'Necessary progress' is a subject that comes up often on here. This is a little discovery I came up with that is pertinent, even though it is kind of trans-Catholic in nature. I hope it is useful.

First, on philosophy.

Philosophy is the most self-conscious discipline of thought that there is. Science doesn't ask what science is. Art doesn't ask what art is. Literature doesn't ask what literature is. But philosophy is always asking itself what it is. For that matter, philosophy is always asking what science is, art is, literature is, etc.

In that sense philosophy has often been conceived as the act of making distinctions (rationally justified, of course). For my own part, I'm writing my central paper on whether religious beliefs are basically like, or else basically unlike our other beliefs (with tie-ins to whether we have to right to believe things without sufficient empirical evidence).

Of course, one of the reasons why philosophy is so difficult to define is that there is hardly any attribute that can be classified as common to all philosophers--just as there is almost nothing common to all religions.

But if I were to dip my hand into the teeming bucket of philosophy and pull out something of peculiar and unique value, it would have to be something like this: philosophy in general, even without respect to its content, gives us a certain ethics of thought and expression.

Now, that is certainly true of the study of logic, where we dub argumentative sins as 'fallacies'. However, philosophy as a whole--even the more illogical parts--have more to offer the ethics of thought and expression than pure logic studies.

Let us take, for example, the much maligned project of 'necessary progress.' We hate this doctrine because, as Catholics, we identify it with a godless-substitute for our own doctrine of salvation history. It also implies a sort of temporal hubris: "Our age is enlightened, and we have climbed out of the dark ages."

However, please allow me to share this with you: "Necessary progress" is alive and well. As a professor of mine put it: "We think of ourselves as at the end of a 'good' progress, even when we debunk progress. We are enlightened even when we pour scorn on Enlightenment. Our scorn is our light."

Striking, isn't it? My professor departed from there, but for the sake of mental mischief, I want to carry that to its radical consequences:

If we posit that we are correcting the philosophical errors of the past--including 'necessary progress'--in doing so we affirm progress. If we would deny necessary progress, we should deny ultimately our self-assurance that what we say is on a level higher than, or priviledged over, the thought of past ages. Easy enough. But if we are correct in this, then we are correct in a way previously never thought of before. Thus we have "progressed." Darn.

But suppose that we, in a fit of unbridled humility, guessed that we, ourselves were in a dark age of thought, and all of our ideas were mere pretensions and shadows of a former great age. Such an ethos, if it were brutally consistent, would effectively assassinate philosophy and make pure scholarship the norm for thought. No one should dare speak about what they read, unless they firmly believed they were only repeating what has been said in the past. Pure, temporal relativism--no age has the right to pass judgement on any thought in any other age!

Let's take it to the oddest extremes: thought and speech are disallowed, and a pervasive 'quietism' falls over the land, in sheer receptive awe of the wisdom of the past, and in dread lest anyone portends to have an idea which has not been had before.

Of course you see, such a revolution, in its modest and extreme forms, consists in a development, a novelty in itself. It would be self-consuming.

So it would seem that no matter what we do, and no matter to what silly lengths of temporal humility we go to, we cannot shed this perception of somehow being on the frontier of history, packed full of original ideas and holding in the palms of our hands the 'all-seeing eye' over the slightly darker centuries past. I am not talking about our inability but our logical impossibility of doing so.

What would we do? That is a very real tension. We seem to be in the middle of two undesirable necessities.

But, as Augustine's insight of self-knowledge eventually burgeoned into a huge project against pure skepticism, so this insight touches on one of those wierd parts of experience whence flows whole schools of thought.

So, going even beyond logic, philosophy--like the mime finding the invisible wall--seeks out those quirky boundaries and impossibilities of our being, and extends them to volumes of conclusions, and changes the way we understand the world, and certainly about how we speak of it.

In writing this, my goal was two-fold: a worthless mental calisthenic, and also to make some people think twice about how they talk about--whether condemning or affirming--the idea of 'necessary progress'.

-- anon (ymous@god.bless), February 19, 2004

Answers

-- (top@top.top), February 19, 2004.