Looking backward, our perception of greater antiquity seen through the lenses of the outcome of the modern transition, in our notation ‘ET6++’, we see the context of secular modernism as an eonic effect, and we are well into a new period in the ‘downfield new aging’ of a major transition. In the contemporary time frame the passage to a first global oikoumene is well underway, and the gross imbalance of eonic evolutionary process endures its sluggish globalization.

Once we set up the eonic sequence the resolution of Kant’s Challenge is almost instantaneous, we see high correlation with political novelty, with the transitional eras, with the birth of the state in the first transition, and the most spectacular being the double emergentism of democracy, ‘ET5, Greece’ to ‘ET6, Europe’.

‘ET6++…: ca. 2000 A.D.

We are immersed in the unfolding structure we are attempting to describe, as the structure of ‘modernity’, i.e. the V-cone of ‘ET6,…’,. Our starting point is the current period of the onset of oikoumene creation, ‘ET6++,…’, in the wake of ‘ET6,…’, now proceeding globally in a fashion almost completely reminiscent of the first Sumerian, and later Hellenic, and other, oikoumenes. The Enlightenment prefigures the new era and seeds a universal global culture.

We are just emerging from…

 ‘ET6…’: 1500-1800

We see the unmistakable effect of relative beginning, notwithstanding small indications from the period of the late medieval, in the sixteenth century, as the parallel interactive emergence of religious Reformation, Scientific Revolution , pre-capitalist economic transformation, overseas expansion, rising nationalism, and the proliferation of seminal literatures, and the rapid appearance of the early political philosophers such as the seminal Hobbes and Locke at the birth of Liberalism. The trigger areas quickly concentrate on a Northern European fringe area, stretching from Germany through Holland to England, and France...

‘ET6+…’: ca. 1800

The transition moves toward a characteristic second stage with the appearance of the English Revolution, the real rise of modern science, and the birth of the Enlightenment, really in this seventeenth century, rather than the eighteenth. This is period of the real cascade of modern effects that will drive the system into its climactic period and passage across a divide. The transition is a divide, and the divide, relatively arbitrary therefore, nonetheless shows a very marked near ‘scene changing’ effect in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The age of Democracy and Steam is attended by such a host of eonic emergents that it is difficult to sort them out. There is no consistent theme, universal name or stage label that we can give to this new age effect as we examine the broad spectrum of eonic emergents. We see the Enlightenment, but we also see Rousseau, and Romanticism. We see the emergence of capitalism, but we also see the collision of liberalism and socialism. The great takeoff is not just a function of economic or other factors, but of action in the eonic mainline.[i]

It is from this vantage point therefore that we look backwards at the entire phenomenon of civilization, and thence to the Neolithic. The modern example is so complex that we can barely grasp what is happening, since we tend to be ship’s mate on one of its emergents.

.[i] R. Lerner & al., Western Civilizations (New York: Norton, 1993), Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 1966), Norman Hampson, A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (New York: Pantheon, 1968), Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), Paul Hazard, The European Mind (New York: World Pub. Co., 1963), F. Nussbaum, The Triumph of Science and Reason: 1660-1685 (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), Tom Sorrell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), Lester Crocker, Nature and Culture (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1963), R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolutions, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford, 1980), Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago, 1977), Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophic History (Standford, 1965), David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), E. Roll, A History of Economic Thought (London, 1973) Athol Fitzgibbons, Adam Smith’s System of Liberty Wealth and Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), John Plamenatz, Man and Society (London: Longmans, Green, 1973), James Miller, Rousseau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), W. H. Weikmeister, Kant (Lasalle: Open Court, 1980), David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford, 1966), Slavery and Human Progress (1984), Pamela Pillbeam (ed.), Themes in Modern European History (London: Routledge, 1995), Ferenc Feher (ed.), The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California, 1990).