September 2008

A selection from World History And The Eonic Effect
1848: End Of Eonic Sequence?

We reach the end of our eonic sequence, as our model forces a distinction of the early modern and the new period at the end of this transition as the new system comes into play. The rough year 1848 is useful, for we can see that this is the first point at which one could begin to clearly perceive the eonic effect. And who do we find here but Marx and Engels generating either a revised liberalism, or else a ‘general TP4 exception’? Our discrete freedom sequence seems to end up an indiscrete Whiggocracy and to have some unfinished business. Not surprising. Whenever there is a Leveller a True Leveller can’t be far behind.[i]

Although the year 1848 is no more than a rough marker chosen as a peg to hang a tale, and end a book, it neatly shows the point at which our pattern starts into its post-transition, and reversal from localization to globalization, unprotected by any factor of eonic determination from imperialistic degenerations and the new economic systems, soon to be downshifted further by Darwinian ideology. Even a cursory glance at modern philosophy shows how the seminal era slumps out after the generation of Marx and Schopenhauer. Many other indicators make the point. This time, seeing the effect, we can take action to recover. We tend to be mesmerized by the ignited exponential processes (e.g. the demographic transition) beginning in the transition, but these are not the same. We must stick to the rules of our model, which suggests the intermittency of our transitions, which puts us outside of the eonic sequence. That will at least enforce a discipline of teleological disarmament of all parties.

1848: Teleological antinomies We can easily spot the crude division point predicted by the model at about the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, at the outside by 1848, a truly spectacular generation in world history. This division is useful because it is about the exact ‘first point’ at which our ‘eonic observer’ can start to see the eonic effect, and also because its symbolic significance forces the issue of ideology. This division is of course a consequence, slightly artificial, of our model, and can’t safely be used for any ideological purpose, although it shows clearly that liberalism is a main core emergent, while the Marxist challenge is a bit too late to alter the momentum of the system, as the Bolshevik fiasco makes clear. But nothing in our model forbids a general TP4 exception just here second-guessing a liberal outcome with an alternate as socialism (i.e. democracy!). Unfortunately the result is likely to start a jackknife sequence. The point is not complicated: a democratic realization leads naturally to a consideration of socialism, but, as it happens, this natural flow is interrupted by the timing of the eonic sequence, as macro switches to micro-action, seemingly causing a division of the two aspects, due to the downshift to low octane. This gesture required someone really smart, such as Marx, perhaps not smart enough. We see the dilemma in the attempt to abandon the rich emergentism of the modern transition for a precipitous TP4 exception. So where’s the socialist Mozart? Nature was done just as socialism got underway. This creates an illusion of legitimation of the first liberal experiments. If the point is not clear consider that it took the American Civil War to set a course correction for the first and greatest liberal experiment, the American democratic breakthrough.

This choice of symbolic year is about the same as Hegel’s 1806, but more cogently directed to the issues, and merely a useful token for a rough ending to the transition. It is like the difference between ignition, liftoff and steady flight getting underway. But is it also the end of the eonic sequence? We don’t know. But it is an unsettling thought, since ‘revolutions as free action’ will move to take the place of transitional sequence.

Armed with the distinction of macro and micro-action we can see at a glance the overall dynamic at work, however we understand it, and it is unsettling. We think in terms of linear progress, and then are understandably baffled by the First World War, the Holocaust. Whatever else is the case, these are well outside the eonic sequence. These are clear cases where mideonic stupidity is starting up again. Nietzsche influenced by Darwin does not bode well for the future.

Can we even maintain the modern transition, let alone advance it? In fact, we can, but we see in antiquity this dread effect as the classical transitions run out of octane fuel and lapse to a higher degree of mechanization, never to recover. That is less likely in this case, although we see the fall-off take effect as the transitional effect wanes. This is not Spenglerian decline but a one-time slump-down from a bursting episode of high performance, followed by a more stable process tending to a more contingent social drift, and then potentially, we can hope, new advance, but without eonic determination, a new freedom beyond the eonic sequence. This is the punctuation, then equilibrium, of the whole eonic effect. But it is not really equilibrium, and the metaphor is not quite right. A whole series of take-offs have been ignited, and it is completely within the rules of the game to realize the dynamic and compensate. The fate of the Hellenistic need not be ours.

Although our model seems to be confounded by an ideological modernism or a Eurocentric focus now under challenge, we see that in fact it has a built-in device to reconcile these contradictions, and we leave our system just as it undergoes its convulsive reversal from local transition to global oikoumene creation. It is important to remember that in our model, the local and long-range future diverge, and no teleological claim on the latter is possible for the former. And our system aggressively reminds us of this as the sequence seems to stop in the wake of the revolutionary early modern. This explains the baffling puzzle arising in the instant bifurcation of our system at the very moment it is getting under way. And one issue is the teleological antinomy, latent in Kant’s Challenge, of the potential system and actual outcome, with its economic emergentism taken as the ‘final state of the system’. Chillingly apt that Marx (not alone!) proposes the abstract category ‘socialism’, which he refuses to define, as a next ‘transition’. This thinking merely reflects the antinomy, and it is important to remember that our model predicts nothing. It is right that it be that way and we can see that Marxism suffered the fiasco of a ‘local time teleological’ projection. Marx/Engels as champions of democracy works quite nicely.

Econostream != eonic sequence We don’t need to indulge in leftist propaganda to see that our model distinguishes two things: the economic stream and the eonic sequence diverge. If someone says that you must submit to economic ‘laws’ in the name of history, laws that make him rich and others poor, that man is pulling the wool over your ideas with bogus theory, because we can see that economic processes pertain only to economies and don’t generate the long-range future (at least so far, looking backward), these points not to be taken dogmatically. Our model simply mirrors the debate, its proper task.

How elegant yet somber to observe this system cross this divide into a new era in rise of liberalism, the turbulence of revolution, and the passage across the spectrum of the Left to the year 1848, about when our transition moves toward shutdown in the open field of a ‘new age’. Although a basic liberal interpretation is well within the bounds of our model, a kind of default outcome, we should note that this construct cannot be safely used as a form of legitimation for that.

It is not hard to show that emergent liberalism was an imperfect outcome of the modern transition. The American system failed even to abolish slavery, proof that nothing deductive can be extracted from ‘eonic determination’, in case propagandists aim at a legitimation of modernism via this model. The sudden chaotification resembles overshoot and undershoot in a control system, and the instability or equivocation is evident from the first in the twin figures of Luther an Münzer, then in Locke and the Levellers. As if a last minute course correction, suddenly turning into a demand for a different outcome, finds Marx and Engels challenging the whole transition as it were, on the verge of a disastrous attempt at course correction. Lest we forget, they took action at a desperate moment in a system that almost failed to accomplish abolition. We are left with an unnerving question, What else is missing?

An immense ideological veil protects the confusion of eonic sequence versus econostream. The modern transition rapidly crystallized into the capitalist societies dominated by market ideology that are prone to the domination of a new type of elite. We can’t quite mediate that using our model, and the potential of this system so far outstrips systems of antiquity that leftist reactions tend to backfire. The world of our transition is nearly done before the Industrial Revolution, which rapidly generates a secondary post-transitional culture of the new capitalist society. Looking at the chaotic movements of world history we should think this development potentially almost benign by comparison, and the classic Marxist critiques, while altogether cogent and seminal, tended to misdiagnosis and false efforts to construct an undefined socialism whose record speaks for itself. We cannot legislate these issues with our model, which promptly reflects this dilemma without resolving it. We see the obvious lost opportunity: the founders of the American system could have created a socialist republic, but were too fixated on Roman history.

However, the whole point of our model is that it allows us to distinguish two levels, e.g. emergent democracy at its initialization, however obscure, and the subsequent realization, which may be flawed or fail. In a global context the dilemma of empire arises very quickly and we find the sad reaction to the American system rising to produce a challenge to its future. The rich potential of the eonic starting point is soon forgotten in the mix of Darwinism, classical liberalism, economic ideology and scientism that assembles the new worldview. Locked in this box we fail to see the limits to our vision this induces. Challenged at once by the far left, the new economic society ambiguously enters its mideonic pilgrimage in experiments still young in the reckoning of five thousand years. The future of the reign of Capital is an ominous suspense.

The new world of capitalism must be judged on its own terms, our job done. We have merely disengaged it from the macrosequence. But we must note that before classical liberalism stands the work of its creators, who never foresaw the results of their endorsement of economic freedom, that orphan of the discrete freedom sequence. The eonic mainline can’t control the economic field, as core and periphery imbalance arises. But the difference between the two can be seen in the way the modern transformation lets loose a new round of slavery in the periphery, while the core, racing against time, generates abolition, and not a moment too soon. The American sidewinder system doesn’t make it, and we have the preposterous constitution of four-fifths person at the outcome. Downfield course corrections beyond the divide point prove very costly, and are prone to fall into the hands of those who don’t know what they are doing. In the post-divide the gates of the penitentiary slam closed, and the inmates begin to make their own rules.

Like a great oak tree the eonic sequence sprouts a new limb and this injects new life into the world system, even as the other limbs continue in their growth and separate existence, forced however to mediate the immense confusions of globalization. Needless to say we must evaluate dialectically the nature of the modern outcome by sifting the eonic emergents defining our transition. There is no simple talisman or formula of success. Some more complex process has differentiated into a scattershot spectrum of results and we are inside that field of eonic emergents, assessing their components as relative free action. We must beware of getting lost in fantasies of a ‘Western Civilization’, although that confusion will prove inevitable, at great cost to the slowing of globalization momentum.

A selection from World History And The Eonic Effect:

A first attempt to answer Kant’s Challenge lies in Hegel (and the other post-Kantians), and his grand philosophic effort whose appearance, timing, and unfolding is itself ‘eonically significant’, and almost spectacular, but our viewpoint is different, springing directly from Kant. A simple systems model has yielded a surprising new insight, hints, at least, into historical dynamics, the stock of Geist-design arguments suddenly plummets. What’s more this is matched with the expression of an exotically austere ethic of action. Hegel’s historical amoralism becomes problematic in this approach and should not be mixed with the analysis. We can no longer say, for example, that some teleological process justifies unethical action. The slaughterbench of historical progression all at once finds itself downgraded to micro-action.[i]

There are a lot of Hegelian Indians in the woods we are traversing, and we should be clear this account is different and therefore made no use of Hegel. Our account echoes the classic theme in Hegel of the emergence of freedom, but we have produced another approach to that. We cannot endorse any effort to graft the two together, which will create hopeless confusion. Once that’s clear we can appreciate Hegel on his own terms, as a classic moment of the eonic effect itself. The solution to the Hegel question for us is to declare his system eonic data! He is too classic for any other approach and we will examine the Hegelian archaeological site like the Sphinx of Egypt.

The issue of ‘historical dialectic’ never arises in our approach (although the oscillations in the degrees of freedom in our eonic sequence, by any measure, would seem some sort of dialectic), and we are left suspicious, since we can see that the eonic mainline does not follow a dialectical logic. It is not our business to produce hasty judgments of Hegel, but we are going in another direction, and after the confusions of dialectic that follow Hegel, we should do well to be wary of the kind of dialectical thinking that haunts Marxists. The irony is that our system showing oscillations of degrees of freedom shows a rediscovered meaning of the idea of a ‘dialectic of freedom’, but our sense is quite different.

Everyone, after Hegel, seems to wish to rid themselves of Kantian dualism. But we see how the issue arises all over again in a new form, and no dialectic argument will come to the rescue. That said, this is probably a better introduction to Hegel bar none, it is simply that we can’t vouch for muddled hybrids here. Austere Kantian-style thinking is as far as we get. The point is that you are on your own if you try to Hegelianize this model. It won’t work.

We should note that our approach sets straight the vexed question of ‘embedded rationality’ (we won’t use that phrase) that Hegel and Marx both struggled with, and keeping our distance is a better way to clarify a classic discourse that went awry, as seen in the confusions of the Hegelian ‘The rational is the real’, and the over-hypostatized concept of Reason in history. The relation of eonic determination to free action allows a decisive recasting in better form of that famous phrase that blew up on the launch pad.[ii]

We should let history do Hegel, rather than Hegel history, to reconstruct the spectacular moment to which he gave expression, next to his political and other discourse. Hegel is often dismissed, but one should be wary of the usual one-line dismissals that seldom ring true. Our ‘evolution of freedom’ seems to echo Hegel, but the thematic is different. Just a warning, you cannot create hybrids here with the eonic model. The problem is that you will ‘understand’ Hegel faster with the eonic model than with Hegel’s texts, even though our treatment is different. The eonic model gives us a way to restate the ‘evolution of freedom’ argument in a non-Hegelian fashion.

Hegel couldn’t see the eonic effect. And his mythology of ‘geist’ is a fairy tale, and not a form of explanation, plays with an extra queen against more sober labors of historical science, and Hegel has no way to connect his system to empirical history in our sense. Poised between Spinoza and Kant, Hegel is altogether provocative, the Dembski of German classical philosophy. Hegel applies the (Spinozistic?) argument by design to the evolution of freedom, but we claim that the better approach is to remain nearer to the Kantian version, if only because our empirical series is finite and not subject to universal generalizations. If you stoop to the design approach, the search for historical structure stops, and Hegel misses the eonic effect, the data still premature in any case. By grafting divinity onto the data, first with Spinoza, then with Protestant theology, he left a fairly bloodthirsty Big Devil in the midst of church services, and electrocuted a lot of Marxists. Small wonder the philosopher Schopenhauer saw a problem here.

The question, for us, is simple. The data we are dealing with is easy to analyze if we assume that we don’t see the mechanism. This suggests the noumenal/phenomenal approach toward our representations of history. But the point is that Hegel’s Spinozistic theology can force our back to the wall: he has taken up our offer for extensions to the nth god name sequence.

Our occasional use of the term dialectic follows standard historical usage as common parlance, next to the Kantian usage in his first critique, e.g. the ‘dialectic of illusion’. That is, a dialectical approach to an argument looks at its thesis and antithesis, and this often shows an historical context. We take ‘dialectic’ as an historical ‘debate’ in motion, etc,… An historical review, as eonic data, of dialectical thought, viz. Hegelian dialectic, is then appropriate, but the slight ‘meta’ in this is something different from adopting dialectical reasoning. To reject ‘dialectic’ would seem ill advised indeed. We will be quickly forced to reinvent such and we could call it ‘dialogical zigzag’, the branching of logical argument. Our synchronous spectrum in the Axial Age is as much ‘dialectic’ as we can handle, but we need a new terminology

We have a problem, and we are stuck with a Newtonian systems model, and the idea of freedom, but we will persist in our positivistic ways using only period analysis and dumb Aristotelian logic instead of some grand dialectic (a tactic that will backfire, to be sure). The discrete freedom sequence is an empirical object. A Kantian philosophy of history exists, but is concealed in other forms. Thus we might note that the philosophy of Schopenhauer contains an inverted ‘philosophy of history’ that gives a new a different clue to the mysteries of Hegel, and we see the difficulty of any strategy of advancing into the unknown with a new metaphysics. Why was Schopenhauer so critical of Hegel, and who got it right? Is it not odd that in the wake of Kant one fellow goes toward Christianity, the other toward Buddhism?

Hegel is beguiling, but many have often felt a sense of unease about Hegel’s method, something awry. Hegel can be mesmerizing, but the problem is not hard to find. A close look shows teleology mixed up with economic self-organization, the cunning of reason. That won’t work, and we see the clear differentiation of two levels, separating economic and another ‘universal’ history. Marx starts tearing his hair, what’s going on here? Hegel is clear on one point, divinities are dangerous devils, this one crushes millions under its boot. Monotheism is a dangerous genre. We can see the snafu arising in Hegel’s discourse on the ‘rational as real’. Follow the eonic model, but without this phrase, considering our two levels which preempt the endless problems Hegel ended up with using his phrase. Our distinction of eonic determination and free action will never allow us to either kiss the donkey of Prussian statism nor fail to see the splendor in slapstick comedy (tragedy).

We can see at once the problem in his teleological generalizations incorrectly matched to historical facts. Why are Julius Caesar and Napoleon world historical individuals? How connect them to world spirit? Something very basic is wrong with Hegel’s thinking here, and the indulgence in ‘geist’ has confused him. Caesar liquidated the very freedom Hegel seems to find germane to the core issue. Our model will clarify this example immediately. After all the trouble of challenging Newton on teleology, the results were fated to be ‘error’, which does not subtract from the interest in the attempt. But in the end Hegel resembles the design theorists and wishes to introduce a second queen onto the chessboard, making anything easy to explain.[iii]

One always suspects something ‘behind the scenes’ with Hegel. He is really an early traveler in an early version of the current New Age movement. His dialectic is a version (quite sophisticated) of primordial involutionary triadism, ‘something we’ve seen before’. Is there any indication in the literature? One casts about for some source. Whence does this come? A clue lies at the beginning of Karl Lowith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche, a reference to the Rose Cross. Does Hegel have any connection to something along these lines? The recent Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition has done our work for us. We see the exact correspondence to this occult tradition. So our wariness about dialectic is confirmed, and one can be a bit appalled Leftists are using ‘negation of the negation’ to plot against governments. Hegel’s system starts to seem suspicious thus. But then again Hegel, and this is significant, is far and away better at ‘involutionary triadism’ that those promoting the endless junk in this field. Later we will reference a Samkhya version of this. These traditions are sometimes very careful if they invoke the ‘spirit n’, where Hegel is content to construct a myth.

To conclude, this isn’t even criticism of the much maligned Hegel. One could wager the eonic model makes better sense of Hegel than Hegel himself. He is beautiful the way he is, and stands with Kant, Schopenhauer, and Marx as one of the Sphinxes cast in timeless granite left by our modern transition. Once we have set up a framework we can reopen the question of Hegel. A prime task of the eonic model must be to be good stewards of the evidence, and this episode of German philosophy so heavily correlated with the eonic effect is spectacular, but might lead to a loss of critical thinking in the name of critical thinking. Nothing in Hegel’s experience could have matched our discrete-continuous model, therefore the terms are not transferable. Our model T ‘idea for a universal history’ proceeds, coughing smoke, just by and by Hegel as we gaze on an archaeological monument of some magnificence.

Marx, self-enriching alienation, teleology There is a remarkable resemblance in some forms of Marxist historical theory to our idea of a discrete-continuous model, i.e. a series of stages of history (with a critical difference). The problem is that the stages are given labels, content, when what we find in the eonic model are simple stages, like computer cycles set by a clock, or recursions of one and the same process of ‘evolution’, like intermittent computational time. The transition from feudalism to capitalism in the rise of the modern was a great idea that turned out to not really work, and we notice from our data and model that transitions out of ‘feudalism’ seem to have happened repeatedly! Instead of stages we will have, once done, an ‘eonic’, i.e. on-off, series or ‘eonic sequence’, of no inherent content save what the locality of transformation has to offer in place. Whatever is in the mainline of the eonic sequence tends to transformation. Thus the ‘modern’ stage is simply a transition to a new era in which capitalism is transformed by the Industrial Revolution into a civilization with a particular economic timbre and industrial organization. This economic system is the characteristic of that stage, but can be changed at any time, since it is not a fixed stage. And a ‘capitalist’ economic system has no inherent status as ‘historical law’, i.e. ethical variations given to it by the individual void value-free mechanics. The difference in our model will be that the discrete series model simply switches off in the present and says nothing. Criticizing Marx can be tricky because he packaged a bit of Hegel into an economic model but with a claim on the future, teleology. Whatever our respect for Marx, his model is flawed, even as he struggles with one aspect of our eonic effect. But every time you refute him he floats back to the surface like a rubber duck in a tub. Each time that happens, bad theory gets in the way all over again.

This connects to the dangers of teleology in the Marx/Hegel thought systems. And Marxism has suffered fatal hybrid confusions here. For example, the ‘self-alienation’ of spirit in Hegel becomes the alienation of labor via Feuerbach. All well and good. The problem is that a series of assumptions seems to pass between the two systems, Hegelian fleas, and the mood of the slaughterbench sacrifice enters into Marx’s own account of the ‘stage of capitalism’, after the stage of slavery. And it seeps into the Marxist version with a cryptic use of teleological thinking. Finally the alienation seems to justify ‘alienation as self-enriching’ capitalism, exploitation is a necessary, perhaps permanent, stage of history. At the very least, we can demand the non-existent formal proof in a sound model for this kind of thinking that began with a myth about self-alienation of spirit. The answer to Marx is Marx. If you plan on a leap into freedom, don’t wait for the final stage. Start today, anyhow. There are no viable theories or religions of sacrifices man is forced to endure on the way to a better future.

Without being unreasonable about Marx’s essential point, it is an important quibble to suggest that Marx in one sense might be more ‘bourgeois’ than the bourgeoisie and in any case in principle indifferent to the issues raised by inexorable transitions between stages. Idealistic liberals with a fondness for Marx forget what he said, whether he meant it or not. It is undoubtedly a difficult question, but the issue that concerns us is the sloppy use of ‘laws’ without proof. There are no such stages. This is no small matter since at the point of Stalinist accelerated catch up development of a capitalist economy the justification of outright tyranny arises from assumptions about a system of stages in question.[iv]

The real issue in terms of the eonic sequence is to ask if the discrete freedom sequence actually produced freedom in the passage from macro-action to micro-action, and by what definition. Nothing in our model speaks of the mideonic outcomes of the general sequence. It is not a question of economic systems evolving but of the creation of democracies from republics. If Marx asks whether that democracy was genuine, then we can as easily consider the creation of socialisms (real democracies) from such republics.

Relevant to our consideration:
From The New Hegelians, Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School, ed. Douglas Moggach, Cambridge, 2006

In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Kant strips down the Christian religion to what he regards as its moral core. This is the pursuit of virtue with the aim of founding with all others a worldwide ethical commonwealth. Kant makes sit clear that he respects the work of churches and church leaders in trying to bring about this moral ideal, but he is equally clear that they do not represent the sole or, indeed, even the most important means in bringing it about. The general external trappings of religious faith Kant regards as, at best, symbolically representing the change at which true virtuous behaviour aims, and, at worst, seriously misleding the faithful in their goal of achieving goodness. Although Kant does not try to undermine entirely the metaphysical or transcendent side of religion, he does regard its role as secondary and dependent upon the pursuit of moral goals. It might be said with Kant that the essence of true religion, of which the best forms of Christian worship are part, is morality. Humanity is at the core of Kant’s interpretation of religion. It has to do with the perfection of the human race as the highest aspect of nature. With Kant, religion is moral anthropology. This brings him very close to Ludwig Feuerbach.

Here is a selection from the Preface to World History And The Eonic Effect, which can clarify the ‘onset of the eonic model’, and its discussions of theory and ideology.
The phrase ‘Nous ne sommes pas Marxistes’ should be analyzed carefully by qualified experts. Its meaning might surprise you.

This is the third revised edition of World History and the Eonic Effect, the self-published/Internet book and underground theoretical self-defense kit in relation to the Darwinian paradigm. The online response to the second edition and associated blog has been gratifying, amusingly so next to the wall of silence from the Darwin establishment, too far gone to grasp the falsification of its ideological idée fixe. Perhaps, as the saying goes, it’s the economy, stupid. The Darwin debate is really a propaganda war, and the work of the Intelligent Design movement has crystallized the critique of Darwin’s theory around the inadequacies of the design argument, betting, no doubt correctly, their public will never encounter, for example, the Kantian critiques of such. At a time of much debate between the Intelligent Design and Darwinian factions, the reader has a different perspective on the subject of human evolution, a second, or third, opinion. The perception of the eonic effect shows the way to a new understanding of universal history, and the way to a new post-darwinian liberalism (or indeed leftism) that is not disguised economic propaganda, Social Darwinist crypto-legitimation plaubibly denied, or the reductionist scientism that has put secularism at risk.

[click to continue...]

The question of the philosophy of history hovers ambiguously between Kant and Hegel. The study of the eonic effect adopts a variant of the Kantian concept as it appears in his essay on history, Idea For A Universal History, and proceeds to construct an eonic model, one that can bring a fresh perspective on the question of historical dynamics, so precariously analyzed by the ‘historical materialists’.

The subject of Hegelianism, as cited in the book by Toews, constitutes a kind of quagmire for leftist analysis, although the profundity of Hegel’s system cautions one against simplistic anti-Hegelian affirmations.

In fact, the eonic model adopts a kind of empirical, and evolutionary, approach to the core issue of the philosophy of history, proceeding from an entirely different direction, the result, however, generating a most remarkable echo of Hegel, with its construct of the ‘evolution of freedom’.

Hegelian study is, should we say it, quite arcane, with the result that few understand it, yet the eonic model performs at a glance what is needed, the demonstration of the evolutionary meaning of freedom. So we proceed to outflank Hegel, looking back to see that our approach will suddenly generate an understanding of what Hegel meant.  We are about our own business, which will, due to the circumstance of our subject, make Hegel a empirical fact of the very self-referential history we are subjecting to analysis. So we lose nothing, and, armed with the eonic model, can backtrack to reconstruct the remarkable moment, or period, from the 1790’s to the collapse of the Hegelian project in the 1840’s.

Our perspective includes far more than this, and we can as well play on the harp of liberal emergentism, complete with the strains of Yankee Doodle as we see the historical moment of the American Revolution.

Here’s a short Amazon review I did, a long time ago, of an important book:
Hegel Myths and Legends
by Jon Stewart

5.0 out of 5 stars The ‘end of history’ and a Hegel Myth, October 16, 2001
By John Landon “nemonemini”
This fascinating book addresses, and counters, the many false interpretations of Hegel that have grown up from the start of his system to the present day. To be sure, these defenses, in the midst of much ’setting the record straight’, might be challenged as partisan or excessively one-sided themselves, yet the fact remains that many attacks on Hegel have failed to grasp the nature of his thinking. This is not even a ‘pro-Hegel’ statement, being of equal relevance to those critics of Hegel who end up thrashing in the labyrinthine subtleties of his influence, and dialectical logic.
This works both ways, as Hegel is pressed into the service of ideology by his friends. Worth the price of the book twice over is the series and expose on the ‘end of history’ mythology now liberal propaganda a la Fukuyama. This material arriving via Koyre and Kojeve with assistant packaging by Alan Bloom constitutes the core Hegel phantom in State Department piece de resistance that graced the end of the Cold War. It is a good example of the Hegel you thought you knew, but definitely didn’t.

The hopeless confusion of the ‘end of history’ theme, and its abuse, is examined in this book.

I am looking at (once again)

Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 (Paperback)
by John Edward Toews

The key to the classic left, or its failure, lies, of course in the era of Hegelianism, and Toews book, among a host of others, examines the post-Kantian lead up to the generation of the 1840’s.
Somewhere in the post-Hegelian confusion lies the characteristic narrowing of philosophical focus that left the left stranded in Feuerbachian oversimplifications leading to scientism and positivism, with the resulting lack of a properly founded cultural project. Marxism is especially insidious in the way the reversal of Hegelian perspectives produces an incoherent crypto-idealism masquerading as materialism.

We are thrust into our subject, post haste, The Future of Work: Where the Labor Movement Is Heading

Global Labor Strategies. Posted September 1, 2008.
Conventional trade unionism is pretty much over. On Labor Day, it’s time to figure out what should come next.

I post a comment,…
The old ‘old left’ and the future

Posted by: nemonemini on Sep 1, 2008 7:04 AM
The labor movement is the child of the old ‘old left’ which since the (fortunate) passing of Bolshevism is essentially defunct, both theoretically and in practice. Isolated labor movements are sitting ducks without the larger framework of a true left. The future needs something new in the way of a theory/philosophy of history that can base the idea of the left in something more than the Leninist distortions and revolutionary adventurism. Behind the errors of Marx and his denunciation as a failed prophet lies the reality that he prophesied the exact situation that neo-liberalism has created for us. But his flawed theories have proven the left’s own downfall. So, for a first thought, we need to both disown the old left, and yet have no illusions about the acute insights of such as Marx that essentially produced the classic diagnosis of our situation. This diagnosis is still mocking us a century and half later. But the old left is in many way in the way of new thinking.
It popped into my head to start a blog on this issue: 1848+: Out of Revolution, (no content yet, but it’s the idea that counts)

Our About page needs an About page, so
A word from nemini, below decks