by nemo on April 24, 2009
We cited this essay Jim Blaut and Jared Diamond here in the previous post.
In light of that post, here is a section from World History And The Eonic Effect on the sudden rise of the modern, with a brief discussion of Blaut.
6.1.1 Frontier Effects and The ‘European Miracle’
There is mysterious seminal generation springing from the period ca. 1500, indicated by the onset of the Reformation. Over and over our sense of historical modernism draws us to this point of the so-called ‘early modern’, and into a controversy or equivocation over its significance as one of the great turning points of history. Relative to world history, progress explodes in the sixteenth century, despite the puzzle over the Renaissance. The abrupt start after 1500 is constantly suggested and then challenged or retracted because its proponents cannot account for it, or sort out the fact that a discontinuity might interrupt prior continuity. We can easily see the reason for the confusion, and its resolution. [click to continue...]
by nemo on November 15, 2008
The Darwin debate and the left
On Intelligent Design and the Left
Cats, Dogs and Creationism
By JEAN BRICMONT
“The criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism.”
–Karl Marx (Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).
Jean Bricmont reviews the MR book on ID. I have commented on the book several times here, before and after receiving a copy.
The left is stuck on nineteenth century materialism, and lives in a Darwinian limbo. I have no problem with attempted ‘material’ explanation, or rather, ‘naturalistic’ ones, but the theory of natural selection is a failure, so back to the drawing board. This book put out by Monthly Review fails to acknowledge a single critique of Darwin’s theory whatsoever and is therefore not a serious book, i.e. a piece of Darwin propaganda. John Bellamy Foster should know better as the co-author of Marx/s Ecology with its historical account of Marx’s early skepticism about natural selection.
by nemo on September 4, 2008
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.