Progress - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

History of the concept

Concept of progress , which seemed obvious even " naturelle" to the men of the end of the XIXe century, is in fact a historically acquired concept and variously included/understood according to times, the places and civilizations. It is a concept plural and historically located. Today still, the " progrès" is not included/understood, is apprehended, is not sought same manner in Europe, in China, in Africa or in Japan, to quote only some countries. The relation with the " progrès" is not an anthropological invariant. The anthropologists on the contrary, raise the difficulty which the companies " have; premières" to apprehend this idea. Jacqueline de Romilly, in connection with the Greeks, shows well that if they knew the concept of progress, and if they used it, it was in a fugacious and very limited way. In the Roman Ideas on progress according to the writers of the Republic , Antoinette Novara clarifies the development of the philosophy of progress (summarized in the word humanitas ), in particular at Lucrèce, Cicéron, Varron, Salluste, Virgile, and Horace.

In Europe, it is only tardily - i.e. at the XIXe century - that the " progrès" became an economic concept, then scientific. It is more tardily still than it joined the concept of innovation, at the point to be confused there. In terms of archeology of the knowledge, the preindustrial technical culture (the system water/wood/wind) slowly learned how to theorize the capacity of the companies to progress, and discovered, not without debates and dissensions, that progress could be thought like a potentiality. The technical culture of the first industrialization (system iron/coal/vapor) on the contrary, was based on the concept of progress, rocking of the potentiality to the power, and comparing progress to science. The technical culture of the second industrialization (system oil/electricity/alloys), which was worked out as from the years 1880, crosses an additional step by comparing progress to the innovation, with the capacity to innovate, which no company had still theorized. The interest of the period in which we currently live, holds so that we are in the same technical system, but on different levels of development, according to the places and the countries: post-industrialization which gallop in the western world and in Japan, industrialization accelerated in the new countries: India, China, Brazil…, stagnation in a situation " pre-industrielle" in Africa, for example.

They are not least paradoxes to see the technical culture of the Western countries, placing progress, notion however founder of the actual position, not to say unifying concept, structuring socially and semantically, in blind point, even denying it, to claim to combine the innovation - fatally thought in terms of rupture, from radically nine - with the new concept of " development durable". From where it arises that historically, the concept of progress cannot be apprehended without is jointly apprehended the concepts of invention, innovation, of routine, of development.

Francis Bacon and the invention of progress

In Europe, the first theorizations of the human aptitude to progress, appeared in XVIe century, the time when precisely, continued technical capabilities of the man jointly, i.e. his capacities to modify its environment, and its capacities to be registered materially, concretely, by the means of the book and printing works, the methods of progression.

To progress or not? The Quarrel of Old and the Modern ones

Diderot: descent in the workshop

Condorcet: progress with perfectibility

Fields concerned

The conceptualization of progress was historically made techniques towards the remainder of the company.

Technological advance

See inventions/technical Training
See Technological advance.

Moral progress

See Moral.

Scientific progress

See Technological advance and Social progress.

Social progress

See Social progress.

Philosophical approach

Pierre-André Taguieff draws up in two recent tests a vast panorama of the analyzes philosophical, but so sociological, concept of progress, since Francis Bacon to the contemporary authors.

In addition to the presentation of its own analysis, criticized for its too unilateral approach and " in the air of the temps" , Taguieff reconsiders in particular the modern criticism of this concept of progress, called today into question within the framework of the principles of Sustainable development, after in particular work of the philosopher Hans Jonas (the Principle responsibility, in 1979), whose matter aimed in particular at highlighting the dangers associated with the Technological advance.

This critic of progress, points out Taguieff to us, does not summarize himself with a denunciation of the ecological dangers of technological advance. Is also aimed at the disappearance of a goal assigned to the progress, which would then have nothing any more as a horizon but its own deployment. It is what Taguieff calls the " bougisme" , also denounced by Jean Baudrillard and before him by Jacques Ellul, and which returns to the concept of " présentisme" developed by François Hartog.

By these various authors the capacity of progress is thus questioned, in all its forms, to take into account the entirety of the variables original, material, cultural, economic, which contribute to the structuring, with the development, even with the regression of the companies.

In religion

The pope Paul VI devoted his encyclical Populorum Progressio on the Christian concept of progress. He encouraged the development of an integral humanism the following the example of that proposed by the philosopher Jacques Maritain.

The social question had initially been tackled by Leon XIII in Rerum Novarum. At the time of the second council of the Vatican, Jean XXIII had written MATER and Magistra on the same topic.

On the level of the worship itself, liturgical progress is conceived like energy of par with the development of the dogma according to the formula lex orandi lex credenti .

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