Kant's Challenge

One of the deepest currents of modern thought, beside the rise of theories of evolution, lies in the heritage of the philosophy of history. Our simple model with its eonic mainline and discrete freedom sequence stages a lightweight transition through this terrain. Strictly speaking our model is empirical and can’t be used for complex secondary deductions, but we can manage a few hunches with our historical black box, and the embedded freedom sequence tweaks the issues very directly.

This legacy of philosophic history, like a stream flowing into a greater current, yet with deep roots in antiquity, casts an ambiguous glance at the sacred lore from which it is spawned, yet accompanies the secular music as a leitmotiv of modernism, despite an ambiguous status on the boundary of metaphysics. Challenged in the mood of science, yet still unchallenged by any science of history, it endures in parallel to the claims against philosophy made by the tide of empirical research. Rising in tandem with all things modern and the pandemonium of a new era of world history, its antiquated reputation is belied by its persistent echo in the mind of the historian, and its eternal smile as the masthead to all ideas of evolution.

The onset of positivism is itself graced with the metaphysical historicism of epochs codified in the philosopher of history, Comte. But if Comte is just such a philosopher of history and all his epigones are shipwrecked trying to do a science of history in the age of Positivism, we should backtrack to the source of the stream to see where we went wrong. Scientists tend to be unconscious Comtean historicists, and assume the epochal scientific revolution will overtake history. The future is unknown, but if that means that unrestricted Newtonianism as total causal explanation will suffice, failure is likely, as we can see already. The Darwin debate shows the train wreck coming. The work of Kant produced a means to mediate this problem, without derailing into anti-science. It is no accident our ‘system-agent’ two-level discourse has a family resemblance to the Kantian rubric.

As we move to examine theories of evolution we find the philosophy of history’s seemingly outdated, almost archaic, charm resurfacing as a renewed challenge, and an obstacle to their completion. If a theory of evolution moves to enlarge its domain to include the whole, then it is forced to reckon with the self-reference of the thinker pondering his own evolution. No other grounds are required for the persistence of this mode. The idea of evolution is a feckless giant, and we should propose, in a gesture more than humor, a comeback of philosophical history, a nimble rascal, to leap and ride piggyback, wishing to direct traffic, to the consternation of proponents of post-philosophical science. Indeed, we should notice at once that the philosophy of history is itself a part of our universal evolution, as is the idea of evolution, that is, the evolution of the idea of evolution.

Displaced in the rise of the positive sciences by the idea of evolution, the philosophy of history becomes one of its first passengers. For the philosophy of history is the history of philosophy, and this shows the signature of its own (eonic) evolution. We can offer no real differentiation, then, of the two subjects, or any decisive means of marking the transition between boundaries of rival disciplines. If Darwinism is free of metaphysics, then let it be science. But we have seen that it fails three times, in the classic antinomies given from Kantian Dialectic. Our discussion of historicism leads us back to a classic essay of the philosopher Kant.

The philosophy of history is born, reborn (a relative transform of a subject born among the Israelites or with Zarathustra, or earlier), at the dawn of modernity as a fellow traveler, becoming visible as early as the sixteenth century and finds its classic realization in the writings of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his essay Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View:

Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment.[i]

This hope is confirmed by the pattern we can exhibit, and we can easily claim the eonic effect a resolution of Kant’s Challenge. Our approach is that of our eonic model, rather than the philosophy of history, but in many ways Kant’s formulation is perfect, with his own post-Newtonian model. The inherent contradiction in this paragraph does indeed generate its own historical dynamic. And the eonic effect answers at once to the question asked. Kant’s language seems a little historicist, but his thinking contains ample depth to deal with the issue of ‘historical laws’. In many ways, it is Kant himself who is the source, almost simultaneously, of the key avenue to the philosophy of history, and the critique of historicism.

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. 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 final 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.

Within two centuries the necessary data is emerging for the first time to resolve this question. 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.

We can easily resolve the question of directionality. Our approach is indirect, and the reason is the danger of premature teleological thinking, 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.

We can only demonstrate correlation with the directionality of the eonic effect. 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. 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. [ii]

Note: Philosophy and periodization A first application of our method will show us that the philosophy of history itself shows non-random patterning. Having summoned up the philosophy of history, we are going to stand back and barely use it, at least for this discussion, but we can in the process outflank Marx and Hegel on universal history, opening up a new avenue here, with an ultra-simple generic ‘emergence of freedom’ periodization. We can do something very basic, simply to see the place of the philosophy of history first in the pattern of eonic data. We stumble thus on a strange fact, the eonic determination, or modulation of world philosophy in the sequence mainline. The significance of the classic ‘nature/freedom’ vein of discourse will dawn on one slowly, looking at the discrete freedom sequence. We can’t take a single step further without plunging into metaphysics. We have uncovered something that the philosophy of history, especially the Kantian genesis thereof, can uniquely clarify, if not resolve. In fact, the whole field was taken over and monopolized by Hegel. We will see the problems there and proceed in another direction, pressing the reset button near Kant. Looking at our pattern, we can cheat a little: we know the divide period will be especially significant. Philosophy tends to drift outside the mainline. Sure enough we see the self-referential co-emergentism of system and idea, in perfectly timed concert. The point will dawn on the reader slowly.

TP3: If we take a close look at the modern transition we notice a clear compressed clustering of world philosophy in a distinct modulation against the whole, focusing only in part of the rise of science. Hegel came close to seeing this fact. With intimations in the sixteenth century we see the take off in the seventeenth with Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley, the philosophes, then

TP3+: The divide The Enlightenment, French, Scottish, and German. The German Enlightenment especially shows a spectacular crescendo at the point of the divide hovering around it, with a rapid fall off by the time of Marx and Schopenhauer’s influence (he actually comes just after the divide). We have seen enough to know this can’t be due to chance, and we zoom in to see what help this period can give us in our search for an historical methodology since it is a key moment in our eonic mainline. Indeed we notice twice in a row teleological thinking compressed on a divide, the Exile in TP2, being another. Second round on the teleological merry-go-round? Maybe we will get it this time.

As we move toward the creation of an eonic model, we find the evolution of philosophy embedded in that history, and therefore an emblem of the self-referential character of our eonic sequence.

Theory as data As we discover our eonic sequence, we notice that philosophy/science show subsets that are themselves pattern correlated, both a source of method, and a form of eonic data. What is our status as observers in this situation? Are we in the present, meta-philosophers, studying philosophy’s history, or in a post-transition potential well using selected strains of the system’s output? Our situation resembles the Lisp programming language, where data and programming are in the same category. We have to explain the ‘evolution of science’ as data, for example. That explodes any easy notion of objectivity, or science of history (as currently defined). We see that the philosophy of history is ‘data’, due to its eonic correlation. Can we take output of the system to do ‘theory’?

This constitutes a sort of ‘boot hill’ for Darwin’s theory. The modulated subhistory of the philosophy cresting near our modern divide is especially interesting. To complete our theory we must select from the output of the system, its ‘evolution of the idea of freedom’, to proceed. Thus, we can see that philosophy of history as an eonic emergent is clustered near the divide of our transition, and as eonic observers our ‘red light’ goes on at once, eonic data. The closely packed region near the divide shows a host of figures, Kant, Hume, Bentham. We have criticized Darwin for ‘philosophic selection’, e.g. Adam Smith. But we can equally propose a different selection, keeping in mind that any full account should in principle transcend all selections, something not possible for us, although a figure such as Hegel saw the game and realized that one has to explicate the whole of philosophy as an evolutionary object in and of itself (not his terminology). With our model we can issue ourselves credentials as ‘philosophers of history’, along with ‘post-Newtonian system modeler’ (along with eonic observer).

Here is the crux: we need the ‘idea of freedom’ to complete our model, but we are caught in philosophic selection and start to downshift into the ‘dialectic of freedom’ for which the divide era of our transition is notable indeed. We have no ‘meta-language’ of freedom, though in the philosopher Kant we see the first attempts to indicate one.

We know the divide cluster will be especially significant, as we saw with the Exile periodization. Just near our modern divide we see Kant and start ‘snooping’ around to see what’s what. Kant produces, in 1781, a classic ‘critique of reason’, then just as an afterthought, right afterwards, composes a short essay on history.

We are done, our tour of philosophy complete. It is interesting that Marx was said to have attempted to ‘leave philosophy’ (in his German Ideology). We can try also, but we see that we won’t get very far, and had best admit that our model is consigned to an embedded state inside the emergentism of philosophy/science, preempting an objective theory.[iii]

We are ready to expand on our data. All we need is one paragraph from Kant. Armed with this, and the basics of our model, let’s return to our pattern exploration. Our distinction of consciousness and self-consciousness is enough to examine history. But our model generates a simple ‘Kantian’ rubric based on our version of his classic antinomy. Further, a suspicious resemblance to transcendental idealism emerges from our data, seen in the simple question generated by a model of the type we are constructing: Where does freedom come from? Its non-random relative generation is a giveaway. We should not jump to conclusions on this point, but the issue for us here is that there is a clear limit to our knowledge, as the dynamic of evolution eludes direct observation.

We can branch off here, and the reader can pursue the Kantian issues in the endnotes, or proceed to Chapter Four, or Five. However, don’t stuff you head with a lot of Kantian terminology, until the subject is intuitive, and the occasion is created to do it right in a Kantian bootcamp situation. In one way, we are finished (?!), but we need to start over and expand on our pattern so far.

[i] Hans Reisss, Kant’s Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 41.

[ii] 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 Scheffer, 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).

[iii] Daniel Brudney, Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998)