Selections: The Challlenge Resolved

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. [i]

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.[ii]

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 cycl ical 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. [iii]

[i] Cf. Robert Wright, Nonzero (New York: Vintage, 2001). For the influence on a recent American president, cf. Strobe Talbot, The Great Experiment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 331).

[ii] Theodore Platinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), Thomas Powers et al. (ed.), From Kant to Weber (Malabar, Florida: Krieger, 1999)

[iii] S. Korner, Kant (NY: Penguin, 1962), W. H. Werkmeister, Kant (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1980), Karl Jaspers, Kant [From The Greek Philosophers, Volume 1] (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1971),William Galston, Kant and the Problem of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1975), Hans Saner, Kant’s Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), Yirmiyahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), Keith Ward, The Development of Kant’s View of Ethics (NY: Blackwell, 1972), George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), J. D. McFarland, Kant’s Concept of Teleology (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1970), Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), Bernard Carnois, The Coherence of Kant’s Doctrine of Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), Peter McLaughlin, Kant’s Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation (Lewisten, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), Thomas Wiley, Back To Kant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,1978), Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Patrick Riley, Kant’s Political Philosophy (New York: Rowman & Allandheld, 1983), Harry Van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1988), Arthur Collins, Possible Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).