Our model is set up to provide a coherent outline of world history in the light of evolution, as a theory of evidence, and automatically subsumes dynamical questions as an empirical map of transitions in an eonic sequence. These transitions take the place of causal analysis, which, as we have seen, founders in the antinomy of freedom. Our exposition has been somewhat repetitive, to look at the eonic effect from several perspectives. But all these perspectives revolve around Kant’s Third Antinomy, and we can summarize the whole question in a paragraph from an essay by Kant on history, where he confronts this antinomy in history, in the process showing how our idea for a science of history entered the realm of the philosophy of history. The advantage of this approach is that we produce a result without a ‘theory’.  Our connection to this system lies in the ‘eonic emergents’ themselves. We have no other options. There is no simple answer to the question of theory. Theories, and science itself, are sub-processes of our pattern!

We regress backwards into theories about the evolution of theories, and this invokes classic issues of philosophy. We can keep trying, of course, in so far as the coherence of this system is such as to be user-friendly, with a means still unknown to match the self-reference of our level of discourse to a deeper unknown. In the process of doing all this we found, in the form of our discussion of freedom and nature, the close relationship to one classic issue of the philosophy of history, which we have expressed already in terms of the previously cited Third Antinomy of Kant. We can develop this a bit further, but note at the onset the ambiguity of our terms of discourse: we are using the ‘output’ of the system, science or philosophy, to analyze our system, a probable source of paradox. We can proceed anyway since we are stumbling on something truly surprising, the correlation of the emergence of freedom, in some sense, with the eonic sequence. We will call this the Discrete Freedom Sequence, and consider its implications once we lay the groundwork. We find that nature itself reflects our model construct, most remarkably. This interior prediction or confirmation should give us confidence in the rightness of our approach, i.e. the use of discrete-continuous model, which is seen to actually reflect the facts.

The resemblance of our situation to a theme in an essay on history by Kant is remarkable, and even as we construct an ‘eonic model’ we should also attempt to consider an ‘idea for a universal history’, a phrase from the philosopher Kant who wrote a short essay, Idea For A Universal History, with this title. In this essay he proposes a challenge, which we can call Kant’s Challenge.

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.

It is remarkable to see that we have already answered Kant’s Challenge directly. Although Kant is still using the language of the 'laws of history', he sees clearly in a majestic premonition the crux of our 'mixed causality/freedom' system. He was still short, for obvious reasons due to his immersion in the eonic pattern, of seeing what he suspected: the eonic effect, and his thinking went off ambivalently along a tangent with the idea of 'asocial sociability', an issue we can discuss later.  Note the resemblance of Kant’s statement to his Third Antinomy.

Kant’s 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.”

This antinomy was first applied to psychological states. Now all of a sudden it is transposed into history! We say this to carefully distinguish concepts of personal freedom from this new extension, ‘freedom in history’, an undefined concept, save that, once again, we have already given it an expression in terms of our model, our transitions. Whether or not they produce ‘freedom in history’, these transitions certainly produce innovations.

One conclusion, however tentative, that we could draw from this is the resemblance of the two levels of our model, the stream and the sequence, to this distinction in Kant of what seems like two kinds of causality. This in turn resembles Kant’s distinction of the noumenal and the phenomenal. There is a classic problem here: we can’t apply ‘causality’ to the noumenal, but, for all intents and purposes, we see the point, and might consider that issue later. Let us not confuse heuristic suspicions with derived conclusions or, for that matter, transcendental deduction, but at least confess our suspicions: all we see is our sequence of transitions, as phenomenological appearances. Their dynamism is hidden from us. This situation is precisely like the ambiguity that arises in Kant’s thinking.

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