04.27.09
Kant, The Matrix, and critical moments of historical change
In the previous two posts we have discussed Kant, The Matrix, and seen the way that Kant’s thinking applies, but that we are looking at long-term history, which we don’t observe. Revolutions per second
However, there is a most ironic partial exception to this, the period of the French Revolution straddles the most sensitive and significant sub-interval of the modern transition as seen in the eonic effect, and has a direct significance both to the question of historical dynamics, and to the issues of the way that Kantian concepts of the philosophy of history impinge on the realm of facts. We can’t see history in large intervals, but we can experience short periods over a generation and if these are a moment of high-speed transition and ‘eonic’ changing of gears, we do (if we were there!) get a sense of something almost noumenal leaving its aroma of mystery in an historical moment.
You need to study the whole model to get a feeling for this, but the facts are clear: people were spooked by the French Revolution, and felt as if no movement they had experienced before in their lives could match this unexpected burst of change, and they could not pinpoint the mysterious reason for this the sudden eruption, as if epochs in succession were in motion by a different law of life. Kant is notable for such a reaction to the French Revolution, as were many others. He was seeing the resolution of his own Kant’s Challenge in history, but his immersion in events was still too great to be able to see this. And yet he sensed that we was close to something extraordinary, and we now see that he was correct. Radicals saw it as a kind of sacred parade of manifesting freedom, reactionaries thought it as an eruption of the demonic and took fright for good. It is clear from the eonic analysis that the whole set of episodes in the large correspond to a Kantian analysis in the large.
It is the same effect that left those caught in the period and generations from Josaiah to Exekiel spooked by the strangeness of an historical transition, leaving them to consider, in a pre-Kantian era, the supernatural acting on the realm of nature (to the disconbobulation of our thinking perhaps). The point is that the dynamics of the eonic model, without explaining it, isolate the dynamics of why that ‘spooked’ feeling arises as a sense of awe in those who lived that transitional moment, recording the experience in the Old Testament.