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We can complete our model by looking at what we
call Kant's Challenge to find the pattern of Universal History. In general we
are confronted by an immense system to which we apply the category of causality
in naive fashion, e.g. What caused the Axial Age? These questions provoke the
classic contradictions of the philosophy of history. There is no avoiding this
issue of the breakdown of a Science of History, and we can see that the problems
are going to restage themselves for any theory of evolution, as far as man goes.
Kant's Challenge Our consideration
of historicism and historical inevitability is really a page from the book of
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason where the Third Antinomy of the Dialectic
is crux of the metaphysical dilemma of free will and historical laws. We have
found a theoretical basis for our system/agent hybrids in this very antinomy.
And we can see that the two levels in model correspond to the same
thesis/antithesis in that antinomy. Kant's essay Idea For A Universal History
is the source of an extension of Kant's thinking to history. We go our own way,
but with a way to resolve what is basically Kant's Question. A
Short History of The World Our three turning points are suddenly transparent
as a macroevolution inside of which 'free action' is emerging into freedom as it
exits from the eonic sequence. This approach allows us to harmonize the stark
opposition of system dynamics and individual freedom This
spawns Two Universal Histories, the macro mainline and the cultural totality.
This can allow us to address issues of imperialism, ideology, Eurocentrism,
etc... Stream and Sequence: A Frequency
Hypothesis We can complete our mode by putting it in a wrapper called a
frequency hypothesis. Our system looks like three beats in a longer pattern. We
don't know, and don't yet have the data, but our method allows us to use a
fragment by itself. The Discrete
Freedom Sequence One of the most remarkable parts of the eonic effect is the
double appearance of democracy, in both cases inside the eonic mainline. This
fact will be the subject of another webpage, so we will merely note it in
passing. It provides one possible clue to the dynamics of this system. This one
is tricky, so we will lay the groundwork first. And
there we find the remarkable intervals of transition, which we can redescribe in
terms the streams of culture and the sequence of transitions. Two
classic cases are the Greek and Israelite examples, where we see the stream of
Greek civilization cross the boundary of the eonic system and produce a
transition.
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This stream and sequence property shows the
way the transitions produce oikoumenes by diffusion from the transitional
area.
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In the Israelite and Indic cases we see the
'eonic evolution of religion', and the appearance from the transition of a
series of religious formations.
Economic Systems All at once we have
resolved one of the problems that so confused Marxists, and continues to confuse
economic historians using the 'economic interpretation of history'. We see that
the economic evolution of society is a misconceived notion. We notice that the
Industrial Revolution and modern capitalist economics is not a macro process,
but a subsystem of our greater system.
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