7. CONCLUSION
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7. CONCLUSION |
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| 7.2.1 Freedom’s Causality and A Kantian Politics | ||||
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The inherent power of
our eonic model exposes at once a curious contradiction in the teleological
thinking of Kant. Kant is confusing here because he produces a splendid critical
methodology for the mediation of teleological issues, but ends stuck with the
wrong dynamic for this method, asocial sociability. But examining our eonic
sequence we discover that dynamic, and should like to use this as a plug-in for
his perspective on teleology. Kant predicts something he can’t find, but which
we have clearly found: ‘freedom’s causality’. As Elizabeth Ellis notes in
Kant’s Politics, What would “bridging
nature and freedom” mean outside of politics? For Kant the big questions are
nearly always epistemological: thus, bridging freedom and nature might mean
specifying the conditions under which investigators of the empirical world
(scientists) are able to find evidence of spontaneity in the physical world
(that is, of freedom’s causality). Either freedom and nature are strictly
alternative perspectives on the same set of empirical occurrences, or there are
some things in the world that can only be explained according to freedom (in
other words, the second alternative posits empirical evidence that some thing
has no antecedent cause). I am not the first person to point out that it is not
an easy thing empirical evidence of a lack of a cause. Kant himself assumes that
a good scientist will operate under the presumption that absent natural causes
may eventually be discovered.[i] But this is just what
we have found, with respect to macrohistory, at least. The author complains that
Kant’s teleology and the necessity of free political action are in conflict. We
have resolved this also, by seeing teleology differently, as eonic
directionality, and dispensing with the factor of asocial sociability, whatever
its relevance as an actual description of human culture, as an intrinsic
teleological process. Our eonic model produces an independent teleological
factor, visible only as directionality, that conditions but does not restrict
human free action. Kant is clearly
dissatisfied with the premature data history is giving him, and clutches at the
straw of the French Revolution, quite on the right track as we can see, from a
later perspective. If we stand back to take into account our entire eonic
sequence, the strength and limits of taking the French Revolution in this way
become clear, even as the larger data set completely confirms his basic
intuition. For we have found in the eonic sequence the unmistakable instances
sought for of ‘freedom’s causality’, or, to put from the viewpoint of the
historical stream, the absence of antecedent cause, empirical evidence of the
lack of a cause. In the greater past, the point is unmistakable in the Axial
phenomenon, thence by close examination of the overall character of the modern
transition relative to world history. Our eonic model has shown an ingenious way to resolve this paradox, and we can see that there is a simple way to mediate teleological questions even as we adopt the operational assumptions of a rational politics based on human autonomy. The riddle of teleology as seen in our system remains unsolved, yet it is detected via its representation in the pattern of directionality, seen looking backward. The constraint on our free power of choice, and political action, takes the form of the degree of our self-consciousness in the realization of the emergent system we find ourselves in. This is an elegant reconcialiation of the seeming contradiction, allowing us to adopt teleological considerations, without these foreclosing on our need to our freedom in history. The necessity of assumptions of free rational action to conduct politics, conflicting with Kant’s teleological thinking has been ‘fixed’ in our approach, by dropping the association of ‘asocial sociability’ with the driving action of evolution, and we can find the reconciliation of the contradiction, roughly speaking, in the way in which our two level system shifts gear between higher and lower degrees of freedom. This formulation allows us to free practical action from teleology, even as we allow this factor to remain in a larger system. |
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