The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture by Dupré Louis K

Author:Dupré, Louis K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

History as Progress: The Philosophes

The idea of historical progress, popular in the eighteenth century, implied that history moves from a less perfect state to a more perfect one. Those who supported it rarely defined in what precisely that greater perfection consisted. They agreed that society was gradually becoming liberated from intolerance, superstition, political lawlessness, and juridical arbitrariness. Their ideal also included the uninhibited development of science, as well as the attainment of a maximum of personal liberty compatible with living in an orderly society. Yet what was the immediate goal of this process of liberation? Was the process finite or would it indefinitely expand? The philosophes seldom raised and never answered those questions, preoccupied as they were with the need for immediate improvement. Because of the unlimited ambition of their project, their theories of progress have been called secularized eschatologies.26 But, as Hans Blumenberg shows, a closer look reveals a fundamental difference: “An eschatology speaks of an event breaking into history, an event that transcends and is heterogeneous to it, while the idea of progress moves ... toward a future that is immanent in history.”27 In the secular theory the impulse toward progress comes entirely from within. The idea of Providence, central in the eschatological view of history, vanishes, even if the name remains. The human race creates its own destiny.

Some notion of historical progress existed even in antiquity.28 Hesiod, Aeschylus, and Protagoras linked it to the myth of Prometheus who brought practical knowledge to the human race. Yet all versions of the story caution that practical knowledge without wisdom and virtue leads to disaster. Moreover, the ancient idea of progress applied only to the past without moving beyond the present whereas that of the eighteenth century stretched toward an indefinite future. The real predecessor of the modern theory of progress is Francis Bacon. As he articulates it in the Instauratio Magna (1620), history moves toward an unlimited expansion of science. One of his followers, Joseph Glanvill, adopted the chancellor’s motto, plus ultra, in the title of a work that fully anticipated the eighteenth century’s expectation of a glorious scientific future.

Infinite progress was indeed inherent in the modern concept of science. It required constant correction, but it also promised ever-expanding horizons of knowledge. The ancient notion of truth, valid until the fourteenth century, had held no such promises. It had a definitive, pre-established character. Each thinker might be able to express it more adequately and would thereby give a later generation some advantage over an earlier one. But truth itself did not advance. The increase of empirical and practical knowledge of nature did not add to truth in the strict sense. In the modern concept of science, truth became an ongoing process. It never fully existed and its results had to be constantly emended. Nor would that process ever come to an end. Though its general objectives remained roughly the same, subject, method, and content had to be newly discovered at each epoch. Truth, then, consisted in a relation to an ever to be redefined object.

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