Re: Affective measures in the social sciences produce more ideologic agi

In Response to John Landon:

Interesting stuff on Rousseau.  I’ll have to take a closer look into his material to see how it fits in terms of your own work.  Even at the outset, however, I’d still be cautious about his philosophic system from what I’ve read so far.  There’s something in his ideas I’m a little bit squeamish about.  Maybe he still has very good ideas; but his notions, his personality as it connects into his philosophy -> it’s all too unstable; seems to me we’re on much more solid ground with Kant and Hegel when it comes to modern thinkers.  Rousseau at times seems like a nutcase.  But then again maybe that nutcase had a stroke of genius I’ve failed to recognize before this point.  I’ll take a look and see what comes of such.

I expect, though, that I’d find better material in working around R’s theoretic shortcomings by my continual probings and reexaminations into thinkers like Aristotle, Heraclitus, and Parmenides.  I think a second best bet would also be with Lao Tse for getting around any other glaring pitfalls in R’s thought.  (Maybe Confucius and Gautama can also be helpful to me in this regard.)

Good Review of “Being After Rousseau.”  He may well have sensed the problems of the emerging modern world & rightly defined/identified the elements of the historic paradox at play in developing modernity and human [historical-evolutionary-civilizational] development.  I just don’t know really if he really succeeds in his attempts to bridge – or even correctly intuit the nature of - this gap between free action and historical inevitability.  Yet, perhaps he does … Have you ever thought of considering the historiography of Acton & his ideas (scientific history as well as ethical theory) within the parameters of your eonic model?  You might just find some interesting results there also for your own researches.

I’m actually surprised there hasn’t been more of this “Aeonic”-style interpretation of the Eonic Effect.  There are a lot of these mystical-evolutionary approaches out there & their founders/students are always on the look out for overarching intellectual theories to tie them all together and in with each other.  So the Steinerians have taken an interest in the Eonic model?  This is interesting!  I’m just a little bit amazed by this, though.  I would have thought the followers of Teilhard de Chardin would have been the ones to naturally gravitate towards this model given its evolutionary approach.  But on the whole, I think your Eonic Effect already has the tools it needs for escaping the mystical “aeons” trap.  The teleology involved allows it, even as the geist-pushers move in on the territory and claim it as their own, to round-about and push in on their domain.  I expect the very dynamics that they see as constituting the “fingerprints” of mystical/spiritual forces are themselves actually a function of eonic evolution and historic-natural teleology.  If the Steinerians and other proponents of “aeonic” interpretations in history and the natural world are catching a glimpse of “aeons” in the Eonic Effect in world history, then perhaps the natural teleology of Eonic evolution can help to better explain the kinds of phenomena in our world that the aeon pushers consider to be soley the playground of mystical and spiritual forces in our world.  Think about it.  Can the Eonic Effect and its dynamics move in on Steinerian “aeonic” territory even as the Steinerians, et al are trying to use it to advance their own spiritual-mystical ideas?  In other words, if there are similarities between “aeonic”-mystical maps of reality and the Eonic Effect, can the Eonic Effect be used to push in on and re-explain those kinds of phenomena that the students of “aeonic” interpretations see as being the exclusive domain of spiritual and mystical forces acting in the human/natural worlds?  … If you can do this, then it seems to me that the Eonic model will have an advantage over and against the Steinerians in their attempt to re-cast it in a mystical geist-centered mold.  At least that’s how I would handle this matter.

Responding to both Landon and Alexander:

I’d be careful on the Newtonian material.  In and of itself, the Newtonian model of physical science is not problematic.  It’s the scientism that grew out of it and around it where the problem lies.

In considering both a social science alternative to Newtonianism (applied to the study of human group phenomena) & a viable way of considering how individuality fits into macrohistorical frameworks (via human psychological structures and activities)(as they interrelate to ‘free action’ plus a host of other physical phenomena in human events), please take into account the models proposed by Lloyd DeMause in his Emotional Life of Nations.  The following chapters illustrate his theories/ approach to empirical content nicely.

http://psychohistory.com/htm/eln05_psychogenic.html

http://psychohistory.com/htm/eln09_psychesociety.html

The ‘billiard ball’ approach to social science/history won’t work even if we posit a chaotic/fractal-like dimension to such movements on the human stage.  And, even if we posit a ‘master switch’ of sorts which alternates from free will to historic-evolutionary necessity, this approach still wouldn’t work.  There still remains this “fundamental indeterminacy to nature” (ala Prugovecki’s earlier post to this list) and therefore also to “human nature.”  A simple “switch” from past human behavior to modernity, from historical inevitability to free will may not be able to account for such complexities in world historical change.

It’s almost as if the “switch” is not one of ON/OFF but more of scaled-operations.  But instead of position “A” on the switch being one exclusively for free action and relativized modernity in human events & position “B” for a script of historic necessity and past behaviors in the long term and macro-socioeconomic level, it’s is almost as if both “A” and “B” work simultaneously in the system no matter where the switch is positioned at.  The difference in the positions is not one of exclusively “A” working or exclusively “B” working, but instead one of predominance.  In our analytic models, we simply “note” that “A” is at work here or “B” is at work.  Both are ON at the same time, both would act contemporaneously; it’s just that we notice specific settings (times and places) where “A” operates or “B” operates.  Whether this fact is a function of what’s going on in the social system or what’s going on in our minds as observers/analysts is anybody’s guess.  It could very well involve a bit of both happenings.

*****

Looking forward to your insights.

All the best!

Luke R.

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