Progress

Aristotle does not appear to hold a theory of progress in the modern sense, if by that is meant the expectation that history moves in a single direction toward a goal set for it in advance. He does, however, observe that inquiry accumulates. No investigator attains the truth adequately, and none fails entirely, so that what each contributes individually may be small while the union of all amasses a considerable amount. On this understanding, the policy Aristotle adopts of calling into council the opinions of his predecessors is itself a method of advance, undertaken so as to profit by whatever is sound in their suggestions and to avoid their errors.

The political writings describe a development which is likewise an advance, though not one projected into the future. The household supplies the needs of the day; several households form the village; several villages, when united in a community large enough to be nearly self-sufficing, constitute the state. Aristotle regards this sequence as a movement from smaller and weaker associations to larger and more powerful ones, and also as an advance toward the realization of man's political nature, since the domestic rule of the eldest gives way at last to the rule of statesmen over citizens. He does not imagine a political unity larger than the city-state, nor does he measure the goodness of existing institutions by their devotion to further improvement.

Two considerations qualify what Aristotle allows to accumulation. The first concerns time. If the world is eternal, then probably each art and each science has often been developed as far as possible and has again perished, so that what appears to be advance may be recovery. The second concerns the difference between the theoretical and the practical sciences. Demonstrative knowledge admits of transmission because its objects are necessary; but prudence deals with contingent matters, and what serves in Athens may not serve in Sparta. Political experience may deepen judgment without converging on a final answer. Whether historical change is cyclical or directional is treated more fully under the idea of History.

Aristotle's separation of intellectual accumulation from any general betterment of the human condition supplies terms which later writers accept or contest. Those who look for progress in the nature of man, such as Rousseau and Kant, must dispose of his view that human nature is fixed; those who look for it in institutions, such as Mill and Marx, must decide whether constitutions cycle or ascend. The question whether man is capable of indefinite improvement is considered in relation to the idea of Man, and the fortunes of the intellectual tradition he founded are discussed by Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal under the head of method.

Lucretius relates the history of civilization as a natural history rather than a providential one. The fifth book of On the Nature of Things traces human life from its primitive condition through the acquisition of fire, speech, shelter, clothing, tillage, the working of metals, law, music, and philosophy. Each acquisition follows from the needs and capacities of men acting upon a material world, without instruction from gods. Fire is come upon by accident; speech grows from the impulse to signify; and political society arises when men, wearied of violence, agree to refrain from injuring one another. The account belongs to the same order of explanation as his account of the origin of species and of the world itself, on which the chapter on Evolution may be consulted.

That the arts have improved the condition of life Lucretius does not deny. His narrative describes an advance in the mastery of nature which is real and traceable in its stages. But he holds at the same time that the accumulation of arts multiplies the objects of desire faster than it multiplies the means of satisfaction. Wealth breeds envy; luxury introduces vices which poverty could not have conceived; and the competition for glory and dominion, which political life alone makes possible, generates a violence beyond the reach of solitary men. Progress in the arts and progress in happiness are, on this view, distinct questions, and an answer to the first settles nothing about the second.

Lucretius draws no revolutionary conclusion from this analysis, and proposes no reform of institutions. The remedy he offers is the Epicurean one: not the abandonment of civilization, but the philosophical relinquishing of the goods civilization most esteems. He who understands the nature of things, and is delivered from the fear of death and the desire for renown, may live well within civilization without being enslaved by what it offers. Set against this is the larger cosmology, in which worlds arise and dissolve into atomic dust, so that whatever men build stands within a motion that does not tend anywhere in particular.

The Lucretian account is the earliest in the tradition to explain the growth of civilization without recourse either to divine gift or to natural teleology, and it descends in two directions. Bacon takes up the proposition that the arts can alter the human condition and turns it toward the future, which Lucretius does not do. Rousseau takes up the observation that each advance in refinement brings a corresponding corruption of manners. The doctrine that the golden age lies in the past, and the doctrine of cosmic cycles which accompanies it here, are treated under the ideas of History and Time.

The City of God is directed against two accounts of the course of things which Augustine finds equally defective. Against the doctrine of recurring cycles, he maintains that time has a beginning in creation, a turning in the incarnation, and an end in judgment, so that what has happened does not happen again in the same manner. Against explanations of the Lucretian sort, which derive the arts and the institutions of men from natural necessity alone, he maintains that the direction of history is intended rather than emergent. The six ages of the world, answering to the six days of creation and moving toward a seventh of rest, give history a shape which neither the philosophers of eternal return nor the atomists could supply.

Within this frame Augustine distinguishes two cities, and the distinction governs what he will allow to be called progress. The earthly city, ordered to the love of self and the goods of temporal life, does develop arts, sciences, and political institutions, and does secure the earthly peace which makes life tolerable. Augustine does not despise these attainments; he grants that Rome achieved goods worth having and was permitted its empire for the sake of them. But such achievements are provisional. They may be lost, as Rome has lately been lost; they are not proportioned to man's final end; and they corrupt as readily as they elevate, since the same civic energies serve ambition as well as concord.

The advance which Augustine treats as decisive is the pilgrimage of the soul toward God. Each life is either a progress or a regress, according as the will moves toward the end in which alone it rests or into the disordered loves which constitute sin. This movement occurs within historical time without being measured by it. The most cultivated ages have produced the most hardened sinners, and the poorest have produced saints. To confound the two orders, and to read the flourishing of a civilization as evidence of the flourishing of souls, is for Augustine the characteristic error of the pagans, and it is the error which later theories of secular perfectibility repeat in another form. What is meant by the two ends thus distinguished is examined more fully under the ideas of God and Happiness.

Augustine's providential reading of history occupies one pole of the subsequent debate, and it survives longest in the shape he gave it rather than in its substance. Hegel retains the conviction that history is a single directed movement whose meaning is not accessible to the actors within it, while transferring its principle from providence to Spirit; Marx retains the direction and the consummation while removing the transcendent term altogether. The question whether such a movement is providentially governed, dialectically necessary, or neither is pursued under the ideas of Fate and History.

Bacon takes an inventory of the state of the sciences and finds that in most of them little has been added since antiquity. He attributes the deficiency to method rather than to any limit set by nature or by the capacity of men. The schoolmen, in his judgment, spun cobwebs of learning admirable for fineness of thread and of no substance or profit, while the collectors of natural curiosities gathered particulars without any orderly way of putting nature to the question. What is wanted is not rarer genius but better organization: an induction which proceeds from observation through instances deliberately contrived to general conclusions, and returns from these to works.

Among the impediments Bacon assigns a large place to the authority of the past. Reverence for antiquity and for the men esteemed great in philosophy has, he writes, retarded men from advancing in science and almost enchanted them. He observes further that the term antiquity is misapplied, since the ancient state of the world is its young state, and the present time, having more of the world's experience behind it, is the real antiquity. To this diagnosis belong the four idols: of the tribe, which are the errors native to human nature; of the cave, which are the biases of the individual; of the market place, which arise from the imposition of words; and of the theatre, which are the received systems. Bacon adds that despair and the persuasion of impossibility do more than any of these to arrest inquiry.

The New Atlantis exhibits what a society ordered to this end might be. Salomon's House is an establishment for research and invention, its members distributed among the collection of experiments, the drawing of axioms, and the production of works for use. The proposal is a political one as much as a scientific one, since it makes the increase of knowledge a public charge and the relief of man's estate a public benefit. Bacon says comparatively little about the government of the power so acquired, or about its distribution among men; the question of who is to command the instruments that command nature is left to be raised by others.

Bacon's complaint about the intellectual tradition is shared by Descartes, Hobbes, and Harvey, though they differ on the use to be made of predecessors: Harvey states what others have thought before dissecting, and Bacon expressly condemns that practice. Pascal takes a middle position, allowing the ancients a limited respect and making their discoveries the means and not the end of study. Mill inherits the institutional proposal while pressing the question Bacon leaves open, whether an increase in the aggregate command over nature is an improvement for those who labor under it. The relation of knowledge to power is treated further under the ideas of Science and Art.

The preface to the Treatise on Vacuum states the law of intellectual progress by an analogy between the mind of the race and the individual mind. Where Aquinas had said only that it seems natural to human reason to advance gradually from the imperfect to the perfect, and had said it of the past, Pascal generalizes the observation and turns it toward what is to come. Not only does each man advance from day to day in the sciences, but all men together make constant progress as the universe ages, because what happens in the succession of generations is what happens in the several ages of a particular man. The whole succession of men is accordingly to be regarded as one man who exists always and learns continually.

From the analogy Pascal draws a reversal of the accustomed relation between the ancients and ourselves. Old age is the time of life farthest from childhood; if so, the maturity of this universal man is not to be sought in the times nearest his birth but in those farthest from it. Those whom we call the ancients were novices in all things and belonged to the childhood of man, and the antiquity we revere in them is rather to be found in ourselves, who have added to their knowledge the experience of the centuries since. Yet Pascal does not conclude, as Bacon does, that the tradition should be set aside. The ancients made their inheritance the means and not the end of study, and we should imitate them in that, and so try to surpass them.

The rule is expressly limited in its application. It holds of those matters which depend upon reasoning and experiment, where authority is of no use and the multiplication of observations enlarges what is known. It does not hold of matters which depend upon fact and testimony, among which Pascal places history, jurisprudence, and above all theology, where the sources are fixed and what is to be known has been given rather than discovered. In these, the authority of the Fathers is not diminished by the passage of time. The confidence proper to the new physics therefore licenses no corresponding confidence about morals or the things of God, a distinction pursued further under the ideas of Knowledge and Religion.

The same reversal of ancient and modern is stated in nearly the same language by Hobbes and by Bacon, whether by borrowing or by coincidence, and it becomes a commonplace of the moderns. What distinguishes Pascal's version is the partition it carries with it, by which progress is affirmed in one order of inquiry and denied in another. That partition anticipates later divisions between the theoretical and the practical use of reason, and it stands as a caution against the inference, drawn freely in the following century, that because the sciences advance the wisdom of an age advances with them.

The first Discourse answers the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon by maintaining that the restoration of the arts and sciences has corrupted manners rather than purified them. Rousseau derives the arts from vices, luxury from idleness, and the sciences from a curiosity which is at bottom vanity, and he holds that what springs from such origins returns to them. Sparta, which excluded these accomplishments, is set against Athens, which cultivated them, and the simplicity of the earlier condition is presented as virtue rather than rudeness. He does not propose that the sciences be abolished, and he acknowledges elsewhere that for those already corrupted they are a lesser evil than idleness. What he denies is that their advancement constitutes any improvement in morals.

The Discourse on Inequality supplies the ground of this denial. Rousseau makes the faculty of self-improvement the mark which distinguishes man from the brute and admits of no dispute, since the beast at the end of a few months is all it will ever be, and its species after a thousand years exactly what it was in the first. But the same faculty which permits advance permits decline, and man, having lost by age or accident what perfectibility enabled him to gain, may fall lower than the brutes. The development of language, reason, and comparison produces the competitive regard for oneself which measures its possessions against another's; the institution of property makes inequality permanent; and the arts become the ornaments of an order which they also conceal.

Rousseau is not on this account a partisan of the golden age, and he denies that a return to the primitive condition is possible or desirable. The Social Contract undertakes to establish legitimate authority on terms which accept the permanence of civil society while refusing its existing injustice, and the Emile undertakes an education which forms a man fit for it. His position is therefore an ambivalent one: he admires the achievements of antiquity which he charges with having corrupted the societies that produced them, and he treats perfectibility as at once the source of every human accomplishment and the cause of every human misery. Whether man is capable of indefinite improvement, and whether such improvement lies in his nature or in his institutions, is considered further under the ideas of Man and Nature.

Rousseau's challenge is directed less at the fact of advance than at the standard by which advance is judged, and later writers answer it in different ways. Kant grants the corruption and locates the possibility of improvement in freedom rather than in the goodness men are born with. Marx accepts the indictment while transferring its object from civilization as such to the class relations of a particular epoch, so that the arts are compromised by their ownership rather than by their nature. Those who continue to hold, with Rousseau, that the advance of civilization and the improvement of men are separate motions may be followed under the ideas of Custom and Convention and of Virtue and Vice.

Hegel undertakes to show that the course of history is neither a collection of contingencies nor a record of what men happened to intend, but the progressive self-actualization of Spirit through human institutions. Each epoch embodies a determinate consciousness of freedom and gives it the form of a state, a religion, an art, and a philosophy. No epoch is simply mistaken, since each is a necessary moment in a development which could not have reached its term by any shorter route. On this view the history of the world is the progress of the consciousness of freedom, and the historian who reports only the deeds of nations reports the surface of a movement whose principle lies elsewhere.

The principle of movement is contradiction. Each shape of Spirit, when its own commitments are carried through, generates oppositions which it cannot resolve on its own terms and which are resolved only at a higher stage. The Greek city offered a beautiful ethical life in which the citizen was at one with his community, but it had no place for the freedom of the individual subject; Christianity established that inwardness and severed it from the political world; the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Revolution are successive attempts to reunite them. The modern constitutional state, in which the individual finds his particular ends realized through the universal ends of the community, is for Hegel the form in which the reconciliation is accomplished.

Two features of this account have drawn persistent objection. The first is the position of the world-historical individuals, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, who pursue their own passions and thereby execute a purpose they do not know, so that what is achieved through them is not what they intended. The second is the cost. Hegel does not conceal it, calling history the slaughter-bench upon which the happiness of peoples and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, and he holds that the sacrifice is the price at which freedom is actualized. A further difficulty is raised by those who ask whether progress can be the inner law of history and yet reach its consummation before history ends.

Hegel's is the most fully articulated of the doctrines which make progress a necessity rather than an achievement, and it answers Rousseau by denying that the corruption of manners in any age settles anything about the direction of the whole. Marx retains the dialectical form and the doctrine of stages while substituting the development of the forces of production for the unfolding of Spirit, and inherits with them the difficulty about the end of history. Kant, in contrast, had made political improvement a work of freedom rather than of necessity, and had treated its goal as an idea which regulates action without being realized. The issue between these positions is discussed under the ideas of Fate, History, and Liberty.

Mill makes the liberty of thought and discussion the condition of intellectual advance. An opinion silenced may be true, in which case the race is robbed of the chance to exchange error for truth; it may be false, in which case the race is robbed of the clearer perception of truth which collision with error produces; and where it is partly true, as most opinions are, only contestation will separate what it contains from what it lacks. Even a received opinion which is wholly true becomes, when held without being questioned, a dead dogma rather than a living truth, professed by men who cannot state its grounds or meet the commonest objection to it. Progress in knowledge accordingly requires that no opinion be exempt from challenge.

The same criterion governs Mill's treatment of government. He rejects the customary division of political ends into Order and Progress, holding that order is not a separate end to be balanced against improvement but a part and a means of it, and that the causes which prevent society from retrograding are the same as those which produce advance. The best form of government is therefore the one which most promotes the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves, and by this measure representative institutions are preferable to a benevolent despotism, since the exercise of political rights educates those who exercise it. Inferior forms may be justified for peoples not yet fit for self-government, but only if they carry them through the intermediate stages which they must traverse.

On economic progress Mill is more reserved than his contemporaries. He asks not how much the aggregate wealth of a nation has increased but what has become of the condition of those who labor, and he holds that an increase which leaves the majority no better off is not an improvement to be counted. The Principles of Political Economy contains his defense of the stationary state: when capital and numbers have grown to the point at which further growth adds little to welfare, a settled condition at a high level of comfort would be preferable to endless increase, and would leave room for what he calls the Art of Living. The distribution of what is produced, treated more fully under the idea of Justice, is for Mill the test of economic advance.

Mill's account is conditional where Hegel's is necessary: progress occurs when men think freely and choose well, and fails when they do not, so that the question of freedom and necessity in history is settled on the side of freedom. Against Rousseau he holds that the cultivation of the intellect and the improvement of manners advance together, provided the political conditions of discussion are secured. A difficulty his position leaves standing is that liberty unequally distributed may yield improvement for some at the cost of others, which neither his utilitarian standard nor his defense of individuality altogether resolves. The related question of what makes a people fit for self-government is pursued under the ideas of Citizen and Education.

Marx measures economic progress by a standard different from that of Adam Smith. Where Smith reckons advance by the increase of opulence, the growth of capital, and the extension of commerce, Marx attends chiefly to the effect of successive systems of production upon the status and conditions of labor. The transition from the slave economies of antiquity through feudal serfdom to what he calls the wage-slavery of the industrial proletariat is accompanied by greater productivity and vaster accumulations of capital; but the Manifesto notes respects in which the supposedly free workman is worse off than his servile ancestors. If progress is conceived instead as the historically determined approach to the liberation of labor, then capitalism is at once an advance beyond feudalism and a stage on the way to something else.

The mechanism is the contradiction between the forces of production, which are the instruments, skills, and organization of labor, and the relations of production, which are the forms of property and class that govern their use. When the former outgrow the latter, the relations become fetters and an epoch of social revolution begins. Capitalism, on this account, has developed science, industry, and a world market, accomplishing wonders surpassing Egyptian pyramids and Roman aqueducts; and it has produced in the proletariat the class whose condition compels it to end the system that made it. Each economic revolution is thus said to bring men nearer to the classless economy, the overthrow of the landed aristocracy preparing the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Two features of this theory have been much disputed. The first is that it sets a term to progress while making progress a necessity of history, and those who think the inevitability of advance should render it as interminable as history itself find an inconsistency here, as they do in Hegel's account of the stages by which the Absolute Idea attains realization. The second concerns where the improvement resides. It resides, for Marx, in institutions rather than in the nature of men, since later generations are not born better disposed to virtue but inherit better arrangements. He allows, however, that man's nature is only partly determined at birth and partly by the system of production under which he lives, which leaves open a further improvement of men themselves once the ideal economy is established.

Marx takes over from Hegel the dialectic of history and its doctrine of stages, and takes over from Rousseau the charge that civilization has served the advantage of a few, while assigning the cause to a determinate mode of production rather than to civilization as such. Against Mill, who makes progress depend upon liberty and wise choice, he makes it depend upon the movement of material conditions, so that the two stand on opposite sides of the question whether progress is inevitable or contingent upon what men plan and do. The issues so raised are pursued under the ideas of Labor, Revolution, and Wealth.