04.27.09

The Matrix and Kant

Posted in History, The Eonic Effect at 5:17 pm by nemo

A commenter in reference to the film The Matrix asks what book about it I was referring to. Here: The Matrix And Philosophy

This film made quite a stir when it came out because of its striking philosophic subtext in the background. Two books showing the connection to philosophy are known to me.
I just watched the film for the first time yesterday and found it quite interesting, despite its violent action-pic style.
And the book has an interesting chapter on Kant, and this, remarkably, raises an issue that is related to the eonic effect and model: with Kant the idea of the ‘matrix’ arises in the way the mind constructs, as it were, a priori the principles of science in the way it perceives the outer world.

This raises the question related to the matrix as to whether the issue is one of the external world or the interior world of the experiencer. I am not sure the movie quite distinguishes these two (I could be wrong, I didn’t quite grasp this strange film in the distractions of plot, action-pic style, and philosophy).

To state the issue in terms of the eonic effect: we see that the eonic effect is an actual historical pattern. Close examination shows its relationship to Kant’s system, with a huge difference: Kant speaks of the mind’s constructions a priori, while the eonic effect finds something Kantian about ‘Big History’ in the exterior world, with no reference as such to the a priori constructs of the experiencer of history.
I need to come back on this issue again in a slightly different way.

In any case, I learned something from this film and the book, or, at least, they pointed to something that has long been a somewhat confusing aspect of the eonic model. Does it refer to the external world (yes) or to the constructs a priori of the historical experiencer (yes, also, but…)

The eonic effect is strange in the sense that its structure resembles a Kantian analysis, but this is applied to ‘history’ which is not a person.
There isn’t actually any contradiction, or a problem on these grounds, but it is at first a strange variant of Kantian thinking.

The connection to history arises from the way that Kant’s Third Antinomy expresses the seeming clash of freedom and causality, making contradictory the idea of ‘laws of history’, and this can’t be resolved except via the hypothesis of (an historical version of ) ‘transcendental idealism’, i.e. the appearance of uncaused events in punctuated discontinuities, resulting in the extension of the analysis beyond space and time. The phenomenal/noumenal distinction suddenly appears in the way in which the ‘uncaused event’ (e.g. the Axial Age) might actually have some ‘determination’ (but not stricly a causal factor in space and time) outside of time and space. All this says nothing about the constructs a priori of the experiencer. The problem here is that we don’t ’see’ history, we read about it in books, and construct mental data processing on curious phantoms in our minds about the past.
But in fact that, as far as I know, doesn’t change the issue. It is as if we were seeing the past. But we have transposed beyond ‘perception’ to ‘large intervals of history’ which we certainly don’t see, so the Kantian perceptual mechanism doesn’t apply.
In fact the same analysis does apply, and we discover this in a surprise: the data of the Axial period, just as one example.
Something simply appears in space and time, and the usual rules of causal antecedence are violated. So how to proceed?

But in fact, it hardly matters since we merely detected that transcendental idealism is once again a better explanation of our ‘bookish’ perceptions so-called, than realism. We see that our experience of history arises in the way we analyze the problem of history. It seems like an issue of empirical realism, but all of a sudden we have a Copernican revolution applied to the appearances of history and we detect by indirect inference the incomplete character of our perceptions of history and the reality of something behind those appearances.

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