Outflanking Hegel

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.