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TH E IDEA O F
PROGRESS
The Idea of Progress
Edited by
Arnold Burgen
Peter McLaughlin
Jurgen MittelstraB

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Walter de Gruyter •Berlin •New York
1997
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Library o f (.ongress CMtalogin^-in-Publication Data

T h e idea o f progress / edited by Jurgen Mittelstrass, Peter McLaughlin, and

Arnold Burgen.
(Philosophic und Wissenschaft, transdisziplinare Studien ; Bd. 13)
Present v. resulted from discussions at a conference in Gargellen, Austria in
Sept. 1994.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-015393-9
1. Civilization - Philosophy. 2. Progress. I. Mittelstrass, Jurgen.
II. McLaughlin, Peter, 1 9 5 1 - III. Burgen, Arnold, 1922— . IV. Series:
Philosophic und Wissenschaft ; Bd. 13.
C B 19.I34 1996
303.44—dc21 96-37561
CIP

Die Deutsche Bib/iotbek — (.'atalopjng-in-Publication Data

T h e id ea o f pro g ress / ed. by Ju rgen Mittelstrass ... - Berlin ; New York : de

Gruyter, 1997
(Philosophic und Wissenschaft ; Bd. 13)
ISBN 3-11-015393-9
NK: Mittelstrass, Jurgen [Hrsg.|; G T

© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D -10785 Berlin

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 Contents

Acknowledgements V

Introduction IX

G eorg H enrik von W right

Progress: Fact and Fiction 1

Walter Burkert
Impact and Limits of the Idea of Progress in Antiquity 19

Alistair Crom bie

Philosophical Commitments and Scientific Progress 47

Shigeru Nakayama
Chinese “Cyclic” View of History vs. Japanese “Progress” 65

Jean Blondel
Political Progress: Reality or Illusion? 77

Nicholas Rescher
Progress and the Future 103

R udolf Flotzinger
Progress and Development in Music History 121

Dag Prawitz
Progress in Philosophy 139
John D . Barrow
Time in the Universe 155

A ntonio G arcia-Bellido
Progress in Biological Evolution 175

Gereon Wolters
The Idea of Progress in Evolutionary Biology:
Philosophical Considerations 201

Philippe Lazar
The Idea of Progress in Human Health 219

Notes on Contributors 231

Index 237
 Introduction

N o other notion so expresses the self-image and the hopes of

the modern age as does the concept of progress. The idea of an
unbounded and irrepressible progress has taken the place of
the Christian theology of history. The concept of progress,
stamped in particular by the Enlightenment, is predicated on
the proposition that a free development of the intellect and an
enhancement especially of scientific knowledge of nature will
more or less automatically lead to an increasingly humane so­
ciety. Progress is to this extent equated with enlightenment as
a historical process.
Today, this kind of notion has lost much of its power to
convince: both for practical purposes, insofar as progress, in­
cluding scientific progress, not only solves problems but also
creates them - that is, the practical consequences of progress
are ambivalent - and also for theoretical reasons. Thus, in re­
cent philosophy of science the concept of progress of knowl­
edge has itself become problematical, in particular with regard
to marking out the methodological criteria of scientific know­
ing and thus of scientific rationality. Philosophy of science
considers several models of rationality, all of which expect sci­
ence to progress; but the explanations and evaluations of pro­
gress given by these various approaches are tied to quite differ­
ing criteria, including criteria that are external to science. Pro­
gress still appears to be constitutive of the activity of scientific
research - scientists and philosopher of science are to this ex­
tent in agreement - but the concept of progress has lost its
former self-evidence and its seeming simplicity. Thus, inde­

Co .1
pendent of its historical significance, the concept of progress
now even more so presents an important theme of philosophi­
cal and scientific reflection.
The contributions to this volume have been revised and
reworked from lectures given at a conference on the “Idea of
Progress” organized by the editors and sponsored by the
Academia Europaea. At this conference the idea of progress
was approached from a number of different perspectives and
on a number of different dimensions: the empirical registering
of change and the normative evaluation of such change as bet­
terment; the view backwards at the past and forward into the
future, that is, the progress we think we have already made and
the progress we may still want to make; the study of the gen­
eral, e.g., of recurrent or cyclical processes, and of the particu­
lar, e.g., the unique course of history. The areas considered
ranged from physics to musicology, from public health to cul­
tural self-understandings, from what philosophy says about
progress to progress in philosophy itself.
The diversity of national and disciplinary background of the
contributors to this volume produces a number of interesting
intersections of disciplines and opinions. Both Blondel in poli­
tics and Garcfa-Bellido in the organic world pursue the ques­
tion of whether there can be objective criteria of progress -
either as efficiency of political structures or complexity of bio­
logical organization. Barrow takes up, on the example of time,
the problem of registering change itself, since this presupposes
some nonchanging background against which the change is
measured. Rescher points to the problematic relation between
progress in knowledge and accordingly in ability to control
the future and the importance of impredictability for a moral
and happy life, and Lazar analyzes and illustrates such prob­
lems with examples from medicine and from science as applied
to medicine. Nakayama points out that there are differences
not just between western and eastern cultures in their concep­
tualizations of change but also among eastern cultures, in par­
ticular in their receptions of western science and technology.
 The philosophers von Wright and Rescher seem to agree on
the distinction between change and its evaluation but disagree
on the evaluation of the change. Garcia-Bellido speaks for and
Wolters against the notion of progress in biological evolu­
tion - nor do they agree on whether the progress of biology
should move us to introduce or to drop the concept of pro­
gress in nature. The different roles and differing status of the
idea of progress in the course of western history before the
modern age, where it has come to be so dominant are put into
focus by the contributions of Burkert and Crombie. Flotzin-
ger shows the difficulties involved in using the concept of pro­
gress in describing the relation of one age’s musicians and mu­
sic theorists to another’s; but also it seems that our reticence in
talking about progress, or even more neutrally, about develop­
ment in the arts is of fairly recent vintage. Prawitz argues that
the seeming return of the same (old) problems in philosophy is
in reality the return of problems of the same type in a more
sophisticated form, and he charts some recent progress in one
area of philosophical research, logic. Finally Lazar points out
some of the paradoxes of scientific progress in its effects on
practical life.
The contributions to this volume are offered as food for
thought and reflection about the progress of science and soci­
ety and in particular on the effects of scientific progress on our
society.
Arnold Burgen
Peter McLaughlin
Jurgen Mittelstrass
 Progress: Fact and Fiction

1. The notion of progress - and its opposite regress - can be

defined in a way which is at the same time illuminating and
thought-provoking. Progress is change for the better; regress
change for the worse. The definitions split the concepts in two
components: the notion of change and the notion of goodness.
The first is a descriptive or factual idea - change being the
transition in time from a state of affairs to a new one. The
second is an evaluative idea. Progress thus involves two con­
ceptual ingredients: a factual and an evaluative one. Neither of
them is unproblematic, and least of all their conjunction to a
whole.
The philosophical problems connected with the concept
notwithstanding, we are from everyday life familiar with clear
and uncontroversial cases of progress as well as regress. We
have all witnessed the progress of a normal child, first in learn­
ing to walk and speak, later in reading and writing and know­
ing things. We judge and usually agree about the progress to
mastership of a chess-player or a horse-jockey - but also
about decline in their mastery of the arts.
The warrant of consensus in such judgments about progress
and its opposite lies in the fact that there are nearly universally
accepted standards of excellence in most of the activities which
humans and other living beings learn and practice. There is
surely a certain “margin of subjectivity” in the application of
the standards - but on the whole it is easy to reach agreement
here.
 We are also all familiar with cases when there is a character­
istic succession of progress and regress, i.e. when progress
reaches a culmination followed by decline and deterioration.
Such cases are often spoken of as cycles, their beginning as
birth, their culmination as flourishing or thriving, and their
end as death. The life-span of a living being - animal or
plant - is the prototype example; but also the evolution of
artistic styles, the rise and fall of great powers, and the history
of entire “cultures” are commonly described in the terms of
such cyclic patterns. We shall later have more to say about
them.

2. From this cyclic conception of alternating progress and

regress must be distinguished what I shall here call the Great
Idea of Progress. It is constitutive of a characteristic climate of
opinion, also spoken of as “belief in progress” tout court.
When doubt is cast on the veracity of the belief, the idea itself
can aptly be renamed a Myth of Progress.
This idea rests upon a linear conception of time as a directed
succession of events, proceeding from a remote past, through
the present, to a distant future. The successive stages are links
in a chain constituting a history of the world, a Weltgeschichte.
It is often said, and probably rightly so, that this historic
conception of time was foreign to Greek thinking. Also the
very notion of change was difficult for the Greeks to fathom -
as witnessed by the fact that some of their philosophers flatly
denied its possibility, labelling change an illusion. N o wonder
therefore that the Great Idea of Progress never dawned upon
the Ancients. It is no part of our Greco-Roman legacy.
Our Judeo-Christian ancestry is different. The Old Testa­
ment fixes the initial point of a story. It is the Genesis or C re­
ation of the World. The New Testament looks forward to a
future terminal, the Second Coming of Christ “to judge the
living and the dead,” thereby putting an end to the world and
to time. The first full attempt to conceive of the stretch be­
tween the two terminal points as a history of the world is due
to Saint Augustine. He is the first philosopher of history
proper.
In the Judeo-Christian story, the two terminals have a tran­
scendental, transworldly anchorage. They are the Paradise
Lost and Regained. The latter also has another transcendental
counterpart known as Gehenna or Hell.
In the Judeo-Christian view of world history, the notion of
regress dominates. Adam’s exit from Eden was a Fall to an
inferior state of life. Saint Augustine saw in the six stages
through which, on his view, mankind was approaching its des­
tined end, a successive deterioration of the human condition.
In this he can be said to echo the tales of Greek mythology
about an original golden age which had progressively wors­
ened, first to a silver, then to a copper, and finally to an iron
age in which, characteristically, the tellers of the tale thought
they were themselves living.
The view of history of our spiritual ancestors, both those of
Hellas and those of Palestine, is thus markedly pessimistic. In
this it differs radically from the optimistic view born with the
Renaissance and crystallizing at the time of Enlightenment in
the Great Idea of Progress. According to it the road to the
future is a progressive, unending improvement of the human
condition, in spite of occasional and temporary set-backs.

3. The origin of modern ideas of progress is coincidental with

that of modern, empirical, and exact science. Some of the early
spokesmen of progress were themselves pioneers of science.
The ideological link between science and progress is tech­
nology. Francis Bacon and, a little later, Descartes, had ex­
pressed the view that the new science would give man the mas­
tery of nature which, in the Biblical tradition, had been
promised him by the Lord himself. But the credit for first hav­
ing articulated the idea that mankind with the new science and
improved technology had entered on a road of necessary and
unlimited progress belongs to the French scientist Fontenelle
in a famous discourse of the year 1683 on the then much de­
bated controversy between les anciens and les modernes. Yet it
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was only more than one hundred years later than the idea was
given what may be termed its canonical expression in Con-
dorcet’s Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de Vesprit
humain. “Toute decouverte dans les sciences,” he wrote, “est
un bienfait pour l’humanite.” The sentence gives in a nutshell
the ethos of the Grand Idea of Progress.
Science and technology share two features which are impor­
tant to my argument here. They are both in a characteristic
way accumulative and transcultural. The development of sci­
ence results in a continuously growing body of knowledge,
partly due to the discovery of new facts and partly thanks to
their subsumption under theories (laws) of ever growing scope
and generality. It is true that this body may undergo occa­
sional diminution because of collective oblivion, and at the
level of theories there occur what has become known as para-
digm-shifts and related forms of change which mark “kinks”
in the linearity of the growth process which nevertheless, in its
main features, remains accumulative in nature. What holds
true of scientific knowledge also holds of technological inven­
tions and skills. Some may be abandoned or forgotten, but
when need arises they can be revived and improved on.
The transcultural character of science consists in the fact
that scientific knowledge is not the secret of an initiated group
of people and that access to it is open to anybody who has the
requisite training. In principle, there is no discrimination on
religious, ethnic or political grounds against those who wish to
acquire for themselves the knowledge and the technical skills
based on it. Ideally, science and technology, although in their
modern forms essentially of European origin, are therefore
common property of all humanity. Attempts to appropriate
them for some privileged groups of men or nations are not
unknown but have so far been, on the whole, abortive.
These two factors: accumulative growth and transcultural
diffusion, in combination with the industrial mode of produc­
tion of commodities, have in the course of the last two cen­
turies given rise to what may be called a scientifico-technologi-
cal form of civilization. This has radically changed the living
conditions of men and is, loosened from its European roots,
gradually assuming a global character.

4. With time the idea of history lost its anchoring in something

over-wordly. History, both in its past and future dimension,
became mundane, innerweltlich. The notion of a lost paradise
reappeared from time to time in the form of nostalgic dreams
of a restoration of ancient ways of life, thought more in accord
with man’s “natural” condition than the artificialities of an in­
creasingly technified civilization. But on the whole modern
sentiments were future oriented. They were looking forward,
not to a promised land beyond the grave, but to one to be
approached through progress on earth, thought warranted by
the growth of science and the gains of technology.
The idea of progress which had its final breakthrough dur­
ing the Enlightenment can rightly be regarded as a secularized
heir to the Christian salvation story. But those who pro­
claimed the new gospel were, it seems, forgetful of the fact that
the Christian world history had had two transcendental termi­
nations: one in Heaven, another in Hell. They prophesied a
heaven brought down on earth. But were they perhaps at the
same time conjuring up the horrors of Gehenna to earthly ex­
istence? The evidence provided by history in our century
surely does not point univocally in direction to the one rather
than the other ultimate destination.

5. The cumulative growth of science - both on the level of

facts and on that of theories - can itself be regarded as pro­
gress. The same is true of the transcultural diffusion of scien­
tific knowledge and of technology.
Some philosophers have held that knowledge is a value in
itself and that therefore more knowledge ipso facto better than
less knowledge. The thought is not easy to grasp and must be
made more precise. Knowledge requires a knower, a subject
who knows. N o single person can know every truth which
science has put on record. The subject of the bulk of scientific
knowledge must be construed impersonally. One sometimes
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speaks of science itself as such an impersonal knower. O n an­
other locution, mankind is said to have or possess this knowl­
edge.
If scientific knowledge is a good or value p er se, growth of
knowledge means progress, enhancement of value. By this
standard one can speak of periods of slower and more rapid
progress in science, and of times of stagnation or even regress.
One can also rate various contributions to science as greater or
inferior. N o one doubts that such assessments and compara­
tive ratings of scientific progress make good sense, even if it
sometimes is difficult to reach full agreement on them.
Progress in science thus has its own internal standards of
excellence. It was not, however, this kind of valuation, which
Fontenelle or after him the French encyclopedists made when
praising science as the vehicle of progress. It was not progress
in science which they had in mind, but scientific and techno­
logical progress as enhancing values external to science. The
goodness of scientific knowledge is instrumental, i.e. value for
a purpose or end other than science itself. So we must ask:
Which is this end science is supposed to promote and in the
promotion of which true progress is thought to consist?
Although Francis Bacon cannot be said to have entertained
what here I call the Great Idea of Progress, he said many
things which are relevant to the question just raised. Particu­
larly in The New Atlantis , Bacon eloquently describes the
blessings which the uses of scientific discoveries will bring to
man - in medicine and weaponry, commerce and transporta­
tion, nutrition and homely comfort. One could sum up his list
be saying that science through its technological applications
will make life easier and more enjoyable, men happier and bet­
ter satisfied with their lot. This kind of change for the better I
shall call hedonic progress. Bacon, unlike some later dreamers
and optimists thought of it as a possibility and promise rather
than a necessary and linear road to the future. Least of all did
he associate it with ideas of social and political reform.
An alternative to the hedonistic view of progress is the
thought that true progress consists in the moral perfection of
man. This moralist view of man’s “progress from rude, to civi­
lized manners” had early protagonists in Scottish enlighten­
ment. Condorcet expressly linked it to the effects which the
advancement of science will have on the human condition at
the societal level. He envisaged a day, when the perfection of
manners and morals had resulted in a world-civilization and
the sun will shine only on free men “ne reconnaissant d’autre
maitre que leur raison.”
It is perhaps significant that also the optimists of progress of
the 19th century - from Auguste Comte to Herbert Spencer -
although they professed the enhancement through science
both of the hedonic and the moral aspect of life did not distin­
guish the two clearly from one another. They seemed to take it
for granted that when life becomes easier it will also become
more civilized and humane. This, surely, is a proposition on
which grave doubts have been cast in the century which is now
approaching its end.

6. We have distinguished three different kinds of progress.

One is progress in science and technology. Another is the im­
provement of the material well-being of individuals and soci­
eties. A third is moral perfection. The Great Idea of Progress
was the thought that the first type of progress has an instru­
mental role in promoting the other two types - the accumula­
tive and linear nature of the first being a warrant of life becom­
ing progressively easier and manners more civilized.
Ends are objects of desire and as such valuable to the sub­
jects who pursue them. The value of the ends - whether hedo­
nic or moral - must be distinguished from the instrumental
value of the means used for attaining them. Yet there is a ten­
dency to confuse them. The improvements of the means - for
example their becoming cheaper or easier or less time­
consuming to use - tends to become itself an end and valued
independently of those ends for which the means were origi­
nally invented. I shall speak of this as a transfer o f value from
ends to means. The transfer may result in neglect of the origi­
nal ends because of our enthusiasm for improving the means.
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 Perhaps the best examples of this phenomenon of value-
transfer are provided by electronic technologies of communi­
cation and information. The technologies in question help us
to conquer the resistance which space and time present to a
variety of end-directed activities. The temporal dimension is
reduced to what is misleadingly called “real time” but should
better be termed “null-time,” since it means the virtual elimi­
nation of the temporal dimension. In a similar manner, televi­
sion and radio overcome spatial separation. Events from the
most distant corners of the world: warfare, natural disasters,
the staging of political meetings and demonstrations, become
present to our eyes and ears without we having to leave the
chair in which we are seated.
This conquest of space and time cannot fail to disturb the
rhythm and increase the speed of life in ways which may be
straining us beyond the limits of our biological endowments
for taking in and reacting to messages from the external world.
This will make us frustrated, restless, and tired. Improving the
means to some important ends thus becomes a secondary end
the pursuit of which may be counterproductive in relation to
other, maybe even more valued ends and vital needs of a good
life.
This transfer of value from originally cherished ends to con­
tinuously perfected means for their attainment has had note­
worthy repercussions on modern ideas of progress. The per­
fection of the means is technological progress, and this in turn
normally results from progress in science. The criteria of per­
fection are internal to the means themselves and external to
whatever ends the means may serve. With this transfer of value
our very idea of progress tends to reduce to identity with the
undeniable and impressive progress which we have witnessed
and continue to witness in science and technology. The risk is
that we lose sight of the other aspects of progress which were
in origin involved in the idea that the man of science and tech­
nology had embarked on a road of necessary and unending
betterment of the conditions under which he has to live.
7. Has belief in steady progress been confirmed by historical
experience during the two or three centuries since it was first
proclaimed and then gradually came to stamp the climate of
opinion - to begin with in the Western world, but with time
also in large sectors outside the Western orbit?
When discussing the question, it is important to keep apart
the hedonic and the moral aspect of progress.
It is an undeniable fact that scientific technology has made
the burden of life progressively easier for broad segments of
the population in the countries we call “industrialized.” A per­
son who like me has lived through the major part of this cen­
tury cannot fail to be impressed and also astonished by the
changes he has witnessed. The advancements in medicine and
nutrition, the improvements of housing and sanitary condi­
tions, access to commodities which earlier either did not exist
or were accessible only to a privileged few, immensely
widened opportunities to enjoy the treasures of art and higher
culture through travel and media network - all these things
bear witness to what progress in science and technology has
done to enhance the well-being of millions of men. Have these
developments not amply justified belief in progress?
One must, however, not forget that there also is a reverse
side of the coin. The scientific and technological developments
which are responsible for progress in the living conditions of
men are also responsible for an enormous load on the physical
environment and on the material resources of the earth, threat­
ening the first with irreparable damage and the second with
exhaustion. Only recently have these threats assumed alarming
proportions, conjuring up apocalyptic visions not unlike those
entertained in ancient myths about a universal conflagration or
end of the world. The implications for belief in progress are
twofold:
First, it is becoming increasingly doubtful whether the bliss­
ful effects of technology can be permanently extended beyond
the confines of the industrialized countries to the vast and
rapidly growing majority of people who do not yet share them
but enviously long for them. If their longing is bound to be
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frustrated in the end - which seems to me anything but un­
likely - then the Great Idea of Progress has surely turned out
an illusion, at least as far as its universality is concerned.
Secondly, also the circle of the blessed is exposed to dangers
of frustration. The easing of life fosters an increased appetite
for more and more of the goods provided by technological
advance. This has adverse psychological effects in the form of
greed and envy and narcissistic individualism. It also works for
a new stratification of society in rich and poor, successful and
dropouts. This threatens social stability in the industrialized
world. Increased material wellbeing does not warrant satisfac­
tion either with prevailing conditions or with the prospects for
the future.
With this observation we touch on the moral aspects of pro­
gress. One need not entertain any fanciful ideas about the
moral superiority of men in the good old times when religion
and tradition still held the conduct of people in a firm grip, in
order to realize that in the moral sphere there is nothing corre­
sponding to the obvious progress in hedonic conditions
brought about by advance in technology and science. N or
need one think of secularized man as necessarily a depraved
creature. But it is probably right to say that science-based
technology has provided us with means for the perpetration of
evil and suffering on a vaster scale and with a more systematic
thoroughness than ever before in history. The horrors of two
World Wars and the ravagings of the political creeds of com­
munism and fascism as well as of latterday fundamentalism
testify to this. It is ironic, and perhaps also ominous, that
many of these horrors were inflicted in the name of an enlight­
ened and progressive utopia. The defunct Soviet Union
showed us the Great Idea of Progress in a fool’s mirror. Is
there any guarantee that Western liberal democracy and mar­
ket economy will not in the end provide us with another?

8. One must beware of a too hasty verdict on the truth or fal­

sity of belief in progress in the light of historical evidence. Ad­
mittedly, the present balance of good and bad things looks
rather unfavourable. The idea of continuous progress has lost
much of the fascination it had for earlier generations. But the
balance may become reversed and more hopeful times again
dawn upon mankind. What it will ultimately be can never be
determined on the basis of the testimony of history. History,
as w e understand it, is an openended process. What will hap­
pen, for good or for bad, will always remain a matter of con­
jecture and contingency. This is noteworthy because it means
that the truth of the Great Idea of Progress is ultimately a mat­
ter of faith - like the Christian notion of salvation through
trust in God. To vest one’s hopes in an earthly rather than in a
heavenly paradise does not make their fulfilment a verifiable or
falsifiable fact. Science and technology will progress. This is a
tautological consequence of their cumulative nature - pro­
vided mankind survives. But the hedonic and moral condition
of man will always be open to regress as well as progress.
These obvious truths notwithstanding, attempts have been
made to underpin belief in progress with technological argu­
ments. Examples are Adam Smith’s notion of “the invisible
hand” or Hegel’s related though more speculative idea of “the
cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft). Their purpose can be
said to have been to argue that apparent set-backs to progress
have an inherent self-correcting tendency which promotes a
favourable balance of progress over regress in the longer run.
The ideas of Smith and Hegel can be seen as mundane heirs to
Leibniz’s tbeodicee and related attempts to reconcile the exis­
tence of evil with the goodness of a transcendent ruler of the
world. We cannot here discuss these ideas further - nor the
theoretical support to belief in progress which Darwinian
ideas of evolution were thought to afford by some philoso­
phers in the sunlit era preceding the First World War.
Kant was a firm believer in progress through increased en­
lightenment. But he was realist enough not to try to support
his view by arguments of pure reason. Like belief in God and
in immortality, belief in progress was for Kant a postulate of
practical reason. As such a postulate it is more like an urge to
work, quand m em e, for the improvement of the human con­
dition than a hopeful prediction of future achievement.
A variant but also a vulgarization of Kant’s idea lingers on in
present-day thinking. It is often coupled with an admission of
the difficulties caused by environmental disaster and dwin­
dling resources, by the gulf between rich and poor nations, and
by psychologically conditioned grievances and restlessness
also under affluent conditions. The remedy for these evils is
then seen in furthering scientific research and technological
development, in the evolution of various “anti-technologies”
to counteract the damage caused by industrialization and
wasteful consumerism, and in helping the underprivileged to
obtain the amenities which the privileged of our scientific-
technical civilization already enjoy in full measure.
It is my personal conviction that this is a foolish view to
take under present circumstances. The Great Idea of Progress
is a fiction. It originated from the self-understanding of a pe­
riod in European history which labelled itself Enlightenment
and took pride in the emancipation of man from the tutelage of
any other authority but Reason. The self-understanding held
out a promise of linear and continuous amelioration of the hu­
man condition. This was the Myth of Progress. It gave a future
oriented telos which guided much of European and Western
endeavour for some two centuries, thereby profoundly chang­
ing the course of the world’s history. But it took us finally to a
station where its role as guide to the promised land has become
increasingly doubtful and continued clinging to it has become
foolish blindness. The self-understanding which gave birth to
the myth now threatens to become self-deception. Therefore
time has come to reject the myth.
Hegel, the most ambiguous and challenging of philosophers
in the Western tradition, spoke of the Owl of Minerva which
begins its flight at dusk. Only when day is over, can one pass a
rightful judgment on the work done during it. One is then
called upon to reconsider one’s potentialities and limitations
and to correct one’s self-understanding in the light of one’s
achievements and their often unintended consequences rather
than in the light of one’s aspirations and hopes.
I think we have arrived at a station when something has
come to an end and when reconsideration of our destiny is
imperative. Spiritually, we are in a period of what I propose to
call reflective dusk. Before us is the impenetrable darkness of
night. It may still last long to the dawn when a new orientation
in the world can be clearly articulated.

9. The Great Idea of Progress, we have said, implies a linear

view of the historic process. It is, moreover, characteristically
“futuristic.” It is an idea loaded with expectations - in contrast
to the backward-looking linear view, also occasionally enter­
tained in modern times, which is loaded with nostalgia.
There probably is no civilization in history the temper of
which has been so strongly forward-oriented and optimistic as
Western civilization after the Renaissance. This fact about it is
reflected in the important role which (social) planning has
played in it and which is an accompaniment of the role which
democratic ideas have had in the development of the political
systems of government. Planning presupposes faith in the
powers of the human mind to foresee the future and rationally
steer our road into it.
To foresee the future may be relatively easy in times of sta­
bility and slow change. N ot least thanks to the rapid techno­
logical developments in the second half of the present century,
the future has become more and more unperspicuous and
therefore less and less predictable. The belief that science could
help us in an increasingly complex predictive endeavour is re­
flected in the origin and rise to prominence of a science of fu­
turology or future studies. I cannot help myself finding the
phenomenon intellectually worrying rather than hopeful. I see
it as symptomatic of a need of reassessing our present which
one mistakenly thinks can be satisfied by anticipating our fu­
ture.
Reassessing and reconsidering one’s situation is a reflective
activity which by its very nature has to be oriented towards
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the past rather than towards the future. The present is then
viewed as an endstation, arrived at when certain hopes have
been consummated, certain possibilities developed to their ex­
treme, and the satisfaction which developing them initially
brought is giving place to a feeling of disappointment, doubt,
and tiredness.
Such a view of our present issues from a cyclic rather than
linear understanding of our past as a process which has taken
us full circle back to a state resembling the one where we were
when the process started. It goes without saying that the re­
semblance can only be one by remote analogy. N or need the
point of comparison in the past be uniquely fixed. We may
locate it either in the outgoing days of the Roman empire; or in
the early centuries of reshuffling in Europe by, on the one
hand, Christianity and, on the other hand, the Volkerwande-
rungen; or in the times of the High Middle Ages, the period of
“privatization” of social functions in feudalism and the “inter­
nationalization” of higher culture through the Church. I shall
not pursue these analogies here. I only mention as a charateris-
tic of the intellectual atmosphere of our times the revived in­
terest in the Middle Ages as a source of inspiration for the
historical understanding of the transformations which are now
taking place in Europe.
An understanding of our present in cyclic perspectives of
our past is, on my view, much more profitable and called for
than seeing it in the future oriented perspective of increased
well-being (economic growth) or allegedly more civilized
manners. This change of the perspective by no means invali­
dates the traditional view of progress in science - although
even it may need some modification.

10. In historic reflections on art, cyclic schemas play a promi­

nent role. This is a difference between art history and science
history. The idea of linear progress simply does not apply in
the esthetic domain. But it is symptomatic of how deeply in­
grained this idea is with us moderns that one sometimes hears
people wonder at the fact that “already the ancient Greeks,” or
classic Chinese, or the various branches of medieval Islamic
culture produced such marvels of unsurpassed beauty as was
the case. As if it were natural to think of Michelangelo as im­
proving on Phidias, or of Shakespeare’s insight into the human
passions as a further deepening of that of Euripides.
The cycles in art-history are what we call styles - in archi­
tecture, painting, music, poetry or drama. An artistic style has
a relatively fixed origin in time, often due to a technical, semi-
scientific discovery of improved or entirely new means of
artistic expression - such as the gothic vault or the central per­
spective or the pianoforte. Richly endowed creative talents
then develop the style through a period when it is said to
flourish or reach a peak, after which it stiffens to epigonery
and mannerism, decays and finally passes away - not infre­
quently because some rival style has begun its life-cycle and
won the acclaim of the public. Later on, a style can regain the
favours of good taste, as long despised gothic buildings did in
the 19th century. A style may revive in imitations - but only
seldom, if ever, can one speak of its revivival as progress or
further development of its once inherent potentialities.

11. It seems to me that cycles of artistic style afford the best

examples of the type of historic perspective needed for a re­
considered and deepened understanding of the present situa­
tion. This presupposes that the cyclic view is applied to quite
different and much greater units of historic development than
those which art-historians study. What is required are alterna­
tives to the Weltgeschichte of linear chronology. Such alterna­
tives are in fact known, not only from ancient but also from
relatively modern historiography and philosophy of history.
The Italian Gianbattista Vico was a pioneer of the cyclic point
of view in understanding historic phenomena. It is symp­
tomatic that in recent times there has been a strong revival of
interest in Vico and Viconian studies.
In the 19th century the Russian slavofil writer N .J. Dani­
levsky under the influence of Darwinian ideas about the evolu­
tion of species, distinguished high-cultures or civilizations
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with analogous life-spans from birth and infancy to maturity
and flourishing followed by decline and death. These are the
great units of history. The most recent one, Western culture,
Danilevsky thought was dying. It was going to be succeeded
by one born in the plains of Russia.
This last thought was not alien to Spengler either, who, with
Arnold Toynbee, is the great reviver in this century of the
view of history as cycles of successive high-cultures. Like
Danilevsky, Spengler thought of the cultures as organisms
with individual lives of their own. The analogy is obvious, but
when pressed can easily be misleading. A useful corrective to
the view of cultures as organisms is to compare them to the
styles in which artistic creativity has manifested itself. The
style of a culture is constituted by the slowly changing beliefs,
customs, and valuations which in the form of tradition are
handed down from generation to generation and distinguish
the cultures from each other. When traditions slacken their
hold on the mores, a culture looses its self-identity, becomes
styleless, fades out.
Just as in the arts there occurs imitation of styles of long
separated periods, similarly a culture sometimes attempts to
revive ideas, elements of a life-style, from another culture
without being rightfully said to continue it. Thus in spite of at
least two grand attempts to revive Greek humanist ideals and
standards of taste, Western culture is as little a continuation of
the Greco-Roman one as is neogothic college-architecture a
continuation of medieval building. Yet comparisons between
us and the Ancients can be most instructive and useful. N ot
least may this be the case in a situation like the present one
when there are reasons for thinking that our culture too has
run its circle to end and people are in search of a new begin­
ning.
Regarding the great cultures as relatively closed and self­
contained units of history will also help us realize the self­
centredness of beliefs in the superiority of the scientific and
technological style of life which has come to stamp Western
civilization in its late days. It will make us appreciate the rela-
tivity of the values once embodied in the Great Idea of Pro­
gress. The new wisdom, if we acquire it, will make us more
humble and respectful, not only in our attitude to other cul­
tures, but also to that which is the common frame of all cul­
tures, viz. nature, the Mother Gaia which nourishes us materi­
ally. The idea of man as lord and commander of nature has
become a curse on us. Getting rid of the curse requires deep-
going revision of current values and priorities.

12. Against my plea for a cyclic view of civilizations, including

our own, I can imagine a cry of protest to which we must still
briefly listen:
The time when there existed self-contained cultures is over.
Such cultures were separated from one another both in space
and in time. Also when they were roughly contemporaneous,
it took the enterprizing spirit of a Marco Polo or Columbus to
bridge the gap which separated them geographically. But this
separation is overcome by modern technology.
The technological conquest of space and time does not by
itself mean that the world has become culturally one. But, as
already noted, (pp. 3-4), the life-style of industrial and techno­
logical societies is rapidly extending over the globe, far beyond
the confines of what once was distinctly Western, not to say
European, culture.
Will this process of “modernization,” as it is also called,
eventually result in the world-civilization, which Condorcet
envisaged? In it the legacies of local cultures - in some cases
relicts of earlier high-cultures - would linger on and constitute
cultural “colour-patches” within a uniform framework. The
frame would continue to be knit by industry, science, and
technology which progressively loose their roots in Western
cultural traditions. A leading role in their future development
will probably be played by actors of neither European nor
American origin, but of Oriental or, maybe, Islamic. It is sheer
conceit and prejudice to think that only Westerners are inher­
ently capable of developing the rational endowments of which
science and technology are the outflow.
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 Let us assume that this will be the future. As long as devel­
opment continues, those responsible for it are likely to stay
captivated by the idea of progress - and the passive partici­
pants will go on paying lipservice to it as long as they can hope
that their hedonic circumstances of life will be improved. I do
not find this state of affairs at all improbable. It is only a futur­
istic extension of prevailing tendencies and trends. But what I
think most improbable is that it could continue for long. The
chances are that Mother Gaia will simply refuse to carry fur­
ther the burden of growing industrial production and accumu­
lating waste, ruining the environment and exhausting natural
resources. The presentment of approaching disaster will make
people restless, increase social grievances, and provoke esca­
lated violence - more like the tribal wars we are now witness­
ing in various corners of the world, including Europe, than
like the two global power conflicts which will perhaps remain
uniquely characteristic of our century. In the turmoils, earlier
achievements of this civilization may gradually get lost - not
only those relating to people’s comfort but also the more deli­
cate values of human rights, democratic forms of government,
and “civilized manners” generally.
If growing chaos leads to gradual fragmentation and disinte­
gration of the fabric of civilization, might it then not also hap­
pen that there will, with time, be one or several new starts
from which another high-culture with its peculiar life-style
will evolve? Perhaps it will at a later stage, under the impact of
its potentialities and achievements, foster a new belief in ever­
lasting progress for man. It must only be hoped that the peo­
ples of this culture will not let themselves be snared and stran­
gled by the lures of this revived myth.
 Impact and Limits of the Idea of Progress in
Antiquity

Ever since the modern idea of progress was formulated and

brought to resonance by Auguste Comte in 1836, the question
has been raised whether this idea too can be traced to ancient
roots, as is usually done in the history of ideas, or else to
Judeo-Christian origins secularized in the modern approach.
Progressus itself is a Latin word, used, among others, by C i­
cero, and there are Greek words in the background: epidosis
and prokope. But not only is the use of these words relatively
late in Greek - epidosis plays some role in the 4th century,1
prokope in the Hellenistic epoch2 - they are not prominent,
they are just catchwords of an epoch. As in the second half of
the last century, with Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Erwin
Rohde, the tendencies and voices of pessimism and anti­
rationalism in ancient Greek literature and thought became
more noticeable and more appealing, the idea of progress was
found to vanish from the ancient world. That the ancients
were ignorant of the the idea of progress was the thesis of a
book of J.B . Bury, The Idea o f Progress, in 1920. Others con­
tradicted, especially Ludwig Edelstein in an unfinished book
which appeared posthumously in 1967, with the programmatic

1 See below at n. 34; 42; 46; Edelstein 92, 79.

2 It com m only refers to personal ‘progress’ in philosophy, as in Plutarch’s
treatise ‘H ow one may note one’s own progress towards virtue’, D e pro-
fectu in virtute\ see Stahlin s.v. prokope in: Theologisches Worterbuch zum
N euen Testament V I (Stuttgart 1959) 703-719.
title, The Idea o f Progress in Classical Antiquity .3 It gave rise to
a thoughtful reexamination by E.R. Dodds in 1969; Dodds’
title, “The ancient concept of progress,” was also chosen as the
title of Dodds’ own Scripta Minora which appeared in 1973.
There has been some further discussion since, without too
much altering of the scenery, as far as I can see.
Resuming the status quaestionis, I shall consider three stages
in the evolution of Greek thought, first, the traditions of myth
and ritual, secondly, the so-called Presocratics, esp. the
sophists of the 5th century, and thirdly, Aristotle in the middle
of the 4th century B.C . I shall add some reflections on the
ancient arguments for ‘cycles’ versus linear progress of time,
and finally some remarks on later antiquity and the new stance
taken by Christian writers.
First, myth: We have been taught by Claude Levi-Strauss
that there is an awareness of the contrast of culture versus na­
ture even in civilizations that have been called ‘primitive’ or
‘Naturvolker’ by moderns. This awareness easily develops into
tales which make the opposition a sequence of dramatic
peripeties, contrasting an original, uncivilized state with the
institution of culture as it is ‘now’, with its order, distinctions,
and limitations. There may be large scale catastrophes to make
the change, such as the deluge, or the intervention of strange
ambivalent helpers ranking from gods to animals, ‘tricksters’
or ‘cultural heroes’, and there is the installation of religion. At
any rate, the conditions of present human life are not found
‘natural’ but wrought by change as against contrasting alterna­
tives, dependent upon intentional creation, invention, founda­
tion, a form of kosmos constructed from chaos, distinctions
against mixture, limits against the boundless, not without the
risk of falling back to the state from which it sprang.
Motifs of this kind occur in Greek myth in multiple vari­
ants. It is true that many of the texts are relatively late, but
their original, ‘primitive’ character is not seldom confirmed by

3 The earlier discussion is resumed by Edelstein xi-xxiv.

connections with ritual, and by oriental parallels, too. One
main ‘cultural hero’ for the Greeks is Heracles:4 Heracles,
through his ‘labours’, made the world accessible and habitable,
by exploring far-away lands, by killing monsters and transfer­
ring the mastership of animals to man; this includes the foun­
dation of sacrifice. Especially in Western colonization Greeks
propagated the reassuring myth that Heracles had been there
before, as far as the pillars of Hercules and beyond, missing
neither Sicily nor Rome. But note that even the well-known
myth of Odysseus and the one-eyed Cyclops5 may be seen as a
cultural myth. As the cannibalistic master of animals on his
paradisiac island is blinded, the mastership of animals is trans­
ferred to man, distinguished by intelligence and language, and
sacrifice is installed. Odysseus sacrifices the ram that has saved
his life. This is culture. Heracles, for one, is also said to have
worked on the landscape, to have dug riverbeds, built dams,
split the mountains in Thessaly or even at Gibraltar. In a simi­
lar way, but by distinct tradition the Thessalians celebrated
what they called their ‘giants’ Festival’, Peloria, alleging that
Thessaly had once been a lake. When the Tempe valley was
opened up and the lake all of a sudden disappeared, people
took possession of the land, civilization had its start, but the
festival recalls what was before.6
What we find in myths of this type is not progress in the
sense of continuous development, but still reflection on civi­
lization marked by alternatives, with the awareness of a break
from what was before. Wild animals and monsters, unculti­
vated land or even inundation, and the positive stress on cul­
ture achieved, with dominance of territory and animals, and
with religion present in sacrifice.

4 See W. Burkert, “Eracle e gli altri eroi culturali del Vicino O rien te,” in: C.
Bonnet, C . Jourdain-A nnequin, ed., Heracles d ’une rive a I’autre de la
M editerranee, Bruxelles 1992, 111-127.
5 O dyssey 9, 177-555.
6 Baton von Sinope, Fragm ente d er Griechiscben Historiker 268 F 5; Meuli
1041 f.; Caduff 246-249.
 There is a related set of Greek myths which too reflects on
‘uncivilized’ antecedents of present ‘civilization’, but makes
the gods, the ‘givers of good things,’ the very protagonists. It is
Demeter in particular, the corn goddess, who brought grain to
Eleusis - Schiller adapted this tradition in his poem Das
Eleusinische Fest - and Dionysus who taught man how to pro­
duce wine. But other achievements, too, are inventions of
gods,7 the taming of the horse,8 the construction of the cha­
riot,9 metalwork, and even the making of cheese.10 The conse­
quence is, once again, a persistent cult of the gods, not without
fear that the gods might withdraw their gifts if offended. There
are festivals to recall the previous stage and the progress due to
divine intervention. There may be initiation rituals to recon­
struct the transition from ‘wild’ to cultivated life, from a pas­
toral stage or even from cannibalism and ‘werewolves’.11 A
concept of ‘tame’ or ‘cultivated’ life (hem eros ) goes together
with ‘cultivated’ plants, grain and vine; in fact these have been
selected and genetically altered through millennia of Neolithic
cultivation, and need constant tending. One might be tempted
to say that the ‘Neolithic revolution’ survives enshrined in the
traditions of ritual and myth.
In general these strike an optimistic note. “I escaped from
evil, I found the better,” this is recited at Athens on the occa­
sion of marriage by a child crowned with thistles and acorns,
carrying a basket with bread.12 Old and bad life, thistles and
acorns, are left behind thanks to Demeter’s gifts. It is a relief to
conform to civilization’s exigencies - this is the lesson taught,
acceptance of society as it is now; it could be worse, and myths
are ready to tell that it was worse in the beginning. Civilization

7 C f. in general Plat. Polit. 274d, Phil. 16c. F o r details o f the mythical and
quasi-m ythical traditions, see Kleingunther.
8 A ttributed to Athena, Pindar Ol. 13,65 f.
9 A ttributed to Athena, H om eric H y m n to Aphrodite 12-15.
10 Taught by the nymphs to Aristaios, Diodorus 4,81,2.
11 F o r the Arkadian ‘werewolves’, see B urkert 1983, 84-93.
12 Pausanias Atticista e 87; Zenobios 3,98 (Paroemiographi Graeci I 82).
means rescue from monsters, from helplessness, from starva­
tion. Life of men is contrasted in particular to animals, the con­
dition humaine is established between animals and gods.
Within the great family of cultural myths, the interest of
mythologists has mainly concentrated on one particular speci­
men, Prometheus and the origin of fire. It is our anthropologi­
cal perspective that makes the management of fire one of the
distinctive steps in the process of hominization. The myth of
Prometheus the Titanic trickster is told twice in Hesiod.13 It is
less naive than the groups of myths just mentioned, because it
implies a double perspective and a double change, towards the
better and towards the worse. That man cannot do without
fire must always have been clear, but this myth makes the ac­
quisition of fire a theft, punished by the superior god, and it
goes on to describe the disastrous consequences through its
sequel, the creation of woman, the Pandora story. Thus two
main institutions of civilized life are discredited, sacrifice and
marriage. Sacrifice is deceit, because men burn the inedible
parts of the victim for the gods and eat the rest themselves, and
marriage is economic ruin for man who still cannot do without
a woman. In addition, Pandora’s barrel of evils and diseases
has been opened once and for all. Thus, gain is counterbal­
anced by loss, instead of the ‘positive’ versions in myth and
ritual which proclaim acceptance of the present state as in­
stalled with the help of gods, Prometheus indicates the prob­
lems of human culture, the cost of change, the ambivalence of
gods. The Aeschylean drama from the 5th century, Prom e­
theus Bound ,14 goes on to escalate the conflict of men and

13 H esiod, Theogony 535-616; Ergo. 42-105. Suffice it to refer to West 1966,

305-336; 1978, 155-172; B urkert 1985, 171; J. D uchem in, Promethee. His-
toire du mythe de ses origines orientales a ses incarnations modernes, Paris
1974. Parallels are collected by J.G . Frazer, Apollodorus. The Library II,
London 1921, 326-350. An alternative, undramatic version of the invention
o f making fire by Hermes: H om eric H y m n to H erm es 108-111.
14 There is endless debate whether this really is a w ork o f Aeschylus (died 456
B .C .); see m ost recently R . Bees, L u r Datierung des Prometheus Desmotes,
Stuttgart 1993, who arrives at a date of about 420 B .C .
gods: Zeus wished to destroy mankind, but they survive
through Prometheus’ inventions, technology. This seems to be
a quasi-modern reversal of the optimistic teachings of myth
and ritual; it is still very old, as it is developed to the extreme in
one of the earliest Babylonian epics, Atrahasis, from the begin­
ning of the second millennium.15 The supreme god wishes to
destroy mankind, yet Atrahasis, ‘outstanding by cleverness,’
with the help of Ea, the philanthropic god of wisdom, builds
his ship and survives the deluge. It is through technology that
mankind survives, nay, has in fact become indestructible - this
is the somewhat cynical message of this text.
There is, finally, that most famous myth of decadence in
Hesiod, the myth of the Golden Age and of mankind’s degen­
eration step by step, the gold, silver, bronze, and iron age,
marking the ‘progress’ from worse to worse. This is in fact a
singular text, most probably of non-Greek origin; the extent to
which it reflects the ‘end of the Bronze Age’ as we see it re­
mains an intriguing speculation.16 Hesiod, for one, found it
necessary to interpolate the age of heroes or ‘half-gods’ in the
metal sequence, to account for the Greek heroic tradition.
Forefathers are exemplary in patriarchal society, the aim and
duty of the descendants is ‘not to be inferior to them,’ to avoid
decadence, which nevertheless seems to happen. There always
were reasons to doubt whether mankind was living in the best
of possible worlds. There are many other myths that dwell on
paradisiac utopias, somewhere else and far away, remember
the myth of paradise lost in Genesis 2/3. The myth of the ages
is memorable by its systematic structure, taking the decreasing
value of the four known and scarce metals to mark the se­

15 See W .G. Lam bert, A .R . Millard, Atra-hasis. The Babylonian Story o f the
Flood, O xford 1969.
16 Suffice it to refer to B. G atz, Weltalter, Goldene Zeit und sinnverwandte
Vorstellungen, Hildesheim 1967; West 1978, 172-204; W. Burkert, “Apoka-
lyptik im friihen Griechentum : Impulse und Transform ationen,” in: D.
H ellholm , ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the N ear
East, Tubingen 1983, 235-254.
quence of devaluation in an unforgettable way. The myth has
retained its particular fascination far beyond the ancient world.
To sum up, there are dissonant reflections and elaborations
on the achievements and problems of human civilization, there
is no unanimity even at the stage of myth.
As to the second, the ‘Presocratic’ stage, one may well speak
of an intellectual revolution in Greece during the 5th century,
even if it remains difficult to describe and to explain this ade­
quately. This was a period of fundamental political, economic,
and social change, with the invention of isonomia, later called
dem okratia, the unexpected but glorious outcome of the Per­
sian wars, the economic boom concentrating on the new cen­
ter, Athens, the growing chances for individual careers. The
limitations of the Greek world made themselves felt again at
the close of the 5th century, with the Persians regaining con­
trol in the East and the Carthaginians destroying Greek Sicily
in the West.
The intellectual foundations had already been laid in the 6th
century. In the background there was real progress in crafts
and arts which can clearly be seen, e.g., in large-scale temple
building, in tunnels for water-supply, in bronze casting, in
red-figure vase painting. No doubt “crafts have made progress
(.epidedokasin ), and in comparison with the contemporary
artists the old ones are not worth much,” as a later Platonic
text puts it.17 In emerging prose literature we find a new and
exceptional trust in individual knowledge and cognition, with
writers starting to write ‘on the universe’ and eager to contra­
dict current beliefs of ‘the Greeks’ or of ‘men’ tout court; they
discover ‘nature’ (physis) as an independent, autonomous yet
understandable complex of processes, encompassing human
life. Somewhat later there arises the thesis that individual life
can be decisively changed and modeled through education, in
contrast to inherited social roles and replication of patriarchal
authority. This is the impact of the so-called sophists who

17 Plato, Hippias maior 281 d.

promise to ‘make better’ by teaching anyone willing to embark
on study. This concept of ‘making better’ though applies more
to individual progress than to society as a whole; still, projects
for ideal ‘cities’ begin to arise. With the hope of ‘getting bet­
ter’, the intellectual power of the individuum replaces older
forms of ‘bestness’, arete, and makes the authority of the fa­
thers questionable. We find the word ‘old’ (archaion ) assum­
ing a negative connotation: What is ‘old’ is outdated, it can be
turned to ridicule, just as were the long locks and hairpins of
the 6th century kuroi. Zeus, as a new god, has overthrown
Kronos. There is new poetry, new music,18 as well as new
forms of speech and argument. Many felt the shock of mod­
ernization; antagonism and conflict were bound to arise. Some
would proclaim that the ‘new’ outlook meant immorality and
decline as against the ‘old’ state. The most vivid picture of the
situation is presented in Aristophanes’ Clouds, produced 423
B.C.
Thucydides, in a speech purportedly held in 432, has the
Corinthians contrast old Sparta and modern Athens: The Spar­
tan way of life, the Corinthians say, is ‘old-fashioned’ {ar-
chaiotropa). “Necessarily, as in crafts, whatever comes latest
will prevail. For a city in a state of rest, immovable customs
and laws are best, but for those who are forced to react to
many different situations, manifold improvement and new in­
vention are needed” - Thucydides coins the word epitech-
nesis, which one might even translate by ‘upgrading’. “There­
fore the ways of the Athenians are much more modernized, on
account of manifold experience” - ‘modernized’, kekainotai,
is another new creation of Thucydides.19 This is his way of
expressing the concept of ‘progress’ or ‘modernization’ which
was happening in 5th century Athens. Thucydides is ready to
acclaim this change, even if the ascent of power politics and
economic competition was to result in the great war.

18 Tim otheos Fr. 21 ed. Page; Tim otheos, Persai 219-33; cf. [Arist.] Met.
9 9 3 b l5 ; contrast Plutarch, D e musica 1135c and pass.
19 Thucydides 1,71,2 f.; cf. de Romilly.
 The triumph of achievement marks a scientific text from the
first decennia of the 4th century B.C ., the Hippocratic writing
‘On ancient Medicine’. “Medicine has long had all its means to
hand, and has discovered both a principle and a method,
through which the discoveries, which are many and excellent,
have been made, during a long period of time, and the rest will
be discovered, if somebody competent and with knowledge of
the discoveries already made will conduct research, starting
from these.”20 It was ‘necessity’ (ananke ), the text says, that
originally prompted research, there has been gradual progress,
much has been achieved by now, and further progress is fore­
seen: The science of medicine will be “complete” in a not too
distant future, through further research. Thus in the special
field of this ‘art’, the idea of progress doubtless exists, even
without a characteristic term.
It was in the context of the 5th century that a general and
consistent theory about the progress of civilization originated,
the so-called ‘Kulturentstehungslehre’.21 Unfortunately schol­
ars remain entangled in philological problems. We have a set of
texts the historical-philological interrelation of which cannot
be established with certainty. The main documents are the fa­
mous choral ode of Sophocles’ Antigone, polla ta deina, dated
to 441 B.C .,22 and Plato’s Protagoras ,23 It is possible that Pro­
tagoras the sophist, who was active after about 450 B.C ., was

20 Hippocrates, D e vetere medicina 2,19; the date o f the text - between ca.
400 and ca. 350 - is controversial.
21 See U xkull-G yllenband; Spoerri; C ole; Karl Reinhardt’s hypothesis that
D em ocritus was the ultimate source of Diodrus 1,8 and hence the decisive
theorist, accepted by Kranz in D K 68 B 5, has to be given up. The only real
piece o f evidence for D em ocritus is D K 68 B 144, see at n. 41.
22 Sophocles, Antigone 332-375. Some motifs are resumed in Euripides, Sup-
plices 196-215, about 422 B .C .
23 Probably the form of myth chosen in P lato’s Protagoras 320c-323a is
P lato’s verdict on Protagoras’ theory: A just-so-story.
the original source, with a book “O n the state of things in the
beginning.”24
The theory starts with the difference of man versus animals
with regard to ‘survival’: By natural endowment, humans are
inferior to many well specialized animals. Man needs clothing
and houses, and weapons to fight ferocious animals. Hence
practical necessity ( chreia) forced man to make pertinent in­
ventions, gradually and in a long and tentative process, yet
with evident success: Man has become dominant, he managed
to subdue the animals, to work the earth, to navigate at sea.
Still this is not sufficient. There is no less cogent need for social
collaboration; it is language which makes this possible, to­
gether with social rules, with forms of ‘justice’ that result in
the establishment of ‘cities’. The city, polis, is the normal form
of human habitat in the Greek perspective. Hence the pride of
human dem otes , as voiced in Sophocles’ Antigone. The word
deinos means ‘terrible’ by etymology, but has developed to
mean ‘impressive’ or ‘admirable’. Sophocles plays on this am­
bivalence: “Nothing is more terrible/admirable than man.”
Here we find a functional analysis of society in the disguise
of reconstructed cultural history. It is presented practically
without factual basis, but for the defective endowment of ‘nat­
ural’ man; arguments are drawn from putative ‘needs’. Gods
have disappeared from the picture. Already Xenophanes, to­
wards the end of the 6th century, had criticized myth: “It is
not true that gods have shown everything to mortals in the
beginning, but in the course of time, through search, they find
out what is better.”25 ‘Search’ and ‘findings’ through a long
stretch of ‘time’. If not the word, the idea of progress is prefig­

24 This title, Peri tes en archei katatstaseos, D K 80 B 8b = Diogenes Laertius

9,55, is discredited by the suspicion that it might be constructed from
P lato’s famous dialogue; still archen kai katastasin biou recurs in the same
context o f ‘Kulturentstehung’ in M oschion, Tragicorum Graecorum Frag-
menta 97 F 6, but not in Plato.
25 Xenophanes D K 21 B 18; see J.H . Lesher, Xenophanes o f Colophon, Frag­
ments, Toronto 1992; Edelstein 3-19.
ured here. The fifth century theory accepts the idea of a long
and gradual process. In fact it was Archelaos, a pupil of
Anaxagoras, who made the transition from cosmological to
cultural anthropology: He introduced the famous opposition
of nomos versus physis, cultural decision-making versus biol­
ogy;26 the process of physis , as described by the so-called Pre-
socratics ever since Anaximander was found insufficient to ex­
plain man’s existence. The further elaboration, the triumphant
accent on ‘man’, superior through inventions and learning,
may be due to Protagoras. “Nothing is greater than man.”27
Anthropology on these lines was handed on by literary tra­
dition until the end of the Hellenistic epoch and beyond. We
have remarkable elaborations in Lucretius’ poem, On Nature ,
and in the first book of the world history by Diodorus. In
Lucretius we finally meet the very term ‘progress’: Everything
has been taught, little by little, through “the experience of rest­
less mind, who makes progress step by step” (mentis pede-
temptim progredientis. 5,1452 f.).
If myths and rituals seemed to reflect the ‘Neolithic Revolu­
tion’, the subsequent historical epoch, the ‘Urban Revolution’,
is integrated in the Protagorean system. We may still note cu­
rious omissions or blind spots in this theory of progress. The
invention of writing which, in our view, makes the distinction
of ‘high culture’ is hardly discussed - Plato has a nostalgic
myth instead28 - nor is the invention of money given promi­
nence - although this had been mentioned in Xenophanes.29
Money rather recurs in moralizing poetry and popular philos­
ophy as a permanent danger to virtue. The ancients kept dis­
cussing society in its political and moral, not in its economic
dimensions. As far as we see, there are no projections or

26 D K 60 A 4 = H ippolytos, Refut. 1,9,6; cf. Heinimann.

27 Sophocles, Antigone 332. ‘M an’ is a concept resounding from Protagors’
famous sentence ‘man the measure’, though this belongs in the context of a
theory o f knowledge, D K 80 B 1.
28 Plato, Phaedrus 274c-275b.
29 D K 21 B 4.
promises about the future. Man is reminded and summoned to
live his own present life consciously.
When we finally come to the great philosophical writers of
the 4th century, it is clear that Plato is ‘reactionary’. There are
other anti-progressive trends in his epoch, the most radical
personified by Diogenes the Dog, the proverbial father of cyn­
icism. This meant denial of culture in order to find back to
some ‘natural’ life of absolute personal independence. The fol­
lowers of Diogenes were to form a weird contrast to the ongo­
ing spread of urban luxuries for many centuries.
Plato, for one, is prone to find degeneration all around, even
if he knows and to some extent accepts the current theory
about the gradual evolution of culture from ‘animal-like’ be­
ginnings to fully developed cities. He still proclaims that the
‘ancients’ were closer to the gods.30 M ost impressive is the
myth developed in the dialogue Politikos. There are two
phases in the lapse of time, two contrasting movements in the
world.31 As long as god is directing the world, there is evolu­
tion towards the better, culminating in a situation of paradise,
but as god has left the steering-oar long ago, a process of de­
basement and disintegration has been going on since, until god
will resume his rule at a certain time. O f course Plato knows
Hesiod’s myth of the ages, and repeatedly refers to it.
It is different in Aristotle: As one basic concept in his phi­
losophy is ‘nature’ (physis) in the sense of a leading principle
that inaugurates ‘movement’ from ‘privation’ towards an ‘end’,
from ‘possibility’ to ‘what has its end in itself’, entelecheia ,
Aristotle has a special sense for ‘evolution’, first of all in the
physical world, including biology. But he does not hesitate to
apply this perspective to the field of cultural achievements too,
especially in his brief account of the development of tragedy:
Tragedy started from ‘natural’ and humble beginnings, the joy
of imitation which led to improvisations, it went through

30 Plato Phtlebus 16 c; cf. Cratylus 398a; Laws 7 13a.

31 Plato, Politicus 269c ff.; cf. also Laws 679e fF.
many changes, as poets “brought forward what became visible
of its forms,” until finally evolution came to a stop, “because it
had attained its very nature.”32 There is evolution towards a
state of excellence all over in the design of nature; the goal is
the end, telos.
Aristotle deals with the history and perspectives of culture
more fully in some of his early works which have been lost;
characteristic fragments survive.33 There are pertinent remarks
also in the preserved treatises. Culture, for Aristotle, is a con­
tinuous process of learning: “In a relay race, as it were, those
who are now renowned have taken over achievements from
many predecessors, who on their part had worked progress,
and thus they have made progress themselves.” Here we get
the term epididonai.i4 It is not even difficult, Aristotle says, to
improve on existing discoveries. “It appears to be in the reach
of everybody to move further on and to improve on what is
well done in outline; in such matters, time is the discoverer, or
else a good helper. In such a way the progress in crafts has
happened, it is in the reach of everyone to add what is still
■ * »35
missing.
Following the established paradigm, Aristotle takes an evo­
lutionary view of human society as a whole. It is best, he
writes in his Politics, “to look how things are growing from

32 esche ten heautes physin, Poetics 1449al5.

33 The problems o f the reconstruction o f Protreptikos and P en philosophies
cannot be discussed here; see I. D uring, Aristotle’s Protrepticus. A n Attempt
at Reconstruction, G oteborg 1961. - Some pupils of A ristotle further en­
gaged in cultural history, such as Dikaiarchos, who w rote a book ‘The Life
o f G reece,’ dwelling on steps of civilization, from hunters through pastoral
life to the agricultural stage - a construct which has had great success down
to the 20th century. H e still could incorporate the traditon o f the ‘Golden
Age’ through reinterpretation of Hesiod. Theophrastus w rote on the be­
ginnings of piety and sacrifice, in a nostalgic rather than a progressive
mood, in his book Peri eusebeias.
34 A ristotle, Soph. El. 183b29.
35 A ristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a23-26.
their beginning.”36 Society developed from family and ‘house’
through village to city (polis); this is the perfect and final
state.37 Aristotle is far from idealizing the beginnings: “The
earliest human beings, whether they were earth-born or the
survivors of some cataclysm, were in all probability similar to
ordinary or even to foolish people of today.”38 Even philoso­
phy, when it was ‘young’, spoke inarticulately like a child.39
There is progress after all.
In detail, Aristotle distiguishes three steps in the develop­
ment of civilization; being steps in intelligence, each of them
may be called a form of ‘philosophy’ which thus had been with
man all the time. There was first “practical need which taught
the necessary things; when these things were present, then
what relates to beauty and luxury would thrive.”40 Already
Democritus had confronted the ‘necessary’ techniques, the ba­
sic crafts, with art created in a state of ‘superabundance’.41 This
was an addition to the Protagorean model, which had pro­
ceeded from ‘need’ and thus found two sectors, technology
and politics, to be determinants of cultural life. Now it appears
that culture is more than ‘need’, it includes those playful and
colourful elaborations which we appreciate so much. N ote
that Greek has just one word for both, techne. Quote from one
of the lost writings: “After the destruction and the deluge,
people were first compelled to do philosophy (i.e.: to use their
intelligence) in relation to food and living; when they had be­
come richer, they developed the arts for pleasure, such as mu­
sic and her like; when they had achieved superabundance be­
yond necessity, they started to do philosophy (in the full
sense). But by now there has been so much progress, starting

36 A ristotle, Politics 1252a24.

37 ib. 1252a26-1253a9.
38 ib. 1269a4; hence “it would therefore be an absurdity to adhere to their
notions”.
39 A ristotle, Metaphysics 9 9 3 a l5 f. F or the follow ing see Edelstein 72 f.
40 A ristotle, Politics 1329b27-31.
41 D em ocritus, D K 68 B 144. See also [Plato] Epinomis 975d.
from small beginnings, in the shortest of time, in research con­
cerning geometry, logic, and other subjects of education, as in
none of the other crafts. And still all people used to recom­
mend the other (practical) arts, paying honour to them and
offering money to those who practice these, whereas those
who practice science and philosophy we do not encourage, of­
ten we even prevent them; but still they make greatest progress
(<epididosi), because by nature they are the most fundamental
(presbytata ).”42 “Further, all people now like to dwell on these,
and wish to take up their study, leaving aside other things,
once they have touched a little bit of the advantage they get
from them.”43
Philosophy has been making tremendous progress, Aristotle
states, progress which is both necessary and ‘natural’, and it is
reaching its final state: “Since in few years great progress (ac-
cessio) has been achieved, philosophy will be finished and per­
fect within a short time.”44 Aristotle seems to have written this
when he was still young, in the Fifties of the 4th century. He
has in view not only the success of Plato’s Academy but espe­
cially the progress of mathematics and mathematical physics
linked to the name of Eudoxus.45 “There was great progress
(iepidosis ) of mathematics at that time,” we read in a text which
comes from the circle of Plato, “as Eudoxus and his like
changed the archaic ways (archaismos )” of older geometri­
cians.46 Once again we meet with the word ‘archaic’ in its pejo­

42 Aristotle Fr. 53 Rose = Protrepticus Fr. 8 Ross = Iam blichos, D e communi

mathematica scientia p. 83,7-21, and Proklos, Commentary in Euclid
p. 28,13-17.
43 Proklos ib. p .28,17-20 and Iamblichus, Protrepticus p.40,20-22.
44 This is C icero ’s resume of the same passage, Tusculanae 3,79 = Aristotle,
Fr. 53 Rose = Protrepticus Fr. 8 Ross. C f. A ristotle, Politics 264a3: “Alm ost
everything has been discovered already”.
45 See F. Lasserre, Die Fragm ente des Eudoxos von Knidos, Berlin 1966; J.
M ittelstrass, D ie Rettung der Phdnomene, Berlin 1962.
46 Philodemus, Academicorum Index col.Y, see T. Dorandi, ed., Filodemo,
Storia dei Filosofi. Platone e I’Academia, Naples 1991, p .126 f.; W .Burkert,
Platon in Nahaufnahme. Ein Buch aus Herculaneum , Stuttgart 1993, 26-33.
rative connotation, in contrast to contemporary achievement.
Eudoxus made decisive contributions to theoretical geometry
and can be said to have founded mathematical physics in the
field of astronomy, with his theory of ‘homocentric spheres’;
he seems to have convinced the aging Plato of the mathemati­
cal perfection of the kosmos, and he provided the basis for
Aristotle’s world system and theology as set out in Meta­
physics book eleven. It was the commentaries to Aristotle’s
Metaphysics that have preserved some knowledge of Eudoxus’
system, which in the field of science had rapidly been super­
seded by Hellenistic astronomy.
To sum up: With Aristotle we find the idea of progress with
the appropriate terms, epidosis, accessio, within a comprehen­
sive and consistent theory of the evolution of mankind
through various steps, with the successive elaboration of tech­
nology, of arts, and of philosophy and science which should
merge into one. What is in focus is the progress of human civi­
lization at the level of intellectual consciousness. This is not
unlimited, Aristotles thought, but close to its end: there is per­
fection. This statement proved to be preposterous.
In spite of Aristotle, and even in Aristotle, progress is not
the main message of ancient civilization. A main counterforce
to check the idea of constant progress was the preference for
the ‘cyclic’ understanding of time. Even Aristotle dwells on
this, as he associates time and the movement of the heavens;47
he was following Platonic and Pythagorean tradition. The idea
of ‘cyclic’ time has often been treated as a mythical idea, or as
an apriori-form of pre-modern or anti-modern ‘Weltanschau­
ung’. Thus it regained its force with Nietzsche and his message
of eternal return, ewige W iederkehr. Mircea Eliade made the
same catchword, the myth o f the eternal return, a central con­
cept of religion.48 It is undeniable that many forms of religion
lead to an experience of a ‘cycle’ through festivals which fol­

47 A ristotle, Physics 223b21-224a2.

48 M. Eliade, L e mythe de I’etem el retour; Paris 1949/T he Myth o f the Eter­
nal Return, Princeton 1954.
low the circles of the year and the moon, and interpret the
course of human life as a ‘circle’ from birth to death. A new
dimension is added with the idea of reincarnation, which came
to Greece probably from India, at the time of Pythagoras; it
makes individual life repeatable over and over again. Its evi­
dent emblem is the ‘cycle’ or ‘wheel’ of rebirth, an expression
found both in Greece and in India.49 Astronomical speculation
added a ‘great year’ as the comprehensive cycle within which
all the astronomical phenomena should repeat themselves, and
possibly everything else too. The Greeks attributed this idea to
‘Chaldaeans’, but also to Pythagoras and Heraclitus;50 we find
it established with Plato and Aristotle. The great year-specula-
tion goes together with the idea of twofold destructions that
should happen on earth, through fire and through water, at the
cosmic summer and the cosmic winter in turn.51
Still one should not take these ideas as due to some ‘primi­
tive’ heritage, as a pre-modern ‘concept of time’ from which
mind was to emancipate itself in the course of progress. N or
should we overlook that to experience and to count time in its
linear sequence is absolutely normal and no less old. People
were wont to remember lines of ancestors, long before philos­
ophy and science made their impact, and the hope of families
was that this would go on and on; lists of kings or victors or
eponyms were recorded since the beginnings of writing.
We should rather understand the idea of ‘cyclic’ time as a
rational, nay logical postulate. It seemed to be the only way to
combine stability and change, to account for stability in what­
ever is happening, and hence for sense. As Socrates says in
Plato’s Phaedo: “If things would not reciprocate (antapodi-
donai), one to the other, going around as it were in a circle, but
if coming-to-be were on a straight line ( eutheia ), going from
one state to the opposite, and did not bend back to the other

49 C f. B urkert 1972, 120-136.

50 C f. B urkert 1972, 314 f.
51 Plato, Timaeus 39d; reduced to local change, w ithout destruction o f the
universe, in A ristotle, Meteorologica 352a25-352b l7e.
side, and did not make turns, then ultimately, you know, ev­
erything would end up in the same state, would suffer the
same fate, and thus would stop com ing-to-be... In the end, by
necessity, everything would be dead, and nothing would be
alive.”52 This is the final and inevitable result of linear progress:
nihilism, the big black hole, when the short history of time has
come to an end - as modern physicists might put it. Plato re­
peats the principle of the ‘cycle’ in his Republic. “For every­
thing that arises there is destruction ... when the turning
around of the cycles makes the curves meet;”53 what remains is
the cycle. Plato is by no means the first to think on such lines.
In Greek philosophy it had been Empedocles, above all, who
proclaimed the ‘cycle’ as the very form of stability, nay of eter­
nity, a cycle of antagonistic forces which dramatic peripeties,54
which still cannot annihilate what exists forever. “Insofar one
is used to arise from many, and conversely many come out
from one, disintegrating, things come-to-be and their life is
not stable; but in so far they do not at all stop changing
through and through, they are forever, beings unmoved/im­
movable in a circle.”55
Plato went on to transfer the idea of the cycle to the move­
ments of civilization, to and fro, oscillating in periods either
under the god’s guidance or left to itself. The evolution of
mankind, as taught in the fifth century model, becomes an in­
cident that must have happened repeatedly. This is reinforced
by Aristotle: not only the world is eternal, uncreated and inde­
structible, but all the species brought forth by ‘nature’, all the
plants and animals, including the human race: They have been
there forever, it is only the form of civilization that may be
destroyed repeatedly by catastrophes, to recover again
through the same steps. Hence if there has been progress until
now, it dates from the last cataclysm; if the triumph of philos­

52 Plato, Phaedo 72bc.

53 Plato, Republic 546a.
54 These can be described in the form of a com bat m yth, D K 31 B 30.
55 akinetoi kata kyklon, Empedocles D K 31 B 17,9-13 = B 26, 6-12.
ophy is experienced ‘now’, this is just one felicitous phase in
the greater circle. “It is natural that every craft and philosophy
has been invented repeatedly, and has been destroyed again.”56
There has been and there will be again catastrophic change
(m etabole), but “the universe remains stable.”57 Even the Sto­
ics, if they postulated a destruction of the kosmos by fire
(ekpyrosis), would equally postulate a new kosmos to arise, and
since there can only be one ‘best’ form, the future world will
exactly correspond to the one which exists now: “Periodic re­
birth of the whole,” as Marcus Aurelius (11,1,3) puts it.
For the alternative of infinite progress, I find just one early
voice, Anaxagoras. For Anaxagoras, the cosmos grows
through movement from an original state of total mixture to ­
wards ever greater distinctness, ruled by ‘Mind’, Nous. “And
Nous has taken command of the whole of the cyclic move­
ment, so that it began to move around in the beginning; and at
first it began to move around from a small center, it moves
around now at a larger scale, and it will move around at a still
larger scale.”58 The powers of Nous are infinite, Nous is capa­
ble of ‘knowing’ the whole of the future, it is steadily pro­
gressing. Anaxagoras also postulates the existence of the in­
finitely small, which leaves infinite possibilities for ‘becoming’
without ever assuming that this happens from ‘nothing’; ev­
erything has been there before, but keeps evolving. This seems
to be also the area from which the theory about the progress of
humanity from humble and confused beginnings through
‘need’ and ‘necessity’ sprang with Archelaos and Protagoras,
Anaxagoras’ younger contemporaries. But others immediately
arose to point out the logical pitfalls and fallacies of the con­
cept of ‘infinity’, of the infinitely small - Achilles never reach­
ing the tortoise - as well as of the infinitely big. Ever since

56 A ristotle, Metaphysics 10 7 4 b l0-12; cf. Politics 1329b26: “O ne must assume

that inventions have been made often in the long course of time, or rather
infinitely often ”; see also D e caelo 2 7 0 b l9 .
57 A ristotle, Meteorologica 352b 17 f.
58 Anaxagoras, D K 59 B 12.
then philosophers have tried to ban infinity from their con­
structs. This meant the end of the idea of infinite progress too.
What remained was the cycle as the only form of permanence.
It means to get rid of fear together with hope, those two
“biggest tyrants of human life.”59
If we add a survey of antiquity after Aristotle - which
means to scan rapidly about one millennium, assuming the
Langobards and Arabs to have put an end to antiquity - there
are contradicting observations to be made.
O n the one hand, there is unquestionable progress, progress
in science, progress in technology, and, most markedly, pro­
gress in the organization of mass society. O n the other hand,
the awareness of these manifestations of progress is limited or
even lacking in the intellectual circles of rhetoric and philoso­
phy. It failed to catch the media. Philosophers had built up the
authoritative image of their own founding fathers, while
rhetoricians kept rehearsing the Persian wars. It is true there
was constant imperial propaganda about ‘this felicitous reign’,
and ‘our’ wonderful ‘saeculum.,b0 But this was personalized,
each emperor being acclaimed afresh as the saviour of the
world who was bringing back the Golden Age; this was to lose
its force through repetition and to confirm the impression: It’s
all the same. What we miss in the whole of ancient theoretical
thought is any analysis of economics, including economic pro­
gress. The development of Mediterranean trade had been deci­
sive for the advent of ancient civilization, and there was re­
markable economic growth from the time of Augustus on­
wards, followed by decline from the end of the 2nd century
but not lacking periods of precarious recovery. In the end,
however, the empire proved to be an economic failure: Many
were quite happy with the Moslem takeover.

59 The expression is Lucian’s, A lexander Pseudomantis 8, echoed by Goethe

in Faust II: “Zwei der grofken M enschenfeinde, Furcht und Hoffnung,
an g ek ettet...”
60 T h e famous expression nec nostri saeculi est occurs in Trajan’s letter to
Pliny on the Christians, Pliny, Epistulae 10,97.
 We must still acknowledge the enormous progress in orga­
nization of civilized life that was due to the Roman empire
ever since Augustus; this cannot be described here. Just imag­
ine if there were peace and legal security from the limits of Iraq
to Marocco and from Britain to Egypt even today. Jurispru­
dence as a science developed from the practice of Roman law.
The Corpus iuris was published in 533.
To pick out a few of the most remarkable instances of scien­
tific and technological progress after Aristotle. In astronomy
there was the heliocentric system to come with Aristarchus,
about 270 B.C., the discovery of the precession of equinoxes
with Hipparchos, about one century later, and finally the
‘Great Syntaxis’ of Ptolemy which was to dominate the next
1400 years. In medicine, there was the discovery of the nerves
by Herophilos in the first half of the 3rd century B.C. - a
physiological phenomenon which failed to find its proper
name; neuronlnervus was the traditional designation of the
sinews. In geography, there was the exact measurement of the
earth’s perimeter by Eratosthenes, before 200 B.C ., with the
division of the earth’s surface through meridians and parallel
circles. In mathematics, Euclid’s Elements, about 300 B.C .,
was just a start, followed by Archimedes, Apollonius, and oth­
ers, with conic sections, trigonometry, and integrals, to give
just a few keywords. Archimedes was conscious of the pro­
gress achieved, and spoke of the well-founded hopes for fur­
ther progress.61
As to technology, public interest concentrated on the ma­
chines of warfare - primitive as the ‘catapults’ may appear to
moderns; it was in this context that the very word machine,
m achina , entered the Latin world in its West Greek form
m acbana, even before Archimedes’ role in the siege of Syra­
cuse, 212 B.C . More important, but hardly noticed was the
invention of the screw. Archimedes theorized about helices-,
the earliest technical application, the water-screw - still cur­

61 Archimedes, Ephodos, prooem ium , II 430,15-18 ed. Heiberg.

rently used in our sewage systems - is linked to his name. By
the 1st century B.C . the screw was applied to winepresses, and
gears using screws became common. The simple screw to fix
components together is found by about the first century
A .D .62 it never appears in literature. I shall come back to
water-wheels and water-mills.
A decisive invention that superseded Greek architecture and
Greek style was the fabrication of mortar and various kinds of
cement. In consequence, the final triumph of architecture be­
came the cuppola, instead of the Greek temple. “Salomo, I
outdid you,” Justinian is said to have proclaimed when the
Hagia Sophia had been completed in A.D. 537; this was some
400 years after the Hadrianic Pantheon had been constructed
in Rome. In between there were the huge Thermae and Basili-
cae, not to forget the temple of Venus and Roma at Rome.63
Later sacred architecture both in the Christian and in the
Moslem world had its model in the Pantheon and Hagia
Sophia, not in the Parthenon.
There is still one document I wish to adduce, an epigram on
the invention of the water mill. It is by Antipater of Thessa-
lonica, from the time of Augustus:
Keep your hand from the mill, corn-grinding females, and take a long sleep,
even if the voice o f the cocks proclaims morning.
D em eter (the grain-goddess) has ordered the nymphs (the water-goddesses) to
take over the toil o f manual work:
They jump down at the highest part o f the wheel and turn the axle around; and
the axle, in turn, through winding spikes makes the hollow weight o f the mill­
stones from N isyra revolve.
We enjoy again the olden life, if we are learning to dine on the produce of
D em eter w ithout toil.64

62 F. Kiechle, “Zur Verwendung der Schraube in der A ntike,” Technik-

geschichte 34 (1967) 14-22. See also Schneider 64-66.
63 See W. Burkert, “Perikles von Mylasa, A rchitekt des Tempels der Venus
und R o m a,” in: Kotinos. Festschrift fiir Erika Simon, Mainz 1992, 415-417.
64 Anthologia Palatina 9,418; cf. Schneider 45-49:
"Iaxete x eip a |i\Aoaov, (Wxipi'Seq, ei38ete (ifiKpd,
Kf|v <5p0pov 7tpoXeyr|i yfjpuc, (i/xKTpttovcov.
 The ‘olden days’ of myth, the Golden Age returns, as man­
ual labour is replaced by water energy. This is a statement
which seems to anticipate the industrial revolution. And we
should not belittle these first energy-producing machines, the
water wheels, which have been kept in use down to our cen­
tury. That the invention only spread in Roman times is not
surprising in so far as the Mediterranean countries, especially
Greece, are not favoured by resources of water power, in con­
trast, say, to Gaul. The biggest installation of a Roman water
mill is found in the Provence. But still the discovery of water
power did not make an epochal change and none was struck
by the idea that this might have anything to do with those toys
described by Heron, how to make a wheel spin through the
power of steam. As to the mills, it would be mainly the slaves
and the donkeys who were relieved or rather replaced - but
who cared about their toil? On the whole one might state that
between about 2000 B.C ., when the Neolithic Revolution had
been followed by the invention of ceramics, the wheel, metal­
working, and writing, and about 1800 A.D., when the indus­
trial revolution fully started, there has been no comparable
through-going change of life due to technology.
There remains the consciousness of progress in science
proper. This was restricted to a few specialists, selected by nat­
ural gift and personal inclination, there was no institutional
education in science. We find some of the finest statements in
Latin authors, especially in Seneca.65 In his Natural Questions ,
he writes: “We are still at the beginning. Only recently we
have come to understand astronomical phenomena, the phases
of the moon, eclipses, planets. There will come a time when,

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GTpaxt)&i Nicrupicov Koi/.a papr| h u X&kcdv.
T£\)6|j.£0 ’ dpxaiou fhoTou 7tdA.iv, e( 5(%a |xox0o'u
5aivuo0ai At)O'0<; £pya 8i5aoK6|a.e0a.
65 See Edelstein 169-177; Dodds 32.
what is still hidden now, will become visible in the course of
days, by the diligence of a longer span of time. A single life­
time is not enough for research of such great things ...
Through long successions these problems will be explained.
There will come a time when our descendants will wonder that
we did not know about such clear facts ... Let us be content
with what has been found: Even the descendants will add to
truth.”66 “How many animals we have come to know only in
our time! How many things not even now! Much which is still
unknown to us people of a future epoch will come to know.”67
Natural science is a kind of mystery revelation: “Nature (re­
rum natura) does not transmit her sacred rites at one time. We
think we are initiated, but we are still stuck in the fo reco u rt...
Some of this our age will come to see, other parts a later age
which will come after us.”68 “I revere the discoveries of wis­
dom, and its discoverers. It pleases me to approach the subject
as a legacy left to me by many men ... Much remains to be
done; much will remain; and no one born after thousands of
centuries will be deprived of the chance of adding something
in addition.”69 Much of this is reminiscent of Aristotle’s ap­
proach, especially the formulation of a ‘legacy’, recalling Aris­
totle’s ‘relay race’, but Seneca does not believe that perfection
is at hand: Future progress seems unlimited. As Pliny the E l­
der, Seneca’s contemporary, briskly puts it: “N obody should
lose hope that centuries always make their progress,” ne quis
desperet saecula proficere semper™ It is strange to notice that
the philosopher-emperor who wrote in Greek was much more
pessimistic: “There is nothing new which those who come af­

66 Seneca, Quaestiones naturales 7,25,4; cf. 6,5,3: “N othing is completed at its

very beginning... every succeeding generation will still find something to
d o ”; ep. 33,11: “T he truth is open to all. It has not yet been usurped. Much
o f it will be left even to the future”.
67 ib. 7,30,5.
68 ib. 7,30,6.
69 Seneca, Epistles 64,7-8.
70 Pliny, Naturalis historia 2,63, in the context o f astronomy.
ter us will see, nothing more special which those before us did
see; in a way a man of 40 years, if he has some measure of
intelligence, has seen everything that has happend and every­
thing that will be, because it is so alike” - this is the verdict of
Marcus Aurelius (11,1,3), joining the resignation of Ecclesi­
astes : There is nothing new under the sun.
A different key is struck with the decisive cultural revolu­
tion, the advent of Christianity. N o wonder the rapid change
from persecution to domination in the epoch of Constantine
gave rise to the feeling that the world had taken a new course.
At the same time, historical reflection revealed that it could
not have been coincidence but divine providence that Christ
was born in the time of Augustus, when the empire got that
great and stable organization which allowed the smooth
spread of the new faith; had this not been indicated to Augus­
tus himself by the Sibyl, as Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue testified?
Christian theology develops as a theology of history, of his­
torical progress. This finds its final form, and its revision, in
Augustine. Agustine refutes and ridicules the doctrine of the
‘circle’ which had been held by the elder philosophers: “In the
course of time something new arises, which does not have its
end in time.”71 “The education of the human race has made
progress in manifold growth, through certain sections of time,
as if through increment of age.”72 There are seven epochs of
world history, Agustine holds in De civitate dei, the fifth end­
ing with Christ, the sixth going on since then, to be terminated
by an eternal ‘sabbat’.73 To make Constantine’s edict an epoch
of its own seems precluded for Augustine because of the disas­
trous events that had struck the empire since, especially the
sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. Augustine’s pupil O ro-
sius, writing the Christian world history - completed in A.D.

71 Augustinus, D e civitate dei 12,14: “fit ergo aliquid novi in tempore, quod
finem non habet tem poris”.
72 ib. 10,14: “humani generis...recta eruditio per quosdam articulos tempo-
rum tamquam aetatum profecit accessibus”.
73 ib. 22,30.
417 - has still another sequence: History, he writes in his in­
troduction, is a terrifying collection of atrocities; yet there has
been evolution towards the better: “Death, thirsty of blood,
had reigned when the religion which holds back from blood
was unknown; when this religion began to shine, death became
stunned; death is coming to an end as religion has gained supe­
riority now; death will thoroughly cease to exist, when this
religion will reign alone - except for the last days,” the epoch
of the Antichrist which is to precede the end of the world; for
the earlier periods, Orosius sets the demarcations with Augus­
tus and Constantine.74 To start chronology with the birth of
Christ was not introduced before 525 A.D., in the work of
Dionysius Exiguus.75
Yet the ideology of profound change, of renewal of the
world and the beginning of a process towards the reign of god
goes much farther back within the Christian message. Already
St. Paul wrote: “The old has passed; behold, the new has
arisen” (II Cor. 5,17). “Behold, I make new everything,” God
himself proclaims in the Apocalypse (21,5). Clement of
Alexandria, about A.D. 200, a Christian in full command of
the classical paideia, writes in his Protreptikos : “Let us shut up
tragedies and raving poets ... together with satyrs and the in­
sane thiasos and the other chorus of demons, at Helikon and
Kithairon, mountains infeebled with age; let us bring down
truth from above, from heavens, together with brilliant in­
sig h t...”76 Helikon and Kithairon, the mountain of the Muses
and the Mountain of Dionysus, i.e. Homer, Hesiod and
tragedy altogether have ‘grown old’, Greek civilization is ag­
ing; Christian truth will overcome the senility of paganism.
Paul’s epistle to the Colossians had already declared: “The
gospel is being brought to fruit in the whole world (kosm os ), it
is growing, just as it does grow in yourself, ever since the day
that you have heard it and have recognized the grace of God in

74 O rosius, Historia contra paganos 1 prol.14.

75 See Patrologia Latina 67, 487.
76 Clemens Alexandrinus, Protrepticus 2,3.
truth” (1,6). In other words, the process towards the triumph
of Christianity has been started, it is going on not only in the
hearts of people at Colossae but throughout the kosm os , and
will not come to a halt. What the epoch of Constantine experi­
enced was just confirmation of what had been proclaimed
since the first days of the Christian movement. This dynamic
view at a stroke surpassed what had motivated pagan thinkers
to cling to the ‘cycle’ of a stable world. Yet even in the Chris­
tian view progress does not directly lead to an earthly paradise,
on the contrary, ‘apocalyptic’ catastrophe is to be expected,
and salvation will only be achieved in a transcendent dimen­
sion. It was only with the demise of spirituality at the dawn of
modernity that unchecked progress of mankind could become
a dominant ideology.

Bibliography

Blundell, S., The Origins o f Civilization in G reek and Roman Thought, L on­
don, 1986
Brackert, H ., F. W efelmeyer (eds.) Kultur. Bestimmungen im 20. Jahrhundert,
Frankfurt, 1990
Burkert, W., Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, Cam bridge, Mass.,
1972
— , H om o Necans. The Anthropology o f Ancient G reek Sacrificial Ritual and
M yth, Berkeley, 1983
— , G reek Religion Archaic and Classical, O xford , 1985
Bury, J.B ., The Idea o f Progress, London, 1920
C ole, T h ., Democritus and the Sources o f G reek Anthropology, Ann Arbor,
1967
CadufF, G .A ., A ntike Sintflutsagen, G ottingen, 1986
Com te, A., Cours de philosophic positive, vol. IV, Paris, 18693
Diels, H ., Die Fragm ente der Vorsokratiker, 6. ed., edited by W. Kranz,
Berlin, 1951 (many reprints) - quoted as D K
Dodds, E .R ., The Idea o f Progress in Classical Antiquity, O xford , 1973/D er
Fortschrittsgedanke in der Antike, Zurich, 1977
Edelstein, L., The Idea o f Progress, Baltim ore, 1967
H ankinson, R .J., “G alen’s C oncept of Scientific Progress,” in: Aufstieg und
N iedergang d er Romischen Welt, II 37.2, Berlin, 1994, 1775-1789
Heinimann, F., Nomos u n d Physis. H erkunft und Bedeutung einer Antithese
im griechischen D enken des 5. Jahrhunderts, Basel, 1945
Kinzig, W., Novitas Christiana. D ie Idee des Fortschritts in der alten Kirche
bei Eusebius, G ottingen, 1994
Kleingunther, A ., Protos Heuretes. Untersuchungen z u r Geschichte einer
Fragestellung, Leipzig, 1933
Lesher, J.H ., Xenophanes o f Colophon. Fragments, Toronto, 1992
Lovejoy, A .O ., G . Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, B alti­
more, 1935
M euli, K ., Gesammelte Schriften, Basel, 1975
M ommsen, T h .E ., “St. Augustine and the Christian Idea o f Progress "Journal
o f the History o f Ideas 12 (1951) 346 ff.
Ritter, J., “Fortsch ritt,” in: Historisches Worterbuch d er Philosophie II, Basel,
1972, 1032-1059
de Rom illy, J., “Thucidide et I’idee de progres,” Annali della Scuola Normale
di Pisa, Classe di Lettere e Filosofa 35 (1966) 143-191
Schneider, H ., E infuhrung in die antike Technikgeschichte, Darmstadt, 1992
Spoerri, W., Spathellenistische Berichte iiber Welt, K ultur u n d Gotter, Basel,
1959
v. U xkull-G yllenband, W., Griechische Kulturentstehungslehren, Berlin, 1924
West, M .L ., Hesiod. Theogony, O xford , 1966
— , Hesiod. Works and Days, O xford, 1978
West, S., “Prometheus O rientalized,” Museum Helveticum 51 (1994) 129-149
 The Chinese “ C y clic” View of H istory vs.
Japanese “ Progress”

Astronomical Background of the Chinese Cyclic View

of Nature

History repeats itself. When the ancients identified cyclic

movements in the heavens, they naturally must have been
struck with the idea that terrestrial events conform to the ce­
lestial cycles, and that everything under the heavens repeats
itself. Thus in the ancient world was born the cyclic view of
nature as well as of human events, which is logically incompat­
ible with the notion of positive progress. This is particularly
true for the Chinese mentality, which maintained the principle
of Yin and Yang, to counterbalance positive and negative. The
Chinese were quite aware that technology and material culture
had become more elaborate over time, but they kept this idea
so carefully segregated from their cyclical view of society and
politics that there was no need to inquire into what would
bother someone today as the tension between the two.
The notion of periodical cataclysmic destructions and recre­
ations of the physical world existed in ancient Chinese civiliza­
tion, as among the Indians and Greeks. Over the last three
centuries B.C. Chinese thinkers made great cycles the basis of
a cosmology that encompassed everything under the heavens.
They gave it an astronomical basis by beginning and ending
these cycles with a grand conjunction, when the sun, moon,
and planets are together in one division of the sky, and all the
calendrical cycles begin simultaneously.
 The dynastic cycles reenact this cosmic rhythm, which ex­
plains history and subsumes all social institutions at the same
time as it patterns Nature. It justified the new centralized im­
perial order and patterned its rituals.

Astronomical Precision as Prototype of Progress

As the lengths of the solar, lunar, and planetary cycles were

determined more precisely by observation, the length of a
great cycle, because it was the least common multiplier of the
increasingly elaborate numbers, increased by many orders of
magnitude. By roughly the time of Christ, it had become so
large that it had lost its connection to practical measures of
length and was finally abandoned. Simple cyclic methods
could no longer maintain the old cosmological scheme. At this
point, there were two ways out. One was to abandon the as­
tronomical basis for purely numerological cycle-counting; the
other was to abandon the cyclic view of nature.1
The first alternative was to replace increasingly complex and
abstract numbers based, however indirectly, on empirical pro­
cedures, with simple symbolic numbers such as those associ­
ated with qualitative discourse based on the Five Phases and
sexagesimal year-month-day cycles. Such a move could have
led to fantastic number mysticism like that of Indian cosmol­
ogy. It could have been more tempered, like the move in
Greek and later European mathematical astronomy away from
a luni-solar calendar (based on the actual spring equinox and
new moons) and toward the Egyptian calendar with its inte­
gral number of days in a month and a year. The Chinese were
too committed to their cyclic view of nature to move in either
of these directions.

N athan Sivin, Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical

Astronomy, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969).
 Greek adherence to the idea of cosmos as harmony was also
challenged by the discovery that the lengths of month and year
are incommensurable, so that intercalation cannot be treated as
a simple harmonious relationship. This problem did not cause
Europeans to move away from a rational astronomy based on
geometrical models until the ideal was compromised begin­
ning in Kepler’s time.
The Chinese, on the other hand, abandoned rational astron­
omy based on simple postulates, preferring numerical and later
algebraic methods of computation and giving priority to em­
pirical agreement with celestial phenomena.
In reality, however, even with the demise of cyclic view of
nature, the Chinese continued to solve problems dealing with
the great-cycle conjunction as the origin of calendrical cycles
in mathematical textbooks as late as the fourteenth century.
This became conventional set-piece using indeterminate equa­
tions, a most interesting problem for astronomers and mathe­
maticians.
The grand conjunction ceased to play an important role in
calendrical calculation two thousand years ago but was not
formally abandoned until the thirteenth century when it was
replaced by an epoch in the recent past. At this point cyclic
numbers, expressed as fractions, were also replaced by decimal
numbers. This coincided with the era of highest achievement
in basic astronomical observations as the Chinese defined
them, far surpassing in some respects the earlier Greek and
Islamic achievements. In those days, the notion of progress in
the precision of observation took firm root in astronomers’
minds. They did not hesitate to say, in a society that normally
put its glories in the distant past, that “the astronomical tech­
niques of the ancients were less precise than those of today’s
system.”
A result of the increasing precision of astronomy was the
‘discovery’ that the length of a tropical year had changed over
history. Astronomers had found that it was possible to recon­
cile ancient observations (or records) of solstices with precise
contemporary observations using an algebraic formula that
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made year length shorter as time went on. This would have
been utterly impossible in Greco-Islamic astronomy, in which
the supralunar world was believed to be invariable.

The Chinese N otion of Slow Historical Rather Than

Spatial Progress

As noted above, astronomers were the first to postulate pro­

gress over time. Even as early as the time of Ptolemy, Chinese
astronomers must have been aware that angle measurements of
celestial positions were increasing in precision. With a contin­
uous improvement over time, astronomers were, by the thir­
teenth century, proud of the radical progress they had made in
determining the exact time of syzygies. This was not just a
matter of meticulous observation; the precise measurement of
time had also begun to improve.
Modern Western technology and its associated time con­
sciousness have shaped the idea of progress over the past three
hundred years. According to the O xford English Dictionary ,
the word “progress” itself changed its meaning during the sev­
enteenth century, from a movement through space to advance­
ment with earthly time, to a progress of advancement with the
passing of earthly time. As utopia was no longer placed in un­
known distant lands, dreams of perfection came to be pro­
jected into the future.2
Unlike the Western evolution of intellectual and cultural ac­
tivities, in which the geographical center has moved from one
place to another since Babylonian times, China has remained
central (and the location of its capital irrelevant to this cosmo­
logical centrality) in the East Asian tradition since the first mil­
lennium B. C. In this respect as well as in those already dis­

2 Samuel L. Macey, “ Literary Images of Progress: T he Fate of an Idea,” J. T.

Fraser, N . Lawrence, and F. C . H aber (eds.) Time, Space, and Society in
China and the West (U niversity of Massachusetts Press, 1986) p. 93ff.
cussed, the Chinese sense of history and progress differs radi­
cally from that in the European tradition.
The Chinese experienced slow continuous progress over
time in one geographical location, as evidenced most clearly in
the increase of astronomical precision. Instead of the spatial
progress characteristic of the Western tradition, the Chinese
have nurtured a sense of history that has let their linear tempo­
ral progress coexist with the older cosmological notion of
cyclic recurrence.
In that intellectual climate, China became the home of one
of the greatest historiographical traditions, in which history
provided a paradigm for scholarship.3 This provides quite a
contrast with the medieval European scholastics, who ignored
history in search of eternal, invariable Truth.

The Japanese Variation on the Chinese Paradigm

In China bureaucratic inertia played a role in maintaining a

sense of continuous history, but the Japanese lacked such for­
mal, rigid institutions. Japanese intellectuals could thus flexi­
bly accept change originating inside or outside their national
boundaries.
I have mentioned earlier in this article the thirteenth-centu­
ry Chinese notion of a secular change in year length. Although
it was eventually abandoned in China, Japanese astronomers in
the late seventeenth century revived it, on the assumption that
such a minute quantity must have been based on exceedingly
precise observations. In the late eighteenth century, Japanese
astronomers extended this idea of celestial change to every as­
tronomical parameter and adopted it for some time in their
official calendar.

3 Joseph Needham, “Tim e and Knowledge in China and the W est,” in J.T.
Fraser (ed.), The Voices o f Time, reprinted in Needham, The G rand Titra­
tion: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen and Unwin,
1965).
 Ogiu Sorai (1666-1728), a leading Japanese Confucian
scholar, supported the idea of celestial change, claiming that
“heaven and earth, sun and moon are living bodies.” Since
heavenly bodies are organic, they should be subject to inces­
sant change. There can be nothing like eternal truth.4

Japanese Recognition of Progress

During the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, the Japanese

were making their own judgments about whether, on the
whole, things Chinese or Western were better. In medicine,
which concerned and interested everyone, there was no obvi­
ous basis for judging the superiority of one over the other, and
in clinical practice eclecticism and complementarity prevailed.
On the other hand, astronomy offered objective standards for
assessing the two cultures, such as precision in predicting of
eclipses.
Thus, Japanese astronomers were shocked in the early eigh­
teenth century, when they noticed that the Chinese had
adopted Western parameters and observational values already
in the mid-seventeenth century. This discovery came late be­
cause of the shogunate’s seclusion policy. Once Japanese sci­
entists realized what progress had been made in Western astro­
nomical precision, they without further ado abandoned the
Chinese paradigm for the Western one.
They made this fateful shift of allegiance solely on the
grounds of astronomical precision. Their recognition of West­
ern superiority over the Chinese was gradually extended to
other fields science. Some, of course, unaccustomed to the no­
tion of rapid progress or unwilling to value a culture on such
narrow criteria, demurred on the grounds that since the pa­

4 Shigeru Nakayama, “Japanese Scientific T hought,” Dictionary o f Scientific

Biography, XV, (Scribners, 1978) pp. 731-2.
rameters of Western astronomy change, they cannot be reli­
able.

Progress of Normal Science Development

As indicated in the above, progress is a characteristic of normal

science (in Thomas Kuhn’s original sense). The precision of
astronomical observations is a paradigmatic example of pro­
gress. N o scientific revolution is required to establish its fun­
damental criterion: “the better the precision, the more valu­
able.” That simple value system has survived since the begin­
ning of astronomy.
One does not have to be a scientist to conclude from Kuhn’s
analysis in The Structure o f Scientific Revolutions that scien­
tific progress cannot be permanent, for revolutions change the
value system that defined progress. Only those engaged in re­
search on a given line of normal science will find it progressive.
It does not appear to be progress for those who do not share
the same value system.
Laymen recognize progress in more materialistic terms, gen­
erally judging it by technological elaboration. The precision of
machine tools is as basic as astronomical precision was for
early scientists. In the modern world, technological precision
is often derived from scientific precision. Hence educated peo­
ple are persuaded that technological progress is based on scien­
tific progress.
When we consider the intermediate technologies prevalent
in nineteenth-century non-European development, we can no
longer apply such a simple value system as mechanical preci­
sion. At this point, the value of linear progress has to be re­
placed with appropriateness to the circumstances in which a
multi-valued technological system is at work.
 Proliferation rather than One-Dimensional Progress

A society or community that depends on a professionalized

and narrowly defined paradigm may appear from its own
point of view to be progressing. Those who believe in progress
come to depend on one-dimensional measures. To those who
do not share their value system such a claim is nonsense. For
instance, applying a simple technological yardstick, Japanese
ceramics like teabowls, which did not evolve handles, remain
functionally premodern, primitive and hence inferior, com­
pared with those produced in Islamic and Western culture.
The orthogenetic notion of progress turns out to be ridicu­
lous when brought to bear on complex matters such as arts and
crafts, where the diversity of values rules out facile appraisals
of superiority.
Archaeologists prove that primitive artifacts proliferate as
they evolve in different climate and geographical settings. In
modern market-oriented production, however, advanced tech­
nology can endlessly create demand by junking its predeces­
sors as obsolete. Modern capitalistic production and open
market economies sacrifice convenience, amenity and fit to lo­
cal environment in the name of progress.
If cultural proliferation cannot be called progress, then the
idea of progress remains useful only in a very limited sense,
that is, to replace the preceding with the new one on some
simple criterion of value. An obvious example is the measure
of central processing unit speed in computers, which leads to
an announcement every six or nine months that what recently
became the latest and most advanced computer is now obso­
lete.
The increasingly predominant way of defining progress, re­
gardless of how much effort goes into it, cannot be convinc­
ingly applied to more complex systems that depend on plural
values and human needs. Although the language used in adver­
tising fashions in clothing is larded with assertions about pro­
gress, no aspect of modern industry is more cyclical and de­
pendent on rummaging in the past.
 The modern world has seen the growth of such simplistic
paradigms in a good number; many, independent of each other
and some contradicting each other. In sum, it may appear that
a modern multi-paradigmatic society is progressing, when a
particular component paradigm makes its own progress.

Progress of Military Technology

The next example of one-dimensional progress was the devel­

opment of modern military technology, in which the measure­
ment of progress is made with a simple yardstick: that which
wins. The Japanese state of mind was perhaps flexible enough
to accept the Western notion of progress. But the threat of the
Western subjugation in the middle of nineteenth century re­
duced the basis of such judgments to the simple criterion of
progress and superiority in military technology. The value
system of Western imperialism, rather than the philosophy of
enlightenment, became the key to future.
The first impression that Western progress made on alert
samurais came from news of the Opium War of the 1840s in
China. For ordinary Japanese, it was the American gunboats
anchored in Tokyo Bay in 1853. Japanese judged correctly that
the moral and ethical progress of mankind in the mode of
Condorcet was beside the point. That notion of progress was
for those confident of victory. Asians, understanding that such
victories would make them losers, faced it with mixed feelings.
It took until the 1870s before Japanese intellectuals, and
Westernization-oriented government as well, recognized Con-
dorcetian progress lay in the background of Western military
superiority. The Chinese were slower to appreciate this pro­
cess. The Japanese word for “progress” was coined from
Neo-Confucian antecedents and was soon adapted into the
Chinese language.
Japanese intellectuals eventually distinguished the imperial­
istic interest of nation states from individual human nature.
Before that point, the early impression of military progress
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was so predominant, among Japanese as among other non­
Western peoples, that when they contemplated the faith of the
Enlightenment they were overwhelmed by a sense of its built-
in contradictions.
I conclude this section with these reflections that progress
can be measured only in simple matters as astronomical preci­
sion, technological precision of machine tools, and military de­
structiveness. It has played no historic role in such matters as
the ethical and moral perfection of human society as well as
individuals.

Conclusion: Darwinian vs. Condorcetian Progress

I have pointed out that in the nineteenth-century military su­

periority impressed the value of progress on non-Western
people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Chinese
and Japanese specialists and intellectuals had recognized West­
ern superiority solely in astronomical precision and, in Japan
alone, in anatomy (which is not the same as medical practice).
They pointedly did not generalize from the technical domain
to others they valued more, such as moral philosophy.
For the Chinese, military superiority became the measure of
progress during the period of hostilities in the 1840s. People
had good reason to abandon the older criterion of scientific
precision as they strove, for the sake of survival, to catch up
with rapid Western advances in the manufacture of firearms
and the construction of warships.
The Japanese, by comparing Chinese and Western astron­
omy, had acknowledged Western superiority in the early eigh­
teenth century. News in the mid-nineteenth century prompted
the samurai class (which had abandoned firearms in the seven­
teenth century and had practically no experience of military
action since then) to master the art of artillery for the defense
of their country. Those early leaders must have had sleepless
nights for the “struggle for existence,” a Social Darwinian
term.
 With the change of political regime in 1868, the new
Japanese government and modernizing intellectuals began to
Westernize in earnest, as a matter of state policy, and since
then European enlightenment philosophy has played a certain
role in the ideology that supported this effort. When these re­
formists coined a Japanese word for progress, what they had in
mind was not the ideals of Condorcet. They were simply
adapting for local purposes the nationalistic Social Darwinian
version of progress that social and political propagandists in
Europe had created out of Darwinism. The Japanese thus al­
ways measured progress by comparison with the West, first in
military superiority in the prewar period and in material
wealth in postwar time. “Progress or perish” and “Progress for
survival” became their state-authorized slogans. The progress
of human nature, its ethical and moral character, played no
part in this calculus.
Even after the high economic growth of the 1960’s, the
Japanese government and industry sectors seem not to be lib­
erated from the paranoia of Darwinian progress.
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 Political Progress: Reality or Illusion?

The view that there might be social and political progress is

relatively recent. Admittedly, in Ancient Rome or in Renais­
sance Italy, the idea of progress in human societies was some­
times put forward; but the bulk of the population continued to
live on the basis of ‘ancestral traditions’. Political theorists also
occasionally referred to progress, but this was rare or some­
what twisted. One can argue that, for Hobbes, for instance,
there is progress in the notion that the ‘Sovereign’ can enable
us to overcome the ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ character of the
state of nature. Only with Locke does the idea begin to prevail
that society might genuinely ‘improve’ politically. In reality,
the true take-off of the idea of progress was in the middle of
the eighteenth century with the publication of the Encyclope­
dia.
After the hiatus of the French Revoulution and of the
Napoleonic wars, during which the idea that there might be
political progress was seriously undermined, an era of opti­
mism began. The industrial revolution led to massive changes
in modes of living from which all gradually benefitted, in the
West at least. Social progress became then closely linked to
technical and economic change. The great exhibitions of the
second half of the nineteenth century, from that of 1851 in
London onwards, were monuments to the idea that hu­
mankind was from now on moving to a better future.
Social progress became translated into political progress.
The ideas of liberty and democracy had existed for a long time;
but they were more symbols or ‘utopias’, as the sixteenth cen­
tury English thinker, Thomas More, had said. These utopias
seemed on the verge of becoming reality, if not in Europe,
since the French revolution had turned sour and the 1848 rev­
olutions had been defeated, but in America where many were
able to implement their ‘progressive’ ideas and where, in gen­
eral, the political system was, from the presidency of Jackson
in the 1830s, ‘democratic’. Old Europe itself was in turn to
adopt gradually some of the ideas of the New World.
This optimistic trend ended with the First World War dur­
ing and after which the idea of social and political progress
appeared once more to be an illusion: the dictatorships in­
stalled in the 1920s and 1930s in Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain,
and other European countries were indeed more brutal than
anything which had been seen before in Europe. Could one
talk about political progress when such deeds as the extermi­
nation of Jews were taking place on the Continent?
Yet, within a decade or so, optimism returned. With the end
of the Second World War and the victory of the democracies, a
new opportunity for political ‘progress’ seemed to open up,
the United Nations being the symbol of this new hope. O pti­
mism was also fuelled by the gradual end of colonialism and
the emergence of ‘new’ countries, which appeared to begin a
fresh start, as had been the case in the United States in the late
eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, it became widely recognised that improvements
in what was to be known as the Third World entailed pro­
found economic and social changes in agriculture, industry,
education, health, and welfare. Such changes were labelled eco­
nomic and social ‘development’, the new and more modern
name given to ‘progress’: a parallel progress or ‘development’
seemed necessary and possible in the political sphere. Devel­
opment was indeed regarded as a comprehensive process
which should not be divided into compartments: improve­
ments in one aspect of the society - political, social, or eco­
nomic - depended on improvements in all the others.
There was also much ground for pessimism. There was war
and destruction in many parts of the globe, if not in Europe;
there were ruthless dictatorships in Eastern Europe and in
many of the new countries about which there had been great
hopes. Even when many dictatorships fell at the end of the
1980s, wars erupted in some cases in their place. It seemed to
be a H obson’s choice between an iron grip and a brutal ‘state
of nature’; was Hobbes in fact right?
Thus the question whether there is political progress can
seriously be raised. Is there simply see-sawing, periods of
‘good government’ alternating with periods of ‘bad govern­
ment’? This is the obviously the main problem. There is an­
other, however: as the matter of progress or ‘development’ was
beginning to be studied by large numbers of social and politi­
cal scientists, these discovered that at least political develop­
ment was difficult to circumscribe and to define. Was political
progress democracy or national independence? What if there
was independence and no democracy? One author, L.W. Pye,
indeed found no less than ten different bases fo r political devel­
opment, ranging from mass mobilisation to the operation of
the State and from the politics of industrial societies to stable
and orderly change; although he then proceeded to look for a
comprehensive ‘syndrome’ in order to bring these approaches
under a common umbrella, it was rather worrying for the in­
tellectual solidity of the concept that there should be so many
views about what it meant (Pye, 1966, 31-48). Hence a major
contradiction: everyone wished to improve society, including
its political aspects, but no one seemed to be able to agree on
what ‘improving politics’ could entail.
Pessimism might then have to return, both because there
might be little progress or none at all and because we have to
say that we do not know what political progress might mean,
although the man in the street would find it incomprehensible
that we should have to leave the matter unsolved in this way.
Indeed, it seems that, on some matters at least, the answer is
straightforward: is it not better to have the United Nations
than not to have that organisation? Is it not better at least to
dream of improving human rights than not to do so? Could it
not even be argued that there is political progress in the sheer
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fact that we do regard a better respect for human rights a goal
to strive towards?
Before stating that we are at an impasse, however, we need
surely to examine this ‘impasse’ somewhat more closely. To
do so, we need to make a rather long detour before returning
to the substance of progress. We need first to identify the
points which raise controversy or lead to differences in ap­
proach: we will see that these points are related both to ques­
tions o f political values and to questions o f political and adm in­
istrative arrangements. We will therefore then look succes­
sively at the relationship between these arrangements and po­
litical progress and at the way in which questions of political
values markedly complicate the analysis. We will then ask
whether in the end there is at least a partial answer to the fun­
damental question: is political progress a reality or an illusion?

I. W hy it is difficult to circumscribe the concept of

political progress

1. The idea o f political progress or developm ent seems

fundam entally subjective

By political progress or development we mean change in a

‘positive’ direction. Change can be described, although there
may be problems about its measurement; what causes diffi­
culty is the assessment o f w hat is ‘positive ’ or ‘negative’ change,
as such an assessment depends on having previously deter­
mined what makes ‘good politics’. The difficulty starts at this
point: it is not that each one of us does not know what ‘good
politics’ is; it is that it seems impossible to find a definition to
which all will agree. The appreciation whether a political sys­
tem or regime is good or not and whether a change is an im­
provement or not is a value judgem ent : what is good for one
may not be good for another. Witness the current controver­
sies over muslim fundamentalism: what is good on the N orth-
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ern side of the Mediterranean may not be good on the South­
ern side. Must of us tend to think that liberal democracy is a
‘good thing’ but many did not think so in the past and many
still do not think so. This explains why political theorists have
searched and continue to search for the ‘good society’. Every
theorist is entitled to renew the search without being bound by
the conclusions of others.
If this is the case, should one simply refuse to give a general
definition of political development? This is impractical, how­
ever, since society exists and political activity takes place in the
society. As we said, the man in the street assumes that we have
a view and is angry with us if we cannot guide him. Whether
we can define political development or not, society will have
to do it: there will be goals and there will be images of what
constitutes good politics. There is thus an ‘existential’ need for
an operational definition of political progress or development,
a definition valid at least for the immediate future and for a
given society. Political theorists are not just entitled to con­
tinue to search for a solution: they have to do so, because soci­
ety needs to have some practical notion of what political ‘pro­
gress’ entails.
Let us therefore see, following Pye, what kinds of defini­
tions have been given of political development and whether we
can at least discover some relatively firm elements. These defi­
nitions fall into three groups. The first relates political devel­
opment to social and economic developm ent by suggesting that
political development is concerned with the politics of indus­
trial societies or with a ‘multidimensional process of social
change’; a second group is concerned with what might be
called the organisation o f the political system by referring to
nation-building and to administrative structures; the third
links development to political values, such as mass mobilisa­
tion, the relationship between mobilisation and power, and the
movement towards democracy (Pye, 1966: 45-8).
 2. Political developm ent and socio-economic developm ent

Definitions of the first group, which relate political develop­

ment to social and economic development, are simple, but
seem rather unrewarding. They assume that we know what
social and economic development is: in the 1960s and the early
1970s at least, social scientists believed that they did, they even
thought that few measurement problems existed, as economic
development could be assessed by such means as levels and
distributions of incomes and extent of industrialisation, while
social development could be traced through levels of educa­
tional and social services, all of which seemed eminently mea­
surable and were indeed measured by many U N agencies en­
gaged in collecting and publishing the relevant data. O n the
other hand, political development was obviously more diffi­
cult to grasp per se: it was not clear what data would have to be
collected. However, as politics is the process by which collec­
tive decisions are taken and collective policies are made, it
seemed justifiable to assess the ‘worth’ of politics by looking at
these decisions and policies. This meant looking primarily at
economic and social policies. It would seem to follow that
there was political development where one could trace the ex­
istence of economic and social development.
Yet such an approach is insufficient and therefore unsatis­
factory. It tells us about the outcomes, but it has nothing to
say about the means. Much of politics is about means, how­
ever. For instance, we do not know whether these social and
economic policies have been achieved by ruthless imposition
or by agreement. Would not many say that there is political
progress if agreement is preferred to imposition? Moreover,
we do not know whether the results are obtained efficiently,
there may have been wasteful bureaucratic procedures and
there may also have been corruption. Thus it is also impossible
to discover by such a method the political conditions which
could favour economic and social progress. Political progress,
if it exists, has to be studied directly.
 3. Political progress as the organisation o f the political system

Yet, as soon as we wish to do so, we find ourselves confronted

with two profoundly different routes to follow. One of these
routes consists in looking at efficiency and to begin with at the
efficiency of the State machinery. It seems at least prima facie
reasonable to look in this direction as ‘progress’ in society is
likely to depend on ‘progress’ in the administrative sphere.
Admittedly, it is difficult to describe, let alone quantify, bu­
reaucratic efficiency, but it seems at least possible to begin to
do so. However, if we move in this direction, we should not
consider just the bureaucracy. Political decision-making re­
sults from activities taking place within many types of political
institutions, such as groups, parties, parliaments, executives,
alongside bureaucracies. Inefficiency in any one of them
should therefore result in lack of political development. One
has therefore to enlarge the search and see political progress as
relating to the way in which policies of all kinds are made,
from the moment they are conceived to the moment in which
they are fully implemented, in and by all types of institutions.
By enlarging the inquiry in this way, we have become more
realistic about assessing efficiency, but the practical problems
of measurement become immense: we would have for instance
to assess whether a political party was ‘efficient’ or not in pro­
moting a given policy at a given point in time; this entails pass­
ing judgements on such matters as the extent to which the
population is ‘ripe’ for the policy, whether it would ‘cost’ too
much in terms of money and energy to undertake such a move,
etc. Comparisons across countries may help to an extent; but
the magnitude of the practical problem is obvious. Moreover,
we also begin to move away from efficiency stricto sensu.
While considering what groups, parties, parliaments, or execu­
tives do, we have to ask also why these institutions exist and
how they interact. We have therefore to pass judgments on the
general value of these institutions: we move from the realm of
means to enter that of norms.
 4. Political developm ent as the implementation o f
political values

This is probably the reason why many students of political

development have opted for another route, the one which
takes into account values such as mobilisation and democracy.
However, as we stated earlier, such definitions are based on
subjective standpoints. While one observer may regard pro­
gress as related to democracy, another may claim that a less
open society would lead to greater progress. We seem to have
run full circle: relatively simple and down-to-earth approaches
are relatively objective, but they apprehend one aspect of the
problem only, on the other hand, more comprehensive ap­
proaches seem to depend entirely on the personal position of
the observer. N or does a ‘syndrome’ taking all these ap­
proaches together truly help, as the problem of value assess­
ment is not resolved since values are one element of the analy-

A different solution has therefore to be found. If values play

a major part in the determination of the good society, what
must be explored is whether there may be some common
ground below the subjectivity of norms and values. Mean­
while, it is also worth exploring the part which all political and
administrative institutions (and not merely bureaucracies) play
in rendering more efficient the processes of decision- and
policy-making. After having established how far we can go by
examining the part played by institutions in enabling societies
to progress politically, we will need to return to values and see
whether we can at least partly overcome the problem of indi­
vidual subjectivity.

II. Political progress measured by the capacity and efficiency

of political institutions

Political progress unquestionably depends, in part at least, on

the capacity and efficiency of political institutions; but, while
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we think we know what we mean when we refer to a particular
institution’s being efficient, there are severe problems of mea­
surement. There are indeed two broad sets of problems. First,
we have to see whether we can discover criteria enabling us to
decide what makes each structure efficient, second, we have to
discover means of determining the efficiency of all the institu­
tions taken together.

1. What m akes a structure efficient ?

There is no simple way of describing, let alone measuring in­

stitutional efficiency. One obviously important factor is con­
stituted by the degree of ‘institutionalisation’. Institutions
would seem to be more efficient if they operate more smooth­
ly, if there are fewer difficulties about the procedures on the
basis of which they are run, and if these procedures are clear.
The concept of institutionalisation attempts to summarise
these points: it has been defined by Huntington as “the pro­
cess by which organisations and procedures acquire value and
stability” (Huntington, 1968; 12). In the detailed analysis
which he then conducts, Huntington discovers four dimen­
sions along which institutions can be located and which can
help to determine their degree of institutionalisation. Institu­
tions have to be assessed, he states, by the extent to which they
are ‘adaptable’ rather than ‘rigid’, ‘complex’ rather than ‘sim­
ple’, ‘autonomous’ rather than ‘subordinated’, and ‘coherent’
rather than ‘disunited’ (Huntington, 1968; 13-24).
It is arguable as to whether one should conclude, following
Huntington, that the highest possible degree of institutionali­
sation is always to be found at the polar extremes of these four
dimensions. There may be a trade-off between the four vari­
ables: ‘adaptability’ may affect the degree of ‘coherence’, it is
probably better to have some ‘disunity’ if this means a lower
level of ‘rigidity’. However, to the extent that the analysis ap­
plies to each institution, it provides guidelines which are both
theoretically rewarding and practically useful. One can at least
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obtain, with respect to of each institution, an impression of
what constitutes ‘progress’ or ‘development’. At this stage at
least, this is not more than an impression: precise measurement
is out of the question; but we may be able to say, with respect
to a given institution, that there is, or is not, ‘progress’.

2. Efficiency at the level o f the w hole political system:

differentiation and autonomy

We must assess progress across the whole political system,

however. This is a markedly more difficult task. It cannot be
achieved merely by summing, so to speak, the results obtained
for the different institutions which compose the political sys­
tem, an operation which would of course be extremely long if
it were possible. Yet, even if it were possible, it would not be
satisfactory. A high level o f institutionalisation o f each institu­
tion may not result in the w hole political system’s being effi­
cient. For instance, interests groups may be so numerous and
so well-developed that the system cannot cope (a situation
which has sometimes been described as one of political over­
load) (Rose, 1980). Admittedly, this means that the parties, the
parliament, the government, or the bureaucracy are not then
truly adapted to each other; but such a conclusion entails that
we look at the ‘relative progress’ of all the political institutions
jointly and in particular at the interconnections among these
institutions.
Such a task is obviously difficult, so difficult indeed that it
seems unrealistic to hope for an assessment of what political
progress consists of in practice by going along this route. Two
criteria have been suggested, admittedly: they are constituted
by the level of differentiation and the extent of autonomy of
institutions (Almond and Powell, 1966: 306-14). In this view,
the efficiency of the whole system is considered to be posi­
tively related to these two characteristics. The first of these
bears some similarity with the idea of the division of labour
which, since Durkheim, has been regarded as a characteristic
of ‘advanced’ societies (Durkheim, 1953: 39-49); empirical evi­
dence indeed suggests that there is greater differentiation of
institutions and groups in the societies which are less tradi­
tional. The second criterion is related to one of the dimensions
mentioned by Huntington since he views ‘autonomy’ as evi­
dence of institutionalisation, as we saw (Huntington, 1968:
12). It seems permissible to claim that, where there are a large
number of autonomous structures, there is at least potential
for greater political development.

3. Do the differentiation and the autonomy o f institutions

constitute indicators o f efficiency and therefore o f progress

While these criteria appear intuitively to be broadly related to

the efficiency of the political system, they are far from being
truly satisfactory. It is clearly not axiomatic that the relation­
ship between them and political progress is linear. A vast num­
ber of highly differentiated and autonomous institutions may
not render the system necessarily more efficient than a smaller
number of institutions incorporating within themselves a vari­
ety of standpoints and approaches. For instance, in some
countries, parties and interest groups are quite independent of
each other: this is the case in particular in the United States. In
other countries, Socialist and Christian parties are related to a
series of groups, such as trade unions, cooperatives, etc. It is
not clear that the first type of arrangement necessarily consti­
tutes ‘progress’ by comparison with the second.
If the relationship between differentiation and autonomy,
on the one hand, and the overall efficiency of the political sys­
tem, on the other, is not linear, then we do have to determine
what this relationship is, whether it is bell- or U-shaped, for
instance. Consider the question of decentralisation: what is
typically suggested is not that that maximum efficiency is
achieved where there is ‘total’ decentralisation (which must
mean the total absence of linkage) but at some intermediate
position between the two extremes. We believe generally that
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the relationship between the efficiency of an institution and
decentralisation is therefore bell-shaped. Something along
these lines might be hypothesised about the whole political
system, from which it would follow that, once we take all the
institutions together, the shape of the curve is likely to be
highly complex.
However, if we cannot prove that there is a linear relation­
ship between institutional differentiation and autonomy, on
the one hand, and the efficiency of the political system, on the
other, (indeed if we have some reasons to doubt that the rela­
tionship is linear), we simply cannot postulate that these two
criteria lead necessarily to political progress. We have therefore
to stop at this point and wait until empirical evidence provides
at least an element of proof. Some have preferred not to wait,
however: they seem to have held the view that a linear rela­
tionship does exist, as if the autonomy of institutions, a situa­
tion which is typically translated in terms of the ‘pluralism’ of
the society, was axiomatically a ‘good thing’: on this basis lib­
eral democratic regimes would necessarily constitute progress
compared to other regimes. A statement of this kind takes us
away from the realm of the analysis of institutional efficiency
and brings us into the realm of preferences, however: we have
moved to asserting our values. If we are to suggest that West­
ern liberal democracies are the most politically developed poli­
ties, it is more honest to state this openly - and recognise that
this statement is based on a value judgment - than to claim
that the developed character of these political systems stems
from ‘objective’ characteristics of the configuration of institu­
tions (Chilcote, 1981: 178-82).

III. From the analysis of institutions to the analysis of values

It is therefore better at this point to turn to the examination of

the role of values in determining what is political progress. In­
stitutions alone cannot provide the basis for a satisfactory defi­
nition, even if their capacity and their efficiency forms part of
that definition. Yet if we turn to values, however, we seem to
have to conclude that there cannot be a single conception of
political progress to which all will agree: there will be many
views as to what these goals of the polity may be. Thus it is not
permissible to state that political development is ‘mass mobili­
sation and participation’ or ‘the building of democracy’, or
even ‘stability and orderly change’ as some have suggested ac­
cording to Pye’s analysis (Pye, 1966: 39-42); nor is it permissi­
ble to state categorically that the political development ‘syn­
drome’ includes the striving towards ‘equality’, as Pye sug­
gests (Pye, 1966: 45-6). We are here in the realm of values and
it is unwarranted to claim that these values are the values
which all have to recognise as characterising a ‘good’ society
(Jackson and Stein, 1971: 32-4).

1. The value-laden character o f the concept o f political

developm ent or progress

In the 1960s, many political scientists writing about political

development were satisfied with the view that liberal democra­
cies were superior, that they constituted political progress. In
the 1970s, this idea was strongly challenged and many theo­
rists came to the conclusion that each society, each individual
even, can have a different conception of the ‘good’ society and
that the concept of political progress could not be other than
subjective. New development theories emerged which sug­
gested that the alleged superiority of liberal democracies was
the product of the exploitation of the Third World by the
West; the ‘progress’ achieved by liberal democracies was ob­
tained by maintaining other parts of the world in a form of
economic dependency. To this was to be added an ideological
dependency by which non-Western States were subjected to
the repeated claim that the Western model of government was
politically superior (Wallerstein, 1979; Chilcote, 1981:
296-312).
 This view connected political development closely to eco­
nomic power. Indeed, supporters of Western liberal democra­
cies sometimes came to the same conclusion, since they typi­
cally claimed and gave empirical data to support this claim -
that liberal democracy flourished primarily where living stan­
dards were high (Lipset, 1983 ed.: 31-45; Cutright, 1963:
569-82). Economic and social development seemed to be the
key element, political development was merely a ‘superstruc­
ture’, an inevitable consequence.
Yet, in reality, ‘developmentalists’ faced serious difficulties
with this interpretation of society, for they needed to establish
the primacy of political development if they were to break the
vicious circle in which they saw Third World societies impris­
oned. The way out, somewhat illogically, consisted in empha­
sising the value basis of development, as if, despite the primacy
of the economic ‘substructure’, societies could none the less
decide on the basis of which political norms they were to be
organised.

2. The concept o f socio-economic developm ent

or progress is also value-laden, hut there is often agreem ent
on socio-economic goals.

Such an approach clearly reinforced the view that there could

not be agreement on what constitutes political development
and that one’s assessment in the matter depended entirely on
one’s ideological preferences. Yet it is questionable as to
whether this conclusion is truly warranted.
To begin with, it is worth examining the apparent contrast
between the characteristics of the concept of social and eco­
nomic progress and those of the concept of political progress.
O n the surface, while the concept of political progress appears
based on subjective standpoints, the concept of social and eco­
nomic development does not seem to raise the same funda­
mental difficulties and even appears rather uncontentious. Is it,
then, that economic and social development is not based on
value judgements? This is not the case; economic and social
progress may be more easily measurable, in some of its aspects,
than political progress, but, like political progress, it is based
on values. For instance, it is neither axiomatic nor logically
demonstrable that higher incomes per capita are ‘progress’, let
alone that industrialisation or the use of sophisticated machin­
ery are ‘progress’, nor is it even axiomatic that more education
or more social services are ‘progress’.
These questions are not only debatable, they are indeed de­
bated; they were often hotly debated in the past and some of
them have come to be discussed, in a renewed manner, since
the 1970s and 1980s, as a result both of the increased strength
of ‘environmentalist ideas’ and of the spread of conservative
views about the State and the individual. The development of
‘green’ movements and parties since the 1970s, especially in
Western liberal democracies, has led to a strong questioning of
the worth of economic and even conventional social develop­
ment. The idea of ‘rolling back the State’ which characterised
also the policies of a number of Western liberal democracies,
such as Britain and the United States, had also the effect of
leading to a questioning of the worth of conventional eco­
nomic and social progress. These points are debated because
they are based on value judgments as is participation or equal­
ity in the context of political progress.
If the concepts of economic and social progress depend on
value judgements about the ‘good’ society, why do these con­
cepts not encounter the same difficulties as the concept of po­
litical progress? There are two reasons for the difference. The
first is somewhat peripheral but it nonetheless plays some part:
because economic and social development is more easily mea­
surable in many of its aspects, there is in practice less scope for
argument as to what, from a concrete point of view, might
constitute progress. As a matter of fact, even the question of
the measurement of economic and social development has
tended to be raised increasingly. The comparison of the per
capita G N P of diverse countries, for instance, is recognised to
be highly controversial. Yet, as countries can be ranked in
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terms of incomes per capita or of educational attainment while
it is not possible to do so with respect to the level of institu­
tionalisation of parties or parliaments, the concept of eco­
nomic and social progress appears more objective.
Second, the values underlying of economic and social devel­
opment, though theoretically debatable, are debated to a lim­
ited extent only, there is a higher degree of agreement on
socio-economic values than on political values. Few believe, let
alone state (at any rate at present) that society should not edu­
cate its members or take care of the health of its citizens; few
believe or state that levels of incomes among the mass of the
population should be low. Meanwhile, many believe and in­
deed state that levels of political participation should not be
high and that freedoms should be restricted.
As a matter of fact, it is so manifest that there is a debate on
social and economic issues that political systems can be distin­
guished and are indeed distinguished according to their sub­
stantive goals: some countries adopt conservative policies, oth­
ers pursue progressive policies. Yet, alongside these distinc­
tions, there is also broad agreement about a number of ‘basic’
social and economic values. There is disagreement on levels of
equality with respect to property distribution and indeed in­
come distribution admittedly, but aspects of social life, such as
those relating to health and to an extent education, as well as
(though to a lesser extent) some aspects of economic life, such
as the increased use of mechanical power instead of human
physical force, are broadly accepted.

3. An intersubjective approach to political developm ent

The point here is not to assess to what extent there is a debate

about which values underlie the idea of economic and social
progress. It is to point out that a lower or narrower amount of
disagreement with respect to these values does not stem from a
difference in kind with the concept of political progress, but
merely from a difference of degree. It is not that economic and
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social development can be defined in an objective manner
while political development must depend on subjective assess­
ment. all aspects of development are based on subjective as­
sessments. What makes economic and social development ap­
parently easier to handle is that the level of intersubjective
agreem ent is appreciably higher - at least ostensibly (Turner,
1986: 188; 328).
Given that the determination of what constitutes progress
depends on a high level of consensus, on shared beliefs, on
intersubjective agreement, and not on the recognition of an
objective reality, it becomes important to examine whether, as
in the case of economic and social development, a broad inter­
subjective base can be found for the concept of political pro­
gress as well. The aim is not to discover a ‘syndrome’ in which
the institutional aspects would, so to speak, reduce the part
played by values in the idea of political progress; it is to see
whether some values are sufficiently broadly held in the politi­
cal sphere to form a basis for an intersubjective approach to
the concept.
It is manifestly impossible to discover such values at the
level of ideological standpoints which are widely adopted in
specific regimes, such as equality, democracy, or ‘orderly
change’ (Pye, 1966: 29-48). These concepts are the object of
too many public and private debates. There are, on the other
hand, some deeper characteristics of politics which might ap­
pear to the large majority - if not all - as ‘positive’. Hobbes
stated a characteristic which seems of this type, the right to
defend one’s life (Hobbes, 1651; Pt I, Ch 14). Could one not
go somewhat further, by being positive rather than negative
and, building on H obbes’ premise, consider as ‘inalienable’
and universally ‘valuable’ the right to strive, the right to
achieve, a view which is perhaps not too far from the right to
‘happiness’ ?
 4. Political developm ent as the ‘expansion o f choice
opportunities ’

Politics is about collective decision-making and policy making.

Policy-making implies choosing among all possible policies,
there have to be mechanisms limiting the number of choices, in
terms of goods, services, as well as values, which the society
can process at a given moment. Does it not therefore follow
that improvement, development, progress would consist in in­
creasing the number and the quality of the choices which are
made in the society? If human beings have a right to achieve
and at least to strive, this surely means that a better society is
one in which all human beings are better able to achieve and at
least to strive; this means that a better society is one in which
decision-making and policy-making open up broader choices
to the members of the society.
This conception of development or progress is the one
which D .E. Apter proposes in his Choice and the Politics o f
Allocation when he states that development is the “expansion
of choice opportunities,” a notion which pertains particularly
to politics (Apter, 1973: 6). Such an approach is in the realm of
values, but it is almost certainly a value which can be regarded
as intersubjective since it is likely to carry broad agreement.
This does.not mean that there cannot be conflicts about the
concrete manifestations of these ‘choice opportunities’, nor is
it claimed that the view that political progress is related to the
expansion of choice opportunities is universally accepted, es­
pecially if we consider the matter historically, but this ap­
proach is likely to produce a sounder basis for intersubjective
agreement and thus reduce the oppositions which seemed at
one point to make it impossible even to discuss political devel­
opment.
 IV. Is there or isn’t there political progress?

We can now return to the substantive question: is there politi­

cal progress? If so, has there been, in the contemporary world,
a trend towards political progress? We stated at the beginning
of this paper that there were two extreme views, correspond­
ing to different moments during the last 200 years: the opti­
mistic view suggested that there was political progress while
the pessimistic view saw at most a see-sawing, periods of
regress being as long and as deep as periods of progress. In­
deed, for the pessimists, regress can and does take place on the
social and economic plane as well: there may be more educa­
tion, but this education may be used for purposes which are
‘nasty, brutish, and short’; there may be more economic facili­
ties, but this is at the expense of polluting the atmosphere and
slowly disintegrating the planet.
If we limit ourselves to the question of political progress,
three remarks can be made. These help to provide some ele­
ments towards a solution of the debate, although they are still
tentative and do not provide means, as yet at least, of measur­
ing and even assessing precisely the extent to which there is or
has been political progress.

1. Political progress and the efficiency o f the political system

The first remark concerns the efficiency aspect of political pro­

gress, that is to say the extent to which political institutions
can be improved and are in effect improved. It seems justified
to advance the view that there has been some progress in this
respect, but only recently and in a way which is far from uni­
form. The reason that there is progress may indeed be due in
part to the very awareness of the need for efficiency in some at
least of the institutions which compose the political system.
Evaluation o f policym aking and implementing has becom e an
important activity , at least in Western countries: while much of
the work on evaluation probably does not have much impact,
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at any rate as yet, some work probably does. Competition and
imitation also probably play a large and positive part in this
process.
Admittedly, this evaluation is typically at the level of each
institution and in particular at that of the bureaucracy and not
globally at the level of the political system as a whole. As was
noted earlier, progress at the global level is difficult to achieve
(and to assess) since what is needed is a systematic coordina­
tion of efforts, a condition unlikely to be frequently fulfilled, if
at all, especially in a democratic society. However, there is
awareness of the global problem. The views expressed by ob­
servers gradually spread slowly among parts of the public. In
this respect, policy studies are most valuable as they analyse
the decision-making process in a comprehensive manner and
thus help to determine whether there is overall inefficiency
when various institutions work in opposite directions, not just
as a result of a deliberate stand, as may be expected in a democ­
racy, but unwittingly as well. It is perhaps too early to say
whether progress is taking place at the global level, but it is
possible to examine specific processes, and conclusions may be
drawn about these. Indeed, one might even make progress oc­
cur in this way, would it only be because most are likely to
wish to get rid of inefficiencies at least if there are no costs
involved in doing so.

2. Political progress and the expansion o f opportunities:

the opening o f societies

Political progress, as we saw, can be assessed by reference to

the expansion of choice opportunities, this expression is suffi­
ciently broad to provide a basis for intersubjective agreements.
Yet this expression can also provide general guidance as to the
direction in which political values should be going if there is to
be political progress. This direction must surely be that o f an
opening o f political societies.
 In the contemporary world, and indeed throughout the cen­
tury, there has probably be some progress in this direction,
even if there have also been upsets. The m ovem ent towards an
opening o f societies has generally been upward, despite the fact
that there have been some ‘downs’. These ‘downs’ were partic­
ularly marked between 1914 and 1945. What makes it reason­
able to suggest that there is some political progress is the fact
that this gradual opening of societies has taken place succes­
sively on a number of fronts. First, many societies became
open to the ‘working classes’ and their representatives,they
then became increasingly open to women and have also begun
to be open to minority groups. There has also been an opening
to the ‘South’ of the world, not only as a result of the end of
colonialism, but also because at least some of the elites of these
countries take part in processes of discussion on world affairs.
Such an opening is social as well as political. The participa­
tion of women or of minorities in political systems which pre­
viously did not give them much if any voice is in part the con­
sequence of these groups’ being socially more involved and
being regarded as equal on social as well on political terms.
This is an instance of the point which was made earlier and
according to which it is not truly possible to divide ‘develop­
ment’ into a number of wholly separate segments. Clearly, the
opening of societies has ramifications at all levels and in all
aspects. There is therefore, globally, progress in this respect
even if it is neither uniform nor truly universal.

3. Political progress and the stress on negotiation

Political progress apears to take place in another way, namely

in that, by and large, emphasis is being placed increasingly on
negotiation rather than imposition. If one looks broadly at the
history of human relations in the course of the twentieth cen­
tury, despite the hiatusses and in particular despite the hiatus
of the 1914-45 period, the idea that solutions to political prob-
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lems should be obtained by negotiation has markedly gained
ground. This must be regarded as political progress.
One can notice this development, first, at the national level.
In many countries, at least in the West, the idea of ‘consocia-
tionalism’ has made its mark. There has been opposition to
this idea: it has been attacked on the grounds that it led to
stagnation and even corruption. Perhaps it should not be
pushed to extremes and perhaps some form of ‘adversary’ pol­
itics has its value, but, even within the context of adversary
politics, it is generally recognised that it is good for a country
that there should be matters on which all agree, not merely in
terms of procedures, but in terms of substance. Traditionally,
one field in which consensus has been expected to prevail has
been foreign affairs, surely, it is political progress that this
view should prevail. The fact that the main political parties
should come to an agreement on these issues, and possibly
about others as well, must be regarded as a sign that, in some
polities at least, there is political progress.
One can also note developments at the international level ,
despite wars and other forms of conflict. As was pointed out at
the outset, many would regard the very existence of the
United Nations as progress; it is progress compared to the
League of Nations, and the League of Nations was progress
over having nothing at all. There is also political progress as a
result of the development of ‘supranational’ or regional organ­
isations grouping a number of countries coming together not
so much or even not at all in order to fight other countries but
in order to organise better relations among themselves. Indeed,
even military alliances such as N A TO have fostered arrange­
ments going beyond military matters.
There are still many wars, the 1990s have had perhaps more
than their fair share of them. Yet the 1990s have also seen the
beginning of international intervention in order to prevent
civil wars and to stop confrontations between communal
groups within nations. This has to be regarded as political pro­
gress since the purpose is to attempt to expand choice oppor­
tunities for each human group. One cannot quantify the extent
of this progress admittedly; but some progress is occurring.
Furthermore, it seems that, in the process, there may be
greater reflection on and some deepening of intersubjective
views about what political progress might signify.
It would of course be pleasant to be able to assess the extent
to which there is political progress in our societies. Many
would like to be able to say that we are indeed improving, if
not continuously and regularly, at any rate over the long pe­
riod, the way we take our collective decisions; indeed, even if
the world is not improving in this respect, we would certainly
wish to be able to state what direction the world should take in
order to improve political life.
This does not seem possible, however. To begin with, the
concept of political progress itself raises such problems that we
do not really know what constitutes political progress. These
difficulties are unavoidable, because political progress is re­
lated to political values and these are intrinsically contentious
and indeed contested. Yet, as the analysis of the concept pro­
ceeds, some scope seems to emerge for a clarification and per­
haps a narrowing of the disagreements. Moreover, we discover
that all aspects of ‘development’, social and economic, as well
as political, have objective and subjective components which
are linked and even intertwined.
Political progress can to an extent be assessed objectively
through an examination of the efficiency and the capacity of
political institutions and in particular through the determina­
tion of the degree of institutionalisation of these bodies. This is
a difficult task: operationalisation is a distant goal. The prob­
lems posed by the determination of the values which are at the
root of the idea of political progress are at least as severe: but
they do not seem unsurmountable either; if they are directly
confronted, the danger of a wholly subjective assessment re­
cedes and we can come to a clearer understanding of the direc­
tion of change in modern societies.
If we take into account both institutional efficiency and an
intersubjective vision of the ‘good’ society, we are able to de­
termine more firmly than before what the contours of political
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progress can be in the contemporary world. If, with these in­
struments, however rough, we then look at the world around
us, we seem entitled to conclude that some political progress
has been and is taking place. By proceeding in this careful
manner, we therefore discover that we have some ground for
suggesting that, in the contemporary world, there are some
sparks which suggest that political progress may be, in part at
least, reality.

Short bibliography

The number of studies on social, economic,and political devel­

opment are legion. So are those on political development. For
a recent presentation, see J.C . Alexander and P. Sztompka,
eds., Rethinking Progress (1990), Boston, Mass.: Unwin H y­
man.
For a general presentation of the evolution of thinking on
political development, see my Discipline o f Politics (1981), pp.
90-102, London: Butterworth. A more detailed examination
can be found in R.H . Chilcote, Theories o f Com parative Poli­
tics (1981), pp. 271-346, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
The most straightforward description of the problems posed
by political development can be found in L.W. Pye, Aspects of
Political D evelopm ent (1966), Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown &
Co. Two other general analyses of the problem are those of
J.L . Finkle and R.W. Gable, (eds.), Political D evelopm ent and
Social Change (1966), New York, N.Y.: Wiley and of R.J.
Jackson and M.B. Stein, (eds.), Issues in Com parative Politics
(1971), St Martin’s Press. O n the question of ‘overload’ see R.
Rose, (ed.), Challenge to Governance: Studies in O verloaded
Polities (1980) London and Los Angeles: Sage.
There is a large literature on the relationship between social
and economic development, on the one hand, and political de­
velopment, on the other. Two earlier and pioneering studies
only are mentioned here, those of S.M. Lipset in Political Man
(1960, new ed. 1983) London: Heinemann, at pp. 31-45 and of
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P. Cutright on ‘National Political Development’ which can be
found in N.W. Polsby et al. (eds.), Politics and Social Life
(1963) Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, at pp. 569-82.
Analyses of specific aspects of the problem of political de­
velopment can be found in S.P. Huntington, Political Order in
Changing Societies (1968), New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ.
Press, especially in the early chapters. The concept of capabil­
ity has been elaborated and developed in G.A. Almond and
G .B. Powell in Com parative Politics (1966), Boston, Mass.:
Little, Brown & Co, especially towards the end of the volume.
O n Durkheim’s view of the division of labour, see The D ivi­
sion o f L abou r in Society (1933 ed.), New York, N.Y.: Free
Press.
O n the notion of intersubjective agreement, see in particular
P.L. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction o f R eal­
ity (1966), New York, N.Y.: Praeger and J.H . Turner, The
Structure o f Sociological Theory (1986). For a presentation of
what a more intersubjective concept of political development
see D .E. Apter, Choice and the Politics o f Allocation (1973), in
particular the early Chapters. See also R. Falk et al. (eds.), To­
w ard a Just World O rder (1982), Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press.
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 Progress in Philosophy

My title “Progress in Philosophy,” is ambiguous - which suits

me well since I want to deal with the subject matter in two
ways. In the first part I shall be concerned with progress as a
theme within philosophy. Questions of progress have engaged
philosophers in many ways. First of all the very notion of pro­
gress, the idea of progress, is closely linked to central philo­
sophical concepts. But also the questions to what extent and in
what respects there has been progress, or will be progress, have
been much discussed within philosophy. For instance, the very
questions what is to be meant by scientific progress and how it
occurs, if it occurs, are main topics within philosophy of sci­
ence. In the second part of the talk, I shall deal with philo­
sophical progress, i.e., questions about philosophy’s own pro­
gress - in what way, if any, does philosophy make progress. I
shall deal especially with one field of philosophy.

1. The N otion of Progress

The notion of progress is what philosophers call a value con­

cept. Progress has occurred when something has improved,
i.e., when one state of affairs is followed in time by a second
state that is better or more valuable than the first one. It is
common in philosophy to make a distinction between absolute
or intrinsic values, on the one hand, and relative or instrumen­
tal values, on the other hand. Something is of instrumental
value if it is good as means to obtain something else. For in­
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stance, bigger and straighter motor roads help to speed up
transportation, and they have thus instrumental value with re­
spect to that end. How valuable they really are depends, of
course, on the value of speeding up transportation. In contrast,
increased quality of life is of value in itself, it has absolute or
intrinsic value.
Accordingly, we may speak of a piece of intrinsically valu­
able progress when there is an increase in intrinsic value and of
a piece of instrumentally valuable progress or relative progress
with respect to E, when there is an increase in instrumental
value with respect to the end E. A change may of course con­
stitute an intrinsically valuable progress in one respect and a
regress in another respect. I shall then say that it constitutes an
absolute progress, if, on balance, the increase in value out­
weighs the decrease so that on the whole the situation really
has got better.
One may also ask: value fo r whom . I shall therefore also
distinguish between what I shall call global progress and local
progress. Global progress occurs when there is an increase of
value for the whole of humanity and local when there is an
increase for some individual or group of individuals.
If we look at biological evolution, one may perhaps say that
it involves progress in some respects, but it is not meaningful
to try to compare these respects with each other and speak of
an overall progress. In contrast, in human affairs, what really
matters is absolute global progress, what we also could call
real progress. I think that too little attention is paid to progress
in this sense. Clearly it is a notion that is central in moral phi­
losophy and value theory. The question what constitutes real
progress is indeed concerned with what we want to make, or
ought to make of our lives. In spite of the complexity of the
question, I believe that it is possible to make progress with
respect to it. Nevertheless, like so many other people, I shall
leave this question here.
 2. The Myth of Progress

One cause of our neglecting the important questions of real

progress - what counts as real progress and how we achieve
it - may be the belief that progress is the normal course of
events, perhaps even something that occurs with historical ne­
cessity. This belief is what has been called the myth o f progress
by Professor von Wright, whose writings about this issue have
provoked a great and sometimes heated discussion in Finland
and Sweden. The progress that von Wright has in mind is, I
think, absolute global progress.
It is certainly not a myth but a fact that local progress in
many respects takes place in the normal course of events. Lo­
cal progress with respect to increased abilities is something
that all individuals normally experience in the greater parts of
their lives. When we grow very old we are content to keep up
our abilities, but before that we normally expect and experi­
ence individual progress in a great number of respects. The
belief in progress is in this way a natural ingredient in a normal
life, and I would say, it is even an inevitable ingredient in many
of our activities. For instance, we would not be discussing this
subject if we did not believe that it could result in some kind of
progress in our understanding of the idea of progress.
In view of this general experience of progress and given
democracy and the emancipation of mankind, which seems to
allow us to shape our lives as we want, what is more natural
than to expect what I have called absolute and global progress.
This expectation is even more natural when we think of the
growth of science and the great accumulation of knowledge
thanks to institutional and technical inventions! Nevertheless,
one must agree with von Wright that in many ways we seem to
go towards regress rather than progress. One could speak
about the paradox of progress: why is it that the local progress
that occurs in such a great degree in many respects does not
lead to real progress? I shall not try to resolve that paradox
here. Instead I shall look further at one of the reasons for ex­
pecting progress, namely progress within the sciences.
 3. Progress in Science

M ost people agree that progress in respect to scientific knowl­

edge is now the normal course of events, but it is not obvious
what more precisely is to be meant by that. Although progress
in the sciences is a main theme within philosophy of science,
this discipline has surprising difficulties in giving a clear analy­
sis of the issues involved.
There is a sociological variant of the notion of scientific
knowledge. One may speak about the spread of scientific
knowledge, the average standards of scientific knowledge
within a community and so on. Philosophers are usually not
thinking of scientific knowledge in this empirical sense but
have a more ideal notion in mind. It may be described as col­
lective knowledge. The scientific knowledge at a certain mo­
ment of time is often equated with the total scientific knowl­
edge that is available at that time; anything known by some
person that is recorded so as to make it generally available be­
longs here. Understood in this way, there is a sense in which
progress with respect to scientific knowledge is a normal
course of events for essentially conceptual reasons. Knowledge
is usually defined by philosophers as the same thing as true
and justified beliefs - a belief that turns out not to be true is
not counted as knowledge. It then follows that the stock of
scientific knowledge is normally what the mathematicians call
monotone in time, i.e., it can only grow as time goes on unless
there is a massive destruction of scientific records or cultural
disruptions that make the records unintelligible.
It is more interesting therefore to consider not scientific
knowledge but scientific beliefs held by leading scientists and
to ask to what extent these beliefs constitute knowledge - pro­
gress occurs, we could say, when the scientists know more, i.e.,
when they have a more accurate picture of the world in the
sense that there is a growth in true beliefs held by the scientists
which is not too much detracted from by the false beliefs that
they also hold. Although still somewhat vague, I think that
this notion comes fairly close to what we ordinarily mean
when we loosely speak of progress within science.
Is it then quite clear that there is progress in science when
the notion is understood as suggested above? In a science such
as mathematics, this seems quite unproblematic. Mathematics
is essentially cumulative. The stock of allegedly proved theo­
rems constantly grows. Besides cultural disruptions, there are
sometimes shifts of perspectives, and mistakes occur, but on
the whole there is a steady growth of true mathematical be­
liefs. When we turn to the empirical sciences the situation is
quite different. They are not cumulative. Philosophers of sci­
ence as different from one another as Popper and Kuhn agree
on this point. Both hold that the essential steps in the develop­
ment of sciences consist in the abandoning of old beliefs. Here
Popper stresses scientific refutations and Kuhn scientific revo­
lutions. From those perspectives, what ground do we have for
claiming progress in the empirical sciences? For Kuhn this
question seems especially troublesome since he also holds that
even the observational languages before and after a scientific
revolution are not translatable one into the other, they are in­
commensurable as he says. Even if we do not follow Kuhn at
this point, and claim that, on the whole, as time goes on, there
is an accumulation of scientific data and perhaps also of low
level scientific laws connecting observables, one must agree
with him and with Popper that scientific theories do not only
grow, but often one replaces the other.
Does science then make progress with respect to its main,
traditional aim to explain the world in' the sense of giving a
true account of the world coherent with our observations?
Popper and Kuhn could serve as two typical examples of how
philosophy of science has tried to deal with this question. Pop­
per accepts the question and thinks that the answer must of
course be yes, but he is faced with the problem that there is no
obvious ground for saying that a new theory is better than the
refuted one in being closer to such a true account of the world.
The crucial thing is how truth is understood. Popper’s notion
of truth agrees essentially with what is known as the corre-
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spondence theory of truth: A theory is true if it describes how
the world really is; and the world is here understood as some­
thing already given, as something existing independently of
our conceptualizations and epistemological powers. What
ground do we then have for believing that a theory gives a true
description of this given world, which is only partially open to
our inspection. There are criteria for refuting an allegedly true
description, viz. when there are logical consequences of the
description that clash with what can be observed, but there are
immediate criteria for the correctness of a description, and
hence, no obvious measure of progress. Popper is aware of this
problem and the ensuing difficulty in combating skepticism.
His attempted solution is by a notion of corroboration, which
has not met general approval and which I shall not deal with
here.
Kuhn’s position is seemingly easier: he gives up the notion
of truth and thus rejects the problem. The scientific enterprise
can according to him be compared to puzzle solving, and he
claims that “later scientific theories are better than the earlier
ones for solving puzzles.” In this sense science makes progress
according to Kuhn. In my view, Kuhn too readily discards the
notion of truth. Many human activities can hardly be ac­
counted for without an appeal to the notion of truth. This
holds for many of our everyday assertions as well as for many
institutionalized activities, like judgments made in court or by
technological experts concerning the strength of bridges, for
instance. The view that truth has no essential role to play in the
institution of science does not seem very convincing. The
common spirit has certainly been that the progress in question
consisted in discoveries of new truths, in particular truths
about not directly observable phenomena serving to explain
observed facts.
The sad fact is, I think, that philosophy of science has no
satisfactory notion of truth which allows us to say that science
makes progress with respect to its main aim to give a true ac­
count of the world. Many more things need to be said to sub­
stantiate this, but I believe that it is the notion of truth rather
than the notion of progress which needs to be reconsidered. It
illustrates anyway how these two notions are intimately con­
nected in philosophy of science and how difficult it is to make
philosophical progress with respect to the clarification of such
central notions.

4. Progress within Philosophy in General

Being a self-reflective activity philosophy has been much con­

cerned also with progress within philosophy itself. Philoso­
phers often regretfully remark that their field has not assumed
“den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft”, and this is clearly a
complaint about what seems to be a lack of steady progress in
their field. For an outside observer, philosophy may even seem
to resemble the field of fashion: One theory is replaced by
another, but then the first theory may come into vogue again,
just like the length of skirts goes up and down.
In his book Explanation and Understanding , von Wright
has commented on this phenomenon. What first seems to be
just a change of fashion turns out on closer inspection to con­
tain an element of progress, he remarks. When a type of philo­
sophical theory loses ground because of what seem to be con­
vincing arguments against it provided by a rival theory but
then comes back again and regains full support, its supporters
may not just be repeating the old theory, forgetful of the argu­
ments against it. What comes back is only the type of philo­
sophical theory that was before, von Wright points out. The
old theory has often undergone essential changes so as now to
assimilate the criticism directed against it by the rival theory.
I think that this is an apt description. Von Wright illustrates
his point with the shift back and forth between an hermeneutic
and a positivistic view of the social and humanistic sciences
during the last century and a half. I would like to add another
example from philosophy of language. An influential school
born in this century and flourishing in the twenties and thirties
was verificationism, according to which the meaning of a sen-
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tence was to be identified with its method of verification or
refutation. This idea gradually met great opposition and it was
pointed out, for example, that for many meaningful sentences
we know neither a method for verification nor a method for
refutation. Today verificationism is again a vital theory in ana­
lytical philosophy of language. Some people assume that it is
the same verificationism from the beginning of the century
that passed away after the Second World War, but, on the con­
trary, an integral part of the new verificationism is just the
point that we may have no guarantee of either verifying or
refuting a meaningful sentence. To know the meaning of a sen­
tence is therefore according to the new verificationism not to
know a method of verifying the sentence but to know what
counts as a verification of it.
Even in philosophy one may thus talk of some sort of pro­
gress. To describe this kind of progress in more detail one
must ask about the goal of philosophy, and then of course, one
immediately encounters controversial issues. I would say that
even in philosophy we aim at saying truths, but no one would
think that a correspondence theory of truth is appropriate
here.
A great part of philosophy is concerned with giving an ac­
count of human activities of different kinds: Philosophy of
language is concerned with our communications by means of
language, logic with our practice of inferences, philosophy of
science with our scientific activities, ethics with our moral
judgments and so on. One may ask whether the philosophical
account is to result in a set of rules that prescribe what is cor­
rect to do within these different spheres. For instance, should
logic find the general rules of inferences which are to be fol­
lowed in a correct deduction? In other words, should we say
that an individual inference is correct in virtue of being an in­
stance of a general rule of inference? O r is it the other way
around? Should we perhaps say that the inference rules only
describe an already existing practice of inferences? In that case,
we should rather say that it is the general rule of inference
which is correct in virtue of being a correct description of an
already accepted deductive practice.
The same kind of question can be raised in all the areas
where we speak of rules in a similar way: grammar, science,
ethics and so on. It is not certain that the right answer is to
choose one of these alternatives. One may try instead to com­
bine them in an appropriate way. John Rawls has suggested
that the task of ethics is to find moral principles that accord
with our considered ethical judgments in individual cases, but
he adds that these principles when found will get their own
force and will function prescriptively in many cases. The goal
of ethics, as Rawls sees it, is to find what he calls a reflective
equilibrium where there is a harmony between our general
principles and our judgments in individual cases. To arrive at
such an equilibrium we may have to adjust both our general
principles and our individual judgments. The same kind of
idea has been proposed by Nelson Goodman in the case of
logic and philosophy of science.
In more general terms we can say that the criterion of cor­
rectness suggested here for philosophy is coherence. The aim
of philosophy is seen to be a system of general principles that
is coherent both in itself and with our considered actual prac­
tice, which implies that the system should not just slavishly
describe a perhaps incoherent practice but should also serve as
a guide to our practice and may even result in a reform of pre­
vious practice.
I agree with this general analysis, and it is easily seen that it
gives rise to a notion of progress. There is in philosophy a
growing stock of arguments, different phenomena are linked
to each other, and incoherencies are sorted out, while new
ones also arise. Progress is in no way guaranteed, but it is
something that could be naturally expected as we learn more
about how different things hang together.
 5. Progress in Logic

If we now turn to the particular field of philosophy that logic

constitutes, I think that the general analysis just given applies
but that the details look a little different. I shall consider three
different kinds of logical research: the studies of logical infer­
ences, axiomatics, and automation of logical procedures.
The main and original goal of logic is to give an account of a
practice of deductive inferences that to some extent exists in­
dependently of that account. The difficulty of this task, how­
ever, is not so much to find a coherent system but to find at all
some general principles that describe the practice of inferences.
When Aristotle founded logic, he immediately hit upon a sys­
tem of general rules, his syllogisms, which did account for a
part of the deductive practice that existed at his time. His
achievement is rightly admired, but it is also remarkable that
logic made very little progress for over two thousand years
after Aristotle, in spite of the fact that Aristotle uncovered
only a rather tiny part of the deductive practice existing at his
time. There was some development, but the domain of deduc­
tive inferences that could be analyzed by logic was not signifi­
cantly enlarged. The great leap forward was taken in the nine­
teenth century by Boole and especially by Frege. By success­
fully analyzing multiple quantification in a system that could
handle relations and sentential operations, Frege was able to
cover practically all logical inferences that are found within
mathematics. Frege’s work has been refined in numerous
ways, and there have also been additions of logical forms and
principles encountered outside mathematics, but the essential
progress occurred more or less in one big leap with Frege.
Today much work is directed towards analyzing logical
structures within natural languages. What is at issue is not so
much to find stronger inferential principles. The ones that are
already formulated are usually sufficient, but in natural lan­
guages there are a great number of different ways to indicate
the same logical structure. To systematize them in an intelligi­
ble way is a difficult and laborious task. It is a domain in which
progress is made, but the task will supposedly become more or
less finished one day, after which there could not be much
progress to be made in this respect.
Frege took a big step forward not only with respect to the
analysis of logical inference but also with respect to the axiom-
atization of logic. Even in axiomatics there had been much of a
standstill since the time of the Greeks, although Leibniz had
prophetic visions about the subject. Euclid’s informal ax­
iomatic method is clearly not applicable in logic. It already
presupposes a notion of logical consequence: axioms are given
and the theorems are what follow logically from them, but
how they follow is not further analyzed. Applying the method
to logic would thus only lead to a meaningless circle: some
logical axioms could be given, but then one would have to say
that the other logical truths were the ones that followed logi­
cally from the axioms. Frege overcame this difficulty by devel­
oping what we today call formal systems or logical calculi, the
idea of which had occurred to Leibniz although he never
worked it out sufficiently. The idea was to specify not only
axioms but also the language in which they were expressed
and, in addition, the rules according to which one was allowed
to go from the axioms to the theorems. In this way one no
longer had to refer to logical intuition for deriving the theo­
rems. This led to the formal axiomatic method, which has then
been applied throughout the whole of logic and mathematics.
This development also opened the way for investigations of
axiomatic systems, often called meta-logic and meta-mathema­
tics. Most logical research today belongs here, and the progress
made in these domains during the twentieth century is gener­
ally recognized as immense. The character of this progress is
essentially of the same kind as that which occurs in mathemat­
ics and which we have already discussed.
Interestingly enough in this context, some of the logical re­
sults in this area may be understood as results concerning the
possibility of continued progress in mathematics. I am think­
ing about Godel’s famous incompleteness theorem. Before this
result by Godel one could imagine that it should be possible
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once and for all to state all the principles needed within any
specific mathematical theory, such as number theory for in­
stance. It would then only remain to apply these principles.
This could be an endless task, but the interesting applications
might perhaps be exhausted one day, after which no essential
progress would occur. In any case, the theory would be com­
pletely fixed and the only thing that remained to be done
within the theory was to apply the given principles. This situa­
tion was envisaged by David Hilbert for instance, and his
school worked hard to bring it about.
Godel’s result shows that this situation cannot obtain at all.
Already in the case of very simple theories, e.g., the theory of
addition and multiplication of integers, it is not possible to
state a set of complete principles. For any given set of correct
principles for such a theory there are truths within the theory
that cannot be proved by those principles. Hence, there will
always remain the possibility of further progress consisting in
the discovery of new basic principles that are not derivable
from the known ones. This is a remarkable, exact result about
the theme of our conference. It shows that it is not possible to
give an exhaustive description of the truths of most mathemat­
ical theories by stating, once and for all, the principles by
which they can be obtained, and, hence, that endless progress
in characterizing these truths is possible.
Admittedly, it is a fairly abstract result, and one may ask
how interesting these new principles are likely to be. Several
things seem to show however that this interest may be consid­
erable. Some of the new principles that can be added to a given
system concern the consistency of the system. Furthermore,
the reason why so many open but easily stated problems in e.g.
number theory are so difficult to prove may very well be that
new principles are required for their solution.
The third kind of logical research that I want to consider is
the automation of logical procedure. This work can partly be
counted as applied research, but it gives rise to theoretical
problems, and, as a matter of fact, it started because of theoret­
ical reasons. As I said a moment ago, the logical calculi that
Frege developed met two requirements: the language of the
axiomatic theory was precisely specified and the rules by
means of which one was allowed to pass from the axioms to
theorems were explicitly stated. The basic idea was to replace
the logical intuition (that is normally relied upon when deriv­
ing theorems in an informal axiomatic system) by formal infer­
ence rules. An inference rule is formally stated when it can be
handled by someone who does not understand the meaning of
the symbols but manipulates them according to instructions
that refer just to their form. This is exactly the kind of manipu­
lation that can be carried out by machines. It follows immedi­
ately that the inference rules of a logical calculus can be han­
dled by a machine. O f course, Frege developed his calculi
much before the emergence of our computers, but he carried
out the essential theoretical work needed to make it possible in
principle to let a machine construct proofs; “in principle”
means here: when we disregard limits of time and space.
As soon as computers became generally available in the
fifties, this theoretical possibility was put into practice and
several programs for performing automatic deduction were
implemented on computers. I was involved in developing one
such program, and it could easily prove theorems that occur in
logical textbooks; when run on the machines that were then
available it proved in 12 seconds that a transitive and irreflex-
ive relation is also asymmetrical. Some people hoped that it
would open the way to proving automatically interesting
mathematical theorems, but it soon turned out that the meth­
ods for automatic theorem proving were hopelessly slow com­
pared to human performance when presented with slightly
harder problems. In this respect the situation is still essentially
the same, although automatic theorem proving has made great
progress since the fifties: computers are useless when it comes
to proving really interesting theorems, at least when left to
themselves without some heuristic suggestions from humans.
The great hope of cognitive science that it would be possible
to create artificial intelligence which could match the logical
ability of a mathematician thus came to nought, but automatic
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theorem proving has nevertheless become useful. We use logi­
cal inferences not only to prove new theorems but also to infer
new information from given information; these inferences are
often very trivial and we perform them quite automatically,
almost without noticing it. For many projects that aim at au­
tomatizing routine intellectual work it is therefore essential to
be able to imitate this human ability. Automatic theorem
proving has been put to very good use in these connections, in
particular when many facts are to be handled and a high level
of security is demanded. For instance, to show that a security
system for trains is constructed in such a way that two trains
cannot meet on the same track, it is sufficient, when appropri­
ately formulated, to prove a long but simple formula in propo-
sitional logic, the most elementary part of Frege’s system, and
such things can now be done by computers.
One might say with some justification that this application
should be counted as a technological rather than a philosophi­
cal piece of progress. However, it should be recalled that the
development in question is a direct consequence of philosoph­
ical ambitions. Frege wanted to show that arithmetic truths are
analytic, derivable from logic, thereby refuting Kant’s claim
that they are synthetic a priori. To establish this point Frege
needed full control of the inferences that were used in the pur­
ported derivation of arithmetic from logic so that it could be
verified that they were of logical character. The kind of calcu­
lus that Leibniz had envisaged offered such a control since ev­
ery inference was then spelled out in formal details. At the
same time it carried further the Greek idea of an axiomatic
system, which made it applicable even to logic and allowed a
full analysis of the logical inferences used in deductive praxis.
Finally, it led to Godel’s discovery of the incompleteness of
the axiomatic systems, showing it to be impossible to state all
the basic principles needed to derive the truths of even quite
simple mathematical theorems, thereby demonstrating that the
Greek axiomatic ideal can never be fully realized.
In a nutshell it illustrates many different kinds of progress
that we find in philosophy and in logic, in particular. One can
hardly summarize them in one formula, varying as they do
from technical developments to philosophical insights, fulfill­
ing ancient ideas but also revealing their unexpected limita­
tions - but certainly they constitute true steps forward.
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 John D. Barrow

Time in the Universe

There is a long-standing philosophical puzzle regarding the

nature of time that has emerged in the works of different
thinkers over millennia. It reduces to the question of whether
time is an absolute background stage on which events are
played out but yet remains unaffected by them, or whether it
is a secondary concept wholly derivable from physical pro­
cesses and hence affected by them. If the former picture were
adopted then we could talk about the creation of the physical
Universe of matter in time. It would be meaningful to discuss
what occurred before the creation of the material universe and
what might happen after it passed away. Here, time is a tran­
scendent part of reality without a conceivable beginning or
end. This idea lends itself readily to the Platonic notion that
there exist certain eternal truths or blueprints from which the
temporal realities derive their qualities. Indeed, time takes
upon itself many of the qualities traditionally associated with a
Deity. The alternative, an idea that emerges in Aristotle’s writ­
ings and in those of the early Islamic natural philosophers, but
is stressed most memorably by commentators like Augustine
and Philo of Alexandria, is that time is something that comes
into being with the Universe. Before the Universe was, there
was no time, no concept of before. Such a device enabled the
medieval Scholastics to evade difficult conundrums about
what took place before the creation of the world and what the
Deity was doing in that period. In essence this views time as a
derived phenomenon, inextricably bound up with the contents
of the Universe. The beginning of time is the moment when
constants and laws of Nature must come into being ready­
made and ready to go. In The City o f G od St Augustine writes:
then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.
F o r that which is made in time is made both after and before some time - after
that which is past, before that which is future. B ut none could then be past, for
there was no creature, by whose movements its duration could be measured.
B ut simultaneously with time the world was made.

This is close to our common experience of time. We measure

time using clocks which are made of matter and which obey
laws of Nature. We exploit the existence of periodic motions,
whether they be revolutions of the Earth, oscillations of a pen­
dulum or vibrations of a caesium crystal, and the ‘ticks’ of
these clocks define the passage of time for us. We have no ev­
eryday meaning to give to the notion of time aside from the
process by which it is measured. We might thus defend an op-
erationalist view wherein time is defined by its mode of mea­
surement alone.
Whereas on the transcendent view of time we might speak
of bodies moving in time, the emphasis of the latter view is
upon time being defined by the motion of things. One of the
advantages of the first view is that one knows where one
stands and what time is always going to look like - it is the
same yesterday, today and forever. By contrast the second pic­
ture promises to produce novel concepts of time - and might
even do away with the concept altogether - as the material
contents of the Universe alter their nature under varying con­
ditions. We should be especially conscious of such a possibil­
ity as we backtrack towards those moments of extremis in the
vicinity of the Big Bang. For any moment that appears to be
the beginning of time inevitably exists where the very notion
of time itself is likely to be most fragile. In an expanding and
constantly changing Universe, the operational view of time is
likely to produce a subtle and variable conception of time’s
place and meaning.
The image of a transcendent absolute time shadowing the
march of events upon a cosmic billiard table of unending and
unchanging space was the foundation of Newton’s monumen­
tal description of the world in which he announces that:
I do not define time, space, place, and m otion, as being well known to all.
O n ly I must observe, that the com m on people conceive those quantities under
no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And
thence arise certain prejudices.1

Once the equations governing the change of the world in space

and time are given, then the whole future course of events is
determined by the starting conditions. Time appears superflu­
ous. Everything that is going to happen is programmed into
the starting state. (This will not be true if other physical pro­
cesses become involved. For example, in the archetypal situa­
tion of billiard balls moving according to Newton’s laws, their
future behaviour after collisions depends upon rigidity of the
collisions and this involves knowledge of the behaviour of the
materials out of which the balls are made. This information is
beyond the scope of Newtonian mechanics.)
The Newtonian laws of motion could be applied to the de­
scription of the world and followed backwards in time. Our
Universe is observed to be expanding and hence a Newtonian
description leads to the assertion that there must have been a
past moment of time at which everything was compressed to
zero size and infinite density - the ‘Big Bang’ as it was first
termed by Fred Hoyle. However, because of the absolute na­
ture of space and time in the Newtonian world-view we can­
not draw any conclusions about the Newtonian Big Bang’s
constituting an origin to time, let alone the origin of the U ni­
verse. It is simply a past time at which known laws predict that
some physical quantities become unboundedly large; we say
they become infinite in value there. But space and time go on
regardless.

Isaac N ew ton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, transl. A.

M otte (1729), edited and revised by F. C ajori, Univ. of California Press,
1934, p. 6.
 The first scientists to contemplate the significance of places
where things apparently cease to exist or become infinite -
‘singularities’, as we would now call them - in Newtonian the­
ory were the eighteenth-century scientists Leonhard Euler and
Roger Boscovich. They both considered the physical conse­
quences of adopting force-laws for gravitation other than
Newton’s famous inverse-square law. They found some of the
alternatives had the unpleasant feature that the solutions just
cease to exist after some definite time in the future when one
studied the behaviour of objects orbiting around a central sun.
They cannot be continued forwards any further in a world
governed by one of these maverick force laws. Boscovich
thought it absurd that the body must disappear from the U ni­
verse at the centre if the force law were inverse-cube rather
than inverse-square. He drew attention to Euler’s earlier study
of motion under the influence of gravity where the master-
mathematician
asserts that the moving body on approaching the centre of forces is annihi­
lated. H ow much more reasonable would it be to infer that this law o f forces is
an impossible one?

These appear to be the first contemplations of such matters in

the context of Newtonian mechanics.
In fact there are deep problems with attempting to apply
Newton’s theory of gravity and motion to the Universe as a
whole. It will not tolerate the consideration of an infinite space
distributed with matter; this leads to an infinite aggregate of
gravitational influences at any one point due to the infinite
number of gravitational attractions exerted by the others.
Therefore a Newtonian Universe must be finite in size and
hence possess a boundary in space. If we think of Newtonian
space stretching out straight in every direction then this
boundary must be a definite edge. For example, if the space is
spherical about us at the centre, then the surface of the space is
the surface of the sphere. Alternatively, the spatial Universe
could be a cube whose boundary was composed of the six
faces of the cube. This prospect of a Universe with boundaries
is a rather unattractive picture because we must specify how all
physical quantities behave at these boundaries when the U ni­
verse is started at some time in the past. Thus, the Newtonian
world requires the Universe of matter to be a finite island in an
ocean of infinite absolute space.
Worse still, Newton’s theory is incomplete. It does not con­
tain enough equations to tell us how all the allowed changes to
the Universe actually occur. If the Universe expands or con­
tracts at exactly the same rate in every direction then every­
thing is indeed determined, but when any deviations from per­
fectly spherical expansion are allowed at the start then deter­
minism breaks down for there are no Newtonian laws which
dictate how the shape of the world will change with time.
Clearly, Newton’s theory of absolute space and time is defec­
tive. The next step to take is to contemplate some coupling of
the notions of space and time to the material contents of the
world.
The earliest and most intriguing speculation of this sort was
made by William Clifford, an English mathematician who
contemplated just the type of situation that Einstein would
build into the general theory of relativity. Clifford was moti­
vated by the mathematical investigations of Riemann, who had
formalised the geometric study of curved surfaces and spaces
which possess non-Euclidean geometry (that is the three inte­
rior angles of a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees where
the three corners of the triangle are formed by joining the
shortest lines that can be drawn between them to form the
sides of the triangle on the curved surface). Clifford appreci­
ated that the traditional space of Euclid is thus one of many
and we can no longer assume that the geometry of the real
world possesses the simple Euclidean form. The fact that it
appears to be flat locally is not persuasive because most curved
surfaces appear flat when viewed over small areas. After study­
ing Riemann’s ideas, Clifford proposed this radical scenario in
his paper of 1876.
This prescience is rather remarkable. Although Einstein
never seems to have been aware of these remarks, Clifford’s
intuitive idea became the central idea of the general theory of
relativity. The geometry of space and the rate of flow of time
are no longer absolutely fixed and independent of the material
content of space and time. The matter content and its motion
determine the geometry and the rate of flow of time, and sym-
biotically this geometry dictates how matter is to move. Ein­
stein’s elegant theory of gravitation possesses a set of equa­
tions which dictate the connection between the matter content
of the Universe and its space and time geometry. These are
called field equations and they generalise the Newtonian field
equation of Poisson which encapsulates Newton’s inverse-
square law of gravitation. In addition to this structure there
exist equations of motion which give the analogues of straight
lines in the curved geometry. These generalise Newton’s laws
of motion.
One further erosion of time’s absolute Newtonian status oc­
curs in Einstein’s theory. Einstein’s theory was built upon a
premise that there are no preferred observers in the Universe:
no set of observers for whom all the laws of Nature look sim­
pler. The laws of physics must have the same form for all ob­
servers no matter what their state of motion. That is, however
your laboratory is moving - whether it is accelerating or rotat­
ing with respect to that of your neighbour - you should both
find the same laws of physics to hold. You may each measure
observables to have different values but you will none the less
find them to be linked by the same invariant relationships.
In Einstein’s world there is no special class of observers for
whom, by virtue of their motion and time-keeping arrange­
ments, the laws of Nature look especially simple. This is not
true in Newton’s formulation of motion. His famous laws of
motion are found to hold only by experimenters moving in
laboratories that are in uniform, non-rotating motion with re­
spect to each other and with respect to the most distant stars,
which he took to establish a state of absolute rest. Other ob­
servers who rotate or accelerate in unusual ways will observe
the laws of motion to have a different, more complicated form.
In particular, and in violation to Newton’s famous first law of
motion, they will observe bodies acted upon by no forces to
accelerate.
This democracy of observers that Einstein built into the for­
mulation of his general theory of relativity means that there is
no preferred cosmic time. Whereas in his special theory of rel­
ativity there could exist no absolute standard of time - all time
measurements are made relative to the state of motion of the
observer - in the general theory of relativity things are differ­
ent. There are many absolute times in general relativity. In
fact, there appears to be an infinite number of possible candi­
dates. For instance, observers around the Universe could use
the local mean density or expansion rate of the Universe to
coordinate their time-keeping. Unfortunately, none of these
absolute times has yet been found to possess a more funda­
mental status than the others.
A good way to view an entire Universe of space and time -
a ‘space-time’ - in Einstein’s theory is as a stack of spaces
(imagine there to be only two dimensions of space rather than
three for the sake of visualisation), with each slice in the stack
representing the whole universe of space at a different time.
The time is a label identifying each slice in the stack. The dis­
cussion of the previous paragraph means that we can actually
slice up the whole space-time block into a stack of ‘time-slices’
in many different ways. We could slice through the solid stack
at a variety of different angles. This is why it is always more
appropriate to talk about space-time rather than the somewhat
ambiguous partners space and time. But the connection be­
tween matter and space-time geometry means that ‘time’ can
be defined internally by some geometrical property, like the
curvature, of each slice and hence in terms of the gravitational
field of the matter on the slice which has distorted it from flat­
ness (see Figure 1 for a simple illustration). Thus we begin to
see a glimmer of possibility of associating time, including its
beginning and its end, with some property of the contents of
the Universe and the laws which govern how they change.
The new picture of space-time rather than space and time
considerably changes our attitude towards initial conditions
Figure 1:
Each o f the slices labelled 1, 2, 3 and 4 taken through space can be endowed
with a ‘tim e’ label that is determined by the radius of the arrowed circle. As we
progress up the curved paraboloidal surface the increase o f ‘time’ is recorded
by the increase in the radius o f the circle bounding the slice.

and the possible beginning of the Universe. Because of the

coupling that exists between the fabric of space-time and mat­
ter any singularity in the material content of space-time for
example, the infinity in the density of matter which occurs in
the traditional picture of the Big Bang - signals that space­
time has come to an end as well. We now have singularities o f
space and time not merely singularities in space and time.
Moreover, any space-time given by Einstein’s theory of gen­
eral relativity is an entire universe. Unlike in Newton’s theory,
it can never merely describe some object sitting on an external
stage of fixed space. Thus the singularities of general relativity
are features of the entire universe, not just one place in it or
one moment of its history. These singularities mark out the
boundary of space and time.
If we study the expanding Universe according to this picture
and trace its history backwards, then it is possible for it to
begin at such a singularity. This prediction has been seized
upon by many as proof that the Universe had a beginning in
time. However, like any logical deduction this conclusion fol­
lows from certain assumptions whose truth needs to be closely
examined. The most shaky of these assumptions is that gravity
is always attractive. Our modern theories of elementary parti­
cles contain many types of particle, and forms of matter, for
which this assumption is not true. Indeed, the whole inflation­
ary universe picture which we introduced above is founded
upon the requirement that it be not true; for only then can the
brief period of accelerated ‘inflationary’ expansion arise. H ow ­
ever, although the avoidance of a singularity might avoid a be­
ginning to time it would not save us from having to prescribe
‘initial’ conditions at some past moment to select our actual
Universe from the infinity of other possible worlds that begin
at singularities. Even if there did exist a singularity, one must
face the fact that there are different types of singularity. The
specification of the properties of this singularity is an ‘initial’
condition to be specified on the boundary of our space and
time. Some extra ingredient still needs to be found which
could provide that specification.
General relativity (and any other relativistic theory of grav­
ity which does not possess absolutely fixed space or time)
gives rise to another subtle property not present in simple
Newtonian conceptions of space and time. There are actually
many distinct space-times that can arise from the same initial
conditions.
Suppose that some space-time S has initial conditions set at
some starting time zero which we shall label £(0). We can con­
struct another space-time by removing all of that part of the
first space-time that lies to the future of some time i(l) later
than t(0) as well as the time i( l) itself. The new space-time, S',
is the same as S to the past of the moment £(1) but contains no
space or time whatsoever to the future of £(1), as illustrated in
Figure 2.
But both S and S' arise from the same initial state and, in­
deed, we could have cut pieces off 5" in an infinite number of
different ways to make other space-times which start from the
same initial conditions. Yet there is something unsavoury
about S' and its fellow neutered Universes. It comes to an end
at the allotted time t(l) for no physical reason whatsoever.
 Time

■*--------------- ► Space

fi / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / f t

S S’

k W //////////////////////////////A V//////////////////////////////7M
(a) (b)

Figure 2:
Two space-times S and S' which are determined by identical initial conditions
on the initial time slice. In (a) the space-time S is maximally extended, whereas
in (b) it is terminated at some time t1, but no physical infinity or other barrier
to its future continuation arises then. T he space-time .S'' is therefore identical to
S until the time t,, but does not exist to the future o f t r In practice, cosm olo-
gists always assume that a given set o f initial conditions physically realises the
maximally extended space-time and not one of the infinite number o f alterna­
tives that are identical to it until some arbitrary moment when they cease to
exist.

There is no singularity of any physical quantity. Indeed, we

have not even had to make mention of the material contents of
the Universe at all. The equations that govern the behaviour of
matter would like to predict the future if only you would al­
low there to be a future. ’
The arbitrary truncation of the future is regarded as unreal-
istically artificial, and cosmologists choose to exclude its possi­
bility and specify the future evolution uniquely. To do so, it is
necessary to introduce a further condition into the prescrip­
tion of possible space-times, or universes, in theories like gen­
eral relativity, in addition to the specification of initial condi­
tions and laws of Nature. One requires that the Universe
should continue to exist until the laws of Nature governing the
behaviour of mass and energy signal that time itself has come
to an end at a real physical singularity. Under reasonable con­
ditions it transpires that there is a unique ‘biggest’ space-time
which contains all the others starting from the same initial
conditions and which is obtained by letting time go forward
until the equations predict a singularity. This maximally ex­
tended universe is the natural candidate for the space-time that
actually arises from a particular set of initial conditions al­
though we should remember that in principle any of the other
truncated realities could be the one that exists following the
initial conditions of our Universe. If the maximally extended
universe is not the extant one, then the end of the Universe of
space and time could indeed come at any moment ‘like a thief
in the night’ without any observable cause or warning.
Despite all these subtleties regarding the nature of time, gen­
eral relativity has failed to remove the traditional divide be­
tween laws and initial conditions. There is still always an initial
slice to our space-time stack which determines what the others
will look like.
In quantum theory the status of time is an even bigger mys­
tery than it appeared to Newton and Einstein. If it exists in a
transcendent way, then it is not one of those quantities subject
to the famous Uncertainty Principles of Heisenberg, but if it is
defined operationally by other intrinsic aspects of a physical
system, then it does suffer indirectly from the restrictions im­
posed by quantum uncertainty. Accordingly, when one at­
tempts to produce a quantum description of the entire U ni­
verse one might anticipate some unusual consequences for
time. The most unusual has been the claim that a quantum cos­
mology permits us to interpret it as a description of a Universe
which has been created from nothing.
The non-quantum cosmological models of general relativity
may begin at a definite past moment of time defined using cer­
tain types of clock. The initial conditions which dictate the
whole future behaviour of that Universe must be prescribed at
that singularity. But in quantum cosmology the notion of time
does not appear explicitly. Time is a construct of the matter
fields and their configurations. Since we have equations which
tell us something about how those configurations change as we
look from one slice of space to another it would be superflu­
ous to have a ‘time’ as well. This is not altogether different to
the way in which a pendulum clock tells you time. The clock
hands merely keep a record of how many swings the pendu­
lum makes. There is no need to mention anything called ‘time’.
Likewise, in the cosmological setting we are labelling the slices
in our ‘space-time’ stack by the matter configuration which
creates the intrinsic geometry of each slice. This information
about the geometry and material configuration is only avail­
able to us probabilistically in quantum theory and it is coded
into something which has become known as the w ave-func-
tion o f the Universe, which we shall henceforth call W.
The generalisation of Einstein’s equations to include quan­
tum theory is one of the great problems of modern physics.
One proposed route uses an equation first found by the Amer­
ican physicists John A. Wheeler and Bryce De Witt. The
Wheeler-De Witt equation describes the evolution of W. It is
an adaptation of Schrodinger’s famous equation governing the
wave function of ordinary quantum mechanics but with the
curved space attributes of general relativity incorporated as
well. If we knew the present form of W, it would tell us the
probability that the observed Universe would be found to pos­
sess certain large-scale features. It is hoped that these probabil­
ities will turn out to be strongly concentrated around particu­
lar values in the same way that large everyday things have defi­
nite properties despite the microscopic uncertainties of quan­
tum mechanics. If the greatly favoured values were similar to
the values observed, then this would give an explanation of
those features as a consequence of the fact that ours was one of
the most ‘probable’ of all possible Universes. However, to do
this one still requires some initial conditions for the Wheeler-
De Witt equation: an initial form for the wave function of the
Universe.
The most useful quantity involved in the manipulation and
study of W is the transition function

T[xv tx\x2,t2J
Figure 3:
Some paths fo r space-times whose boundary consists of two three-dim ensio­
nal spaces o f curvature g ( and g2 respectively where the matter fields are pre­
scribed by m , and m v

This gives the probability of finding the Universe in a state

labelled by x2 at a time t2 if it was in a state x x at an earlier time
where the ‘times’ can be prescribed by some other attribute
of the state of the Universe, for example its average density,
(see Figure 3).
O f course, in non-quantum physics, the laws of Nature pre­
dict a definite future state will arise from a particular past one,
and we would not have use for such probabilistic notions. But
in quantum physics a future state is determined only as an ap­
propriately weighted sum over all the logically possible paths
through space and time that the system could have taken. One
of these paths might be the unique one that the non-quantum
description would follow. We call this the classical path. In
some situations where there exists a conventional deterministic
situation, its corresponding quantum description has a transi­
tion function that is principally determined by the classical
path, leaving the others to combine so as to cancel each other
out rather like the peaks and troughs of waves that are out of
phase. In fact, it is a deep question whether all possible starting
conditions allowed for a quantum universe can give rise to a
‘classical’ universe when they expand to a large size. This may
well turn out to be a very restrictive requirement, one neces­
sary also for the existence of living observers, that marks our
Universe out as unusual in the set of all possibilities. If this is
true then it would also have the interesting consequence that
only by a study of its cosmological consequences could a com­
plete appreciation of quantum mechanics be arrived at.
In practice W depends upon the configuration of the matter
in the Universe on a particular slice through the space stack
and upon some internal geometrical property of the slice (like
its curvature) which then effectively labels its ‘time’ uniquely.
Again, there is no special choice of geometrical quantity that is
elevated above all others in labelling the slices in this way.
There are many that will suffice and the Wheeler-De Witt
equation then tells you how the wave function at one value of
this internally defined time is related to its form at another
value of it. When we are close to the classical path these devel­
opments of the wave function in internal time are straightfor­
ward to interpret as small ‘quantum corrections’ to ordinary
classical physics. But this is not always the case, and when the
most probable path is far from the classical one then it be­
comes increasingly difficult to interpret the quantum evolu­
tion as occurring ‘in’ time in any sense. That is, the collection
of space slices that the Wheeler-De Witt equation gives us do
not naturally stack to look like a space-time. Nonetheless, the
transition functions can still be found. The question of the ini­
tial conditions for the wave function now become the quan­
tum analogue of the search for initial conditions. The transi­
tion function slots Xj and tx are where we could insert our can­
didates.
We have seen that the transition function T tells us about the
transition from one configuration of spatial geometry on
which the matter has a particular arrangement to another. Let
us think of it as T[mvg {; m2,t2] where m labels the matter con­
figuration and g is some geometrical characteristic of space,
like the curvature, which we are using as an internally defined
time at two values ‘V and ‘2 ’. We can envisage universes that
begin at a single point rather than at an initial space so that
their development looks conical rather than cylindrical (as was
Figure 4:
A space-time path whose boundary consists o f a curved three-dim ensional
space o f curvature g2 and a single initial point rather than another three­
dimensional space. If there is a geometrical or physical infinity at this point
then we cannot calculate the transition probability T from this point to the
state with curvature g2. If this were possible then it would give the probability
of a universe with curvature g 2 arising from a ‘point’ rather than from ‘noth-
ing\

the case in Figure 3). This is illustrated schematically in Fig­

ure 4.
Yet this is no great advance in our attempt to transmogrify
the idea of initial conditions because the singularity of the
non-quantum cosmological models always shows up as a fea­
ture of the classical quantum path and in any case we just seem
to be picking a particular initial condition, which happens to
describe creation from an initial pre-existent point, for no
good reason. We have not severed the dualism between laws
(represented here by the Wheeler-De Witt equation) and ini­
tial conditions.
There is a radical path that may now be taken. One should
stress that it may well turn out to be empty of any physical
significance. It is an article of faith. If we look at Figures 3 and
4, then one sees how the stipulation of an initial condition g,
relates to the state of the space further up the tube or the cone
at g2. Could the boundaries of the configurations at gj and g2
be combined in some way so that they describe a single
smooth space which contains no nasty singularities?
 We know of simple possibilities in two dimensions, like the
surface of a sphere, which are smooth and free of any singular
points. So we might try to conceive of the whole boundary of
the four-dimensional space-time to be not gj and g2 but a sin­
gle smooth surface in three dimensions. This might be the sur­
face of a sphere living in four space dimensions. One of the
curious and attractive features of these smooth surfaces that
mathematicians habitually consider regardless of their dimen­
sion, and which we can visualise better by returning to the
two-dimensional surface of an ordinary sphere, is that they are
finite in size but nevertheless have no edge; the surface of the
sphere has a finite area (it would only require a finite amount
of paint to paint it), but however one moves one never runs
into an unusual point like the apex of a cone. We might de­
scribe the sphere as being without boundary from the point of
view of flat-landers living on its surface. Interestingly, such a
configuration can be conceived of for the initial state of the
universe (see Figure 5).
However - and now comes the radical step - the sphere we
are using as an example is a space of three dimensions with a
two-dimensional surface as a boundary. But for our quantum
boundary we need a three-dimensional space as a boundary.
However, this requires that the four-dimensional thing of
which it is the boundary be a four-dimensional space and not a
four-dimensional space-time, which is what the real Universe
has always been assumed to be. Therefore, it is proposed that
our ordinary concept of time is transcended in this quantum
cosmological setting and becomes like another dimension of
space so making three plus one dimensions of space and time
into a four-dimensional space. This is not quite as mystical as
it might sound because physicists have often carried out this
‘change time into space’ procedure as a useful trick for doing
certain problems in ordinary quantum mechanics, although
they did not imagine that time was really like space. At the end
of the calculation they just swap back into the usual interpreta­
tion of there being one dimension of time and three other
qualitatively different dimensions of what we call space.
An interesting path is one whose boundary is sm oothly rounded off so that it
consists o f just a single three-dim ensional space, and no sharp point at the base
as there was in Figure 4. This situation admits of an interpretation as the tran­
sition probability fo r creation out o f ‘nothing’ because there is no initial state:
there is only a single boundary. This can be used as the picture o f the three­
dimensional boundary o f a four-dimensional space-time only if we suppose
that time behaves as if it is another dimension of space.

The radical character of this approach is that it regards time

as being truly like space in the ultimate quantum gravitational
environment of the Big Bang. As one moves far away from the
Beginning of the Universe, so the quantum effects start to in­
terfere in a destructive fashion and the Universe is expected to
follow the classical path with greater and greater accuracy.
When this happens the conventional notion of time as a dis­
tinct concept to that of space begins to crystallise out. C on­
versely, as one approaches the beginning, the conventional pic­
ture of time melts away and become indistinguishable from
space as the effects of the boundary condition are felt.
This ‘N o boundary condition’ was proposed by James Har-
tle and Stephen Hawking for aesthetic reasons. It avoids any
singularity in the initial state and removes the conventional
dualism between laws and initial conditions. This it can
achieve if the distinction between space and time is lost. More
precisely, the ‘N o boundary’ proposal stipulates that in order
to work out the wave-function of the universe we compute it
as the weighted aggregate of paths which are restricted to those
four-dimensional spaces which possess a single finite smooth
boundary like the spherical one we have just discussed. The
transition probability that this prescription provides for the
production of a wave-function with some other matter content
m2 in a geometrical configuration g2 just has the form
T[m2,g2]
Thus there are no slots corresponding to any ‘initial’ state
characterised by m x and g r Hence, this is often described as
giving a picture of ‘creation out of nothing’ in which T gives
the probability of a certain type of universe having been cre­
ated out of nothing. The effect of the ‘time becomes space’
proposal is that there is no definite moment or point of cre­
ation. In more conventional quantum mechanical terms we
would say that the universe is the result of a quantum mechan­
ical tunnelling process where it must be interpreted as having
tunnelled from nothing at all. Quantum tunnelling processes,
which are familiar to physicists and routinely observed, corre­
spond to transitions which do not have a classical path.
The overall picture one gets of this type of quantum begin­
ning is that the Wheeler-De Witt equation gives the law of
Nature which describes how the wave-function, W, changes.
The geometry of the space can be used as a measure of time
which looks essentially like the ordinary time of general rela­
tivity when one is far from the Big Bang. But as one looks back
towards that instant which we would have called the zero of
time, the notion of time fades away and ultimately ceases to
exist. This type of quantum universe has not always existed; it
comes into being just as the classical cosmologies could, but it
does not start at a Big Bang where physical quantities are infi­
nite and where further initial conditions need to be specified.
In neither case is there any information as to what it may have
come into being from.
We should stress again that this is a radical proposal. It has
two ingredients: the first is the ‘time becomes space’ proposal;
the second is the addition of the ‘N o boundary’ proposal - a
single prescription for the state of the Universe which sub­
sumes the roles of both initial equations and laws of Nature in
the traditional picture. Even if one subscribes to the first ingre­
dient there are many choices one could have used instead of
the second to specify the state of a Universe which tunnels into
existence out of nothing. These would all have required some
additional specification of information.
The study of the wave-function of the universe is in its in­
fancy. It will undoubtedly change in many ways before it is
finished. The ‘N o boundary’ condition leaves much to be de­
sired. It probably contains too little information to describe all
the observable features of a real universe containing irregulari­
ties like galaxies. It must be supplemented by additional infor­
mation about the matter fields in the universe and how they
distribute themselves. O f course, it may also be complete non­
sense! The important lesson for us to draw from it here is the
extent to which our traditional dualism regarding initial condi­
tions and laws might be mistaken. It might be an artefact of
our experience of a realm of Nature in which quantum effects
are small. If a theory of Nature is truly unified then we might
expect that it would employ the possibility of keeping time in
terms of the material contents of the universe so as to marry
together the constituents of Nature with the laws governing
their change and the nature of time itself. However, we are still
left with a choice as to the boundary condition which should
be imposed upon some entity like the wave-function of the
universe. N o matter how economical its prescription, it is an
inescapable fact that the ‘N o boundary’ condition and its vari­
ous rivals are picked out only for aesthetic reasons. They are
not demanded by the internal logical consistency of the quan­
tum universe.
The dualistic view that initial conditions are independent of
laws of Nature must be reassessed in the case of the initial con­
ditions for the Universe as a whole. If the Universe is unique -
the only logically consistent possibility - then the initial con­
ditions are unique and become in effect a law of Nature them­
selves. This is the motivation of those who seek basic princi­
ples which might serve to delineate the initial conditions of the
Universe. If this is truly the case, then it introduces another
new ingredient into our thinking about the Universe because it
points to a fundamental asymmetry between the past and the
future in the make-up of the laws of Nature. On the other
hand, if we believe that there are many possible Universes -
indeed may actually be many possible universes somewhere -
then initial conditions need have no special status. They could
be just as in more mundane physical problems: those defining
characteristics that specify one particular actuality from a gen­
eral class of possibilities.
The traditional view that initial conditions are for the the­
ologians and evolution equations for the physicists seems to
have been overthrown - at least temporarily. Cosmologists
now engage in the study of initial conditions to discover
whether there exists a ‘law’ of initial conditions, of which the
‘N o boundary’ proposal would be just one possible example.
This is radical indeed, but perhaps it is not radical enough. It is
worrying that so many of the concepts and ideas being used in
the modern mathematical description - ‘creation out of noth­
ing’, ‘time coming into being with the Universe’ - are just re­
fined images of rather traditional human intuitions and cate­
gories of thought. Surely, it is these traditional notions that
motivate many of the concepts that are searched for and even
found within modern theories that are cast in mathematical
form. The ‘time becomes space’ proposal is the only truly radi­
cal element that we cannot detect as the inheritance of past
generations of human thinking in philosophical theology. One
suspects that a good many more habitual concepts may need to
be transformed before the true picture begins to emerge.
 Philippe Lazar

The Idea of Progress in Human Health

Life is a lukewarm state, highly isolated in the space-time

immensity of the story of the universe, with a future heavily
compromised by the next glaciation to come in less than one
hundred thousand years, and sadly limited, just a few billion
years later, by the unavoidable transformation of our tiny yel­
low sun into an hostile red giant. Health should have an even
more restricted story. If we follow the World Health Organi­
zation (W H O ), health will have a major milestone in no more
than six years from now, since, as you probably all know, this
rather optimistic institution proposed, a few decades ago, to
reach “Health for All in the year 2000” an ultimate goal which
destroys any perspective for future progress!
Being then quite aware of the basic limitation of my topic, I
would point out that the general title of this book relates not
to progress in itself, but to the idea of progress, which I inter­
pret as a wish to put a stress on the (various) possible represen­
tations of progress. This means that we should bring special
attention to the various ways people perceive health issues ac­
cording to their social status (i.e. specific categories of “heal­
thy” population or patients, various health care practitioners,
medical or health scientists, etc.), not forgetting that the ex­
pression “progress in human health” is understood by most
people as describing a value (a significant improvement of
health) - maybe as an intrinsic value, following Dag Prawitz’s
vocabulary? - much more than an evolution over time.
The field of health indeed is probably one in which the naive
feeling of a continuous improvement due to general progress
of knowledge is still quite vivid in most people’s minds, since
they are ever more strongly pushed in this direction by the
mass media, always ready to point out some magnificent new
turn in biomedical research, which naturally leads immediately
to a “revolution” in diagnosis or therapy.
It is true, indeed, that life expectancy - a currently used
global health indicator - is increasing (almost) everywhere
(even in Africa, taken as a whole!). In developing countries, it
is fair to say that such an increase is massively due to the im­
provement of basic hygiene, in industrialized countries, it is
also due to recent major improvements in medical care and
treatment, especially among adults and older people. Let me
point out, to underline this fact, that in my country average
life expectancy without impairment at age 65 increased from
about ten to twelve years - a 20% increase! - just between
1981 and 1991 - i.e., in no more than ten calendar years!
I would like now to try to cover some of the issues evoked
by these introductory remarks, and I have decided to express
my views under four “theses ”, this word being chosen both to
show my personal involvement in each of these theses and also
to present them as being fundamentally open to discussion.
These theses cover four basic questions. Health progress:
from and for what? how? to whom? in which society? Each of
them will be now developed through a series of non-exhaus-
tive remarks and questions.

Thesis 1: “from and for what?” It may be formulated as fol­

lows. “Public health policies and health actions on the one
hand and health research (including biom edical research) on
the other hand should be conceived in a dialectical way: they
should be intensively interacting but keep a respectful distance
from one another, without any operational hierarchy betw een
them. ”
We are indeed in a period of explosion of basic biology.
Everyone has heard about the immense progress during recent
years in molecular and cellular biology, fundamental immuno­
logy, molecular genetics, etc. The concept of big science has
even itself penetrated the biology fortress with the project of a
total analysis of human genome.
Incidentally, as far as the concept of “progress in knowl­
edge” is also concerned here, particularly in its sociological
dimensions, I think it would be of interest to study why this
specific project has had such an emotional impact on some sci­
entists, on the media and, hence, on the population. It might
well be compared, to the psycho-sociological and political im­
pact of the first autopsies, which were perceived by many peo­
ple as a new qualitative rupture in the “authorized” explo­
ration of nature and, more specifically, of human beings.
All these fascinating progresses (and their genuine transla­
tion into a better understanding of many diseases and also in
terms of a “transfer” into a real increase in our ability to pre­
vent or to treat disease) have their counterpart, they may
contribute to emphasize a too reductionist conception of
health, mainly perceived in its first “W H O dimension”,
namely “the absence of disease”. However perfect health is not
only such an absence, but also the absence of “infirmity”1 and,
moreover, the representation of a complete state of well-being
under three complementary aspects: physical, mental and so­
cial. This classical definition of health - that some people now
find a little too passe and questionable - still has the merit of
clearly showing that health is not only defined in a negative
way by the presence of deficiencies but that it is also stakes
positive and ambitious claims which interact with major indi­
vidual and societal needs and/or projects.
An operational translation of these considerations is that the
fields of research which are concerned with health issues are
considerably wider than those opened by modern biology and
related sciences. In particular, all human and social sciences
have a direct implication on health issues, including the defini­
tion of health itself, and of disease. There is a sociological defi­

1 This questionable expression is used as a fast summary fo r the self-explana­

tory trilogy “deficiency - impairment - handicap”, also known as “Woods
classification”
nition of any disease, which is as important as its biomedical
representation, not only in terms of understanding what hap­
pens, either in individual or collective aspects of this disease,
but also in terms of possible actions towards its control.
I do not wish indeed to develop the paradoxical thesis ac­
cording to which medical and health improvements have noth­
ing to do with medical and health research, and vice-versa, but
I think that it is very important to try to clarify the respective
roles of researchers and decision-makers and to respect the
needs expressed by the latter in terms of relevant information
and those expressed by the former in terms of basic freedom
for research - which we know to be a legitimate condition for
developing high quality research!
However, it happens that both “wishes” are perfectly com­
patible if one takes into account that time scales for function­
ing are not at all the same for research and decision-making,
nor are the genuine needs of each of the potential partners!
Research is a long-term process, always specialized in very
“narrow” tracks - even if, later, such narrow tracks may
evolve into broad avenues! - whereas decision-making is a
short-term issue, which should be ideally based on well-
founded, structured and properly assimilated information. The
question of speed is in particular more and more significant in
our democratic societies, which are exposed to high pressure
for immediate realizations under the heavy impact of informa­
tion power, an uninterrupted avalanche of opinion polls and
an almost continuous series of partial or general elections!
A solution to these difficulties might rely on what we have
described, at my research institution - the French National
Institute for Medical and Health Research, IN SERM - as
“collective expertise”.
Collective expertise is a process aimed at answering ques­
tions raised by decision-makers (belonging either to industry,
or government, or services) and for which scientific informa­
tion is available. It consists in asking a small number of experts
to gather, to analyze critically and to synthesize in a report all
published relevant information in the world about a given
topic. Such an operation usually takes between three and six
months and it may be applied to either scientific or technical
assessment of new research or innovation tracks, or to the
preparation of “strategic” decisions.
As a brief conclusion of thesis number one, I would say that
it tries to open a clear path to reconcile two complementary
but also to some extent contradictory aspects of progress: pro­
gress in knowledge and progress for action.

Thesis 2: “H ow ?” may be formulated as follows. “Expected

improvements in care and cure resulting from progress o f
know ledge are not unequivocal processes; their introduction is
bound to an explicit or implicit search fo r a fa ir balance be­
tween two complementary risks o f error: errors o f excess or er­
rors o f neglect. ”
Genuine progress in the way we can either prevent the inci­
dence of diseases (care) or correct their effects (cure), or, more
generally, deal with health problems are directly related to the
degree of real innovation generated by the “new” available
knowledge, this knowledge being used, according to the spe­
cific situation, either to introduce new modes of action or to
modify present ones.
This preliminary remark should be sufficient to bury finally
the false and yet very hard to kill distinction between “funda­
mental” and “applied” research. Following Pasteur, I would
rather say that such a distinction does not hold: research and
applications of research are just like a tree and the fruits it
bears. We all know indeed that, since research ignores bound­
aries, it would be quite stupid not to use the most relevant and
acutely available results of relevant research, however they
have been established, whether in looking for leads for new
drugs or for improving diagnostic or therapeutic processes.
However if high quality research appears to be the potential
purveyor of improvements in health care and cure, this appeal­
ing medal nevertheless has another side. Indeed, the more in­
novative a substance or a process or a technique is, the higher
is the level of the risk of introducing it. Together with an im-
provement - which may be a major one - some unpredictable
(or at least highly difficult to predict) adverse associated side-
effects may occur.
Such a risk (which statisticians would call their “first kind”
type of error) is intrinsically bound to the introduction of new
actions, which means that it is strongly related to the idea of
“progress” if we take this word in its dynamic meaning (i.e.,
“an attempt to improve a situation through a step forward”).
Naturally, there is a way to avoid (or to decrease) such a risk,
which is simply to refuse (or to delay) the use of available in­
novations, but then we have to face the other risk (the one
statisticians would describe as of the “second kind”), which is
the risk of not benefitting from what the innovations would
have brought.
These two risks are, in a devilish way complementary!
When you decrease one of them, you automatically increase
the other. Obviously these risks are not specific to the health
field, but they have a major weight in this area, taking into
account the obvious high sensitivity of people to health issues.
M ost of the major health controversies we have to face
nowadays are more or less bound to this issue. It looks clear,
for instance, that most people have a tendency to think about
medical attitudes in controversial situations - for instance ei­
ther in the case of induction of H IV contamination by non­
heated blood for transfusions or in the situation of induced
Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease by the use of growth hormone ex­
tracted from the pituitary in dwarfs - as if physicians who
used these treatments at a particular time had then exactly the
same amount of information as we now have available. O bvi­
ously, I do not wish here to give a solution to these grave and
painful situations, I just want to underline that it is necessarily
always the formal situation that we have to face when some­
thing really new happens, with an error by excess of activism
(in the case of growth hormone) or by excess of conservatism
(in the case of H IV contamination).
In some specific situations - when a research process is ex­
plicitly launched - all our countries have adopted similar rules
of behavior. Such is the case, for instance, for controlled ran­
domised therapeutic trials.
I just wish to recall, for those who might not be quite aware
of the usual technique of controlled therapeutic trials, that
they consist in comparing alternative treatments (sometimes
including “placebos”) on groups of patients, each of these
groups being chosen from the whole series of available patients
by a random selection. A large fraction of the ethical literature
has been devoted to studying the moral legitimacy of such
procedures, usually with a rather positive answer as long as
individual human rights are carefully protected.
More generally, when a patient enters any kind of medical
research, it is generally recognized in Europe that his or her
so-called “informed consent” should be asked for before his or
her admission to the trial or study. I want to stress that such an
attitude - which can be considered, as “progress” - does not
solve all the problems. To some extent it mainly transfers them
from the medical team to the patient himself - a transfer which
undoubtedly can be considered as a progress in the respect of
the patients as responsible human beings, but which does not
eliminate the risks I mentioned earlier and which also puts a
burden on the patients (the necessity of assuming a personal
choice in a situation where they are at a disadvantage due to
their disease) that some of them would probably prefer to
leave to their practitioner!
As far as care is concerned, we often say, in French : “mieux
vaut prevenir que guerir” (it is better to prevent than to cure).
Mentioning again the unavoidable problem of the balance be­
tween opposite risks, I would like to say a few words about
two issues which the increasing appeal, nowadays, to preven­
tion raises. The first concerns preventive medicine and the
other the development of so-called predictive medicine, mainly
based on genetic individual data.
As far as preventive medicine is concerned, I wish to recall
that prevention has a cost, not only from an economic point of
view, but also from many other aspects. When prevention is a
simple process (the usual vaccination programmes, fluorid­
ation of drinking water for prevention of dental caries, iodin-
ation of salt in regions of endemic goiter etc.), it is obvious that
the “cost” is negligible in comparison with the expected ad­
vantages. But is it the same, when for instance - and this is the
case, in an on-going French survey - a cocktail of vitamins is
to be taken every day for several years (and perhaps for a
whole lifetime if the present survey appears to be successful)?
The manifest “medicalization” of life which such a decision
involves should be at least considered when such an attitude is
recommended.
So-called “predictive” medicine is concerned with the use of
individual genetic - or other - “markers” to predict and if
possible, to prevent future disease. I would like to stress the
fact that, here again, things are less simple than some people
might expect. I am awaiting with true impatience the golden
age when it will become possible, from one drop of umbilical
cord blood, to describe all future major health events in the life
of any individual, including his or her life expectancy. Let us
also think about the possible commercial use of such informa­
tion (by insurance companies for instance), if clear interna­
tional rules are not set up strictly to forbid such deviations. Let
us also imagine how oppressive the social organization could
become if people would accept suggestions such as the one
recently made by an excellent human geneticist to use the
knowledge of genetic profiles to avoid “some major risks for
society”; and, as an example, she mentioned the eventual dis­
covery of a gene responsible for sudden death syndrome and
the concomitant “legitimate” prohibition which should be
made to those bearing such a gene to become, for instance,
airplane pilots (notwithstanding the fact that one could won­
der how many planes have crashed since the beginning of civil
aviation because both pilots together died from sudden
death!).

Thesis 3: “To whom?” can be formulated as follows: “In­

equalities in health should be treated according to the level o f
intrinsic value that societies attribute to health. ”
 Progress in health can have quite different meanings either
within our countries when we deal, for instance, with various
social classes or ethnic groups, or between countries, and more
especially when we compare developed and developing coun­
tries - i.e., the so-called “N orth” and “South”. Let me just
recall that the difference in life expectancy between social
classes in France can be as great as ten years and that Euro­
peans live on the average twice as long as the inhabitants of
several countries of Central Africa. It is obvious that the idea
of progress in health cannot be the same depending where you
are located within such an extreme range!
However, as far as industrialized countries are concerned,
sensitivity is usually much more centered on major environ­
mental issues than on tackling directly the question of massive
world health inequalities. Most people believe that the future
of the planet is nowadays truly threatened by the degradation
of the “global” environment, and, further a lot of people do
seriously think that such threats to the environmental integrity
of the earth are mainly due to an overwhelming and un­
controlled third world development. For instance, they take
the progressive destruction of the Amazonian forest both as a
symbolic and highly worrying step towards the end of the
planetary ecological balance.
I do not wish to challenge the necessity of being aware of
the major risks we are faced with, and of trying to avoid gen­
uine irreversible situations and there is no doubt that it is a
part of our worldwide responsibilities. However my own sen­
sitivity is more oriented towards the lack of real concern for
the perils connected with the demographic explosion of the
world population and its health consequences.
While it is true that a clean and pleasant environment does
facilitate the realization of “a perfect state of physical, mental
and social well-being”, we should not forget that in the long
run health is firstly bound to the level of development and
that, in consequence, even if uncontrolled development partly
degrades the “natural” environment, such a degradation does
not compromise its primary positive effects on health. And let
us try not to forget that the main environmental degradations
of the earth are still due much more to the N orth’s over­
consumption of energy than to the South’s growing activities!

Thesis 4: “In which society?” may be formulated as fol­

lows: “Health progress constitutes a m ajor political issue,
which might offer a fruitful field o f thinking and experi­
mentation fo r the improvement o f democracy. ”
I wish to dare to use the formal protection of “theses” to
raise two last questionable issues .
1. Biomedical and health research has given birth, here and
there, to various kinds of ethical committees. In France for
instance, I was personally deeply involved, in 1982, in the cre­
ation of the French national consultative committee for ethics
in the life and health sciences. Such a committee needed to
study the moral problems involved in the incorporation of
new biological knowledge relevant to use in medical and
health practices and to help society to face them by disentang­
ling their components. In my mind, such a committee had to
play a preparatory role for basic debates within society, help­
ing citizens and their representatives (including parliament) to
start thorough and well-documented discussions about the
main issues resulting from scientific progress and its conse­
quences.
What has struck me is that our committee has progressively
evolved in the direction of a kind of brotherhood of “wise
people”, discussing for long periods among themselves (they
are about 40) and then producing, as a final output, an official
advice to society and the political powers, which, generally
speaking, is a fair compromise but which puts forward the idea
of a consensus ahead of the idea of a legitimate diversity of
opinions and of the structural role of debates for finding the
best acceptable solution to such problems in a given society.
Would not it be possibly a better progress to move to a bet­
ter conception of the respective roles in a society of its experts,
on the one hand, and of laymen and their elected representati­
ves, on the other hand, instead of imprisoning the main social
issues within highly specialized groups of distinguished peo­
ple?
2. Progress, as we have seen from various examples in health
or other issues, is bound to audacious steps forward in a state
of partial ignorance. We have seen that such “advances” may
carry within themselves specific risks, which may later turn
into adverse effects, sometimes serious. However, refusing to
take any step forward bears other risks, bound to an in­
adequate level of intervention. I wonder whether the situation
we meet here is not a kind of a direct expression of the perma­
nent conflict - which feeds what we call “democracy” - be­
tween the forces which pull the system forward, sometimes
too strongly or without a careful enough evaluation of the
risks they take and the forces which have as a first objective to
keep what is already working in good condition, sometimes
underestimating the risks of global regression if no real pro­
gress is integrated into the system.
3. The mixing of these two last assertions would simply lead
to a recommendation that any deliberate attempt to integrate
potential progress into the ordinary functioning of society
should be coupled with well-prepared debates between true
democrats, independent of whether they are personally closer
to progressivism or to conservatism: genuine progress and the
social perception of its importance do rely on such in diversi­
ty-rooted political processes.
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