05.03.07
More on Kant/historical materialism
Another post on Kant/historical materialism, after yesterday’s piece: from Kant at yahoogroups.com
Intro out of context [I would enjoy reading your essay on Kant's importation of historical
materialism. ( I haven't resolved the status of my previous, perhaps 'off the wall'
indication of material in Hans Saner's book on Kant's political philosophy,
although Kant's precritical thinking, a world in itself, shows a highly
complex mix of thinking from Leibnitz to Newton, and the debate over physical
forces, mixed with a sort of primordial dialectic of such forces, ??)]Start:
To me, whatever the core or nexus behind the basically Smithian or any other
version, there remains the question of historical explanation and analysis
as such, which I see (in his apparent contradictions) sensed by Kant in his
essay on history.
In my view Kant produces a complete methodology for dealing with
teleological issues then throws it all away, or seems to, on the ‘bad penny’ of
semi-economic ideology, or else whatever it is that is meant by his ‘unsocial
sociability’, an important idea in its own right, but not sufficient for resolving
the ‘teleological question’ as this pertains to world history. Conflicts go on
and on, it is an illusion to think they will generate progress in the long
term. People fight until they are exhausted, and fall into decline, or
oblivion. It is dangerous to suggest such conflict will bear the gifts of the
future.
Look at the test case, conflict rendered sacred in Islamic jihad. It
explodes on the world and expands to an immense scale of social integration, then
begins to peter out in excessive violence, degenerating into what it wished to
replace, the regime of empire. Its achievements are immense, but in the end
it peters out, and leads to nothing. The rise of modernity simply does an end
run around this oustanding experiment and this modernity, as I show has its
own larger dynamic, in no relation to ‘unsocial sociability’.
So the emphasis on ‘unsocial sociability’ is, to me, disproven in practice.The dynamics of world history as a whole has been an orphan from the word
go, for the simple reason that the seeming randomness of its incidents and the
complexity and duration of its chronicle drive one to clutch at straws, one
such being the observation that if we see unending conflict then it must be
conflict that is driving its ‘progress’ (if any), and this is the key to the
dynamic. That easy fallacy is the primordial trap, the more so as its economic
version might unlock the key to economies in action.Here economic thinking misleads us. Competition in markets seems to generate
its own kind of ‘self-organization’ in wealth-creation and this process
leads to attempted generalizations to the whole of history. Unsuspected is the
sudden apearance of a definite macro-historical order visible in a minimum
interval of five thousand years since the invention of writing, indicated by my
‘eonic effect’.
A simpler, incomplete version of that is visible in the so-called Axial Age,
where the clue appears in plain sight: multiple synchronous emergentist
culture transformations in a parallel time-frame. With that data we are lead to
suspect a larger pattern, and then, all of a sudden, we see the clue to the
‘teleology’ of history in an ‘eonic’ or alternating progression system. This
fragmentary pattern is enough to show us that, where least expected, history
shows large scale processes on the scale of macroevolution.Thus, Kant’s suspicions, coexisting with his ruminations on ‘unsocial
sociability’, are confirmed: we see an explicit historical directionality as a
stupendous long-range oscillation in the world system, and this gives us a
representation of the hidden, yet inferable, teleological process operating between
the fields of random events.
Thus to rescue Kant from the ‘Mandeville to Darwin’ morass I take the clear,
half-conscious, suspicions in Kant’s essay on history, not as a telic
solution to the issue via unsocial sociability, but as a question he projects into
the future, and rightly so, since the data available to him was inadequate.
The discovery of early Sumer and Egypt is very recent! And this data crucially
extends our range of observation to the point at which it reaches critical
mass and we suddenly detect a non-random directionality at work. The first
paragraph of his essay, by my rendering, gives an intuitive rendition of this
unsuspectingly, and in the way it restates the ‘Third antinomy’. The trick is,
not to apply causal reasoning to history, but a distinct mixture of causality
and freedom concepts in tandem, to describe this dynamic. I explore this at
great length in my work.
That’s a strong claim, of course, but the resolution in this fashion
elegantly resolves the hidden prophecy in Kant’s almost casual essay.
Thus the elements of the ‘telic’ in, say, economies, cannot be generalized
to Big History, and indeed Marx, himself unclear on this point, nonetheless sen
ses that there must be some dynamic larger than that of economic
functionality. Unfortunately he gets stuck in his own ‘economic fallacy’ and can’t
derive the emergence of freedom from the determinism of his scientism, etc…So, I would say that so far from Kant being an historical materialist it is
actually Marx who is a frustrated transcendental idealist manque. What a
thought, for post-Feuerbachians!The question of ‘unsocial sociability’ is interesting in its own right.
But it can’t generate long-range ‘teleological end-states’. Endless conflicts
might produce the impulse to form treaties of peace, and institutions to that
effect, in that sense, it is telic or ‘reverse telic’, but the real
‘evolution’ is something far larger, on a world historical scale.Our scale of analysis has always been too restricted. Centuries mean
nothing. Civlizations are mere moments. The scale of nature operates in units closer
to several millennia,and beyond that to tens to hundreds of thousands of
years.
I think I have shown that the bare bare minimum, five thousand years (and
this since the invention of writing), is just enough to give us one glimpse of
the process of historical dynamics. How, given the reality of ‘deep time’
could it be otherwise?
So, the rise of civilization since the Neolithic can be given expression in
a system of historical directionality, contradicting every tenet of the
hard-core materialists. Nothing like the facts to kill a theory.I should note that Adam Smith is, was, and remains an economist. His
possible ambitions to extend his thought to greater history notwithstanding, his
economic reasoning is secure because it restricts itself to examining in action.
It is all the efforts to extend this reasoning to areas where it doesn’t
belong that has produced the confusion.