1848+: Last and First Men

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.