Chronos: the West Confronts Time by François Hartog

Author:François Hartog
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

“INDEFINITE PROGRESS”

Once humanity has arrived at that seventh epoch, with all those happy perspectives opening ahead, Condorcet readily takes the baton, offering a vision of the “indefinite progress of the human mind.”16 No longer need there be any pretense of coordinating the advance of reason and theology. The French Revolution had come and gone, freeing Condorcet to censure the deadweight of superstition. No more condemnations will issue from the Sorbonne, a change from Buffon’s time. In another change, Condorcet set aside the time of nature, addressing only the seventh epoch, that of man. No great admirer of Buffon, Voltaire had explicitly declared in his article on history drawn up for the Encyclopedia that natural history was “inappropriately termed history” as it was “an essential part of Physics.”17 For him, the most philosophically rewarding history was that of “the human mind,” an idea he applied to the century of Louis XIV. What he wrote was not “the annals of his reign; it is rather the history of the human mind, examined in the century that sheds the most glory.”18 Condorcet could have seized on the moment when that history neared its climax, but instead he began with the very “first state of civilization.”19 Sent off toward physics, nature will not put in an appearance in the painting; the subject is the time of human beings.

What did he hope to show in writing A Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit? “That nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the progressions of this perfectibility, from now onward independent of any power that may wish to halt it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us.”20 Before his proscription drove Condorcet into hiding, he had time only to draw up a sketch of Picture. When Madame de Condorcet published the sketch in 1795, the Convention bought and distributed three thousand copies. Rehabilitated through that act, Condorcet was recognized as the official intellectual of the new regime. Since their earliest days, human beings have never ceased to advance toward perfection—history shows this. The theory of sensations—the foundation of the idea of perfectibility—suffices to explain this, from that first mental faculty consisting of receiving sensations, initially simple and more elaborate with time. Clearly there is no longer any need for the overseer, the patron of the divine perfection toward which human beings, fallen and redeemed, have tended. Instead of accommodation we have sensations; rather than reformatio there is progress. Obstacles have hindered the march forward—prejudice and superstition still do; yet the march never comes to a halt. “Everything tells us that we are now close upon one of the great revolutions of the human race.”21 For a wanted man with a price on his head, these were optimistic words indeed.

Condorcet’s Picture is conceived as “the hypothetical history of a single people.” The progressions of that history are divided into nine “stages,”

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