Sasha wrote on Jan 30
th, 2014 at 11:03am:
Is Human Progress a spiritual one?... Is it an advance in technology and human knowledge? Is it attaining Enlightenment? Is it an individual selfish desire for self-fulfilment? So what is Human progress from your viewpoint OP?
Taken from Hegel, the idea of progress is about bringing the higher realms, or spirit, into the world. For Hegel, human history works in stages, each progressing step by step towards a state of pure consciousness. Descartes split the phenomenon of reason from the flesh, or human desire. The Enlightenment notion of progress was about bringing the laws of God into the laws of men through reason, scientific discovery, and later, through political-economy.
Marx developed the stages of human progress into the idea of historical materialism. Here, the purpose of reason, or consciousness, was to be in the world. In defining such a purpose, Marx did away with the notion of God. The endpoint, or
telos, of human progress was not based in a Platonic world of idealist forms as it was for Hegel, but in the world of human relations. For Marx, progress was about ending class struggle, which caused history to progress through stages.
For Hegel and Marx, progress was predicted to end at a certain historical point, culminating in what Hegel called the end of history. The conservative philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, called this historical end point as the end of the Cold War. For Hegel, human progress ended with the political establishment of liberal democracy (or constitutional monarchies or republics).
Fukuyama, however, has since retracted this opinion.
Marx's telos was communism. While Marx never formally retracted this opinion, he moved his emphasis in his later works towards the political model of social democracy. This is one reason why communist parties throughout the world struggled to put what they called "theory into practice": Marx was never clear about what needed to happen to achieve communism, or the end of class struggle. His
Communist Manifesto was just a passionate call for the proletariat (Marx's endpoint as history's triumphant class) to take over the means of production. The main architect of communist thought became Lenin, articulated in his work,
What Is To Be Done. During the Cold War, communist parties throughout the world struggled to identify as the true party of Marxism-Leninism.
Existentialists like Satre picked up on Marx's materialism, but did away with the notion of progress. For Satre, "existence precedes essence", meaning that Hegel's world of spirit (or pure reason) was a mere projection of things, and relationships between things, in this world. Satre had no time for God, but a focus on existence required a closer look at how humans think and perceive things. Satre referred to the later work of Nietzsche, which hovers on the question of metaphysics and being.
This required a focus on language - a move in 20th century Western thought that became known as the "linguistic turn". This move looked at the relationship of language with things - signs and "signifiers" (or words, if you want) with their meanings, or "signifieds". This field came to call itself semiotics, a movement within structuralism. Semiotics initially articulated a push in modern thought towards "pure" expression. This was the basis of modern art, movements like cubism, abstract expressionism and minimalism aiming to capture the real meaning of things in a visual form.
From this perspective, Western thought quickly reached the limits of such a project. Modern thought began to accept this. It came to identify no relationship at all between"signifieds" and their "signifiers", language and its meaning, or representation and the thing being represented. This was a pivotal historical rupture in Western philosophy.
This disruption, started largely by Neitzsche, saw an end to Hegelian idealism, along with the question (or possibility) of human progress. For many, it marked the end of the Enlightenment itself. If spirit, or pure reason, was merely a linguistic phenomenon, interchangeable with any of a myriad of signifiers, it could never be fully captured within language itself. This moved Western thought towards what has become known as post-structuralism, a very loosely connected group of thinkers who share the implausibility of defining human evolution in linear terms; the impossibility of progress.
This has also seen an end to the faith in politics once held by Marxists. Such ideas as equality, human progress, and historical and dialectical materialism have come to be seen as "liberatory discourses" and "universal signifiers" - a term that also applies to God. The Hegelian/Marxist idea of history as progressing in stages - thesis, antithese and synthesis - is also called to question. Thinkers we might call post-structuralists have focused any political action on specific social movements. Following the linguistic turn, it is still possible to reform institutions, seek to put "theory into practice" and act "in the world", but it's important not to create further abstractions (and greater social problems).
The 20th century saw so much death and destruction, its response was indeed gloomy. Such systemic conflict was part of our competing Western views on human progress. It can, of course, also be seen as the teething pains of human progress, or class struggle.
I'll let you be the judge of that.
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