SPEP Co-director’s Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise

The topic of my remarks is progress, but I should note at the outset that I have structured this article as something like a theme with variations, rather than a tightly interconnected, progressive argument. I am interested in problematizing how the concept of progress is deployed across a range of discussions. I start with the role of progress in my own field of critical social theory, and then move on to consider the idea of philosophical progress, and finally connect this idea to different visions of philosophical pluralism. So, in other words, I will be starting with the otherwise and then moving on to the philosophical.

1. Progress in Critical Theory

First-generation critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, especially Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, were famously extremely skeptical of the idea of progress. In his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, Benjamin depicts what we call progress as merely an ongoing catastrophe hurling wreckage at the feet of the angel of history.¹ Similarly, in his lectures on the philosophy of history, Adorno notes that the catastrophe of Auschwitz “makes all talk of progress towards freedom seem ludicrous” and makes the “affirmative mentality” that engages in such talk look like “the mere assertion of a mind that is incapable of looking horror in the face and that thereby perpetuates it.”² In their skepticism about the idea of progress, Benjamin and Adorno were joined by other major political thinkers of the twentieth century, all of whom deserve to be called critical theorists in the broader sense of that term. Thus, for example, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offered theoretical critiques of progress, which tended to focus on the highly metaphysical nature of the philosophy of history that under-girded such claims. These critiques dovetail in interesting ways with the political-theoretical critique of progress that came to the fore at around the same time in the work of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, and others, which uncovered the highly ideological role that claims about progress play in justifying imperialism and colonialism.

Indeed, the chorus of voices critiquing the idea of progress was so strong throughout the latter half of the twentieth century that one might think that the concept had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And yet the idea of progress has been quietly making a comeback in Frankfurt school critical theory. Starting with Jürgen Habermas, critical theorists have been reformulating the concept of progress in a more postmetaphysical, deflationary, differentiated, and pragmatic vein, in an effort to detach it from the traditional philosophy of history in which it was previously embedded. They have also attempted to respond to the post- and decolonial critiques of progress as inherently Eurocentric or culturally imperialistic.³ These recent reformulations of the concept of progress in critical theory are motivated, at least in part, by the thought that critical theory in some way crucially depends on the idea of progress, that one cannot be a critical theorist without being committed to some notion of progress. But given the metaphysical baggage and colonizing distortions that have plagued the idea of progress, one might also wonder how a critical theory could hold onto this idea and still be truly critical.

One can talk about progress with respect to many different goals or benchmarks; given any particular goal or aim that I might have, I can understand myself as getting closer to or further away from attaining it. In that sense, I can talk about making progress in my training for a marathon or in finishing my book manuscript, and all that I need to make sense of such claims is some more or less clear sense of the standard by means of which progress is being measured. The traditional discourse of historical progress as it emerged in the European Enlightenment tradition made a much broader claim about the overall advancement of humankind from some primitive or barbaric condition to a more developed, advanced, enlightened, or civilized state. As Reinhart Koselleck reminds us, the term progress as it was used by...