The Enticing Light of Progress

Helena Moradi asks if the promise of pure progress is problematic.

- Dr Helena Moradi

In November 1784, the Berlinischer Monatsschrift published an article titled 'An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?' The article's author was Immanuel Kant. His famous answer was, "Enlightenment is man's emergence from self-inflicted immaturity (Unmündigkeit)." This long-standing question is a historical staple that continues to preoccupy the present. Two hundred years later, the French post-modern philosopher Michel Foucault still asks it in What is Enlightenment? (1984). In this essay, Foucault claims that modernity finds itself with a constant desire to know where we are right now. So where are we? Has humanity emerged from our immaturity, that is to say, really progressed?

American author J.B. Bury's The Idea of Progress, published in 1920, contains a difficult interpretation of 'progress'. According to his definition, the idea of progress is the belief that 'civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction'. But what is 'desirable' here? When the elderly Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau went for a walk in a pasture he admired for its beauty, he discovered a knitting factory in the middle of the idyll and was horrified and disgusted. Yet if his old adversary Denis Diderot had made the same discovery he would have become curious and happily interested, maybe even paid a study visit. For Diderot, but not for Rousseau, the factory in nature's womb was a sign of progress 'in a desirable direction'. So clearly, subjective perceptions cannot be used to define progress. Social movement is always in some direction and we'll never have a universal I agreement that any particular direction is good.