Nature's Secret Plan
The Eonic Effect 
As A Resolution of Kant's Challenge

We can repeat our claim to resolve Kant’s Challenge here. Our three turning points show a clear solution to Kant’s Challenge: cyclical directionality. We can see that the eonic effect shows us the resolution of the problem, and why Kant is ambivalent about ‘asocial sociability’. We can say ‘resolved’, rather than solved, because the overall form of the question’s answer is clear, and because the dialectical question, ‘Is history random or teleological?’ avalanches toward directionality, raising the question of teleology, and short of stating the teleological endstate.

We can already stand back, to see the existence of a remarkable overall structure to world history as a whole, the resolution of Kant’s Challenge, to which we have also brought the term ‘eonic evolution’. This data makes it obvious that ‘evolution’ requires more than contingency. But strictly this speaking this applies only to our dataset.

Idea of a Universal History Note that we proceed from a provisional idea for a universal history  to an idea of a universal history: the question is resolved. We can see that, contrary to expectation and the standard views of history, we can detect a ‘regular movement’ in the play of freedom of the human will. This is our eonic sequence, with its cyclical emergentism based on ‘free action’ under ‘eonic determination’. We have created a terminology for a special subpattern, of the eonic sequence, the discrete freedom sequence, which throws especial light on the question.

We can see that the eonic effect corresponds exactly to the implied question given in what we have called Kant’s Challenge. Our model resolves Kant’s Challenge, but that is not the same as ‘fully solved’. We are later, but not outside of history.

Our progression in three stages answers to this query directly and with great precision. As to ‘free will’ we have constructed a different approach using a dynamic surrogate descriptive, ‘eonic determination’, given empirically in three phases and eight sectors, and a freedom stand in as ‘relative free action’ taken as impulses of creative self-consciousness able to express ‘will’ in action on a de facto basis sufficient to advance the system. Thus this formulation can be left open as to free will, in the sense of Kantian ‘practical reason’, for it can go either way and stand independently of any preconception about free will.

Thus history on one level is the field of free activity operating in open-ended fashion on the surface of a planet. Yet if we attend to this ‘play of freedom’ as global fields of free action we can easily detect a regular movement in it, the eonic effect, although only in a limited snapshot since the onset of higher civilization and the keeping of records. This regular movement is overlaid on the flat distribution of general history and is directly associated with the eonic generation of civil infrastructure, starting with the statist emergentism visible in Dynastic Sumer and Egypt, the birth of the great religions and democracy in the second, and the resurgence of democracy in the third. In general a far more complex description is required of the fuzzy term ‘democracy’ in terms of incipient republican conceptions and much else. Further we see that this regular movement tends to be in counterpoint to the mideonic fall off into empire taken by a failed ersatz construct between state and its defined boundaries in the context of globalization. This pattern clearly raises the issue of teleology , and is also complicated by the distinction between relative free action and system generation. Freedom generated by eonic determination cannot be purely free, and the jumpstart process visible in the regular movement can only assist but not determine the free action beset with the need to self-initiate its own freedom.

The issue of Kant’s system might overly complicate our simple conclusion, but it is essential to bring him in just on the sidelines. Our intention was to demonstrate a non-random pattern, and we are done with that in almost one hundred yard dash, but it is no accident that a Kantian theme lurks in the background. The relationship of ‘freedom emergence’ to our discrete-continuous periodization evokes an echo of the issues of transcendental idealism, i.e. a two-domain resolution of the Third Antinomy. 

Such a spectacular concordance of historical patterning is almost eerie in its action and will not fit the standard models of historical explanation, yet finds a splendid though unwitting commentary in the successive Kantian considerations of mechanics, ethics, and teleology/esthetics. Indeed, we have seen the way in which a ‘causal gesture’, the eonic sequence’, moves to corral large episodic blocks of religious, ethical, and esthetic action, moving any consideration of an historical dynamic well beyond the formal abilities of standard mechanical models.