Shama Adams
Conceptual Contingencies: The Notion of Progress and the Idea of “History”
Principia Historiae: Theories of History and Murmurs of Progress
Celebrated mathematician and logician, Bertrand Russell once remarked: “A
process which led from the amoeba to man, appeared to the philosophers to be
obviously a progress, though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not
known.”
Whilst I’m sure that many of you share my fondness for humorous intellectual
anecdotes, this quote also serves to remind us that notions, judgments, and ascriptions
of the idea of progress, especially progress in history, are always a matter of context
and subjectivity. Progress is not unproblematic. However, it is fair to argue that
progress is a discrete philosophical concept which emerged during the Enlightenment,
and remains embedded in the broader philosophical systems prominent during this
time, namely German Idealism, and French Humanist Rationalism. Far from being a
generic or simple term which refers broadly to scientific or technological
development, the idea of progress is a way or modality of seeing. The idea of progress
is a product of specific historiographical and historical transformations during the long
eighteenth century, namely profound changes in the ways in which history was written
and employed, and the raison d’etre of history itself.
The categorisation of progress as a discrete philosophical concept in my
research and this paper specifically, is based on the realisation that, through a survey
of Classical and Enlightenment philosophy, the idea or “Geist” (to borrow the
Hegelian term) of progress operates as the “ghost in the machine.” That is, as a
phenomenon which seems innate or inherent, and is therefore rarely fully actualised or
singled out for philosophical analysis or critique. This assumption masks the
culturally constructed and contextually contingent nature of progress, and leads to the
concept being further conflated with dominant narratives of history and the
Enlightenment itself.
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Progress, theories of history and the Enlightenment, whilst mutually
inextricable, are not philosophically synonymous, and nor are they intellectually
interchangeable concepts. The Enlightenment’s collective assumption that progress is
inherent in history can be explained, in part, by the fact that progress is both a
concept, and a historical narrative which is deeply enmeshed in, and conflated with,
numerous, interrelated concepts, including but not limited to, secularism and
humanism.
As several of my colleagues have emphasised throughout the proceedings of
this conference, history is not innate, natural or unproblematic. Rather, history is a
contrived intellectual and institutional construction, which is temporally and culturally
specific. Whilst notions of history begin in Antiquity, nuanced theories of history were
not fully-actualised for many centuries later, during the Enlightenment.
“History” itself, is also contingent on several intellectual precursors which
predate its conceptualisation; namely, an understanding of time, and, historical
consciousness. Hence the discipline of history has a history of its own, and it is
impossible to talk of progress without intimating universal history, and it is equally
difficult to invoke contemporary understandings of universal history without inferring
a sense of progress. However, it is necessary for heuristic purposes to deconstruct this
intellectual conflation, and demarcate the discreet qualities and unique histories, of
both concepts.
The notion of progress lends itself favourably to a specific way of both
interpreting and writing history, that is, universal history. Whilst it is my contention
that universal history, (at least as we understand it today), is product of the eighteenth
century, attempts to write versions of universal history have been made long before
the Enlightenment.
For example, as early as the fifth century C.E, the Roman, but Early Christian
historian, Paulus Orosius in his History Against the Pagans strove to construct an
account of history which was accessible and relevant to humanity as a cohesive whole,
as opposed to the parochial epochs. Similarly, St Augustine’s City of God, also fifth
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century C.E, intimates a version of universal history, as it concludes that the central
plan and purpose of history is the unfolding of God’s will throughout the ages, for the
whole of humankind. So we begin to see that Judeo-Christian accounts of history, by
virtue of their respective author’s beliefs in providence, could not help but be
thematically universal, even unwittingly.
However, the impetus to construct explanatory narratives of universal
development, which were for the first time in history, markedly and deliberately
human-centred and dismissive of the idea of divine providence, grew manifestly
stronger in the years after the Reformation. I think the reasons for this “humanist
universal impulse” are numerous, but the most significant of these reasons can be
broadly identified as:
1. The rise of secularism and the gradual wane of religious authority on public
and private life, since invention of the printing press in particular.
2. The rise of empiricism, and the growing belief that empirical science and
reason would advance the cause of humanity, whereas religious edict and
superstition were regressive forces.
3. Interestingly enough, the European power’s colonial and imperialist
expansionalist projects in far-flung and previously “unknown” parts of the
globe.
Succinctly put, as Europeans began to “discover” more of the world, it seemed
only natural that philosophers might attempt to unify or at least account for the
seemingly disparate anthropological histories of the world’s various cultures, and this
is exemplified by the numerous attempts at constructing “universal histories” which
began to emerge during the long eighteenth century. Voltaire writes:
Everything speaks to us, everything is done for us. The silver on which we
dine, our furniture, our new needs and pleasures, everything reminds us that all
parts of the entire world, have been joined for the past two and a half centuries,
thanks to the industry of our fathers. No matter where we go, we are reminded
of the change that has taken place in the world.
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According to Voltaire, the momentous developments of the past two centuries
had both precipitated and necessitated that history now be written from a universal
perspective. He and others advocated for a new model of historiography, which placed
emphasis on distinguishing fact from fiction (something which ancient and medieval
historians had problematic degrees of compliance with!) by way of close reference to
historical documents, stressed the critical evaluation of these sources of evidence, and
was to deliberately focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history, as
methodologically, knowledge of the recent past was thought to be more certain and
easier to obtain than knowledge of the distant past. Voltaire remarks: “Modern history
has the advantage of being more certain, because of the very fact that it is modern.”
This universal method gained popularity, and was gradually institutionalised, in
the sense that it became, (and arguably remains to this day) the dominant theory of
history under the auspices of the French writers and religious scholars the Abbé
Bossuet, preceptor and tutor to Louis XIV’s young daughter and heir-apparent son, the
Dauphin, and the philosophes Voltaire and the Marquis de Condorcet.
Published in 1681, Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History, was specifically
written for the educational instruction of the Dauphin, though it is clear that Bossuet
also intended the text to have a much wider audience. Though self-defined as a
universal history, it is perhaps better described as a history of the Greek, Roman and
early Christian worlds, with the occasional mention of a wandering or invading, but
always transient civilisation which falls outside of these specific and limited
groupings.
These limitations aside, the Abbé’s central argument is that from the creation
of man to the present day, the Judeo-Christian religion has been one and continuous,
whilst in the same interval, a succession of mighty empires have passed across the
stage of history and disappeared, and it therefore naturally follows that the stability of
this religion can only be (reasonably) accounted for by way of the special
conservation of a Divine Providence.
Bossuet argues:
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Thus I have no more to say upon Universal History. You will discover all its
secrets, and it will now be in your own power to observe in it the whole
progression of Religion and succession of great empires down to Charlemagne.
While you see them fall, almost all of themselves, and shall see Religion
support itself by its own power, you will easily understand what is solid
greatness, and wherein a wise man out to place his hope.
Murmurs of Progress
The notion of progress has a complex and conflated, linguistic, philosophical,
and cultural history. Historian Sidney Pollard defines progress as “the assumption that
a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind which consists of irreversible
changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement” (16). In
common usage, the word progress has come to be tacitly synonymous with notions of
advancement, improvement and growth. Finnish philosopher and mathematician Ilkka
Niiniluoto argues against this common understanding, and states that progress is an
“axiological” or “normative” concept which should be distinguished from neutral
descriptive terms such as “change” and “development”. According to Niiniluoto,
inherent in the notion of progress are ideological assumptions, investments and value
judgements.
From the nineteenth century onwards, progress came to be increasingly
associated with notions of development and advancement as they pertained to science
and technology. This can largely be attributed to the successes of the Industrial
Revolution, and the pervasive belief that scientific discovery, coupled with
technological innovation, would transform society for the better. In our late-modern
and increasingly technocentric culture, it is difficult to separate progress from notions
of technological development. The idea that progress is mutually synonymous with
technological advance is a product of and a testament to the cultural supremacy of
empiricism.1 As historical philosopher Ronald Wright explains: “our culture measures
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human progress by technological means because it delivers - the club is better than the
fist, the arrow better than the club, the bullet better than the arrow”.
Further, historian of science George Sarton argues: “the acquisition and
systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities which are truly
cumulative and progressive,” and “progress has no definite and unquestionable
meaning in other fields than the field of science”. Technological progress has become
the modus operandi primarily because it is quantifiable, and hence immediately
discernible. Philosophical and social progress are more difficult to define, much less
measure. However, this dominant and common-sense view is problematic, and needs
to be deconstructed. Progress does, indeed, have a definite, though contentious
meaning in fields other than science, and these meanings are culturally and
contextually constructed. Historian Sidney Pollard notes that the idea of material
progress is a very recent intellectual development, one that has occurred only in the
past “three hundred years.”
The Turn to Philosophy
Progress has often been seen as the logical outgrowth of the secularisation
processes of the Renaissance. However, I would argue that it is changes in the
disciplines of philosophy and history themselves, which promoted the belief that the
past should be read as the story of humanity’s rise towards civilisation, and that
progress was the conduit which necessitated and made such a reading possible. These
changes were temporally and culturally specific to Europe, expressly the rise of a
sense of European cosmopolitanism, and the Enlightenment’s quest for universalism
and the universal foundations for knowledge grounded in reason. Neither Classical
European, nor Renaissance history, conformed to this new, benchmark.
The solution was to infuse thinking into historical scholarship, and to make
history factual, scholarly, and above all, philosophical. Voltaire’s intellectual
contemporary, the historian and champion of public education, Charles Rollin argued
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that fundamental purpose of history was to take us beyond the confines of our time,
and that philosophy was the conduit which could make this understanding possible.
There is an eighteenth century urban myth which is as follows: The early
composition of the new genre of history was in part, a result of a complaint made to
Voltaire, by the Marquise du Châtelet that history was “unpalatable”:
A confused mass of unrelated facts, a thousand accounts of battles which have
decided nothing. What is the point for a Frenchwoman like myself of knowing
that in Sweden Egli succeeded Haquin and that Ottoman was the son of
Ortugul?
Voltaire concurred with the criticism, and set to work on his own, secular continuation
of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History. Voltaire titled this piece: The Essay on
the Manners and the Spirit of the Nations (1756.) In re-conceiving and re-imagining
history and origins, the philosophe attempted to reduce facts to a minimum and
concentrated instead on broad, cultural patterns. Voltaire writes: “in this history we
shall confine ourselves only to that which deserves the attention of all peoples and of
all ages” (75). He thus strives for a purposeful universalism, and this is consistent with
the Enlightenment’s attempt to procure the universal foundations of knowledge,
grounded in empiricism and reason.
Hence, the practice and purpose of history was changing. This change can be
attributed to both the burgeoning development of the concept of progress, and the
belief that human progress in history was universal and unassailable. Rollin
emphatically states:
“Confined to the bounds of the age and country wherein we live, and shut up in
the narrow circle of such branches of knowledge that are not peculiar to us, and
within the limits of our own private reflections, we remain ever in a kind of
infancy, which leaves us strangers to the rest of the world, and profoundly
ignorant of all that has gone before us, or indeed, even surrounds us now.”
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Progress, Universal History, Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, generally understood as spanning between the late
seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century, is the period in which the
concept of progress was theorised philosophically. The concept in turn became reified,
and was transformed into both a narrative of history, and the raison d’être for history
itself. It is also during the Enlightenment that progress came to be the secular purpose
of humanity, culture and civilisation.
The first systematised conceptualisation of progress to emerge during the
Enlightenment was the French rationalist Nicolas de Condorcet’s posthumouslypublished treatise Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
(1795).
An avowed and unrepentant atheist, Condorcet’s work encapsulates the rational
spirit of the Enlightenment, and the Marquis was the only philosophe to witness the
Revolution and participate fully in its constitutional aftermath. A celebrated thinker
and reformer, Condorcet’s ideas were often radical and prescient, and it is this
foresight which makes so much of his work still relevant to the pertinent issues and
conditions of our own time.
The eternally optimistic Condorcet argues that progress is inevitable, and
believes that future societies will surely be rational and prosperous, as their systems of
knowledge and ethics will be shaped entirely by empirical science. Condorcet’s text
constitutes a comprehensive theory of universal development, and is hence, though
perhaps unwittingly, a thorough example of a fully-nuanced theory of universal
history.
In contrast to those versions of universal history in which the author’s premise,
purpose and argument is grounded in religious precept and doctrine, such as St.
Augustine’s or the Abbe Bossuet’s, Condorcet’s Sketch is wholly-secular and
humanist in approach. This represents a radical departure from Bossuet’s thesis of
history being the unfolding example of God’s everlasting providence throughout the
fullness of time. Condorcet sites human initiative, action and industry as the motors of
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history, not supernatural patronage and intervention. For the Marquis, the persistent
existence of religion and religious belief is seen as profoundly regressive, rather than
progressive. As the German idealist Hegel saw the Prussian state and Christianity as
being the ultimate fulfilment of historical development, Condorcet saw the cessation
of belief in the supernatural altogether, and progress itself to be the continuing theme
of, and development within, history.
As a conclusion and coda to this paper, let us now turn our attention to the
Post-Enlightenment. Owing to its entrenchment in, and conflation with, the
Enlightenment, the notions of progress in history, and the idea of progress itself, in
postmodernity, is problematic. Progress is seemingly incompatible with the ethos of
postmodernity and postmodernism. French cultural theorist Jean-François Lyotard
claims that the defining characteristic of postmodernity is scepticism towards all
attempts to make sense of history, or imbue it with purpose. It is therefore not
surprising that both universal history, and the concept of progress, receive a thorough
trouncing in the post-enlightement.
The post-Enlightenment’s unrepentant critique of the notion of progress can be
attributed to what Lyotard describes as postmodernity’s “scepticism towards all
metanarratives,” and to postmodern culture’s problematic relationship with the ideal
of secularism, and by extension, theories of history. According to Lyotard, the
Enlightenment functions as the definitive metanarrative of progress. Lyotard is critical
of what he regards as the grandiose and prophetic claims of the Enlightenment, and its
versions of universal history, (some of which I’ve discussed today), and sees
postmodernity as the temporal and cultural context which will herald the collapse of
the Grand Narrative and, moreover, that which is central to all others of the
Enlightenment Project, namely, progress.
Postmodernity, Lyotard argues, is post-history.
But I think, (amongst other discoveries) that the proceedings of this conference
have resolutely demonstrated that we have not arrived in Postmodernity just yet, for as
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we have seen, universal history, and history itself, are not mere or forgotten footnotes
on the transcript of human thought.
Rather, and as eminent historian and scholar, Edward Hallet Carr states:
“history is an unending dialogue between the present and the past.” Universal models
of history, whilst replete with their own internal idiosyncrasies and incongruences,
invite us, as historians, to engage in a dialogue between our own contextual comfort
zones and the multitude of cultural and temporal spaces outside of our limited, livedexperiences.
As Bossuet ambitiously surmises:
Particular histories show the sequence of events that have occurred in a nation
in all their detail. But in order to understand with greater insight, we must know
what connection that particular history might have with others, and that can be
done by a condensation in which we can perceive, as in one glance, the entire
sequence of time.
And that my colleagues, whilst seemingly grandiose, should be viewed instead as an
ambitious project to which we as historians can aspire to.
Besides, history is in the making, refuting, and contesting.
A static history is a dead history, a universal history, is one that in the words of the
seminal Czech author, Milan Kundera, is there to “provoke and admonish us.”
I’m leaving myself open to a barrage of question in the discussion time with this
concluding comment, but I, for one, am happy to be provoked.
Thank you.