Our eonic periodization is about to uncover one of the most remarkable mysteries of human history, and evolution, a windfall that leads us to the core of the Kantian philosophy of history. It is the only clue we have to the otherwise invisible action of the eonic sequence. On the surface the eonic effect is a transparent phenomenon, almost widget-like in its system action. But the basic dynamic never shows its hand. However, like a dropped handkerchief it does leave behind the traces of a bare something, and in the next chapter we will attempt to uncover that mysterious logic, reminiscent of the Kantian intimations of the noumenal.
Looking at the eonic effect we see that the scale of evolution is so vast that no simple theory of the usual type is possible, the reason for our retreat to a ‘tracker-approximator’. No single generalization will suffice, and ‘evolution’ can change its meaning at each interval. A classic example is the ‘state emergentism’ of TP1 and the ‘anti-state emergentism’ in later transitions, a system reacting against itself. Further, we are embedded observers, which will lead us to the concept of an ‘eonic observer’. Finally, the last straw, we notice, and we simply describe, what we will call the discrete freedom sequence, in the process discovering the relationship of our data to a classic Kantian antinomy. These are empirical observations, not proofs, but we are left suspicious. We are left, we suspect, in ‘theory deadlock’, as we do a double take on a theory of causal generation and a theory of freedom emergence. There goes ‘theory’. However, none of this prevents our model from tracking the data, and the result is still highly useful, and informative, and hopefully on its way to ‘some new kind of science’. If this seems complex, relax. We have reached the limits of theory, and can proceed, in the next chapter, to creating our ‘eonic map’.
Thus, our eonic sequence is now a ‘causal surrogate’ for some kind of Big History. But inside that sequence we find ‘freedom clusters’ as eonic emergents in the frequency schedule. The result is four things, eonic determination, free action, eonic determination of Freedom, and free action as potential Freedom, along with ‘freedom from sequential dependency’. That’s more than we need, as artificial concepts in our model, but with a little experience, the distinctions here are interesting, and clearly relevant to our model.
If you ever wondered why the American, French, and later revolutions tended toward snafu problems, the reason is somewhere in there. The study of these together shows why an evolutionary or historical theory always suffers difficulty: it’s just mis-applied Newtonian thinking. But at the same time this pattern inside a pattern is solid enough to be part of our photo finish demonstration. We see large-scale macroevolution, empirically tracked, of ‘freedom phenomena’. Although ‘free action’ can generally manage near republics, real democracy only gets a jumpstart in the eonic mainline, a clear smoking gun for some kind of ‘eonic determination’.
Thus, to define terms, one of the most interesting things we can observe about this pattern is the double appearance of democracy in two successive turning points, in both cases near a divide. If only we had a longer sequence, more data, but this is unnerving. This is the piece de resistance of the eonic effect. We will call this the discrete freedom sequence, a subset of our eonic pattern.

Discrete freedom sequence: a second hypothesis Looking at the eerie and exact timing of our eonic sequence we suspect that the double emergentism of democracy is, however we might conceivably explain it, not chance. A look at the general backup in the deep modern emergent core shows this to be a more than reasonable guess, since the ‘evolution of the idea of freedom’ is itself a crucial component of the modern transition. The resemblance to questions raised by Kant is quite extraordinary, emboldening us to proceed. But our demonstration of a non-random pattern doesn’t require closing on some oversimplification as theory.

A Kantian antinomy Confronted with our black box we have few clues to its action behind the scenes. Its depth is locked and sealed. But in the discrete freedom sequence we get an inkling. On the one hand the eonic sequence generates a ‘causal nexus’, on the other hand the discrete freedom sequence is generated in the mainline in an opposing, yet embedded, trend. This, most remarkably, resembles the Third Antinomy of Kant. Our system is ‘evolving freedom’ over millennia, in some formal sense. But can we define ‘freedom’?

This sequence is the crux of the whole question of theory. But all we are going to do is try to fit it in our general scheme of periodization, as a clue to what is going on. We will see later that we have in all innocence rediscovered the basis of ‘noumenal freedom’ concepts, for which Kant’s system is so notable. We will make no firm claims there, but leave that as a side study in the endnotes to this Chapter. Let us simply note that no matter how hard we zoom in on our data, we will never find the ‘causation’ of freedom. By definition, in our type of model, reflecting the data, we see that it just appears, inside the eonic matrix. Think in terms of a simple question, where does Freedom come from?
Since this is circumstantial evidence in a complex history stretching over millennia, caution is required, and we need to return to the data, which shows that Greek democracy seems to appear out of nowhere. We suspect that no standard sociological causation theory is going to explain it, although the point is open to debate. But its placement in our derandomized pattern is too suspicious for comfort. That’s obvious at a high level, but counterintuitive as we zoom in. It is good to make a zoom target of the emergence of Greek democracy for a dose of realism, to ensure that we don’t get carried away in some metaphysics.
A big part of the answer, for most theorists, in the Greek case was the invention of cheap iron weapons, and the resulting equalization. But we can, and must, produce the Axial Age correlation, both here and in the Old Testament instance, without flinching at the paradoxes created by the gesture of Big History. We can’t sweep this under the rug in the name of some scientific account. Quite apart from anything else the philosophy of history is itself part of the discrete freedom sequence, as is the emergence of abolitionism, and the general question of slavery.
But let’s get carried away for a moment, not with metaphysics, but periodization. We have a modern divide. Backtracking 2400 years, we should have another, ca. –600. Right on schedule we see the rough comparison (as our later discussion of the Old Testament will make clear). So what do we find in the Greek case?

Zoom target: Solon The emergence of democracy in ancient Greece is a complex subject, and the slow progression from monarchies to city-states should, by any standard of sociological analysis, be confined to local social causative explanations. Yet if we zoom out and adopt eonic periodization we see that the appearance and timing of Solon is non-random, occurs near a transitional divide, and becomes otherwise inexplicable by standard canons. To finish the question off, we jump 2400 hundred years to the next divide, and what do we find, another democratic take-off. Chance? Not likely, dumbfounded or not.

We must be careful and distinguish two levels of evidence, the non-random pattern of the eonic effect, and the subpattern of the discrete freedom sequence, which might give us an inkling of what’s going on in our black box, for here we discover some familiar issues of the philosophy of history dropping some historical hints. The issue of theory, teleology, and ideology will prove desperate in this case. The question of the emergence of freedom is taken here as an exercise in demonstrating a non-random pattern. Pointing to something is not as such an explanation. This is one of the most complicated problems in the whole of human knowledge. So we won’t pretend to solve it via the fantastic.
But this example will show us the real complexity of historical theory, where reductionist scientism simply strikes out ad infinitum. We should note that Hegel attempted to exploit this situation for a theological approach. And Marx, moving to the opposite extreme, produced his historical materialism. We need to start over in ultra-cautious fashion and simply describe the full puzzle, which has a kind of Kantian simplicity and sublimity in its stark mystery.

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

.

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.

A science of history? The question of a science of history provokes a contradiction as an antinomy of causality and freedom: in the stance of science, there must be a science of history, but in the consideration of freedom there cannot be a science of history. This variant of a classic Kantian antinomy is resolved in a dialectic that ‘somehow’ unites both thesis and antithesis, and bursts asunder the limits of space-time in the context of a discovered analog to ‘transcendental idealism’, the classic companion to Newtonianism. If we connect this to our question, when did evolution stop and history begin? we can precipate the same antinomy for earlier ‘evolution’. The Darwinian framework is inadequate for this situation. As we will see there can be a science of history: this requires an evolutionary basis, and a mediation of causality and freedom together, a strange requirement, one most surprisingly satisfied, and very exactly, by the data of the eonic effect. We must connect history and evolution in a new way, and this can be found if we pursue a ‘science of freedom’, in the resolution of the paradox of determinism. We can bring evolution into history by asking still another paradoxical question, Has man become ‘homo sapiens’ yet, by ‘evolving freedom’ (according to various definitions of freedom)? If man is ‘not yet free’ the ‘evolving freedom’ must show a macro aspect, otherwise, as his freedom evolves, man’s self-evolution will become a micro process, exiting from evolution in our Great Transition. In fact, as we discover the eonic effect we see that nature provides us with the elegant and simple solution to these enigmas of the descent of humans. We will adopt a rubric of ‘self-consciousness’ as the intermediate transitional category, compatibalist with respect to causality and freedom.

A Science of Freedom? The idea of a ‘science of freedom’ emerged in the wake of the Kantian critique of metaphysics. We can easily establish that, while such a science is not easily attainable, the idea itself is at least coherent, and can be approached empirically. As an example consider the relationship of a computer with a GUI and a user. The tandem system, computer/user, is a relationship of the user’s options and the computer’s (deterministic) program. We must analyze a combined system in which the field of the user’s options and its relationship to a larger system must be studied together. The eonic model discovers such a system in historical/evolutionary terms.

Looking at history we can easily show where Darwinian theory is going wrong. The relationship of history and evolution creates a paradox, and placing the two in conjunction allows us to infer something about earlier evolution. The quest for a science of history is now beginning to overflow from Darwinian confusion as a reductionist tactic for the social sciences in the claims of sociobiologists, ambitious to dismiss all other forms of discourse. It seems like a welcome mistake, a foolhardy gesture we can applaud! Just at that point we do have facts, facts that can stop Darwinist thinking in its tracks, and in the process discipline the current confusions.

The inherent power of our eonic model exposes at once a curious contradiction in the teleological thinking of Kant. Kant is confusing here because he produces a splendid critical methodology for the mediation of teleological issues, but ends stuck with the wrong dynamic for this method, asocial sociability. Indeed, this confusion has overflowed its bounds into a Darwinian mystification applied to history, embraced by an American president.[i]

But examining our eonic sequence we discover that dynamic to be different, inherently developmental. Kant predicts a teleological processs he can’t find, but which we have clearly found: ‘freedom’s causality’. As Elizabeth Ellis notes in Kant’s Politics,

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.[ii]

But this is just what we have found, with respect to macrohistory, at least. The author complains that Kant’s teleology and the necessity of free political action are in conflict. This is the case, but we have resolved this also, by seeing teleology differently, as eonic directionality, and dispensing with the factor of asocial sociability, whatever its relevance as an actual description of human culture, as an intrinsic teleological process. Our eonic model produces an independent teleological factor, visible only as directionality, that conditions but does not restrict human free action. Teleology enters our discourse as a perception looking backward of the eonic sequence, but this cannot directly change the nature of our freedom in the present, save to change the self-consciousness we bring to current action. That is, looking backward, we can see a teleological directionality, applying to macro-action. Our micro-action in its wake may or may not reflect that. This is critical for the preservation of freedom in history, for, as we examine the discrete freedom sequence, we see, remarkably, direct macro association with the emergence of democracy and this should lead us to examine the match to micro-action. Already, the American system is under challenge on the grounds of imperialistic distortions. And the fate of the American Indian in this outcome is not something that can be legitimated on teleological grounds. Because of that factor of its realization as micro-action, the American system is likely to be in trouble down the road.

Kant is clearly dissatisfied with the premature data history is giving him, and clutches at the straw of the French Revolution, in the field of micro-action, quite on the right track as we can see, from a later perspective. If we stand back to take into account our entire eonic sequence, the strength and limits of taking the French Revolution in this way become clear, even as the larger data set completely confirms his basic intuition. For we have found in the eonic sequence the unmistakable instances sought for of ‘freedom’s causality’, or, to put from the viewpoint of the historical stream, the absence of antecedent cause, empirical evidence of the lack of a cause. In the greater past, the point is unmistakable in the Axial phenomenon, thence by close examination of the overall character of the modern transition relative to world history.

Our eonic model has shown an ingenious way to resolve this paradox, and we can see that there is a simple way to mediate teleological questions even as we adopt the operational assumptions of a rational politics based on human autonomy. The riddle of teleology as seen in our system remains unsolved, yet it is detected via its representation in the pattern of directionality, seen looking backward. The constraint on our free power of choice, and political action, takes the form of the degree of our self-consciousness in the realization of the emergent system we find ourselves in. This is an elegant reconcialiation of the seeming contradiction, allowing us to adopt teleological considerations, without these foreclosing on our need to our freedom in history. There is no relief from the differentiations in the meanings of the term ‘freedom’ and its consequent divergences of realization.

The necessity of assumptions of free rational action to conduct politics, conflicting with Kant’s teleological thinking has been ‘fixed’ in our approach, by dropping the association of ‘asocial sociability’ with the driving action of evolution, and we can find the reconciliation of the contradiction, roughly speaking, in the way in which our two level system shifts gear between higher and lower degrees of freedom. This formulation allows us to free practical action from teleology, even as we allow this factor to remain in a larger system.

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.

A short and very accessible text, it avoids the technical language of Kant’s larger works, but was written right between the 1st and 2nd editions of ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and thus represents Kant in his ‘mature’ stage. As a meditation on themes of world history, progress and enlightenment the essay picks up themes that Kant developed elsewhere but in a bold and programmatic fashion. It can thus be read productively in comparison to Hegel and Marx’s approaches to world history, and can in some ways be seen as setting a challenge which Hegel was to take up in his own philosophy, and which Marx was consequently to develop. Of particular interest in relation to Hegel and Marx is Kant’s reference to man’s “unsocial sociability” in the Fourth Thesis, which seems to suggest something like a socio-historical dialectic.