We have set up our model to both express a dynamic of Big History, and yet at the same time to avoid the expression of false determinism in the sense of historical laws. This took the form of transmuting the poles of the antinomy of freedom and causality, as expressed in Kant’s version of the Third Antinomy, into a dynamism of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’, in the alternation rhythm of the eonic sequence. We do not know the nature of this system action, although we can clearly see its phenomenological legacy in the eonic flowering of self-consciousness that we see in the sequence of transitions stretching over millennia. But we have a strange clue, and we now come to the beautiful result, and the final enigmatic climax of our eonic sequence, the embedded subsequence we have called the discrete freedom sequence, visible in the double emergence of democracy twice in a row at the point of the divide in our series. We could more generally cast the nature of our eonic evolution as an 'evolution of freedom’. And yet throughout we have confronted a mystery and in our analysis we have found only the phenomenological aspect of a set of transitions, never seeing the hidden or veiled dynamic behind them. The fact of the discrete freedom sequence gives us a clue to this deep structure in the way it resembles the keynote of the idea of freedom as this appears in the philosopher Kant.  

Let us recall still again our previous citation of the Kantian antinomy, and to digest this stunning realization.

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.”

We should interject that the term ‘causality of freedom’ is problematical and the object of a famous historical debate over a perceived contradiction in the Kantian system (summarized by Schopenhauer). We can bypass that question, since in rough strokes the point is clear (and our model has summoned up causality to reformulate it, hence the contradiction doesn’t arise), and since we have replaced‘ causality/freedom’ with our fuzzy and neutral ‘system action/free action’. We have made no commitments to historical causality of any kind, confined to phenomenological transitions. We can play both sides of the fence to make our point. We have no theory to suffer contradiction, remember, only an empirical pattern as a theory of the evidence, not of its causality.

We have made the discovery that this abstract expression of an antinomy, one resolved by Kant in terms of transcendental idealism, and more generally in the realization that both poles of the contradiction are in some fashion true, has an actual reflection in the dynamics of history, visible at the core of the eonic effect itself. This remarkable concordance can be seen from the terms of the antinomy itself, which on the one hand gives expression to the 'causal' aspect we have called the 'stream' and on the other to a 'second causality', that of freedom, which is directly expressed in the interleaved 'causality of freedom' that is seen in the discrete freedom sequence. Thus our expression, an 'evolution of freedom' is well chosen for it shows how in essence the evolution of man is an evolution of his freedom. There are a number of problems with the idea of the 'causality of freedom' and we have actually replaced the term with our expression of system action, 'eonic determination', which expresses the actual reconciliation of opposites behind the contradictions of causality and freedom. We see however that this antinomy, as it resolves itself historically, is much more exact than we could have expected. 

The Discrete freedom sequence Not only does our system show an evolution of freedom, it shows more exactly in the example of the double (re)-birth of democracy in two successive transitions (just at what we call the ‘divide’) an exact match to the eonic sequence, and to the famous antinomy of Kant about freedom and causality. It is ‘as if’ there were two forms causality on two different levels. In fact, the ‘causality of freedom’ points to an unknown (what Kant called ‘transcendental freedom’, a dangerous term).
Furthermore, as we zoom in on both cases, we see, to our surprise, that the correspondence is exact to the decade: just in the generation of the divide (Solon, near -600, with the Exile about to start, thence to Rousseau, the French Revolution, Thomas Paine) the initialization starts, almost exactly 2400 years apart. And there is an obvious reason why this baffling coincidence ought to be so, which our model uncovers on spot with its distinction of 'system action' and 'free action'. The system action can only initialize a new potential, since its action, if this is about democracy, would deprive freedom of its own realization. Since democracy couldn't arise outside the eonic sequence, regrettably, the system generates it. And the way through this would be to put the system action inside the transition, and then ignite democracy just at the divide, as ‘system action’ turns into ‘free activity’. If you read the history of this period you see at once and with new insight the strange concordance of a brilliantly emerging new order mixed with spastic idiocy that sets sail with an initial result achieved, at least in the American frontier region. We have a model of the thunderclap of the starting point, and the rough edges of the realization. And we also see why Greek democracy was so short lived.
An evolution of freedom This double action, as if there were a law of causality and a causality of freedom, gives us the hint we need to describe the overall character of our eonic sequence as, speaking formally, an ‘evolution of freedom’. This is a descriptive statement, a sort of ‘meta-description’, not the statement of an evolutionary law. The contradiction in the antinomy is reconciled by our processes of ‘system action’ and ‘free action’, somewhere in between ‘causality’ and ‘freedom’: we see oscillations in degrees of freedom. The agent must step beyond this ‘evolution’ into history, history as the realization of freedom, in a sense he must define. The result can only be mapped out by our model. We never see the ‘system’ whose action we detect. It is like the distinction of the noumenal and the phenomenal  in the Kantian system.    
We should note in passing that the fine-grain structure we have found clearly distinguishes our version of the ‘evolution of freedom’ from the great precursor of this idea, the philosopher Hegel. We have annexed the question, in one major respect, to the field of system’s theory, from its possible theological interpretations.

Thus our eonic system has left a strange clue in the double emergence of democracy in successive transitions. Such a high degree of ‘eonic determination’ over millennia is almost as bad as determinism and should make our hair stand on end confronted with the microprogramming of what we had thought our free creations). We are left wondering to what degree our freedom, so far, is but a kiddie rid in a carnival. We should also realize the difference of the democratic starting point (e.g. the American version, directly the first born of the modern transition), and the later democratic realization, less able to repair its dysfunction. This is ominous, since the 'system action' undergoes shutdown at its divide. That our model should correspond so closely to the actual facts of history in such a close match shows is as strong a result as confirmation by experiment, and shows a situation smarter than we realize, although still so mysterious we hardly know how to use it. We have preempted our chance to produce a predictive theory, but nonetheless we have produced ‘interior inner-dictions as confirmation’. Thus we zoom in to discover that a timing that is eerily exact, (with no proof but the overwhelming suspicion this could not be chance) for a reason connected with the nature of our system: its discrete-continuous matches exactly the double action of the Kantian antinomy. This deep pattern of coherence uncovered by systematic periodization gives us a mysterious confirmation of the rightness of our model.

Kant considered that in this case both poles of the contradiction were reconciled in practice. We see that this is so, as reflected in our shift in terminology from ‘causality/freedom’ to ‘system action/free action’. And this is true of history, save that unexpectedly the data shows so neatly the emergence of freedom associated with the eonic sequence. We have proceeded indirectly in the construction of our model by using periodization alone in an attempt to clock the action of a dynamic whose action we detect in the pattern of the eonic sequence. We never see this dynamic directly. The correspondence to Kant's phenomenal/noumenal distinction is exact, save that we are speaking of history, not the psychology of the individual and what are called his representations. We have thus produced, or stumbled on, a new concept, almost a phantom term, 'historical freedom', which has one and the same problematic as the Kantian version, as the actually realized freedom generator, beyond the action of individuals, this in time (phenomenal), a macro process of 'freedom evolution of some kind' whose action matches the eonic sequence. We cannot transcendentalize this in any logical manner. All we see is the varying degrees of temporal freedom. This is why modern revolutions (those inside the transition, please note, no others) generate their own dialectic of ambivalence. We should be wary of all this in that while our a priori concepts fall into perfect sync with 'reality', as predicted by Kant's transcendental deduction, their noumenal correspondences can at no point be known to us. Thus we get the result, and yet the deeper reality is beyond concepts, and we approach that with an 'idea of reason', in the well-qualified usage of Kant. But somehow we get lucky. And a model as crude as this eonic construct actually scores an easy bull's eye, to our uncomprehending amazement. Nature shows its hand and our discrete series catches the result. Because the crux of the process is that of intermittency, and this intermittency is associated with the relative entanglement of causality and freedom, its structure is suddenly seen to be a direct translation into historical terms of the Third Antinomy. We have stumbled without trying into the exact situation Kant describes. We can proceed to document this double action further by looking at what we have called the discrete freedom sequence inside the eonic sequence. And as Kant suggests, nature itself resolves the contradiction, and we see how the two aspects seem in some way to be both true.

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