A brief history of the western idea of progress – part three
Renaissance Humanism
Galileo (1564 - 1642)
“While we might admire his practicality we also might question his virility.” - Camus (paraphrase of his take on Galileo’s renunciation of his sun-centered model of the solar system)
While many contemporary commentators on the western idea of progress suggest that it originated in the late Renaissance or early Enlightenment, I follow Robert Nisbet’s lead in placing the idea as far back as ancient Greece. I also agree that the modern idea of progress is a secularized version of a “linear conception of time and the idea that history has a meaning oriented towards the future” present in the teleology of divine providence in early Catholicism. The appearance of Jesus and his crucifixion put God’s plan into action in history. This teleology ends with his reappearance and the creation of God’s kingdom on earth. Modern thinkers promoted other teleologies that were similarly millennial.
The Enlightenment was still a confident era. The task of man seemed to be to use reason and science to displace superstition, custom, and tradition to inevitably yeild progress towards the perfectibility of man.
To begin sketching this formation we must turn to the rise of humanism, a story that begins with the Byzantine Empire, who never called itself by that name. They saw themselves as the eastern half of the Roman empire, which remained intact after the western half fell to marauding Germanic tribes. The Orthodox church sees Catholicism as a heretical breakaway.
When the Ottomans overthrew the eastern remainder of the Roman empire (circa 1299 A.D.) a large number of intellectuals conversant in ancient Greek thought migrated throughout western Europe, which had lost much of ancient Greek and Roman heritage during the Dark Ages. This resurgence of formal learning in the early universities of Italy led to the formation of numerous other European universities throughout the continent, to secular humanism, and to the Renaissance. With the advent of the scientific revolution, beginning with Francis Bacon (1561–1626) we begin seeing an increasingly self-conscious modernity that abandons vague metaphysics and a reflexive obeisance to Greek and Roman sources, preferring experience and a universal method based on observation, induction, and experimentation to conquer, control, and exploit nature “for the relief of man's estate.” Bacon “was the first to use the word ‘progress’ in a temporal rather than a spatial sense.” Bacon’s role was “to remove the stumbling blocks in the path of inquiry.” It is Bacon in whom we find the inextricable intertwining of progress with the exploitation of nature. We need to understand the genealogy of progress in western intellectual history because there is not enough“nature” left to exploit to provide the rest of the planet with the “standard of living” of contemporary Americans.
In fact, we would need an additional five planet earths for the entire world to enjoy the American “standard of living,” which as George H.W. Bush so memorably noted at the Rio environmental summit in 1993 was “non-negotiable.”
It was left to Bacon’s peers, especially Rene Descartes (1596–1650), to elaborate upon his scientific method. Descartes was modest about his own personal faculties. In Discourse on the Method (1637) he noted “I have often wished that I were equal to some others in promptitude of thought, or in clearness and distinctness of imagination, or in fullness and readiness of memory. And besides these, I know of no other qualities that contribute to the perfection of the mind; for as to the reason or sense, inasmuch as it is that alone which constitutes us men, and distinguishes us from the brutes, I am disposed to believe that it is to be found complete in each individual”
He placed great stock in his new method of knowing, creating a mathematical language to understand nature by means of a four-part theory of epistemology.
Rene Descartes Discourse on the Method (1637):
“The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence. And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”
These new methods of inquiry combined with a proliferation of new inventions presented us an ever growing body of evidence that a new and better era had emerged. Other leading lights of the scientific revolution included Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543), Galileo (1564 - 1642), and Isaac Newton (1642 - 1726/27). Newton wrote in a letter that “What Descartes did was a good step...If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
Since they had discovered regular and uniform laws of the natural universe, many thinkers saw the potential for not only the discovery of regular and uniform laws in the social universe, but means of applying those laws towards the perfectibility of man. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was optimistic. The prophets of crisis like Marx and Nietzsche would not arrive until a century later.
An explicit debate on the perfectibility of man first emerged in the late 17th century in the Académie Française as the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.” The debate continued in the first decade of the 18th century in the Royal Society in London where it was often characterized as the “battle of the books” after a 1704 tract of the same name written by Jonathan Swift (who took the side of the ancients in the UK, which is ironic because his use of irony is so strikingly modern). This debate, especially its emergence in France first, is generally considered “the first secular statement of the idea of progress in modern Europe.” On one side were those who supported the aesthetic and intellectual achievements of classical antiquity, who had enjoyed millennia of universal approbation in Europe (except perhaps during the interregnum of the Middle Ages) and felt nothing modern would ever surpass those pioneering sources. Even advocates of the moderns, who considered modern science unimpeachably superior, were willing to admit the ancients remained unsurpassable in the arts and letters.
Two leaders of the modernist point of view in the Académie Française were Charles Perrault (1628 – 1703) and Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657 - 1757). After Perrault read a paean to Louis XIV of France, the Sun King, to the academy upon his recovery from a severe illness, he wrote Parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns with Regard to the Arts and Sciences (1688). In the preface Digression on the Ancients and Moderns Fontenelle (1688) described to excessive veneration of the ancient sources as a frivolous prestige game that denies the obvious “beauty of our century, on which heaven has bestowed a thousand distinctions altogether refused to Antiquity, that I have been unable to restrain a sense of veritable indignation.”
In the same piece Fontenelle also suggested that if the ancient’s brain were so much bigger than those of the moderns, the trees should have been larger as well. He established the basic modernist worldview by the eighteenth century that “mankind has advanced in culture, is now advancing, and will continue to advance during a long future ahead, and that this advance is the result solely of natural and human causes.” Fontenelle also suggested that “eloquence and poetry” depends less on an accumulation of knowledge than “natural philosophy, physick, and mathematick” which “is always improving.”