom’ in some sense, the discontinuity aping an ‘uncaused cause’. The general resemblance of overall formalism is striking, and we see the glint of the noumenal through the fog of our fuzzy periodization. Our model was not designed to deal with these issues, but produces an out of focus version of the classic Third Antinomy. But this is an historical dataset, and not a psychological issue of representations.

Kant must have sensed that a new perspective was needed for history, and wrote his essay after his first Critique. In any case, we find this ‘antinomy’ in history itself. We cannot directly apply this antinomy to the discrete freedom sequence, but we are left to wonder. We see nature’s resolution of the question. Here’s our version of the thesis: Generalized causal determination (GCD) according to the laws of nature is not the only causality, it is also necessary to assume a GCD through the eonic emergence of (historically phenomenal) freedom, visible in discrete transitions. This is not an explanation, but the match is perfect, as the term ‘causality’ undergoes meltdown to show nature’s solution to the antinomy. Problems remain. Are we speaking of transcendence or immanence? In fact our model strongly suggests the latter, but its level of abstraction sets it prior to such a dualism. We could not determine such a question with the data we have. But we could hardly endorse any thought of ‘transcendence’ in such an obvious evolutionary schematic.

Thus, our prime objective, to demonstrate a non-random pattern, once complete, resolves Kant’s Challenge. But, with the status of scratchpad extensions, we suspect more, a suspicious resemblance to transcendental idealism. Although it is beyond the scope of our argument, which is empirical and can’t produce a deduction, the result has a cousin look to the noumenal/phenomenal distinction. We need to be wary of such statements, which will outstrip the simplicity of our prime objective. Later philosophy has done everything it can to abolish this distinction, but we see that it reappears at a stroke of the pen using our periodization. With a slight catch, however. We cannot say that our eonic mainline has any connection to the noumenal, or can we? We can see that this invokes a classic debate, the so-called double affection problem. We escape from this because we have started with ‘standard Newtonian causal language’, discovered it was nonsense, and then replaced this with a generalized causal matrix and a freedom emergentism (Here freedom is strictly the phenomenal traces of some purported noumenal aspect, not ‘transcendental freedom’). Our result is simply a phenomenological matrix of historical data, and suffers no contradiction. We see, however, that we are deprived of a solution as law in closed form.

Thus, our model was not designed to demonstrate this distinction of noumenon and phenomenon (it was not an historical construct), but stumbles on it, the concordance exact, and the discrete freedom sequence shows how there is not just a loose connection, but an exact macro-historical analog. The specter of transcendental idealism is a very undesirable result for both scientists and religionists (why?), but it is actually a very realistic and elegant approach that has a formal rightness to it. In any case, we can simply speak of a two-domain model that fits the emergence of freedom into a ‘generalized causal nexus’, thus crossing the tripwire of Kant’s Third Antinomy. All we can do is voice our suspicion here, keeping in mind that we are dealing with history, and that the Kantian formulation refers to the individual and his representations only. We would have to reconstruct a new version of Kant’s system for history, not a simple thing to do.

But the basic issue is extremely simple. Look at our eonic pattern. Where does freedom come from?

This noumenal aspect, or look-alike, arises because we see our general freedom emergentism enclosed in a finite region bounded by our discrete-continuous periodization, a strange gift of the data, a stroke of empirical mystery That is a provocative hint indeed and a clue to what is obvious from the data, that we are seeing the appearance behind which something else remains hidden. It is remarkable indeed that nature should mimic this transcendental aspect.

It is important to remember that this is history, and what we see is not the noumenal/phenomenal distinction as such, but a mysterious cousin, in an artifice of periodization that (quite unwittingly) produces two kinds of history, a phenomenal region, and another kind of region, still quite in the region of the phenomenal, but with a connection of some kind with the ‘noumenal’. Since all history, everywhere and always is the same, we cannot divide history into two kinds based on such an idea, although the history of this mistake is considerable, ‘ages of revelation’. But all these have missed the point. Don’t make that mistake with the eonic effect. It is a problem that resembles what happens with Kant’s moral theory, which we won’t pursue. But in the final analysis, the Israelites were correct. Some intervals in history have something strange about them.

Finally, notice the resemblance of all Kant’s antinomies to each other and to the three great outcomes of the Axial Age, a religion of soul, a religion of divinity, and the birth of the idea of Freedom! We have an ace up our sleeve. Our eonic effect is some strange mechanical play on this ‘Dialectic’ of Kant.

Thus, a close look shows that divinity, soul, and free will, all revolve around some core Idea, e.g. ‘will’ (‘will of god’, ‘latent will as soul’, and ‘uncaused free will’). Note further that the eonic effect shows three civilizations specializing in each of these antinomies.

One of the strangest facts of our pattern is the appearance of Kant himself with his antinomies at the ‘slingshot maximum’, the divide, of the third ‘discontinuity’, or transition.

Kant’s moral theory Our powerful model instantly reproduces the dilemma that arises in Kant’s moral theory where the status of ‘freedom’ is ambiguous. Kant’s second critique is charged with inconsistency against his first, to be resolved in the third. This confusion is inevitable since we cannot have knowledge of the sources of our action, yet seem to see them in the phenomenal realm at every stage. Kant just seems to bite the bullet and contradict himself, very puzzling.[i]

More Kantian than Kant It is not our job to explicate Kant’s moral theory, our subject being history. We should proceed in our own vein by being more Kantian than Kant and enforce a strict version of ethical action as temporal realization in the phenomenal domain. But this realization has some connection, unconscious to us, in the noumenal aspect of our greater ‘self’. We connect to this with, we suspect, the moment of conscious attention, which conceals a trace of ‘will’, and the deep emergence of ‘acts of will’ from the unconscious, often overriding our intellectually inert idea of self-will. We could easily rewrite Kant’s ethics in this vein, but will eschew this, Kant’s system being fine the way it is, no doubt, and already complicated enough. The problem is simpler in the case of history because we actually see the mediating factor, albeit already temporalized in the realm of phenomena: our transitions.

Our situation resembles what Kant distinguished in his concepts of intelligible and empirical character. As far as history is concerned, since the eonic sequence gives an empirical example of ‘phenomenal freedom as an approximation to noumenon’, we should feel emboldened to stick with the implications of Kant’s first critique and insist that the basis of ethical action is phenomenal, and yet with a complex mystery requiring almost a yoga of self-realization to change gears toward the unknown noumenon. Most of Kant’s moral thinking survives intact in this approach, although the details of such an interpretation might be difficult (and might examine the thinking of Schopenhauer). As far as history is concerned, we see only the pseudo-noumenal echo of the noumenon in our eonic series, ages of ‘revelation’.

Historical freedom Our model does produce a host of suggestions about the questions of ‘ethics and reality’, and generates a default ethical ‘open window’ in the jerky, discontinuous action of the eonic sequence violating causal continuity, giving us, in the resemblance to Kant’s Third Antinomy, the dynamic of emergent freedom. Since this antinomy is a ‘cosmological’ one, our usage is actually superior to the Kantian version wrested from cosmology to the ethics of the individual. This spawns a curious notion, ‘historical freedom’, which is not a property of individuals, but the phenomenon of sudden innovation breaking historical continuity. Please don’t confuse ‘historical freedom’, a macro factor, with the presumption or postulate of ‘free will’, a micro factor. ‘Historical freedom’, an ersatz term, means ‘eonic innovation’ or the perception of ‘uncaused new beginnings’ in the eonic sequence. We say that a ship breaks away, or ‘frees’ itself, from its moorings, while a passenger is ‘free’ to act in the space of the ship.

A discrepancy There is a slight mismatch in our grafting of Kant onto the eonic model: from one perspective, Kant’s system, we would apply Kantianization to the individual. Yet on the level of macrohistory we apply Kantianization to the eonic sequence. Thus the individual is seemingly taken two ways, as free, or as causally determined. In fact, we solved this problem in advance using our model as a stream and sequence duality, in which the terms ‘causality’ and ‘freedom’ are left fuzzy, and are replaced by degrees of self-consciousness in the interaction of macro-action and micro-action, this self-consciousness being the vehicle of relative degrees of freedom. The paradox resolves itself in the fluctuating degrees of freedom in the realization of self-consciousness. Our model, at least, doesn’t have the problem.

Our model, strictly speaking, has spoken only of ‘stream and sequence’, and ‘self-consciousness as the surrogate of will’, and not of causality and freedom. But the value of grafting these terms onto the eonic model was so profitable as to have been worth the effort, as an exercise, but a confusion can arise. If the ‘stream’ aspect is said to be ‘causal’, while the ‘sequence’ aspect is associated with ‘freedom’, then what about the free will of the individual in the execution of history inside that stream? We haven’t said anything about individual ethics, and have inadvertently reduced this to causal mechanism. The answer is that we have indulged in a macro approximation, and can’t answer save to retreat back to our model. But there is an obvious solution, and a way to proceed if we note that the quality of ‘self-consciousness’ can degrade to a mechanization of behavioristic consciousness. This mesmerized state, stripped of the power of free attention, is visible on any street corner, and defines the mechanical stream of history, from which man must awaken. In the greater stream of history we just don’t see much effort to realize ‘free will’, yet. Our ‘evolution of freedom’ is trying to ‘spank the baby’ and create ‘free action’ beyond the eonic system. One day you may evolve to be your own ‘general TP4 exception’. So the stream of history is by and large, mechanized, if not causal, but the individual carries the potential to change gears and act.

In our search for ethical realization, we can adopt a kind of minimal ‘fuzzy Kantian ethics’ whose principal question is the existence of the autonomous human ‘will’, however inchoate, a possible metaphysical extension to our absolutely basic and primitive version of given as the ‘self-consciousness’ of the individual. This search for ethical realization is easily grafted onto our basic evolutionary psychology of the ‘self-consciousness of the surrogate will’, as the default ‘frankenstein ethics’ of the evolving creature-man-ape. This will allow one to explore (what is not our task) the resolution of ethical systems as these appear historically, Kant’s being one of the most brilliant, though incomplete, advances in this vein. The point is that our theoretical reason (theory) only requires ‘self-consciousness’, a compatibilist intermediate, not free will, while the action script adopted by the eonic observer, yourself, might well be a decision to consider ‘practical reason’, or free will, a matter of operational faith, a working assumption. Our model won’t do that for you! This kind of effort is under assault now from anti-foundationalists, devotees of scientism, and disciples of the Nietzsche cult. It’s up to you to get it straight.

Schopenhauer After the Hegelian interlude, the philosopher Schopenhauer appears attempting to restore the Kantian perspective in a brilliant and streamlined form. Note how our post-divide branches into Hegel and Christianity and Schopenhauer, a closet ‘Buddhist’. We don’t take usually take him as a philosopher of history but that he is in an inverted sense. There are so few exemplars at this high caliber of the Kantian strain that we tend to be swept up in a Hegelian tide, oblivious to the secret entranceway into Kant’s views or convinced that ‘Kantian dualism’ has been superceded. Although this formulation (also with its open sesame of the Third Antinomy) is open to the charge of being a metaphysical idealism of the will in a fashion that is distinct from Kant, it is often a starting point for many baffled by the host of distracting issues, from the analytic/synthetic question, to the transcendental deduction, standing at the gateway to Kant’s formulation in his first critique. But Schopenhauer is often the way we take Kant, like it or not, i.e. our preoccupation with ‘causality’, but not the full set of twelve categories in Kant’s metaphysical deduction. And we can easily find ourselves in a subjective ‘appearance and reality’ philosophy as a watered down version of the full set of ideas in Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s thinking. Schopenhauer’s insight into the connection with Indian philosophy is highly instructive and revealing, and his perspective on history tends to reflect that. Actually, for our purposes, we can take up Schopenhauer’s offer to peek into the Pandora’s box, take his ‘philosophy of the will’ as a dangerous adventure, and slip away, enriched with a guided tour of the Kantian basics. The next stage after opening the Pandora’s box seems to be Nietzsche and a torrent of ‘demons unleashed’. But, genius though he is, Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ runs the risk of being Kantian pastiche, and simply does not live up to the Kantian formulation, however vexed the foundationalism that Nietzsche attacks head on.[ii]

Theories of will? We are just near a mistake, if it is that, confusing ‘will’ with an historical dynamic, something we should avoid. Perhaps it isn’t a mistake, but we would cross the wire into metaphysics, and theologies of divine will are dime a dozen, and no explanation of anything. Study your ground carefully here. Ideas of the will suffer the same dilemma of ‘noumenon/phenomenon’ that we find elsewhere in the outer world.

Kant’s system is braided with elements of rational theology, which secularists might find distracting, but which conceal a deep insight, and a trap. The ‘will’ and issues of faith, in Kant’s formulation, would demand careful understanding of the real meaning of this gesture, which is not the same as that of Christian faith. We need to be careful of transferring such a perspective to the domain of history where ‘faith’ will certainly backfire. The point should seem obvious. Schopenhauer adopts a highly restrained version of the will disconnected from the idea of freedom, Nietzsche bringing the issue across the boundary of the noumenal, a dubious development. Has the whole subject been fleeced? ‘Will’ in man is like an unsecured website. Proceed with caution, perhaps Buddhist style in a slightly different direction, as remarkably intuited by Schopenhauer. If the ‘true will’ manifests in your case, all very well, otherwise…

The issue for us is history. We are being empirical, and would have to show data to back up any statements. We can do window shopping here, but we are not rich kids, and can’t afford a theory of the will, and will have to do with our truncated man, and his self-consciousness, which rides before ‘will’, if that is real, as the horse before a chariot, the ambiguous moment of decision, which momentarily wakes up the consciousness. But, speaking of psychology, we need, or could aspire to, a theory of will, but nothing is cheap in life, and such a theory is tantamount to a theory of Reality, Big Bang to final Omega. It should remain, however, as a latent possibility of theory, and a challenge to adaptationist thinking. There can be no adaptation resulting in an unseen, virtual ‘will’. Our yogi in the Shiva seal is climbing one of the ancient ascent paths toward this peak. In the nonce, current thought would categorically reject Kant’s theme of Reason with its noumenal ambiguity. Theories of will have a real time history (observe the fate of Kant’s via Schopenhauer with his brilliant suggestions to Nietzsche with his quite different and alarming ‘will to power’), and not always an easy one. Obviously, they impinge on a basic contradiction. So we will travel light, monkey-see monkey-do, with embedded consciousness on the look out for a theory of will. It is beyond the scope of this study, but this would be a good time for a Kantian time-out, to examine his (moral) theory of the will, followed by the successors to that. We can simply treat all this as historical data about free action scripts in TP3.

Kant the Magician? Kant’s moral theory is too often dismissed, but his discourse on ‘practical reason’, however open to critique, is an absolutely classic formal gesture, by definition a form of ‘magic’, like the mustering of arms in a regiment, the cop on the beat. Scientific culture has lost this side of man, known for millennia, and Schopenhauer shows the obvious connection, with a Buddhist melody as to the ‘cessation of will’. In a secularist environment this kind of thinking has lost ground, even as an immense underground of shady characters routinely violate Kant’s strictures on the categorical imperative. Let us note that the question of ‘will’ is highly contested ground, with more at stake than philosophical issues. Tread warily here, for there is an immense occult crime zone using the same or similar terminology. The Faust myth is no myth, in this regard.

The Challenge Resolved And A Kant Fix
Within two centuries the necessary data is emerging for the first time to resolve Kant’s Challenge in unexpected fashion. But we must fix the confusion over asocial sociability that flows into the vacuum of archaeological data, data only now showing a way out of the trap. The great irony here is that we will see Kant caught up most beguilingly in the very turning point that constitutes one aspect of his problem’s solution. The answer needs just a bit more time and perspective. It is a beautiful prophecy and proof of the power of his system of critiques.
Kant’s essay, as a ‘minor’ work, is actually one of the most influential of modern history, for it enters on cat’s paws into the whole struggle of modern philosophy of history and ideology. It seems to foretell the next two critiques, and is a deceptive work in the sense of giving consideration to what Kant calls ‘asocial sociability’, but is really pursuing a different issue, in the process asking a question. Many have answers to questions of history, Kant, with a curious brilliance, had the presence of mind to but ask, and leave some answer to the future, for he must have sensed that he was given inadequate data. The essay arises just after the first critique, and yet seems to foretell the next two.
The unsuspected significance of this work shows us something very elegant about our understanding of history, if we can manage the dangers of historical directionality, and its teleological implications, which we can successfully evade with our ‘discrete-continuous’ model. Kant created a critical system, yet was so curiously wry as to propose not a Critique of Historical Reason, the curious lot of his successor Dilthey (Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism being one attempt at this book), but an Idea for a Universal History. We shall have to hope the first book, still unwritten, appears in the attempt at the second.
Our treatment of Kant’s Challenge will emerge over the course of the text, but at the same time let us note that we have already resolved the question, in essence, almost without trying. We can say that the eonic pattern satisfies, to a fuzzy first approximation of the Universal Historian, a different but related question to that which Kant posed, as we see in broadest scope that the solution is within the range of the cyclical driver of an evolutionary emergentism. Note Kant’s wording. It is very similar to our distinction of historical determination and free action, macro and micro.
We can easily resolve the question of directionality, but not fully that of teleology. Directionality, seen in the evidence of past times, expresses the phenomenal representation of some inferred teleological process, whose outcome, or telos, however, is beyond observation, and in any case a timeless unknown with its foot in the future. Of this we can know nothing as our eonic system is seen, looking backwards, to have proceeded toward the present in the recursive approximations we see in the eonic sequence. And we isolated one theme of that progression as an ‘evolution of freedom’, as an empirical study, without committing ourselves to any generalization beyond our present. Our approach is indirect, and the reason is the danger of premature teleological metaphysics, which ends in limbo if we give it an answer without an ending, which requires some statement about the future and/or the eonic sequence. But that very caution is implied by Kant’s essay.

A noumenal mystery Our eonic model almost automatically produces a structure isomorphic to Kant’s distinction of noumenon and phenomenon, and it does so deftly using different concepts and without any of the complications that haunt the original. Isomorphic, but in a different context, large-scale history. Since this was serendipitous, and unasked for, we are left to wonder what this means. The problem is that history is all of a piece, phenomenon, including our eonic sequence. And yet this sequence stages the hard evidence of the ‘uncaused freedom emergence factor’ inside a temporal oscillation. All we can do is notice this isomorphism, and proceed on our own way with our self-sufficient model, which exploits a dualism of levels for purely practical system model reasons. So what is the relationship of our eonic sequence to this enigma of Kant? Since our transitions are phenomenon yet noumenally tuned, we must consider that in some fashion our eonic sequence oscillates near the limits of manifestation (a statement bordering on a kind of metaphysics we haven’t allowed), and at the limits of our representations we see the inexplicable appearance of the freedom generator. The long lost mediating factor between the phenomenon and the noumenon suddenly appears, where least expected, in history itself. We must suspect that the ‘teleological’ aspect is beyond the limits of our representations, noumenal, as all that we see is phenomenon, directionality, a stupendous oscillation in the degrees of freedom of the system execution.

That the dynamic behind eonic evolution should stand veiled in the noumenal is a severe caution against the reification of our empirical framework into ‘theory’. Our answer therefore will be about directionality as evidence of possible teleology. Directionality means that successive transitions show ‘connected sequence’, still far short of declaring teleology, since we are not at the end of time, or out of time. It is a reasonable operational assumption to conclude nature shows teleological processes as long we don’t presume to project this thinking on the unknown, and reckon the ‘snafu of present action’ seen in the Oedipus Paradox. With this caveat, we should accept our own version of Kant’s challenge. Our study is of a phenomenon we will call the eonic effect, a temporal subset, due to the nature of the evidence, or lack of it, of a pattern of universal history.
The pattern of the eonic effect is not a philosophic solution to a problem, but an archaeological finding, partial in the sense that a shard of some lost whole is discovered empirically. Our pattern for all intents and purposes answers the quest initiated by Kant, seen in the subtle wording of his remarkable formulation, itself correlated with the pattern, that we should attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, to discern a regular movement in it.

Visions Of A Ghostseer

The labyrinth of modern thought is a difficult one in which the unforgiving complexities of parallel dialectical movement, seen in the divergence of idealism and materialism, can leave understanding stranded in the restricted movement of divorced specializations, and paradigms. Issues of ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ can vitiate thought, and deserve to be relegated temporarily to the sidelines, so that a practical study can get underway. We can construct our model of the eonic effect on the basis of limited foundations without deciding on key metaphysical issues. The philosophy of materialism is very ancient, for example the Indian Samkhya, and its modern reductionist form can confuse us, and often ceases to serve contemporary thought where the ideas of physical force fields, computer software, infinitesimals, and of information, move to bridge, better replace, the ancient distinctions of material and spiritual. Methodological naturalism, as current in the conduct of science, often muddles the question of ‘naturalism’ in its stances toward mind, consciousness and values, sometimes making them seem ‘spiritual’ unless subjected to reductionist revisionism. It is important to consider the often neglected potential of so-called ‘transcendental idealism’, in its Kantian version. Neither transcendental, nor quite an idealism, it is the perfect complement to Newton. This crude but effective kludge is, at the least, the perfect way to state our problem, whatever its solution.

Whatever the case, the stance of science is appropriate, and a rough and ready ‘materialistic phenomenology’ can be our starting point. But let’s declare the ‘material/spiritual’ distinction bad terminology. The ‘mind’ is not a ‘spiritual’ entity, but it doesn’t follow we can reduce it to simple mechanics. We can make no assumptions about the limits of naturalism, the nature of consciousness or self, based on reductionist preconceptions or extensions of physics. To make natural selection the de facto principle of demarcation was and is a recipe for confusion. One problem is that Western thought is stuck in Cartesianism. And this becomes worse as the attempt is made to transcend this dualism via reductionist materialism. However harebrained, Cartesianism is not worse! Kant’s transcendental idealism and the hybrid dual system of Samkhya are two ways to examine, and bypass, the frequently sterile ‘idealism versus materialism’ dialectic.

Extending the religion-science debate, we can consider various New Age perspectives inherited from antiquity and resurfacing in modern times. We can examine later the materialism, or generalized naturalism, of the classic Samkhya with its freedom from Cartesian duality. This non-theistic tradition, predating the rise of monotheism, shows how ‘spirituality’ can be cast without the material/spiritual terminology that is the source of chronic confusions and exploitations. Such literature, as it is translated into such terms, often ceases to make sense.

But the best guide here is the philosopher Kant, given also those he tacitly debates, such as Spinoza. The Cartesian self is seen as a metaphysical totality veiled from our self-representations. Agree or not, Kant is unmatched as a mediator of religious and scientific metaphysics, although he is still too theistic for our Darwinian atheist obsessive, and his system is complex, and often charged with inconsistencies. Kant, at least, does not suppress the issues in one-sided claims. His thinking bursts asunder his own rational theology lurking in the background. In an age where science education systematically avoids philosophy, it is strangely forgotten that Kant, issues of his idealism apart, with Newton at his fingertips, pronounced skeptical judgment over assumptions, material or otherwise, arbitrarily made about the ‘Big Three’, divinity, soul, and free will. We might consider them semantic quagmires one, two, and three, Q1, 2, 3. Kant came close to showing the subtle mechanization of this triad of concepts whose mastery will prove the true foundation for some future theory of evolution. His early essay, Visions of a Ghostseer, with its critique of mysticism, prefigured this classic treatment of metaphysics later addressed in his famous Critique of Pure Reason. The Preface to that Critique opens with the famous statement,

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions that it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.[i]

The Darwin debate can be taken as fully in the grip of this peculiar fate. This passage has suffered a strange fate itself. It was a challenge to metaphysics. Yet now science denounces Kant as metaphysical even as it makes the mistake indicated in Kant’s Preface. Reductionist evolution based on natural selection is as metaphysical as it gets. If Kant is seen to be wrong somewhere, we default back to this paragraph, with no science of metaphysics, and hence no science of evolution, physics generally managing to fend for itself.

The problem arises because Kant proceeded to a seemingly inconsistent viewpoint in his also famous Second Critique, dealing with ethics. Sometimes Kant is accused of being a foundationalist, and pragmatist or Nietzchean diatribes attempt to dismantle Kantian deductions or systematics. Neo-pragmatist denunciations of Kantian dualism are a current fashion, although this began with figures such as Hegel. But analytic philosophy is thrown off-track by Darwin. A seminal text here is Dewey’s book on Darwinism and philosophy. If we reject natural selection it is back to square one. We might have to proceed here without foundational deductions. And then such strictures apply to science as well.

There could be nothing more outrageous than accusing Kant of foundationalism, only to make Darwin’s theory of natural selection the single and sole foundation for universal and cosmic conclusions. The world of modern physics has led to another, perhaps in the future a better, version of all this, despite the massive denials of most physicists. One might conjecture that Kantian distinctions of the noumenal and phenomenal are early anticipations of current physical dilemmas. It is not true that realist Quantum Mechanics, for example, renders these issues obsolete. Current physics sails straight into these waters both at the quantum level, and in the issues of relativity and the speed of light. Science has a way to proceed here, but it is never used.[ii]

One approach to this confusion is to bypass the methodology of the first Critique and simply look at the real starting point, the antinomies explored in the section on Dialectic. In Kant’s first Critique, the section of the Dialectic addresses the Ideas of Reason, and the antinomies that arise in the context of the metaphysics of divinity, soul, and free will. Kant’s double-edged critique of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ finds the Darwinists disguised metaphysicians. Despite the fury of the Darwin debate, it is not Q1 (unless they adopt a reverse argument by design to claim disproof of the existence of divinity) but Q2 that is the nemesis of Darwinism. They have failed to consider the boundaries of the ‘self’. We would like very much to avoid the quagmire of ‘soul’ discussions. But we cannot, and we cannot claim selectionist theories provide proof for us here. This is a question of epistemology. There may be other approaches to the issues that don’t adopt the standards of knowledge discourse. But even a polite view of much ‘soul discourse’ shows that while soul beliefs may be justified the discourse of such is hopelessly confused. It is significant that even Buddhists speak of reaching ‘Enlightenment’, yet no discourse of such has truly resolved the question of self in closed form. We should take Kant’s warnings about divinity, soul, and free will to heart without presumptions, and be wary of any fixed assumptions in these three areas, even at the price of a fuzzy or incomplete theory.

Kant’s Third Antinomy In many ways the crux of the whole issue of theory and society is prefigured in the classic ‘Dialectic’ of Kant’s first Critique. “Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.” Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.”

In terms of the first Critique, Kant is a transcendental idealist, and empirical realist. This terminology tends to throw people off-track, and is in many ways unfortunate. The usage of the term ‘transcendental’ is not the same as ‘transcendent’. Although endlessly criticized now, and despite problems, this approach has never been bettered. It is one of the most classic treatments of the ‘spiritual/material’ quagmire shared by religionists and reductionists both. It is not our intent to promote Kantianism, but it is good to aware of this classic discourse. Darwinism simply proceeds into this swamp and sinks. Despite its evasions, science cannot make a place for the formal idea of freedom, and enters an infinite loop of causal theory. Kant is taboo, and endless research is devoted to methodologies making the same mistakes. Darwinian claims for the evolution of ethics are displaced into deep time, and inferred without evidence, a novel metaphysical finesse. Kant thus remains a player here. Sorry, but it’s cash at the point of sale. It’s no use saying Darwin solved this problem if the proof is deferred to the next paradigm shift or the expectation of some future discovery of fossil bones.

At the price of a two-domain theory, Kant’s approach is unmatched for its treatment of the idea of freedom, becoming problematical for some in his stance on ‘practical reason’: to which domain belongs ‘will’, if any? It is useful to displace discourse to the idea of freedom, bypassing the theological deadlock of Q1. It is really Hegel who is the idealist, and who, in collating Q1 and Q3 attempted to counter Kant’s two-domain theory with a Spinozistic metaphysical fugue. Schopenhauer tries to restore a streamlined Kantian two-domain theory. The value, or flaw, of the Kantian approach is its self-limitation: the two-domain theory produces the noumenal and phenomenal distinction, careful to deal only with what it knows.

Many will attempt to recast this as the spiritual/material divide, and many dissenting critiques exist of this in current analytic philosophy, or the philosopher Nietzsche, but it remains a benchmark, against which we can measure most other theories. The issue of dualism and its debates distract attention. Like the tip of an iceberg, we see a dualism, supposedly, of the visible tip and the invisible part. There is a dualism, yes, between tip and whole, or, no, there is no dualism, only one iceberg. Although our approach diverges from this formulation, being about history, and certainly doesn’t intend to be fooled by the rational theology that Kant almost too fairly withdraws into a systematic skepticism next to the demand for autonomy, that theology of reason should be a caution to the fanaticism of monotheists entangled in the legitimation strategies of theistic mythologies of domination. Since it would be a five-minute exercise to unscrew the Kantian formulation from its sockets and recast it in the fashion of someone like Schopenhauer, we might simply pause in respect for a potential contribution to the crisis of religion that never survived its birth in the press of propagandas.

Version .9: temporal evolution of theory We neglect the possibility that since we are immersed in our own evolution, we cannot resolve its metaphysical issues unless we have concluded this evolution. We may be observing intermediate phases where freedom as an aspect of behavior is still ambiguous. We should note that since theories of evolution are themselves embedded in a greater historical evolution, any final theory must answer to, or resolve, the antinomies of self, and will, i.e. a definition of an organism. But theory is unable to do this, define its own fundamental unit, hence the endless temporal delay, and dialectical oscillation, of any such theory. Therefore there is, as yet, no theory of evolution. Our strategy is to close on the eonic effect, without commitment to the three antinomies. Thus, for the time being, we will adopt no theory that forces the issue on divinity, self, and free will. The eonic model happens fast, and we will be done before the majestic date on which the relevant proofs emerge in time. Our model should, like software, be marked Version .9, the final Version 1.0 forever estimated for the ‘end times’ of the Final Theory. Thus our theory is itself embedded in some form of evolution (we will soon see which one).

Kant and his followers the teleomechanists ought to be included in any account of the history of biology. Swept away in the tide of Darwinism this early methodology demanded a close attention to the question of teleology and mechanics. Unfortunately, Kant has also become a defining figure in the emergence of classical liberalism. His classic essay, Idea For A Universal History, introduces the idea of ‘asocial sociability’ and the resemblance of this conceptual nexus to a kind of proto-Darwinian theory of social conflict matched with the economic materialism of Adam Smith has even left some to the propaganda ploy of claiming Kant anticipates Darwin! It is easy to show how the eonic effect resolves the ambiguity latent in Kant’s historical thinking.

Thus, E. O. Wilson, who is at least clear that Kant is no precursor of Darwin, and after a diatribe against Kantian muddle, in his Consilience takes an extreme view of the issues, in part because of the assumption natural selection is established:

If the empiricist world view is correct, ought is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement, a word that denotes what society first chose (or was coerced) to do, and then codified. The naturalistic fallacy is thereby reduced to the naturalistic problem. The solution of the problem is not difficult: ought is the product of a material process. The solution points the way to an objective grasp of the origin of ethics.[iii]

This view of the question will always sink on its maiden voyage. The public is not required to join in another round of this charge of the light brigade straight into Q3, and we should wonder why after so many failures scientists are still intent on trying. It is much simpler to accept reality, that value-free theories can’t do values, and that there is no value-free science of such. Let’s assume, however, we could mechanize this duality. It would be like an on-off switch. We can try to explain the switch, but we can’t eliminate the device itself, to produce a theory about a switch that denies its existence in a dualism of continuity and discontinuity. The term ‘naturalistic fallacy’ was always misleading here. The fallacy is no doubt real, but we should challenge this terminology ‘naturalistic’, for it doesn’t follow that the issue is one of nature versus ‘non-nature’.

Darwinism, we can see already, because of its concealed metaphysical ambition, and claims for ‘universal science’, is thrashing about miserably in Q1, 2, 3, claiming that natural selection resolves them. And nothing can relieve this confusion with the theory in its current form. Its claims about divinity (if any) are challenged by monotheists, its claims about ‘self’ by yogis (among others), and its claims about ‘freedom’ (if any) resolve, as we will see, to a particular ideology of social action. Actually, Darwinists are not so unreasonable as near Kantians, and take intelligent stances here in many cases, and it is only the misuse of selectionist theory that is a problem.

The problem is the implied resolution of Q2, using natural selection. The floodgates of scientism open and we have ethics derived from population genetics, next to implied ‘proof’ of the non-existence of soul. This is pure metaphysics in disguise. The point is that the implied negative affirmations on these issues are often taken as established, when they can be no more than disguised metaphysical assumptions. To construct a science of history we would need a science of metaphysics. But we do not have decision procedures on our three key questions. If Kant’s science of metaphysics fails, these issues will stand unresolved. The point is that natural selection is not a decision procedure on these issues. The reason is that we have not properly correlated the emergence of self with actual data of natural selection. The clear projection of a metaphysical thesis onto an unseen totality triggers the Kantian alarm bell.

Notice then that Darwinists tend to make fixed assumptions on all three of our questions, small wonder the tenacity of the Darwin debate. Darwinism is really a ship that has taken three direct hits, but always stays afloat due to the artificial respiration of sophistry or assumptions about what science will discover in the future, based on assumptions about what reductionism or natural selection ought to be able to explain, if science is to explain everything. We will construct an ‘evolution of freedom’ argument to try and trap the Darwinist in a discrepancy, if not contradiction, over freedom and necessity.

In summary, we should note that the questions of metaphysics forever haunt any form of macrohistorical reasoning, and this applies to the descent of man, and we need to stay clear of the ‘dialectic of illusion’, by using sage concepts that do not precipitate contradictions. In fact, we will embrace one such contradiction explicitly, that of freedom and necessity, and use the two ideas in tandem in a generalized empirical model.

Kant’s ethical theory Since ‘history’ is not a moral agent (although ‘evolution’ will be found to braid facts and values), the question of Kantian ethics is not our subject, and we should note that the original form of the Third Antinomy was cosmological, and we are thus more Kantian than Kant, even as our analysis of historical laws and their antinomies falls short of a derivation of Kantian moral thinking. Kant’s elaborate constructs here tend to veil the obvious insight into the place of the idea of freedom in a causal science. No more is needed for our purpose. That said, a project of parallel study of Kant’s discourses on ethics is highly useful as we proceed, and it should be recommended, in its complexity.

Kant’s ethical thinking has been dismantled so many times by irate secular critics that it is a miracle the way it forever resurfaces in its stodgy and contradictory grandeur. The reason is obvious from Nietzsche’s attempt to sweep away the apparatus of the noumenal with a spurious ‘will to power’ (in a form of thinking with a concealed influence of Darwin, no less). The strength of Kant’s attempt to scale the impossible summit is that it benchmarks the problem to be solved, that noone can solve, man’s peculiar fate. It is the perfect foil for amateur secularists, and is really about a ‘transcendental deduction’ of the possibility of freedom in the context of Newton.

We need make no assumptions about Kant’s success in his endeavor to see that Kant’s system, should we consider it problematical, or refuted, still defaults to the way we take ethical action, and is a statement of the nature of the problem we must solve. And its construct of transcendental idealism stands as a challenge to any claim to reduce freedom to causal thinking. It accurately describes our actual behavior, as we confront spontaneous ‘myths of self-will’ before the silent unseen, our noumenal being or self. The great religions carry disorderly versions of this ancient baggage with honest muddle into an age of scientism determined to rationalize what cannot be so rationalized in a causal scheme. We cannot endorse the total rejection seen in a figure such as Nietzsche, who wishes to scrap the whole apparatus of transcendental idealism for his ‘genius spree’ armed with some intoxicating notion of the ‘will to power’ as ‘all there is’. It’s fine to get drunk once in a while, but you are responsible for the consequences. If we encounter difficulties in a Kantian discourse, the fact remains that all the pieces of the puzzle are present in Kant, viz. a fundamental concept of ‘will’, at metaphysical risk, in relation to the defining standard of what we mean by a human organism. If we cannot resolve these contradictions, we must still live them.

The postulates of practical reason in Kant’s moral theory raise issues that simply won’t disappear with facile conversion to a fashionable atheism. In fact, Kant, a curious sort of dialectical atheist/theist, speaks better to the secular skeptic than the religionist. Secular critics have lost the dialectical knack to see Kant’s point here. Thus the question of ‘soul’ or ‘free will’, far more than the exhausted shibboleths of divinity, are cogently brought back to some consideration from the oblivion of Kant’s metaphysical destructions, and we must, to examine, for example, the history of Buddhism, make no prior assumptions about the claimed empirical facts of ‘reincarnation’, however great the absurdity these make of Darwinian assumptions of organism. Kant’s generic thinking, in his postulates, is thus not so easily rejected by the secularist (who ought not to be making, in any case, a reverse theology of scientism as his defining ideology). We must remain ‘free and loose’ in a dialectical movement, with a de facto non-theism that is liberated from the pall of theological discourse.

Self, Soul, and Reincarnation We see immediately where Darwin goes wrong. His theory assumes that ‘self’ is resolved as a construct of natural selection (apparently, Darwinists never really see the problem). But we can make no such assumption, for the self, in Kantian terms, may have an unseen aspect not subject to the causality of phenomena, beyond space and time. Modern positivistic scientism is adamant in the denial of such a possibility, but millennia of yogis and Buddhists should give us pause. Kant with great profundity tried to rescue science from reductionist deletions of the unknown dimensions of man. In fact, theories of evolution consistently fail to define the ‘organism’ at all. This is a disaster for scientific foundationalism. We can no longer forbid Buddhists their thinking here, based on epistemology at least. It can’t be helped. That is not an endorsement. Once New Agers get started, at the green light, the nonsense about reincarnation is unending. But this historical stream of rumor speaks from a deeper tradition that sees the organism as a temporal transient with respect to a timeless totality. The implications of transcendental idealism allow this possibility.

We cannot find resolutions of Q1, 2, 3. But Q2 leaves us suspicious. Man’s evolutionary experiences consistently come down on the positive for self, or soul. These issues concern the dilemma of the knowable, of epistemology. False beliefs are no doubt rampant, a New Age chaos. We would like to help, clamp down on superstition. But we cannot therefore know that we don’t have a soul, for example, just because epistemology is at fault. It could go either way. What’s more, scientists slyly dip into this goblet, the question of soul is like the issue of a computer program, an intangible entity associated with a mechanical assembly. In that sense discourse on soul is both inevitable and justified. But the deeper question remains, and Kant’s critiques can be helpful here. The Himalayas are filled with yogis who see their past lives, they claim, and have a special name for those rare beings who achieve such knowledge. Supposedly. How would we know? Our only concern is to remain neutral in constructing our argument, which can’t depend on assumptions here, but threatens to do so in any balanced study of something like the history of Buddhism. We will take no stand on reincarnation here, but the probability is that an entire dimension is missing in current scientific accounts. That said, most of the discourse in this field, even the best in the Buddhist tradition, is wildly unreliable.

In a scientific culture brain and mind are assumed without proof to be identical, figures such as Eccles and Popper being significant dissenters. We should be tolerant both ways, of reductionist hotheads who make provisional assumptions to explore new knowledge, and foolish enough to wish to download the mind onto a computer. In the age of genetics this reductionist view seems to some to be on the verge of demonstration, but science is always on the verge here, although this research might hopefully allow us to restate or clarify some old confusions in a genetic context.

The confusion lies in the scrambled usage of the terms ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’. In fact, the terms are almost meaningless as used, hence warning us to be wary of denying soul, disaster in reverse. As we go along we will look briefly at the classic (non-denominational) Samkhya materialism of the tradition of India. This tradition is interesting because everything is ‘material’ in some sense of ‘material’ or ‘samsaric’ phenomenology, and the shades of human consciousness in a vast spectrum fall naturally within the scope of ‘material or natural phenomenology’. There is state beyond soul to which a name is only reluctantly given, turiya. This means the ‘fourth’, and these discourses speak of four states, sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, and a fourth. Samkhya enjoins liberation from soul as a ‘material condition’ in some sense (?!). The confusion arises because we tend to think ‘transcendent’ simple realities, e.g. mind, which can’t find reductionist accounts in current science. These yogis learned the hard way that much talk of ‘spirit’ is just that talk, and that even mystical states are phenomenological, far short of their destination. They couldn’t afford the luxury of religious fantasies.

Schopenhauer and death In the wake of Kant the philosopher Schopenhauer produced a brilliant, streamlined version of transcendental idealism. We might cite a passage from Dale Jacquette’s The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, remarkable for revealing the latent potential of ‘transcendental idealism’.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy often gives the impression of having been composed expressly for the purpose of reconciling the phenomenal will to the inevitability of death. All the apparatus of his main treatise, the fundamental distinction between the world as Will and representation, the concept of thing-in-itself as beyond the principium individuationis, and fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason, can be understood as contributing to a moral, metaphysical and mystical religious recognition that death is nothing real and hence nothing to fear. If Schopenhauer is correct, he proves that death is not an event, and hence altogether unreal. Death is not an event in the world as representation, but is rather an endpoint or limit of the world as representation, and in particular in the first-person formulation as my representation. The world as representation begins and ends with the consciousness of the individual representing subject. At the moment of death, all representation comes to an immediate abrupt end, after which there remains only thing-in-itself. An individual’s death is not something that occurs in or as any part of the world as representation. Nor can death possibly be in or a part of the world as thing-in-itself or Will. There are no events or individuated occurrences, nothing happening in space or time, for thing-in-itself, and in particular there is no progressive transition from life to death or from consciousness to unconsciousness. If with Schopenhauer we assume that there exists only the world as representation and as thing-in-itself interpreted as Will, then there is no place on either side of the great divide for death, no possibility for the existence or reality of death.[iv]

The connection between science, transcendental idealism, and the issues of the nature of the organism stand out in an especial clarity in this passage, which shows the key to an evolutionary psychology that reconciles the hopeless confusions of degenerated mysticism in the context of a philosophy tailored to the context of science.

The missing software manual Along with the problem of Version .9 of the theory, we also have problem of the missing human software manual. Who am I and how do I work? No manual for this has ever been produced, although Schopenhauer, less his metaphysics of will, comes close, as he serendipitously restates the essence of many classic sutras for a modern age. One of the more difficult aspects of Kantian discourse lies in the transition from the first to second Critiques. There practical reason comes to the fore as a seeming contradiction to what has been established in the first Critique. And here an ‘issue’ of faith seems to arise in relation to the ethical will. Kant must speak for himself here, but in our thinking we can see the dilemma arising: we have no ability to produce an account of the real psychology of man. But our software suggests that a factor of ‘will’ is called for to give meaning to what is plainly in front of us. We can truncate the factor of will, and yet the result is not a full account of man, what to say of a theory of the evolution of man. Kant offers a way to deal with this, and the Indian sutras another. So man suffers a severe limitation, and can’t easily even produce a proper software manual for his own function. Beware of the ready market for such manuals. They are dime a dozen. The better ones are the Indian sutras, but these are simply procedural more than philosophical. They say, do this, then maybe… And they produce their own extravaganza, deserving a Kantian treatment. Kant with a brilliant wisdom and ruthless self-discipline reaches the limit with his discourse on ‘apperception’, and then simply stops. Kant shows the way to modernize those sutras.

Notes toward an eonic sutra: Self-consciousness The distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness is very ancient and useful for our purposes, for it allows a bridge between science, history, and the evolutionary psychologies of many ancient traditions. It tends to die out in normal discourse. It can also rescue us from the metaphysics of mysticism. We can adopt a lightweight ‘pidgin sutra’ approach to this theme of self-consciousness, in a generalized usage that can be passepartout between cognitive science, a Buddhist discourse (where it is always present in some form), and anything else. It is not good to hybridize these different things, but our usage can embrace all of them as objects of examination.

Despite the problem of free will, we have one work-around. We can use the classic distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness to construct a surrogate ‘will’. We attempt to construct an idea of the ‘evolution of freedom’ and this will be seen in the context of the contradiction of freedom and determinism. This takes the form of seeing the ‘will’ as an almost virtual consideration, its self-understanding being an embedded aspect of its own evolution. Note that man speaks of will but seldom shows this feature, like software installed but rarely used. He is stranded with an intellectual idea of ‘will power’ that goes nowhere, is powerless, for reasons a Schopenhauerian analysis might illuminate. The most that he can do it seems is to act in brief intervals of self-consciousness to change direction, and this mimics ‘will’. Thus this barely active factor of will takes the form of the distinctions or shades of consciousness, or self-consciousness, which carry for all intents and purposes some element of will. This amounts to saying that our consciousness can be transformed as self-consciousness, which can elicit momentary actions that look like free will (you have that experience twenty times a day). But in this approach we can define self-consciousness within the realm of nature. In fact, that is probably how the history of man’s freedom and self-evolution occur. This self-consciousness is a demonstrable aspect of man’s evolutionary psychology, and occurs as the ‘moment of attention’ standing beyond the stream of consciousness. Thus instead of ‘free will’, we can proceed with volition, as ‘moments of attention’. In general, the functions of choice and self-direction can be taken as is in terms of psychological processes open to historical description, with or without a scientific description of their functionality. What the software does requires no ‘machine language’, so to speak.

Students of Kant will of course wish to adopt his stance on free will in relation to morality and other questions. But our approach, at a more primitive level, is optionally compatible here, in the sense that free will in the Kantian meaning would always act via ‘self-consciousness’ at the boundary of the awareness. We will adopt no stance on Kantian moral theory except to note later the way the ‘idea of freedom’ in our model will suffer a similar ambiguity in the sense of ‘historically realizable freedom’ versus some deeper level of the same.