12.07.05
The Question
Email from Teilhard, posted at Chaos/chaosmos/hegel/kant/teilhard/Scfp/consilience
In a message dated 12/6/2005 9:34:24 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, wispj@[ ].net [from Teilhard-yahoo] writes:
Yes, but what about the ‘why’? What do you see as the cause of the eonic effect? And what about punctuated equilibrium? Any relationship?
Questions, questions!
Questions, questions. Good question, one that, like ‘open sesame’, unlocks the dragon’s gate. If you pursue my eonic model you will discover the built in relationship to the Kantian noumenon/phenomenon problem. The question is very deep.
If we sense the noumenal aspect of something that probably means “It’s curtains”. NOBODY KNOWS AND YOU CAN’T FIND OUT. We reach the limits of our knowledge.
So we proceed carefully here, suspecting this is the case, careful not to invent a new myth, religious or Darwinian or whatever.
Please note your fascinating, but simple, phrase, ’cause of the eonic effect’.
Look at the data of the Axial Age. What is it that could ’cause’ the Axial Age?
Note the meaning of the question.
What is it that could ’cause’ massive innovations on five continents, from China to Greece, including major transitions in a brief span of centuries in five cultures, two world religions, one theist, one not, the beginnings of philosophy, science, democracy in Greece, the list goes on. That’s just for starters, the Axial part, one third of the whole pattern, which probably has earlier parts invisible to us in the Neolithic or before. There is no way to evade this since we have such up a very simple periodization, noticed a massive correlation, and been forced into a causal question, what caused this? We can proceed along a Kantian line, to see that the question itself is part of our built in a priori, an aspect of our representations.
We are out of our depth here, and confront a problem so vast, so complex that we are stunned into silence.
This something, ‘It’, simply streams outward on the surface of a planet over millennia in perfect timing lightly touching small areas that morph rapidly and then diffuse the changes into their environment. Then it stops as swiftly as it started, and goes silent, returning millennia later right on schedule. Like a strobe light in a room of dancers it blinks on and off every several millennia.
Note that it ‘does’ nothing, causes nothing, and yet immense things happen because of it. Odorless, tasteless, invisible, silent, leaving no signature. That’s mystifying, but simply means, people do everything, and they do this, but do so in concert with this greater pattern. So what causes people to cause the eonic effect? We are back to where we started.
We NEVER see the sources of this phenomenon, but one thing we can do is call this ‘evolution’. It is the exact image of ‘punctuated equilibrium’. It punctuates, then the system settles into equilibrium. That explains nothing, but merely uses the words by their meaning. Since Darwinists invented this term, we should be wary of using it.
But this is what real evolution is like. But that again explains nothing. By definition, this is ‘evolution’, historical evolution, though we have to suspect the emergence of early man was like this. Certainly natural selection is a false explanation.
To see the connection to the Kantian noumenon, consider Kant’s Third Antinomy.
“Causality according to laws of nature is not the only kind of causality from which the phenomenon of the world can be derived. It is necessary, in order to explain them, to assume a causality through freedom.†Its antithesis is: “There is no freedom: everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.â€
It is a statement on two levels about causality and freedom. Note this point: normally what we would do is say that history, if we are scientists, follows a causal law, and that the whole of history takes place solely in accordance with that causal law. But we see that our eonic pattern seems to contradict this. It is not continuous. It is not ‘causing history’, rather, it is causing changes in the usual causal history, causing it to evolve beyond its steady state. Otherwise history just follows a steady stream according to causal law (it’s not quite that simple, but this is roughly right). We would like to consider therefore that beside the usual causality of history there is another process, a causality through freedom, or simply some other process that is not causal in our first sense. Note that this is history, not the individual, so we can’t speak of ‘freedom’ for history like free will for an individual. So what is ‘free history’? Actually the answer is obvious since our pattern gives us a perfect answer, which is, an ‘anti-causal’ process that can interrupt the steady state causality of history, i.e. continuous history with discontinuous intervals of sudden change. We have an almost perfect match to the Kantian antinomy.
We can leave it at that or dig deeper a little
Reflect on what we have said so far. If we dig deeper we can confuse ourselves in the snarl of some of the most vexacious problems of philosophy.
_________________.
The problem here is that we are speaking of history, not of the standard Kantian analysis of the individual and his representations.
It makes no difference, but we should tread carefully.
Consider the question again.
Note the ambiguity of your question, what causes the eonic effect? Despite the language of Kant’s initial statement of the Third Antinomy, we can’t really use the term causality for freedom. We must retreat to some other language, or simply leave a blank. Thus we have a
beautiful but contradictory question, because we can show, as I do in my webpages/text (follow the series in Chapter Three up to the part about The Discrete Freedom Sequence) that this is the freedom pole of the antinomy given by Kant, and that it is reflected in history itself, the most beautiful example being the question of the discrete freedom sequence, i.e. the double birth of democracy in two success phases of the eonic sequence, an amazing clue.
We can/can’t really speak of ‘what causes freedom’, or can we? Further this gets entangled in what Kant scholars refer to as the famous ‘double affection’ problem, where causality is misapplied as a category to what is beyond those categories, Schopenhauer’s starting point beyond Kant, to say nothing of Hegel. What my eonic model does is to mimic Kant’s two-layered Third Antinomy. The question then reflects the noumenal/phenomenal aspect of that antinomy. That means that the causality of freedom, as a phrase, must be withdrawn, but for all intents and purposes we see how it happens in practice, and that the source of this phenomenon is beyond our observation. All we see are historical punctuations.
However, historical freedom is not the same as the ‘transcendental freedom’ that Kant points to as he develops the implications of his ‘critique of reason’ as this generates the rubric of what he calls ‘transcendental idealism’ (which isn’t transcendental or an idealism, as such), a misleading term. I mention that because there is a catch to any direct partition of history into the noumenal/phenomenal distinction. That must be so, since all history is phenomenal. But some periods stand out, and like the moon reflecting light, they shine with an intensity that, while never violating the law of causality, nonetheless show a creative aspect that is puzzling in retrospect. And history reflects this. They mimic the noumenal, that’s all. (There can be no historical noumenon, a contradiction in terms). I wanted to mention that because use of Kantian language in this context works beautifully, but requires care. There is no historical noumenon.
It just means what we have demonstrated here, which is that we can set up a model that, instead of showing causality, shows a relationship of an causal and an anti-causal component.
If we succeed in that, it probably means the same thing as what happens in Kant’s discussion of the individual and his representations, that there is something beyond space and time.
If you are a Kantian you can stop here. There is a lot more here, but it will tend to pall, until you are ready for more. Just stand back and look at the way in which world history, to our amazement, shows a perfect pattern of ‘causal’ and ‘anti-causal’ intervals, right there behind us, in evidentiary splendor.
If Kant is right, then,
Nobody knows and you can’t find out.
If you are still not satisfied you can pursue the Hegelian or Schopenhaurian attempts to move beyond this, and I think Schopenhauer, with his philosophy of the will, since he grasps and respects the question of the noumenon, is the clearest, and shows how we can intuit something beyond the surface that slams the door in our face, denying us metaphysical entry. Followers of Hegel and Schopenhauer will tear each other to pieces like wild dogs, gobbling up Christians and Buddhists in a few bites.
You are on your own there, and I would caution against the usual round of vulgar theism that would forever like to claim this beautiful mystery that forever defines, and defies, the human mind. That’s not what we were talking about.
I tend to avoid the Kantian terminology, because it degenerates into ‘thing in itself’ jargon, save to show the connection with Kant’s beautiful system. I simply speak of a two-level discrete-continuous model that has a causal and a freedom layer. The stream of ‘causal’ history is interrupted by the eonic sequence, and this creates ‘eonic transitions’ where the individuals exhibit eonic determination or self-consciousness beyond their determinate free action in the greater system. That’s why we are seeing this sudden appearance of creative individuals in these transitional intervals. The Old Testament is a garbled attempt to describe one of these Axial transitions, and it has caused great confusion. It is time to take back the Old Testament from superstition and rewrite it in system’s language. Then its beauty will return, beyond the vulgar exploitations that have destroyed its meaning, and left a piece of vulgar religious trash. The only safe thing is to put the Old Testament in a shredder and start over using eonic analysis.
The Greek case is much clearer, because unwitting. We see the most amazing thing, the non-random evolution of democracy, and much else. Then we end with something quite amazing, the double emergence in the eonic sequence of democracy in perfect timing with its series. We see that history mimics the Kantian analysis down to the last detail. Check out Chapter 3.
The phrase ‘nobody knows and you can’t find out’ is from John Brockman, The Late John Brockman