4. IDEA FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||
|
4. IDEA FOR A UNIVERSAL HISTORY |
|||
| 4.1.1 Laws Of History And Popper On Historicism | ||||
|
Even as we respond to the challenge of Darwinism, we must confront the legacy of historical theory, as we embark on a path often labeled ‘historicism’. The perception of the eonic effect, in the evidence of what we have called the eonic evolution of civilization, seen in the strange hints of periodic motion in its emergence, must by its nature propose to reopen the issues, well-known to students of historiography, of macrohistorical structure and sequence, ‘laws of history’, in the debate that has attended the rise of modern historical research, beginning in the early nineteenth century. This research has tended to skirt these very issues as intractably difficult, or undecidable, in the first priority of accurate historical fact-finding. Indeed, a healthy skepticism is generally brought by the specialist narrative historian to the legacy of Universal History as it emerges in the movement, for example, of German Idealism , and to attempts to find laws, forces, or regularities of the kind studied in the more fundamental branches of science. In the latter category must be placed the Darwinian theory of evolution, and in the middle, the Marxist theory of historical materialism, this a significant inversion of an idealist program. To these can be added the eclectic world of the macroeconomic model, seldom explicitly offered as a model of historical evolution, but very much so taken in practice in the various ‘economic interpretations of history’. Related to this, one of the most interesting challenges to
the attempt to find historical ‘laws’ is the work of Isaiah I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history. This term has a complex and confusing history but we will take Popper’s version to start. This important critique (directed at Marxist predictive ‘laws’) does not apply to our eonic effect, for the simple reason that our evidence is empirical, and gives us the answer, without telling us what the question was. We see pattern, rhythm, but these are not laws, and we make no predictions from the observation. But this was our problem, not nature’s. We can retreat from causal explanation to pure periodization, and correlated causal association.[i] It would seem that the case against laws of history, laws of evolution strangely exempted, is so overwhelming that we should abandon their consideration. But the ironic result of seeing the eonic effect is precisely this, to find strong, conclusive, evidence of historical regularity that courts rather than preempts the issues of freedom. Our three turning points suddenly start to make sense, for they show us nothing but free activity, and yet this is demonstrably different in the crucial eonic intervals, witness the Axial Age. More, we see the idea of freedom born in this very context of historical determination, e.g. emergent democracy shows historical conditioning. This provokes the classic contradiction in the question, what causes freedom? We will explore in the next section the simple solution we see in action, which is to find some middle ground between ‘freedom and necessity’ in the factor of self-consciousness. Thus, we can adapt our thinking to the eonic effect, by taking the contrast of consciousness and self-consciousness as surrogates for determinism and free will. And then freedom can be an evolutionary idea carried as a virtual potential realized at points of ‘relative freedom’ or self-consciousness. Indeed, note the paradox that arises here, which is that ‘freedom’ in history, and ‘the generation of freedom’ cease to be the same thing. We must realize our own potential, and activate that. Note that the emergence of philosophical ideas of freedom itself shows correlation to our non-random pattern. ‘Laws’ and differential equations The problem can be seen by looking at the differential equation, the rubric for the idea of a ‘law of anything’. This sometimes enters historical theory under the discourse of ‘covering laws’. The problem is that a differential equation is a causal sequence from a set of initial conditions, and has a net information content that is unchanging from beginning to end. But in our case evolution is putative ‘self-organization’ in some form, and, whatever we call it, broken into intervals that allow a net increase in information content (we suspect, not proven, many of our ‘eonic effect’ look like permutations, relative transforms of something prior) at each stage. In effect, a differential equation determines a future, while our process of evolution ‘breaks free’ from the causal sequence at periodic intervals. And it spawns a new category, ‘geographical freedom’ in opposing types in the interiors and exteriors of its localized mainline. A freedom paradox Consider as scratchpad heuristic thinking the contradiction (there are any number of variants), speaking very loosely: either man is free to self-evolve or else he is not so free and is ‘evolved’ by a larger process toward that freedom, at which point there should be a transition to a post-evolutionary era where ‘evolution’ is switched off and freedom takes effect. Note the dilemma. If he is too ‘evolved’ by that larger process, that self-evolution can never begin or exercise itself, yet if that ‘self-evolution’ is total he might never advance, remaining at the level of his starting point, and never reach freedom (which we didn’t define, the definition might itself be evolving). One resolution of the paradox might be to consider that some form of ‘evolution of one kind’ must initiate an evolutionary sequence toward freedom as un-interfered with ‘sort of freedom’, and yet operate intermittently in a series of on again off again bursts of ‘evolving’ between which self-evolution can occur. It is like the extra wheels on a child’s bike. The temporary constraint on ‘freedom to ride’ is necessary as a stage toward riding solo. We have just found a way to derive the eonic effect with its distinct alternation of degrees of freedom. Thus an evolution of freedom might well break down into a series of alternating intervals of degrees of freedom, induced or not induced. Such situations occur all the time in real life, e.g. the ‘third wheel’ on a child’s bike. Note: Popper and historicism We find the rejection of the entire domain of macrohistory in Popper, who amplifies Fisher’s Lament, in his attack on ‘historicist’ beliefs in The Poverty of Historicism , where he criticizes grand clichés of historic Destiny and the ‘dramatic’ view of history, the idea that history has a plot or significant structure. Unfortunately, the term ‘historicism’ has changed its meaning here. Not only Kant’s Idea, but Herder’s other Idea, arises in a genuine dialectic at the eonic synchronous moment of German philosophy. The different historicism of Herder, the complex world of nineteenth century German cultural philosophy, the phantom Book never written, The Critique of Historical Reason of Dilthey, as the emphasis on the unique, and Popper’s critique of his definition of historicism, as the historical generalization of physical law, show the complex legacy of this perspective, as the term seems to shift into its opposite. The eonic effect beautifully synchronizes the contrary meanings of the term ‘historicism’, for we can see therein a way in which the ‘lawful’ and ‘determinate’ can be taken in a sense that does not contradict the unique, the particular, or the potential individuality of the historical agent.[ii] Our position with respect to this viewpoint that scorched the pot for all macrohistorical thinking in its Cold War vein, is that we cannot easily compute historical forces in action, but cannot conclude thereby the fallacy of the genre. In a play on the idea of the ‘covering law model’ (law as differential equation and initial conditions), we see the points of historical initializing, if not their law of dynamism in each of the fretting points of our eonic dynamism. If we cannot find historical laws, we can nonetheless discover a (not very rigorous) ‘deduction’ of the probable existence of some form of ‘Big History’. Turning toward world history to find what we suspect, we discover it in short order.[iii] In general, critics of ideas of Universal History (never the least critical of the idea of Universal Evolution extended over several billion years) expose the requirements for an historical law: such a ‘law’, that can be no law, as determination, or patterning, must not only have its forcefulness, but take into account or interact with what its agent or actor does or ‘will do’, and allow the transformation of optionality, that is a factor of human ‘will’. In other words, without fail, as in Popper’s critique, the idea of freedom is brought to causality, Kant’s Antinomy. We have one of the few solutions to the paradox, or at any rate the ‘solution’ we see in the eonic effect , in a cyclical driver, operating at different degrees of freedom, which is essentially our distinction of ‘eonic determination’ and ‘free action’. What our pattern suggests is that there can be an alternation between directionality and randomness or free action, a simple solution to the contradiction, if we can find evidence for this, and we can. The relative transformation of cultural streams operating on self-consciousness can take one’s breath away. Nature has a hidden mystery.
[i]
Isaiah [ii] Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), R. Burns & H. Rayment-Pickard, Philosophies of History (New York: Blackwell, 2000), p. 57, ‘Classical Historicism’, Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man and Reason (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1971), Charles Brambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision: Marx, Foucault, Habermas (NY: The Guilford Press, 1995). The term ‘historicism’ has a complex history and multiple strains of definition beyond that given by Popper. Even as Kant was writing the figure Herder and others generate a discourse that is subsumed in the Hegelian philosophy of history. We don’t have sufficient space to pursue this here, a major omission, but we can see how our model potentially resolves one of its key issues and concerns, the interplay of the particular and the universal. Our eonic sequence produces a balance of the unique moment of a cultural transition and its integration into a greater whole. Robert D’Amico, Historicism and Knowledge (NY: Routledge, 1989). [iii] William Dray, Philosophy of History (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993). |
||||