Selections: Critique Of Historical Reason

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 daptationist 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.

[i] Robert P. Wolff (ed.), Kant (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1967), George Schrader, “The Thing In Itself in Kantian Philosophy”.

[ii] Arthur Hübscher, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer in its Intellectual Context (Lewiston, New York: Edward Mellen, 1989), Christopher Janeway, Self and World in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).