2.2 Eonic Observers
Last modified 07/05/2008
|
Instead of an objective outsider pronouncing on the laws of history, the
eonic model works with the idea of an eonic observer, who is immersed in the
evolutionary sequence that he is attempting to describe, and his task is the
description of the 'eonic emergents' or 'eonic effects' that arise in the wake
of the eonic sequence. Instead of theories we have 'eonic observations about the
emergence of theories', and we can see that evolutionism is itself an eonic
emergent, correlated with the Greek and modern transitions. Thus the emergence
of Darwinism is itself a contracted realization of the more general rubric of
eonic emergents, and fails as a description of either the biological or cultural
aspects of human evolution, primordial or historical. Instead we see the more
general framework of 'eonic evolution' behind the emergence of civilization, and
this reduces 'theories' to their primordial philosophic or other components, as
scripts of action.
In general the nature of action is related to the emergence of freedom in the context of the eonic sequence. It is thus no longer possible to say of this system that a universal causal reduction is possible. Or if you prefer, there are two 'causal' levels, one dynamical/causal, the other the 'causality of freedom'. Most importantly, the 'eonic evolution', complementary to the action of individuals inside it, does not express a prediction about the future, and is thus free of the implications of universal generalization that arise as Social Darwinism in a 'theory' such as selectionist Darwinism. The drumbeat sequence of alternation between the macro system and the micro field of agents is constructed in such a way as to leave the model referring only to the past, as evolution, switching off in the present. This unique property of the eonic model thus coopts any kind of 'acting out of theory', even as it enjoins its agents to 'act out' the implications of its series of eonic emergents. The results must be judged by their qualitative outcomes, and are conditioned at all points by the implications of ethical imperatives, whatever those might be. Ethical systems are themselves eonic emergents, and their correct understanding remains a task of eonic observers. Thus the Social Darwinist hallucination, the 'should' in the 'acting out of Darwin's theory' is discarded at once as unethical by the eonic observer as 'theory confusion' in the progression of the eonic system.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||