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. 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.

The issue of the philosophy can be reduced to one simple idea (and we have already built in this idea). The resemblance of our situation to in an essay on history by Kant is remarkable, and even as we construct an ‘eonic model’ we will 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. 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.

This should not be misunderstood. We are just near the classic confusion of the Christians and Israelites: some history is an ‘age of revelation’, special, the theatre of the transcendent. We make no such claim. All of history is in the realm of the phenomenal, including the history of eonic transitions, but the interaction shown in the eonic effect in its mysterious correlation with a domain beyond our representations is the key both to its mystery, as beyond knowledge, and yet to its intelligibility as an expression of a familiar discourse in the philosophy of history. 

Let us note the basic fact of the discrete freedom sequence. We suspect that it is no accident that democracy emerges so powerfully in two successive trransitions, and we are left with a true mystery in the clear demarcation of the ‘evolution of freedom’. And near the second, we see the birth of the philosophy of history, and the philosophies of freedom to match. We can take these are as a correlated nexus combined with the history of science.  And the history of liberalism. All these are becoming aspects of our non-random pattern, because their appearances are eonic, in this case, as we shall see, down to the decade. We must proceed methodically to study these details comprising extensive domains of discourse, to grasp the nature of the free gifts of time, and work to understand the nature of our historical freedom as we step beyond the boundaries of the eonic sequence, at the point where its action goes into shutdown and we are left to work out our evolution alone. We should note that Greek democracy lasted but a generation or so, and be mindful of the brevity of its flowering, and the long centuries of civilization without it, and then the sudden, quite on schedule, system action of its reappearance. 

There is something mysterious here, the very idea of freedom is showing strong eonic determination, the effect of system action. We can restate again our perception that the emergence of philosophy (and science) is itself bound up in our eonic sequence. Do you know think it very odd indeed that our system self-referentially produces philosophers of freedom, starting with Rousseau just at the close of its transition? We know, by taste, a sort of hunch, this no accident.

Let us note in passing that as we observed the Axial Age, the scientists, sages, prophets, philosophers, yogis, all seemed to be men in a common spectrum of realization, prior to the differentiation of categories that began to occur almost immediately. Thales was a sage, a natural philosopher, the prime scientific beginner, and not too far from a figure such as Heraclitus, who quite resembles a yogi, in some fashion. The prophets of Israel will join this club as 'early eonic observers' trying to make predictions about the course of an eonic transition! So they are scientists, of a sort, also. Be that as it may (we tend to root for our eonic heroes with a slight stretch), the point here is that early modern science is clearly still undifferentiated from philosophy, witness such figures as Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Descartes. The cutaway point is Newton, and yet he takes a very careful stance  towards his own science, one that is very different from what science became. He refuses to include the 'will' in his physics, for example.  In practice, in a process especially visible in the modern transition, we see the parallel emergence of causal sciences and ‘freedom action scripts’, e.g. the emergence of modern liberalism.

The rapid differentiation of science (natural philosophy) from (metaphysical) philosophy signaled the wish to complete the science project and clean up the infelicities in Newton, but instead created the first intimations of reductionist positivism, and this led to a kind of 'crisis of the Enlightenment' as many began to notice that overly differentiated science would attempt to mimic physics in the social sphere, and this was an unexpected problem, one that the philosopher Kant most of all addressed with his famous critiques. Note that Kant was faithful to Newton, as he was, not as history rewrote him, and asked how the self/will fit into the physics picture. It was all very well to dismiss philosophy as metaphysics, the problem is that this is a two-edged sword. The foundational concepts in the realm of science are really disguised metaphysical claims. The prime metaphysical claim was that the organism, or at least man, was a causal machine, a 'thing' of nature, something Descartes, for example, never claimed.  These issues impinge especially on the question of history, which has never yielded to the claims of science, and explain the gist of the philosophy of history whose strange flowering in concert with the rebirth of evolutionism is itself an 'eonic effect'. We should note that the philosophy of history was reborn in modern times, but first appears in the Old Testament as a universal history of man, based on a mythological account of the Axial period, or one isolated part of it!

On the way to our model we dealt with the various classic objections to a science of history. Is history a causal machine? These questions take the form of the 'historical inevitability' argument, famous from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, or else the critique of historicism given by Karl Popper. In fact these issues were anticipated by figures such as Kant in the period of the Enlightenment. The issue is directly related to our sense that positivism was producing a too limited perspective for the human/historical sciences. At one and the same time the eonic pattern gives us the breakthrough data needed for any such science, for our eonic pattern shows all the characteristics of a particular type of system, if not laws of history. In fact we have also brought the term 'evolution' to this, properly qualified. This precipitates a sense that we really have found the right way to do a science of history, subject only to the 'wild card' of freedom in a causal system. And this has something to do with evolution. Maybe evolution isn't what we thought!

The intermittent or on-off effect of our eonic pattern leaves us dumbfounded by its transparently simple method of operation and does the same thing as simple feedback device, save that it switches on in what seems to be a fixed frequency. How could something so complex be so simple? Actually, it seems like a clock. We sense the ticking moments seen in the transitions, whose inner character is more complicated. In any system, no matter how complicated, a temporal sequence or clocklike property can be skimmed off the surface as a valid observation of its character. We will make our model reflect the data we have, even as we retreat from causal statements of laws to simple periodization, whose effect will be to map out transitions as descriptive substitutes for causal laws. We will do this by setting up, what the eonic pattern clearly shows, a two-level system based on the 'system activity' and the 'activity of the individuals inside it'. We should note in any case  that our system looks teleological, but we never closed the case, retreating to simple directionality. A directional system may or may not be causal. A feedback device is causal, but operates on a different level from its environment. One causal law interrupts another. 

Despite this simplicity, however, our system is peculiar in the way in operates on free activity itself. That seems odd, at first, but we encounter such systems all the time. At set of traffic lights operates on the free activity of the traffic. A sheep dog operates on the free activity of a flock of sheep. Note that we would be hard-pressed to ascribe free will to sheep, but would certainly speak of their free activity, if only as a herd. An army issues orders to soldiers, but how the soldiers execute those orders is more or less their free activity. Something not dissimilar to this is going on in the eonic sequence. At every stage of history we have the free activity of individuals, and yet, looking backwards, we discover something operating on that field of activity. 

Self-consciousness In the case of the eonic effect, high-octane self-consciousness arises in the individuals in the transitions, and this is the factor X that drives the sequence of transitions. This simply means that the normally random distribution of creative behavior is clustered in the eonic mainline. That's a fair whopper of claim, that evolution is not driven by genetics, but by self-consciousness, so let us ask ourselves again what we are seeing in the Axial interval: creative (self-conscious) individuals simply appear in a clustered time-frame and a geographical zone and produce a new stage of culture, history, and social advance. More we do not see, but the key is transformed consciousness (what we call, using a grabbag term, self-consciousness). 
Let us reiterate that self-consciousness is real historically, beyond the abstractions of causality and freedom, and can be taken as is, prior to its possible explication, as the medium in which the antinomy is reconciled. There is something causal about self-consciousness, and yet something free about it. We might declare man free, yet in practice he muddles through via his transient states of self-consciousness, which give him episodes of creative freedom. Self-consciousness can be mysterious, it is transparent, an everyday state, yet we cannot transcend it, save by applying self-consciousness to itself. Perhaps some Buddhist or yogi might claim otherwise. In any case, the factor of self-consciousness is the pocket money of historical change and innovation.

All this provokes the paradox of freedom and causality, and yet our mixed system is able to reconcile this apparent contradiction. The eonic effect shows a classic resolution of such paradoxes. Note that contradictions exist in our own minds, while nature proceeds at a deeper level to transcend the contradiction. The point is that the solution to our problem seems based on a contradiction, but with a slight shift in perspective, and terminology, we will follow nature's way.

Our system does this by changing the degrees of determination of its action, our transforming consciousness. Clearly there is something that induces a higher degree of self-consciousness or creativity on schedule in the eonic sequence. Again, look at the Axial interval. This type of consciousness is open to man at all times, but it intensifies in the macro periods of our 'eonic evolution'. This point is important, since our system is not deterministic. It can act only up to a point, the rest depends on free action. There is no other way to describe what we see in the Axial period, for example.

Take a somewhat drastic example, one where the eonic sequence generates forms of activity we cannot replicate on demand, as 'free activity'.  This brings us to the strange Cheshire Cat smile behind the eonic effect.

Greek Tragedy: eonic data The emergence of Greek Tragedy is an exact eonic correlate, appearing almost like a miracle in the Axial interval. We are free to write a Greek tragedy at any time, but the fact of the matter is that the genre flowers in the Axial interval in the eonic sequence. What causes this? A causality question with no simple answer. We could not say the 'eonic sequence' knows anything about tragedies, least of all that is micromanages the details of dramas, only that some mysterious transformation of consciousness leaves some exceptional art in its wake. The very question provokes the key issue for a science of history, and yet at the same time stumbles on the contradiction of freedom. We are going to find that we will invent a new type for the 'science of history' by watching its standard definition collapse and turn into something else.   

Note: We must proceed with some caution here since we have, just as Kant did himself, taken a step from the psychological focus of his considerations of freedom into the realm of history. Man’s free will, if any, applies to man. But now we are speaking of history, the aggregate of all men together. And we have taken a step beyond Kant by producing a possible answer to his challenge by noting the presence of an historical dynamic giving expression to the emergence of freedom. But this is a statement about aggregate history, not just the individuals that make it up. We have spawned the notion of some kind of ‘free history’, which must be applied to some definition of a ‘universal history’.  This is a risky thought, but in fact we have produced all the foundation, plus data, to do just that. We must be careful therefore in our usage of the term ‘freedom’ in all its varieties. But we are beset with a remarkable answer to many of the paradoxes of freedom in history if we take this approach. Since our data is the spitting image of a Kantian thematic, we should take our cue from it and be careful to distinguish the ‘historical realization of freedom’, which has its own distinct phenomenology, from some detected noumenal but never seen aspect, what he pointed to with the label ‘transcendental freedom’.  Such a term is an invitation to many confusions, but its historical context is directly significant in relation to our model (which should nonetheless eschew it, save as formal Kantian study). Armed with this we can rapidly clarify the many confusions over the question of freedom in history as this produces the well-known ambiguities we see in such chaotic events as progression of revolutions so characteristic of the modern transition.

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