Selections: Kant's Question

Even as we examine Kant’s essay on history we develop a critique of one aspect of Kant’s thinking, which devolves, at least in the minds of some, into another conflict theory. Even as this happens Kant is proposing a new and brilliant method of dealing with teleological questions. Unfortunately the contradiction between the two creates a confusion, one instantly resolved by our eonic model. Kant seems stranded in the category of ‘bourgeois ideologist’, bestowing the curse of teleology on a dismal science of human conflict. Small wonder, then, that Marx categorically rejected the whole critical system. Another casualty of Adam Smith.

Kant is very strict in his separation of the phenomenon, and its mechanical causality, and the noumenal, associated with the complexities of freedom (until he arrives at his moral theory). But we have discovered a macroevolutionary link between the two! Let us be aggressive here, and wrest Kant’s essay from its sockets with a demonstration that it is really asking a question, not proposing a conflict theory.

Constitutive vs. regulative judgments Kant distinguishes carefully between constitutive and regulative judgments, then again, in the Third Critique, between the determinative and reflective.[i]

The ‘As If’ Sometimes Kant is interpreted as asking us to proceed ‘as if’ in the consideration of natural teleology or purpose.

Teleology as constitutive! The problem here is that we can see, with sledgehammer force, that directionality, hence a detected teleology, is genuinely constitutive of the data of the eonic effect, in its representation as directionality, seen looking backwards. Thus, although this seems incautious, and we have erected a severe failsafe against teleological presumption, we cannot easily conclude that teleology is to be seen only ‘as if’ through regulative judgments. After five thousand years of records the smoking gun of empirical data appears out of the blue. You may fight a losing battle to say this is subjective, and indeed, such a judgment involves complex assessments, including moral and aesthetic iffy hunches. But the overall gestalt is devastatingly obvious. The mediating link between the noumenal and the phenomenal takes the form of the eonic sequence, itself we presume in the realm of phenomenon.

Teleological ideologies To call the teleological constitutive is a dangerous step, but our eonic method will spawn an instant failsafe. None of this is grounds for teleological ideologies projected on the future, unfortunately. Any such ideology will be micro-action in the wake of the eonic sequence, and history records an ‘antinomy of teleological judgment’ in action, e.g. as the collision between Kant the bourgeois ideologist and Marx, for example.

The noumenal approximation Our eonic sequence is nonetheless strictly an aspect of the phenomenal realm. Its noumenal lookalike character points to the limits of our knowledge and the noumenal mystery behind the evolutionary driver. Please note that we cannot divide history up into phenomenal and noumenal sections, never our point!

The Old Testament again This point is important because the ‘mistake’ we are pointing too is clearly one that haunted Jews and Christians as they tried to reckon with the concept of an ‘Age of Revelation’, and fumbled the ball most tragically. There is no such age, nor does it inherently impinge on the spiritual domain. All we see is the pseudo-noumenon pressed against history in the eonic sequence. We have thus a powerful and different interpretation in the eonic effect. And yet the Israelites were onto something, their eonic context, whatever the primitive character of their realizations as an upgraded Canaanite polytheism turned monotheism (almost) was ejected into the stream of history.

The data for historical directionality is powerful and conclusive, and we can see the problem that Kant had, and the reason he ends up entangled in the confusions of ‘asocial sociability’, even as his essay senses something that will resolve it, a ‘something’ that we have discovered. Let us dispense with ‘asocial sociability’ once and for all. One way to do that is to redefine it as the dynamic relationship of individual and society, and the tension between the two. In this interpretation there is no conflict with our different interpretation. But unfortunately the serpent has entered the garden, and the grounds for a pseudo-theory of the teleology of social conflict is ambiguously evident in Kant’s rendering. Kant may as well be a proto-Darwinist. Disaster! We must, if necessary, bail out from the Kantian connection and stick to our independently derived eonic model.

Asocial Sociability Even as we examine the issues of the Kantian philosophy of history, we should note that we depart radically from the conventional interpretation of Kant’s historical thinking in dislodging the focus on ‘asocial sociability’ as a teleological mechanism driving cultural progression. More Kantian than Kant we stumble on a solution to the teleological confusion that still lurks in his historical thinking. The meaning of the term ‘asocial sociability’ tends to drift between some idea of ‘social conflict’ and/or the basic descriptive categories of ‘individual and society’. In any case to ascribe progress to social conflict is a clear mistake, and we can see that a now visible macro component voids the necessity of this ‘flat history’ thinking.

Discrete Freedom Sequence We can see at a glance that the emergence of a progression toward a ‘perfect civil constitution’ has two components, a macro factor and a micro factor. The emergence of democracy, for example, is perfectly timed in our eonic sequence. This macro aspect, even as Kant spoke, is then replaced by the micro-action of democratic realization. In general, the eonic sequence has its finger in all pies of human state formation and deliberation, from the early Pharaohs to the era of Solon to the French Revolution. While social agents are at each other’s throats, Greater Nature proceeds by eonic induction to produce democracy virtually on schedule.

Nature’s Secret Plan Kant’s asks us for ‘nature’s secret plan’. This language is too hypostatized for us, but we can see that the eonic sequence clearly draws the veil for one glimpse of this ‘plan’.

Kant’s essay has more than this paragraph, speaks of progress toward a perfect civil constitution, Nature’s Secret Plan, and creates an ambiguity over a proposed idea of ‘asocial sociability’, as its own resolution of the question implicit in the essay. We can see that Kant is just on the threshold of another conflict theory of the Smithian type, but senses that something is wrong and that there must be some larger process at work, possibly teleological, in the category of natural teleology. As it stands Kant produces an elegant general framework then is reduced to near proto-Darwinian thinking in the default collapse of historical motivation to ‘antagonism’. To ascribe this to ‘Nature’ in the large as teleological is a potential calamity and the moral individual is renedered irrelevant. Further, this is ambiguous. Is a ‘macro-teleological something’ ascribed to hypostatized ‘Nature’ doing historical progress, or is it the individual in his freedom? Kant never really resolved this problem. The eonic model resolves the question at one stroke. In our two level model, the answer to the paradox is that there are two components to historical progression, macro and micro. When they intersect in our transitions, the agent of history rises to the higher degree of relative freedom as his ‘self-consciousness’ and realizes the macro ‘telos’as a micro result, however imperfect or incomplete.

Narmer’s Palette To see the potential subtle mistake in the use of the idea of ‘asocial sociability’ locate (e.g. via Google) an image of Narmer’s Palette, an extraordinary portrait of an early Pharaoh at the dawn of Dynastic Egypt and the birth of the State. This spectacular find, temporalized inside our eonic sequence, thus a putative candidate for an eonic emergent inside the interval of macro-evolution (but strictly micro-action), demonstrates in almost canonical fashion the factor of asocial sociability, the individual and society in conflict, here, however, in pursuit of the ‘good’ of higher social organization, a kind of implicit teleology of violence. The problem is that if we zoom out we can see that there is a factor of macro-evolution behind this that is beyond violence, and that as micro-evolution Narmer’s Palette shows only a primitive stage of political emergentism (the image is also out of context, we hardly know the real sequence of events). At other stages of development a different resolution might apply, voiding the generalization. Thus, we might seem naïve in the eyes of the violent as peacemongers, but we can insist that we cannot ascribe teleological statements about ‘asocial sociability’ to our macro-evolution. We are not being pacifists here. We cannot say our macro system ‘intends to use violent means toward an end’. In fact we cannot make statements at all about this. It resembles a noumenal unknown. This is the advantage of a two-level system. In general, warfare is pervasive in human history. But historical progress proceeds by another category, almost always with the benign injection of higher ideals as thought systems. The ambiguity of the issue can also be seen in examples such as the Battle of Marathon. A great degeneration is also visible in the spurious emergence of notions of ‘holy war’. Hegel and Marx suffer from this confusion. And the political realm is obviously almost beyond redemption on this issue in the warmongering of degenerate elites, which leads to nothing.

Perpetual Peace Kant is also the author of a famous essay on the emergence of an international system of peace. Here, in fact, the incessant conflicts might drive all parties to construct a system to regulate the passage beyond warfare. But this would not be the same as the evolutionary mechanism of general culture, such as we see in the eonic evolution of civilization. The idea of perpetual peace is itself a clear eonic emergent characteristic of the modern transition, codified by Kant from sources in the early modern.

Kant was no Darwinist Kant is at risk of falling into the category of ‘bourgeois ideologist’ or ‘proto-Darwinist’ with this idea of ‘asocial sociability’ at the dawn of classical liberalism. The influence of Adam Smith, or Mandeville, is undoubtedly a possible factor. But in the end Kant, by the skin of his teeth, undermines his own topical resemblance to such figures by producing a critical system that transcends his own hesistant conclusions.

In the age of Adam Smith, Kant’s problem is obvious, as is the reason he asks for someone in the future to help solve the problem he has solved in essence, or soon will solve in his later critiques, but whose complete solution requires more historical data to find this regular movement in the flow of historical action. History documents that puzzlement very accurately in Kant’s ambivalence toward the French Revolution, and his sense of some greater moral process in history. His essay, What is Enlightenment? shows that he is thinking implicitly in ‘eonic’ terms, of age periods. Kant was just on the verge of a solution, lacked the total perspective of our eonic transition, the carrier of teleology as directionality,

We need to rescue Kant from the ideological interpretations, a straight jacket, to which he has been subjected. Kant himself shows the way. A certain ambivalence arises in Kant’s essay, and he proposes a standard ‘flat history’ interpretation in terms of a concept of ‘asocial sociability’ to resolve historical dynamics. But a closer look shows that he has created a framework for a new and better answer, one to be found in the future. This remarkable prescience is confirmed by the way in which the discoveries of archaeology in Kant’s wake have shown his deeper intuition to be the right one. We need to show how the literature here, although often uncertain, does prefigure our statement that Kant’s essay proposes, not a solution, but a question asked by Kant, Kant’s Challenge. Kant’s essay seems ambiguous, and we will end up in an argument with classical liberals who have annexed Kant using the idea of ‘asocial sociability’. It seems to ask a question, and then produce ‘asocial sociability’ as the answer. But that, surely, is not the point. Kant senses correctly that he is not yet in a position to answer his own question. Thus his question is projected into the future. With the discovery of

Sumer

, and the Axial Age, the pot begins to boil.

A passage from Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, might throw light on the question. “The ‘Idea For A Universal History from a Cosmological Plan/intention Point of View’ is only a preliminary essay. Not only are its nine propositions thrown together in a seemingly unsystematic manner, reminiscent of Aristotle’s treatment of the categories, Kant even emphasizes from the very outset that this little essay will be withdrawn in favor of a universal history written by an as yet unknown philosopher of the future. In the footnote added to the title Kant explains that the essay was undertaken on the occasion of certain rumor that happened to make its way into a journal; this rumor ‘forces me to make a clarification, without which it would not make any sense’. Kant needs to show that one of his ideas and indeed a ‘cherished idea’ is not only founded on reason but even bound up with the very point of human rationality. This idea is cherished to the point of eroticism, the issues of priority and succession are thereby implicated in its general movement. Simply stated, the idea invites one to think that a ‘philosophical writer of history’ might one day appear and, after having established himself as a successor to Kant, compose a world-history that, since it is itself based on the ‘final purpose of the human race’, will be able to measure how far we have traveled with respect to our cherished goal. [Footnote below] To justify his remark, therefore, Kant will have to demonstrate that history in its entirety is not without sense, direction, and ultimate destination. Footnote: The remark attributed to Kant that happened to make its way into the Gothaische gelehrete Zeitung runs in part: ‘A cherished idea of Professor Kant is that the ultimate purpose of the human race is to achieve the most perfect state-constitution, and he wishes that a philosophical writer of history might undertake to give us a history of humanity from this point of view, and to shows to what extent humanity in various ages has approached or drawn away from the final purpose and what remains to be done in order to reach it’ ”.[ii]

[i] Consider the following from S. Korner's Kant: “Kant’s resolution of the antinomy of reflective Judgment must be considered in the light of the first Critique. In that work, especially in the Analytic of Principles, he has expounded a system of theoretical a priori propositions, which constitute the fundamental conditions of Newtonian physics, and, in his view, of all science. The result of the first Critique is thus, among other things, a mechanistic metaphysics; and nothing in the Critique of Judgment indicates that Kant has in any way changed his view on this subject. ...The third Critique does not develop a teleological metaphysics. On the contrary, it shows that teleological principles are not constitutive of the empirical world, but can only be regulative, for our reflection upon the empirical world. While the first Critique justifies the mechanistic method on the basis of mechanistic metaphysic, the third Critique justifies the teleological method in spite of the impossibility of a teleological metaphysics. This impossibility is insisted upon time and again. Kant admits only a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysic of morals. There is no metaphysic of purpose, but only a Critique of Teleological Judgment. He shows that there is no conflict between the maxims of mechanistic and teleological method. There can be no conflict between mechanistic and teleological metaphysics because, according to the critical philosophy, there can be no teleological metaphysics.” Stephen Korner, (New York: Penguin, 1974), p. 208-209.

[ii] Peter Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, (Ithaca: Cornell, 1991), p. 85. Note also Fenves’ remarks on the transition from an ‘idea for a universal history’ to ‘idea of a universal history’, at the point where the project of a world history is brought to fruition. Consider also this passage from Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: “There is a certain irony in the fact that the little philosopher—Kant was only five foot tall—who never left Königsberg wrote a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view. It corresponds perfectly, however, with Kant's abstracting mind as well as with the content of his philosophy. History, as he tells us, has to be looked at in its full, universal time sweep, for only in history as a whole is nature's purpose realized. And history has to be considered from a cosmopolitan point of view because its necessary goal is a ‘perfect civic constitution of mankind’, a point which Kant stresses not only in the Idea, but in Eternal Peace, where he defends ‘the idea of a cosmopolitan world law’ against the charge of utopianism. Kant begins the Idea by an assertion that human actions, like any other phenomena, are determined by general laws of nature. What appears accidental in the individual is determinate and predictable in the species. An example is marriage: although a marriage seems freely willed by the individual, yet the annual statistical tables exhibit a consistency which, according to Kant, show that marriages “occur according to stable natural laws”. Such a social phenomenon can be compared the oscillation of the weather: while we cannot predict individual states of affairs, we can rely on a regular support of the growth of plants, the flow of streams, and so forth, ‘at a uniform, uninterrupted pace’. The conclusion is one to warm the heart of Adam Smith. “Individual men,” Kant tells us, “and even whole nations, little think, while they are pursuing their own purposes—each in his own way, and often one in direct opposition to another—that they are unintentionally promoting, as if it were their guide, an end of nature, which is unknown to them.” Nevertheless, since man himself has neither instinct, like the animals, nor a rational plan of his own to guide him to a preconceived end, history, at first glance, seems pointless, like Shakespeare’s ‘tale told by an idiot’. Or, as Kant puts it in typical Enlightenment fashion, ‘It is hard to suppress a certain disgust when contemplating men’s actions upon the world stage.’

This disgust is relieved only by the discovery that “in this senseless march of human events” nature has a plan and an end. This discovery, however, is the philosopher's task, or rather Kant poses it as a problem for a future Kepler or Newton of the historical world. Kant himself will seek in the Idea only to provide a clue, or a guide, to this happy discovery. The whole point of Kant's attempt, however, is that he assumes from the beginning that man's random and free pursuits are to be considered as if they were subject to nature’s laws--which Kant, as we shall see, equates with an aim or purpose of nature.” Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History (Harper & Row, 1966), p. 103.