6. TRANSITION AND MODERNITY
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6. TRANSITION AND MODERNITY |
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| 6.2 From Reformation To Revolution | ||||
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Of all of our transitions, the modern is the most transparent because we have continuous data throughout, and the result shows a clear overall dynamic and interior structure, in a unity stretching from the Reformation and Copernican Revolution to the Enlightenment and French/American Revolutions. And this transition falls naturally into two stages, centered on the seventeenth century, as the Reformation ignites the fast passage, the field clearing in the wake of the Thirty Years War, to give birth to the seminal first signs of virtually all the characteristic eonic emergents of modernity. The relative transformation of a small piece of Christendom on a northern frontier, the Protestant Reformation, is a classic instance of the ‘eonic evolution of religion’. This ‘re-formation’ is at first confusing in that it is a religious rebirth that remorphs into secularism. Our model summons up the enigma of revolution and solves it indirectly. To be blunt, the thesis of slow evolution fails completely and the cluster of revolutions in the modern transition is no accident. However, these revolutions inside the transition are unique and don’t transfer outside the transitional interval. A great deal of confusion has arisen over ‘revolution’, in part due to the influence of leftist ideologies, which are a secondary response to economic contradictions in emergent capitalism and the post-transitional onset of globalization. But Marx saw the point very well, and categorized modernity as a ‘bourgeois revolution’. Whether that is fair or not, or a complete analysis, the point is clear that the center of gravity of the early modern ‘revolutions’ lies in emergent liberalism, with the ambiguous Münzer a genuine prophet of working class revolution. But our eonic ‘revolution’, to use the apt metaphor of ‘revolution’, is something else, and as a transition is a response to the entire world system as of ca. 1400, and echoes a recursion on the order of the Axial Age. Its action produces a new potential for civilization, with many possible outcomes. Having jolted the Eurasian system from its doldrums, it comes to a stop. It is not true that there is some kind of teleological result in the emergence of capitalism. Note the resemblance of the Greek Axial and the modern transition, one with, the other without a capitalist outcome. The same can be said of technological innovation. Technostream != eonic sequence An immense technological revolution accompanies modernity, in the wake of the Scientific Revolution (with the exception of the Big Three, clocks, gunpowder, printing bestowed much earlier from China) but it is important to see that the rise of the modern is only secondarily a technological revolution, if only because that’s the way we define it. The technosequence is a series of human innovations, the eonic sequence a macroevolutionary driver able to remorph whole culture streams. Modernity and the Greek Axial show an isomorphism independent of technological factors, one with, the other without advanced technology. Econostream != eonic sequence The same can be said of the economic stream of history, whose actions are basic market operations, the higher cultural software for modern capitalism being claimed by the eonic sequence. Economic systems are universal and occur at all times and places. The Burkean perspective is equally uncomprehending. The fetish of medievalism is dispatched forthwith in a ruthless recasting of infrastructure. We see the answer: our transitions are revolutionary as macro-action, but not the same thing as revolutions as such which are micro-action. Failure to grasp this distinction has produced confusion, especially in the Marxist focus on economic transformation via revolutionary adventurism, and a new kind of revolution attempting to extend the idea of revolution from liberal to socialist emphasis. No secondary revolutionary initiative can match the complexity of an eonic transition. And these aren’t primarly economic. The question of private property gets a thorough foundation, then our later leftists just after the divide try to reverse this. Such a recasting would force a ‘recompute’ of the whole transition, small wonder the far left fell into chaos, in the sudden appearance of a ‘floating fourth turning point’ phenomenon, the ‘islam’ of the socialist revolutionary. The latter, in any case, will, we can see, prove a constant, if incoherent, mideonic companion to ‘bourgeois’ modernity. This statement makes no judgment whatever about the relative justice in capitalist or socialist systems. In any case we can’t extrapolate a theory of revolutions outside the eonic sequence, since the latter is macro-action and anything else micro-action. Social transformation in that case must be constructivist. Even our mighty transitional interval, to ca. 1800, can barely achieve a basic liberal revolution, getting lucky once with its North American sidewinder (a frontier effect!), and then comes to a stop, as the synchronous emergence of a new economic system conditions the outcome, and throws democratic revolution out of whack. The emergence of the far left as microaction attempting to complete the result ends in collision and the system becomes the chaotic result we see. We should be wary here, since our model gives the appearance, due to its periodization, of a strong legitimation of the liberal order, but nothing in our mechanics of transitions is designed to resolve the ambiguity in a system using a shotgun approach, and where democracy, liberalism, socialism, and capitalist claims on freedom are all synchronous eonic emergents. We have to exit the model to deal with real problems. Thus revolution as micro-action in the wake of the modern divide becomes problematical, allowing the system to crystallize in the ambiguous democracies of capitalism. The modern transition is a comprehensive transformation across the full spectrum of culture, not simply political revolution. But the metaphorically ‘revolutionary’ character of modernity is clear from the Reformation itself, accompanied by the German social revolution of 1625. Our later associations with the idea of revolution might make us forget that the truly foundational period of the English Civil War shows us a hybrid stage where the concerns of the Reformation are at work. It begins as a religious conflict and ends with the birth of secular politics. The question of revolution is controversial but the eonic model reduces the question to a simple clarity. Revolutions are eonic emergents. The transition itself stands beyond its incidents of political action. The transition is a massively complex interplay of philosophic, religious, economic, political, and aesthetic emergents. No group of revolutionary agents can match this scale. TP3: an emergent field Let’s list a few of the eonic emergents relevant to our definition of the modern transition. Although the size of this dataset is staggering, if we list enough overlapping zoom targets we can likely get a fair picture of what’s going on. The list can keep growing. We are outside this transition, and must assess using judgment what should be on the list. But even with a partial or debatable list we can make our point, TP3 creates a massive change of historical direction. Thus we get: The Reformation, with Luther’s and Tyndale’s Bible, Copernicus, Vesalius, then the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution, the birth of liberalism, Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy, Hobbes and onward, the German, English, American and French Revolution s, the birth of democracy, the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution, and the onset of modern capitalism… Note that the
generation near the American Revolution, our divide inside our transition, is
one of the most massively packed periods of innovation in world history, and
much more than a matter of technical innovations. We see the French
and American Revolutions (and soon liberalism spawning democratic liberalism),
the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment with a Scottish Enlightenment, and
a German Aufklärung, Adam Smith and a
new economics, German Classical philosophy and the Romantic Movement, Kant,
Hume, Bentham, Thomas Paine, … This just skims the most visible data off the
top. Our divide is a matter of degree, and could be from 1750 to 1850. But there
is a clear fall off in the rate of basic cultural innovations, as opposed to technical innovations or
economic expansions. A good way to see that is in the Industrial Revolution.
That creates a massive transition of its own, and then stabilizes as a ‘market
society’, however unstable that is. TP3+:
Since our turning point is a finite
interval, it produces a divide (early nineteenth century?) and, sooner or later,
goes through a post-transitional phase, perhaps of reaction against the turning
point. The onset of the
modern transition shows us a mysterious starting chord in the synchronous
appearance of Luther, and Münzer, next to Machiavelli and our first modern
Utopian Thomas More. Let us remind ourselves that if Machiavelli initiates a new
science of politics, the hidden note of politically invisible actors, no doubt
immoral riff-raff, mongrel descendants of the godly Pharaohs, it is also true
that precisely at our divide an ultra-idealistic protest, anti-Machiavel,
appears in the Kantian contretemps with Benjamin Constant. Before continuing we
should rescue our subject for some ‘idealistic thinking’ with an interpolated
‘sermon’ in the midst of ‘value free science’. Realist politics and the devious
schemes of Machiavelli have no status in our system.
An ominous question
Has civilization been hijacked by
Machiavellian politicians? Note, in our account, how little politics matters in
the long run. A few brief incidents of successful bootstrapping beyond dead
history in a chronicle of the ‘history of crime’, e.g. the American Revolution,
a non-random event structure relative to world history. Our transition in its
braiding of macro and micro-evolution shows the strain of morphing toward an
ideal, moral ideals at that. There is no implication that the outcome matches
that ideal. Fussy old Kant, perched on a crag near the Great Divide, won’t even
grant the right to lie by power elites, to the consternation of Benjamin
Constant. We should finally
count our blessings to have the counterpoint in a figure so foolish as Kant to
protest the ‘dead political zone’. The moral is not assume anything, as far as
our model is concerned, about the morality of political action, and the
failures, or successes, of obscure political schemes is judged finally by
ethical, not simply ‘scientific’, protocols. That said, the enigma of
Machiavelli haunts any and all attempts to recast the eonic sequence as
‘idealist history’ and we must remind ourselves, that theory, at least, cannot
lie, suspicious that Darwinism is a Machiavellian deception of ideology.
The
Luther—and Münzer
Luther’s ‘revolution’ is a geopolitical
one, the decisive stroke against the theocratic empire of Christendom, and his
‘re-formation’ is the classic instance of the ‘relative transform’ effect, so
characteristic of our eonic sequence: break off a piece of the prior state of
affairs, and remorph that in a frontier effect. Neglected in the overall
portrait is the German social revolution of 1625, and the appearance of the
first of our radical eschatolotical champions of the proletariat, Münzer.
Machiavelli
is often said to initiate the modern era of politics, but he is a
perfectly Janus-faced figure, looking backward and forward at the same time. As
our eonic system starts uphill on
More’s Utopia
One translator of More’s classic remarks
that its position is like that of the baby of the Judgment of Solomon, Catholic
tract or political manifesto? It is a premonition, at the least, of the last
question spawned by our transition, gestating liberal worlds, the question of
private property. In the relative transform of a genre created in antiquity, it
spawns the ‘eonic emergence’ of the utopian genre, perhaps even the genre of
science fiction. We should note that our eonic sequence deals in potentials, and
utopianism is an exploration of potentiality in relation to horizontally causal
history.[ii]
Copernicus
The ‘eonic evolution of science’ in the form of a second Scientific
Revolution, the Greek being the first, is a sixteenth century phenomenon, and
the ‘great paradigm shift’ of the Copernican Revolution heralds the first order
of business for our eonic sequence, the rebirth of Archimedean physics. As we examine the
modern transition, a puzzle resolved about the Greek Axial interval comes to
light: why is the effect of the Greek transition so clustered
after its divide, and why does the first half of the interval, in
the Greek Dark Age, seem to be empty or invisible? In fact, we see the answer in
the modern instance. The first half of our transition is hard to distinguish
from the ‘Middle Ages’. The real onset of ‘modernity’ occurs in the seventeenth
century after the closing of the Thirty Years War. The Greek Reformation, and
the progression from monarchy, is there, if we care to look (eschewing overly
precise analogies). The first visible effects of the Greek transition appear in
the second half, in the eighth century BCE, visible in the Homeric starting
point. In a strangely similar pattern, the modern transition really takes off in
the generation after Shakespeare and Cervantes, with his Don Quijote, quite the
modernist malgré lui. Thus the Treaty of
Westphalia tokens the clearing of the field as the seminal gestation of the
Enlightenment begins with rise of modern science, philosophy, and the
intimations of democracy. We see in the title of the great work by
Copernicus, De Orbis Revolutionibus,
that ushered in the Scientific Revolution both the unfolding, and a new
signature definition, of the term ‘revolution of the ages’, with the ironic new
modern meaning for the term, emerging in relation to the other.
The English Civil War
The key to the politics of the coming new
age is seen in the English Civil War. As Christopher Hill notes in
The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714,
“During the seventeenth century modern English society and a modern state began
to take shape, and England’s position in the world was transformed”, and yet the
transformation lies beyond the question of states, the German field having been
almost torn to pieces, yet still exhibiting all the elements, by its end, of the
transition. The German Aufklärung
proceeds with or without a state. The seeds of the English exemplar will
resurface in the American sidewinder in the emergence of the first great mass
democracy—at the divide. Christopher Hill, in his
The English Bible and the Seventeenth-century Revolution, notes the
frequent observation that the English Revolution had no ‘ideological forebears’,
that noone passing through it “knew they were living through a revolution”,
often taking their cue from the Bible![iii]
Levellers and True Levellers
The period of the English Civil War
suddenly spawns a virtual hotbed of diverse and beautifully potential radical
movements, from the Levellers to the Diggers and Ranters, prophetic in their
import, and leaving behind a legacy that will resurface in the great moment of
equalization that emerges at the divide. These virtual eonic emergents that soon
disappear remind us that we can never finally conclude the outcomes of our
transitions correspond fully to ‘what was intended’, so to speak. It wasn’t long
before the same old elites reestablish control. The American Revolution will
receive many of the influences appearing at this brief moment of historical
self-consciousness.[iv]
A bloodless revolution
As we examine the eonic sequence we see
the danger in this kind of evolution with its frontier effect that certain eonic
emergents will be left behind in the hopscotch between cultures, the Indic
vegetarianism being one example. Yet if we examine the period of the English
Revolution we notice the sudden appearance of a new modern vegetarianism,
leaving us to wonder indeed at the nature of our eonic pattern. The modern
transition will have a problem in leaving the Indic tradition behind. But we
will see its efforts to compensate in the wake of the Enlightenment.[v]
Leviathan: Hobbes to Locke
The first seventeenth plateau of the
transition produces a recursion from beginnings of political science, with the
brutal clarity of Hobbes’ opening note, followed by the essence of the future
liberalism crystalling in Locke.[vi]
Birth of the Enlightenment
The real beginning of the Enlightenment
occurs in the seventeenth century with Descartes and Spinoza, and a host of
other seminal premonitions of modernity…[vii]
The New Atlantis
Our transition is not without prophets, in
the true ‘eonic’ sense, and Francis Bacon, although now beset with the critiques
of his enthusiasm, creates the ethos of innovation and technological liberation.[viii]
The eonic evolution of science
Our rubric the ‘eonic evolution of X’
comes into its own as we observe the nicely scheduled re-ignition of science
seen in the (second) Scientific Revolution in our eonic mainline. We should
declare the case of the missing centuries solved in noting that the emergence of
science is bound up in the ‘eonic determination’ of the eonic sequence. This
raises the question of the contrasting ‘science as free action’ in the passage
to the post-transition. Indeed the crystallization of ‘scientism’ shows just
this effect. The rise of a distinctly modern philosophy crystallizes with Descartes. As Bryan Magee notes in an account of Schopenhauer, the rise of modern philosophy shows a clear narrative that chaotifies after the period of Kant.[ix] Descartes to Hume/Kant The course of Cartesian dualism haunts modernity from beginning to end, and yet if we feel the urge to the non-dual we should consider the plight of contemporary neuroscience shorn of dualistic ‘crudities’. Descartes did his work well, and describes the two-sided creature that will inherit the wasteland of Aristotle and Aquinas.[x] Spinoza It would be hard to find two more ‘eonic’ beings than Descartes and Spinoza. Spinoza, as if in the first order of business for modernity, appears like an apparition in the Dutch Enlightenment, and produces the last Biblical apochrypha in his brilliant ‘exodus’, the invention of Biblical Criticism, pantheism, and the foundations of liberal secularism. His thinking proceeds underground then resurfaces at the Great Divide in the famous Pantheism debate. Perhaps the true resolution is glimpsed at the threshold of awareness, as in Kant’s transcendental deduction: The Rationalist Descartes takes the ‘I think’ to indicate the existence of a substance, distinct from the body. This ignores the important paradox concerning consciousness—which is that we cannot experience it, because it is experience. Hence, the saying “the I which sees itself cannot see itself”. Kant recognizes this paradoxical point and explains it. According to him, the ‘I’ is not an object of possible experience, because it is a presupposition of experience.[xi] No Age of Revelation here. All you get is a ‘transcendental deduction’. The course of modern philosophy is reflected in this statement, in the endgame of Heidegger, and the postmoderns. As the modern transition takes off into its scientific fugue, Descartes produces a brilliant ‘fix’ or failsafe that will allow the work to be done by those destined to be left orphaned by the onset of reductionism and its myths, almost as pernicious in potential as those of fanatic monotheism. The work of Kant, and his descanting Schopenhauer, perfectly timed at the divide, will lift the question into a realm evocative of the Upansishads, as our eonic sequence comes full circle. The New Physics
The great glory of the modern transition is the birth of the New Physics, with
the calculus of The Leibnitz-Clarke debate Our transition produces an improbable pearl-stringing sequence of exotic genius, and the counterpoint of two such, Newton and Leibnitz, can be seen in the so-called Leibnitz-Clarke interaction which tests the limits of the new physical world view precisely at its onset, resulting finally in the classic antinomies explored in the Kantian dialectic.[xii] Analytical Mechanics The breakthroughs of Newton and the early physics develop by leaps and bounds and by the conclusion of the Enlightenment have transformed into the abstractions of analytical mechanics, the Laplacean moment, of causal moment matched by the Kantian exception taking, and this mechanics already seems to prophecy the coming Quantum Mechanics, which is born here, essentially. Even as physicalism spawns the reign of nineteenth century ‘frozen scientism’, physics has already, by the point of the divide, moved to a potentially deeper perspective. Rebirth of teleology Newtonian science, in reaction to Aristotle, comes full circle with the appearance of a new teleological insight, quite inchoate, in the minimum principles of analytical mechanics. The eighteenth century stages the classic second phase of the Enlightenment and this ends in the rushing cascade of the point of the Great Divide, the generation of revolutions and the emergence of capitalism. This period is massively packed with innovations in all areas and consists of multiple ‘enlightenments’, the French, English, German, Dutch, Scottish, American,…
Battle of The Ancients and Moderns
The classic debate over modernity is
the morning songbird of the birth of a new idea of progress, and the passage
beyond the achievements of the ancients.
Voltaire, Diderot, D’Holbach
Voltaire and the philosophes are the
spearhead for the secualization process inexorably springing from the
Reformation. Diderot with his Encyclopedie
tokens the ‘information revolutions’ to come. We should note that Voltaire was
not an atheist. The rise of modern of atheism is ‘still another eonic emergent’,
a long suppressed dialectical potential, no more, no less.
Rousseau and Kant
Rousseau is in many ways a difficult
figure to understand, in part because we think in terms of results, not in terms
of the creative dialectical moments of true innovators. Rousseau
precipitates
the reaction to Newtonianism, the democratic revolution in the evolutionary
macro-action of equality/equalization, and is a direct influence on the Kantian
analysis of the idea of freedom in the context of the New Physics.
The invention of autonomy
Historians of this period are often
describing processes of eonic emergence without realizing it. J. B. Schneewind
traces the complex chords of the discovery of autonomy from the rebirth
(relative transform) of natural law theory and climaxing in the moral philosophy
of Kant.[xiii] Perpetual Peace
Kant is also the author of a famous essay on the emergence of an international
system of peace, a text with traceable antecedents in the early modern, thence
connected with the emergence of ‘just war’ philosophies. Alex Bellamy in
Just Wars traces the tradition,
appropriately (no accident!), to one eonic source, the Greek transition,
“Between 700 and 450 BC, Greek city-states observed loose traditions aimed at
limiting war…The Peloponesian War caused these customs to break down.” A double
eonic emergent! Note the concordance as to periodization of the Peloponesian and
First World Wars. Note the pre and post divide timing. We must be wary of what
we call an eonic emergent in this case, and be ready to refine analysis, since
the appearance of ‘jihad’ in the wake of the Israelitic corpus might also be
called an eonic emergent, or a degenerated mideonic echo. Our term, in this
case, is too coarse-grained a sieve. Our model is too crude to solve the problem
of war, indeed we see Hegel with dialectical precision fall in the trap with his
remarks on warfare. At least we can be sure that our two-level analysis
abstracts teleological unknowns from any connection to temporal drivers of
warfare. Kant’s thinking at the divide point sounds the clarion call for peace,
most eerily in its timing.
[xiv]
German Classical Philosophy
Kant triggers one of the most remarkable
surges of philosophical innovation in world history in the the
tour de force sequence, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, concluding
with Schopenhauer and Marx.[xv]
Two meanings of historicism
The period of Kant is flush with
dialectical oppositions and the appearance of, and then conflict with, Herder,
Hamman, and the Sturm und Drang,
expressing the contradictions of our ‘idea for a universal history’, which we
have put into our framework of ‘two, or multiple, universal histories’, in the
twin levels of our eonic model. As our eonic sequence swings outward toward
globalization the theme of universalism will require challenge from the ‘other’
universal histories in the garlanding of diversity against the dangers of
Eurocentrism.
Birth of Romanticism
Our eonic model instantly transposes our
viewpoint into a larger context where the issue of modernity is not the ‘ism’ of
the Enlightenment, but the concert of many eonic emergents, among them the
contrary descant of Romanticism. The sudden flowering of poets near the divide
challenges the emerging scientism with a chorus of contrary poetic music.
The Pantheism debate
Spinoza resurfaces from the early modern
just at our divide and is reckoned against Kant in what is really the climax of
the Protestant Reformation.[xvi]
Aesthetics
With roots once again in the seventeenth century, we see the birth of
aesthetics as a modern discourse, the contribution of Kant, once again, standing
out in the birth of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. Kant’s third
critique, paradoxically, almost has a greater influence than his first, in the
reactions of Goethe and Schiller.[xvii]
Bach to Beethoven…to Wagner
In a mystery of aesthetic dynamics we see
the clear relative transform we call ‘classical music’ peaking in the
Enlightenment/divide period, reaching its climax at a white heat in the music of
Mozart and Beethoven. This eonic emergent starts falling apart at the end of the
nineteenth century.
Utilitarianism
Our deliberate over-emphasis on a Kantian
perspective should not for a moment blind us to the immense potential spectrum
(‘dialectic’) of our divide period, seeing, for example, the parallel birth of
utilitarianism as an unmistakable eonic emergent, perfectly timed. Our
transition is a multidimensional set of innovations.
Adam Smith
Seen in context, Adam Smith, perfectly timed, is a champion of liberty,
prior to the emergence of the capitalism he senses coming into existence. Note
how Smith has clear roots in the transition, e.g. with figures such as
Mandeville.
The eonic evolution of evolutionism
The idea of evolution is reborn in the
Enlightenment as an obvious eonic emergent, and finds its first true theorist in
Lamarck
who produces the correct framework for a theoretical foundation of
evolution in the double action of micro and macro factors…Darwinism will decline
from this insight. This period also produces the teleomechanists, and the
Naturphilosophen. The period straddling 1800 periodizes as our transitional divide. The clustering of emergent processes is so massive as to be almost a dialectical flood. The transition to micro-action occurs within a half century. The Great Divide Our transition is swiftly accomplished and gives rise to the sense of a divide. Such a massively packed point of innovation is the best evidence of our eonic model. Discrete freedom sequence Like clockwork, 2400 years apart, from Solon to Tom Paine, the ratio of macro to micro-action spawns twice-born a democratic emergentism, just at a divide point. Now we see the logic of the mysterious timing of the great democratic revolution(s) of the end of the eighteenth century. Our calculus suggests that the divide line is the appropriate point for ‘free action’ to overtake ‘system action’ in the passage from eonic determination to free action, however ‘free’. The brilliance of the generation of Thomas Jefferson passes quickly to the crystallizing outcome in the world of the Age of Jackson, as a new democratic experiment takes its chances as free micro-action in the new mideonic period. The Athenian experiment lasted about two centuries. The year 2000 might prove ominous for the American experiment. Abolitionism Out of the blue the abolitionists, appear just at the divide and the overcoming of the great curse of slavery is given its great historical first. The timing is almost uncanny, but our eonic model gives us the mysterious clue.[xviii] Human Rights A prime eonic emergent here is the concept of human rights which comes to the forefront in the eighteenth century, and along with it the (relative) transformation of concepts of natural law arrive just in time to stage an ideological accelerator for this period of revolutions.[xix] Feminism A late-breaking eonic emergent (but we can see once again its sources in the seventeenth century), feminism is nonetheless another child of our transition, witness such figures as Wollenstonecraft, and its slow take-off in the nineteenth century will await fruition in the twentieth. Trend toward equalization We can stand back for a moment to see how misleading Darwinian thinking is. Evolution responds to the ‘survival of the fittest’ with injected trends toward equalization. Twice in our eonic sequence, beginning with Axial Age, we see the eonic determination during phases of macro-action, of the evolutionary trend toward equalization. This emerges with unmistakable force in Rousseau, and we can see that the immediate tension arising in the contradictory new economic order. Equalization is an aspect of macroevolution. Our transition draws to a conclusion with the great era of democratic revolutions, the passage to the new capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, as the nineteenth century begins the New Age proper of ‘modernity’, whose spectrum of opposites is a very balanced dialectic. Watered down renderings of secularism will tend to beggar this holistic totality.
The birth of liberalism
From the seventeenth century to the point of the divide we see the gestation of
liberalism, climaxing in its take off in the generation of the great
revolutions.
The American Revolution
It is hard to think of a more stunning
eonic phenomenon than the almost uncanny and magnificent emergence of the great
American democratic experiment, perfectly timed at the Great Divide, and showing
the massive improbability of so many creative political ‘revolutionaries’, from
Jefferson to Thomas Paine. A frontier effect inside a frontier effect, our
transition seems almost deliberately to stage its novelty in the geographical
fringe area of the open
Tom Paine
Like Spinoza and Kant, Thomas Paine is one of the most perfectly timed
gremlins of the eonic effect, appearing in perfect concert, as if with a task to
perform, the clarion of secularism, economic freedom, and democracy. Dying out
of fashion, in his wake the contrary tide of American fundamentalism will rise
to claim a democratic revolution it did not initiate.
Age of Reason
Paine’s classic is accompanied by
critiques of reason (reason noumenal or phenomenal?), and Hegel on Reason in
History…
The rational the real?
Our eonic model outflanks yet fulfills
Hegel’s classic rumination on the rational as the real, one destined to
chaotification short of our rigorous division of levels. We see the eonic
sequence expresses an ideal while mideonic micro-action may or may not be so
legitimated as rational.
Industrial Revolution
Revolution indeed! We tend to see
modernity as characterized by capitalism, but this is misleading. Emergent
capitalism is a classic ‘eonic emergent’ in the larger system of the modern
transition. This ‘relative transform’ reinvents the already existing forms of
commercial economy at a new level of technology and a new level of economic
philosophy, or ideology.
The French Revolution to 1848
The same eonic characterization is
deserved by the French Revolution
, whose fate is to become the
controversially ambiguous ‘failure’ of the period of the Great Terror. The
democratic future will be endlessly delayed by the reactionary formations
haunting the comparison with the American exemplar. The French Revolution also
shows intimations of the nineteenth ‘far left’ emerging in the wake of the
revolutions of 1848.
Tom Paine and the sans-culottes
Paine has a close call with the sans-culotttes…The
progression from the American to the French Revolution uncovers the latent
contradictions in the liberal revolution as an eonic emergent as the element of
class warfare enters with the birth of the step child ‘socialism’, and Graccus
Babeuf’s timely appearance at the first of the fake Thermidors.
Is there a Kantian Babouvism?
The latent contradiction is expressed
perfectly in the ambiguities of the classic liberal Kant’s categorical
imperative, and an antinomy of teleological judgment with respect to the ‘end(s)
of history’, Babeuf to Marx, via Hegel.
Napoleon at
The Restoration
Is conservativism an eonic emergent? The
incomprehending Burke, oblivious to his surroundings, nonetheless exposes the
contradictory logic of revolution, as the drama of action and reaction play
themselves out, from the streets to
Romanticism…
Modern science…to scientism
We have flipped the balance in our
selection of eonic emergents away from the main event, the spectacular surge of
modern science, toward the softer sounds of the multiple garlands of other
emergent processes prone to being drowned out in the roaring thunder of the
scientific revolution, cresting at the divide, onward through the nineteenth
century. This temporary operational bias is easily corrected, and will itself
correct our mesmerized focus on the science stream. This transition is almost
overwhelmed by modern science, and yet, not. Kant with austere elegance poses
the idea of freedom in a complement to the Newtonian triumph.
Schopenhauer
The philosopher Schopenhauer, in parallel opposition with Hegel, produces
a brilliant Kantian seed ‘sutra’ of superior quality to the decayed Upanishadism
that will overwhelm Enlightenment discourse with another version of that term.
The two neatly express a Buddhist and Christian line of realization.[xx]
Phenomenologies of spirit
We have devised a means to outflank
Hegelian metaphysics for an age of scientism, and yet we must pause to confess
our wonder at the magnificent completion of the Protestant Reformation seen in
its genuine ‘prophet’, the philosopher Hegel, and his version upgrade of archaic
‘god talk’. This instant archaeological monument shows us an eonic observer
first sensing the eonic effect, and giving expression, as did the creators of
the Old Testament, to the eonic character of a transition in the eonic sequence.
Was Hegel an atheist?
Enough to ask, we need not answer what
some have asked. Camouflaged for the age of the Restoration Hegel’s Concept
sublates theism/atheism into a philosophy of religion that will soon be swept
aside in the scientific revolution, yet one that carries the hidden dialectic
that will haunt the age of scientism.
Manchester…and the birth of ‘socialism’
The rushing logic of the modern
transition shows the first signs of jackknife as the bourgeois revolution is
sublated into a prophetically envisioned and renewed democratic revolution: a
socialism of the proletariat, in a negation of the first outcome of revolution.
The question of private property is too basic for easy revisions and the result
will be the birth of a floating fourth turning point ideology.
Young Hegelians, Left Hegelians
In the collapse of the Hegelian
movement the secular era of modernity comes into its own, soon weighted down
with the implications of metaphysical materialism and scientific positivism.
Karl Marx carries the day with the last stage of liberalism remorphing into an
ideology of mideonic ‘floating fourth turning points’.
1848: Marx, Schopenhauer,,…
Was Marx a frustrated ‘transcendental
idealist’? The strange fissions of the ‘Concept’ show us two figures on opposite
sides of the barricades of 1848, and it is strange that Marx’s philosophy of
history could so easily have been cast with a non-positivistic foundation.
Wagner is there, and will attempt the perhaps failed, perhaps iself tragic,
art-politics of the aesthetic state in his realization of his operatic labors. We have garlanded just a few of the ‘eonic emergents’ and ‘relative transforms’ that characterize the modern transition. It is difficult to grasp the way so many creative individuals and innovations are clustered in the short rush of three centuries, with its climax at the point of the divide. We can see all at once that the explanation is eonic, and that such perfect timing reflects our frequency hypothesis. System shutdown By the very nature of our model, we can see that the factor of macro ‘system action’, being intermittent, will wane and micro free action will rise to fill the void, with potentially ambiguous results. We see this effect clearly in the nineteenth century, despite its explosion of changes and innovations. The deep action of the early modern is at the source in almost every case. The dangers of chaotification or derailment are ever-present, and with the First World War and the Holocaust we see the first of the mideonic calamities possible in this eonic progression. Take the measure of the modern transition: its action is at all points benign, then it stops. The continuations of completely uncomprehending politicians can wreak havoc in the outcome. Please note that scientism, Darwin, Nietzsche, come well after the divide point and yet rapidly purloin the definition of the Enlightenment. Zooming in, zooming out We have done a kind of ‘hundred yard dash’ through the modern transition, culling a short list of eonic emergents, just on the verge of a more intensive look. We need to do the exercise many times for different viewpoints. We should just here, before losing the forest in the trees, also zoom out to see the context against the backdrop of world history with just enough to see the clustering effect that once seemed like discontinuity but now seems like fullness. [i] J.G.A Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). [ii]Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (New York: Penguin, 1965). As Max Nomad notes in Political Heretics (1963), “The question has often been asked as to why over a period nearly 2000 years no attempt was made by philosophers or poets to present the image of an ideal state”. Similar examples will be visible in art, science, politics, etc,…The ‘case of the missing centuries’ pattern is clearly evident in F. Manuel’s Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: Belknap, 1979), Chapter 4, et al., “The Passion of Thomas More”. Also, Chapter 18, for the revolutionary period, “Freedom from the Wheel” (!). [iii] Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 7-8. Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 1. [iv] Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Penguin, 1991).
[v]
Tristram Stuart, A Bloodless Revolution ( [vi] Craig Thomas, From Here To There (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), Peter Schouls, Reasoned Freedom: John Locke and Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
[vii] Jonathan I. Israel,
Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity
1650-1750 ( [viii] Charles Witney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). [ix] “I have shown how, when the mainstream of modern philosophy ran up against transcendental idealism it ceased to flow along a single current and ramified into various channels.” Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (New York: Clarendon, 1997), p. 96.
[x]
William Bluhm, Force or Freedom?
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), Jerrold Seigel, The Idea Of
The Self (
[xi]
Garrett Thomson, On Kant
(Belmont, Ca.:
[xii] Sadik Al-Azm,
The Origins of Kant’s Arguments in
the Antinomies ( [xiii] J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[xiv] Alex Bellamy,
Just Wars (
[xv]
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy
1760-1860 ( [xvi] Frederick Beiser, The Fate Of Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). [xvii] Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus, The Invention of Taste In The Democratic Age (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990).
[xviii] Eric Metaxas,
Amazing Grace (
[xix]
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (
[xx]
Alexander Macfie (ed.), Eastern
Influences on Western Philosophy ( |
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