Re:

[Nemonemini@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 5/25/2001 9:10:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
xah@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:



> What _is_ your method? I'm begging you. Please explain it. I don't
> understand it. What is "Darwin-style thinking?" I honestly don't know
> what you mean.



Questions of method can be quite vexing. I am sending you an e-text, and you
can find plenty on method in there. But consider method in relation to Kant,
Hegel, Marx, economics,  positivism, and historical theory, Karl Popper
lurking somewhere. How could anyone find a method in all this? Add all the
back issues of History and Theory and look at the train of fads since
covering law theory was abandoned in the sixties for a host of
anti-methodological questions, viz. Hayden White's Metahistory, postmodern
anti-history, etc...

But is universal history so dead. If not, should we accept Hegel's reversal
of Kant, and Marx's reversal of Hegel?  Darwinists insist on their own
method, yet perhaps, since Darwin was a Comte enthusiast, we shoud consider
we have reached the Positive Age from the Metaphysical, and be Comtean
metaphysical positivists. The postmodernists wish us to abandon historical
analysis altogether, the Big History problem, the metanarrative.
So it goes. I was reading Tom Rockmore's Before and After Hegel a while back.
He describes the glorious decade of the 1790's when the foundationalism of
Kant ( the ultimate in method) began to give way to the Fichtean, finally
Hegelian issues of antifoundationalism. There Hegel produced an Absolute
Science with a new logic of the dialectic, grave nonsense according to the
Analytical Marxists and Karl Popper.   Again, why bother, isn't Darwin's
method enough? I think that with all this biological method, in one hundred
years plus, they got the wrong result, and therefore most rocket scientists
must have a flawed method.
So you will forgive if I become shifty eyed at requests for method, slink
down back alleys looking over my shoulder.
Actually, in one line, my method is, quite scientific by the book,  throw a
sine curve at world history. The results are astounding.
More seriously,....
I think the eonic effect reverses the issue, to some degree. Instead of
determining method in advance, we can look at history, to see Nature's
method.  We have the answer, the thing is to understand it. The issue
resembles a 'pattern and process' enquiry, as with biologists. We can see a
structure to evolution, by our methods influence what we see. And vice versa.
This makes an empirical approach difficult. But the fact is, history is
beginning to show us the fuzzy answers, and that suggests a renewal of
'universal history' as generalized evolution, using concepts that match the
data, keeping ideas of 'complex systems' close by, without forcing the data
into them.

More....later.


John Landon
nemonemini@xxxxxxx
Website on eonic effect
http://eonix.8m.com
http://www.eonica.net