The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (31 page)

More surprising than Hegel’s idealization of the Prussian state is how he fits the New World into his ideal universal scheme. “America is . . . the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself,—perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe. Napoleon is reported to have said
Cette vieille Europe m’ennuie.
’ ”

This was only one (and not the least plausible) of the extravagant speculations that Hegel drew from his view that the history of the world was a repetition of his triadic dialectic—with its inevitable progression from thesis to antithesis, to synthesis, and so on. As Time and Space would fragment experience, Hegel had conveniently found them unreal. For Hegel, only the whole—the World-Spirit—is real. Still Hegel offers us no convincing reason to believe that the later processes of history embody higher categories than the earlier. For this lacuna in Hegel’s scheme, Bertrand Russell offers a Hegelian explanation—“the blasphemous supposition that the Universe was gradually learning Hegel’s philosophy.” Other heirs of the Enlightenment, as we shall see, were not so ready to believe that the world had to go through Hegel’s laborious triadic stages. In the world of experience all about them, European thinkers would find other, less abstract clues to the meaning of history.

PATHS TO THE FUTURE

Many discoveries are reserved for the ages still to be. . . . The world is a poor affair if it does not contain matter for investigation for the whole world in every age.

—SENECA,
NATURAL QUESTIONS

Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest.

—WILLIAM JAMES,
PRAGMATISM

Just as Western Seekers discovered their power and duty to build civilization and so fulfill the common mission of humanity, they invented a new science of history. As the Age of Discoverers had found in America realms of experiment and self-government, so the Age of Science produced new views of historical forces that carried along men and societies. They invented historicism, a theory that events were determined by conditions beyond individual human control, and they snatched history away from God and from community, in a modern version of prophecy. Again, they sought solace in the future. Ideology, reinforced by the social sciences, gave people a new view of the extent and limits of their control. Dogmas of the way the world was destined to work overcame the liberal way of communal seeking. Religious faith retreated before the certitudes of science. And these stirred Seekers to find sanctuaries of doubt—on the way to make the seeking itself a source of meaning.

THE MOMENTUM OF HISTORY: WAYS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

Seek, Seeker
The future is made of Seeking.

—ORTEGA Y GASSET

A Gospel and a Science of Progress: Condorcet to Comte

The first modern ideology, the first “scientific” dogma of human history, was the idea of progress. It was heard in many voices in an era of dramatic changes in Western Europe, where the chorus of progress began to be sung in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. For this was an age of increasing wealth, growing cities, expanding empires, scientific advance, new technologies of communication and transportation, and political revolutions. “The confluence of French theory with American example,” Lord Acton explained, “caused the Revolution to break out” in France and across Europe. “The American Revolution,” as Condorcet would observe, “. . . was about to spread to Europe; and . . . there existed a country where the American cause had diffused more widely than elsewhere its writing and its principles, a country that was at once the most enlightened and the most enslaved of lands . . . that possessed at the same time the most enlightened philosophers and the most crassly and insolently ignorant government. . . . It was inevitable, then, that the revolution should begin in France.” Change was in the air. With their Enlightenment enthusiasm, French
philosophes
preached the infinite powers and infinite increase of knowledge—the fruit of endless seeking. But would the idea of progress itself be only a way station in the search? Dogmas of social science would, in their turn, eventually be embodied in institutions whose mission it was to enforce a frozen ideology. Which would again stir rebellious spirits to continue the search.

Of the many spokesmen for a new science of history, there were two high priests, both French—the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) and his follower, Auguste Comte (1798-1857). They impressed their scheme of progress on the compulsory currents of history. No longer mere “inquiry” nor only a narrative of past events, history now seemed a process that man dared not defy.

Ancient Greek mythology had begun with the Golden Age of Cronos, when men lived like gods, from which men and society had degenerated. The Hebrews, too, had begun with their own version of a Golden Age in the Garden of Eden, until man’s disobedience—the Fall, from which ever since he had been trying to recover. Christianity offered a Savior to redeem sinful man, which made history an effort to recover lost innocence. Ancient pessimism was sometimes tempered by a belief in cycles, a never-ending repetition of rise and fall. “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” Classical writers had their own way of describing the cycles. Our rational mind, observed the philosophical Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180), “stretches forth into the infinitude of Time, and comprehends the cyclical Regeneration of all things, and discerns that our children will see nothing fresh, just as our fathers too never saw anything more than we.” The idea of novelty in history, that man’s lot had improved from the beginning of time, had to await the experience of Europe in modern times.

The first classic statement of the modern idea of progress and the indefinite perfectibility of the human race was the work of the Marquis de Condorcet. Born to an old aristocratic family in the French provinces, after education in Jesuit schools he joined the community of
philosophes
in Paris. There he shared the lively salon of his beautiful and witty wife. He worked on the mathematical articles of the
Encyclopédie,
and on the Supplement, and came to be called “the last of the
encyclopédistes.
” During the turbulent days of the French Revolution he wrote a draft constitution that was never adopted, but his original scheme for universal state education did shape policy. He was one of the first to propose a republic, and he drafted the summoning of the National Convention in August 1792. But he opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and his moderation earned the enmity of Robespierre.

So Condorcet was outlawed, and under threat of the guillotine he went into hiding. There, within less than a year and without access to a library, he wrote his classic work on the progress of the human mind and the perfectibility of man. He called what he offered a mere
Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
(1795). A larger work was to follow. But this Sketch would have an influence on modern thought quite out of proportion to its modest brevity. It bears marks of haste. Parts were written on the backs of proclamations and other sheets of used paper. The manuscript in Paris shows numerous mistakes of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. Condorcet must have had an incorrigibly sanguine temperament—to write in the shadow of the guillotine so persuasive and passionate a paean to the progress of the human mind and to human perfectibility. Yet he did see the Revolution of which he was now a victim as a modern climax of human progress!

An admirer (and biographer) of Voltaire, Condorcet offers in his brief
Sketch
a cogent statement of the Enlightenment spirit that animated Voltaire’s hundred volumes. He sees the increase of knowledge, of science, and the liberty that comes with them as collaborating forces for human progress throughout history. Condorcet discovers nine epochs, beginning with men united in tribes, coming through the rise of agriculture and the invention of the alphabet, the progress of the sciences in Greece, the invention of printing and “the time when philosophy and the sciences shook off the yoke of authority”; the ninth stage begins with Descartes and climaxes in the founding of the French republic. The tenth stage, the future, he prophesies, will be marked by “the abolition of inequality between nations, the progress of equality within each nation, and the true perfection of mankind.” Following Locke’s method and Locke’s view of the limits of human knowledge, he saw philosophers finding, for the sciences of morals, politics, and economics, “a road almost as sure as that of the natural sciences.”

Condorcet’s antireligious passion prevents his valuing the achievements of the European Middle Ages.

During this disastrous stage we shall witness the rapid decline of the human mind from the heights that it had attained, and we shall see ignorance following in its wake. . . . Nothing could penetrate that profound darkness save a few shafts of talent, a few rays of kindness and magnanimity. Man’s only achievements were theological day-dreaming and superstitious imposture, his only morality religious intolerance. In blood and tears, crushed between priestly tyranny and military despotism, Europe awaited the moment when a new enlightenment would allow her to be reborn free, heiress to humanity and virtue.

He sees printing as the agent of knowledge, and knowledge as the agent of freedom. Progress, then, is a coherent, inevitable process. Religion, the enemy of progress, was a system of hypocrisy in which priests “frighten their dupes by means of mysteries.”

Has not printing freed the education of the people from all political and religious shackles? It would be vain for any despotism to invade all the schools. . . . The instruction that every man is free to receive from books in silence and solitude can never be completely corrupted. It is enough for there to exist one corner of free earth from which the press can scatter its leaves. How with the multitude of different books, with the innumerable copies of each book, of reprints that can be made available at a moment’s notice, how could it be possible to bolt every door, to seal every crevice through which truth aspires to enter?

So printed books opened paths for political freedom.

And Condorcet foresaw the rise of a new power. “The public opinion that was formed in this way was powerful by virtue of its size, and effective because the forces that created it operated with equal strength on all men at the same time, no matter what distances separated them. In a word, we have now a tribunal, independent of all human coercion, which favours reason and justice, a tribunal whose scrutiny it is difficult to evade, and whose verdict it is impossible to evade.”

Progress actually transformed, and enlarged, the very subject matter of history. “Up till now, the history of politics, like that of philosophy or of science, has been the history of only a few individuals: that which really constitutes the human race, the vast mass of families living for the most part on the fruits of their labour, has been forgotten. . . .” So the historian himself was now to be transformed from biographer into social scientist. Formerly he needed only to “collect facts; but the history of a group of men must be supported by observations.” Only Enlightenment could guide the historian to the observation of groups.

Condorcet had thus sketched an enticing scheme of history past and future, with a momentum not apt to be deflected by individuals. This was an ideology. But he never made of it a religion, a dogma to be enforced by institutions. Whether he might have made his theory into an enforced orthodoxy we will never know. His arrest was ordered in July 1793, but he remained hidden in Paris in the house of a Madame Vernet until the end of March of the following year. During these few months he wrote his influential
Sketch.
Then when he left the house he was identified as an aristocrat, arrested for being without papers, and confined in the prison of Bourg la Reine. He was found dead in his cell the following day. Perhaps he had committed suicide by taking poison.

While Condorcet was fortunate in not having seen his theory become an enforced ideology, he did have some prophetic notions of the future of the social sciences. In his scheme of universal education he included a new science that he called Social Mathematics. His “
art social
” was the “application of mathematics to the moral sciences,” believing as he did that “the truths of the moral and political sciences can be as certain as those that make up the system of the physical sciences.” With a flair for mathematics, Condorcet proposed the statistical description of societies and applying the calculus of probability to human phenomena. He applied the technique himself to a theory of voting that sought ways of structuring voting to produce the maximum probability of collective choice of a “true” solution.

Condorcet’s
Sketch,
brief and unpolished, has survived as a monument in the liberal tradition. His view of modern Western civilization, though overly optimistic, was uncannily prophetic. Except for his dogma of human equality, his view of society remained open-ended, aiming at human “perfection,” whatever that might be.

* * *

While Condorcet did not live long enough to make a religion of his ideology, his more influential disciple, Auguste Comte, would do just that. In fact, Comte did everything with the idea that Condorcet had not done. What his predecessor had made into a suggestive
Sketch,
Comte would elaborate into a massive system. While Condorcet had casually touched on some sources and results of progress, Comte would document and define the “laws” of progress. Comte would play the role of a learned Aquinas to his predecessor’s inspired Saint Paul.

A precocious, independent boy in a royal and passionately Catholic family in Montepellier, the young Comte early rebelled against the conventions of his community. His erratic and troubled personal life was in dramatic contrast to the rigor of his philosophic system. He offended his family by abjuring Catholicism at the age of fourteen. When his brief career at the École Polytechnique was cut short by his refusal to follow the school rules, he stayed in Paris occasionally teaching and writing for magazines, educating himself by wide reading and conversation with the lively intellectual community. The most influential of his young acquaintances was Henri de Saint-Simon, whose ideas he would adapt and develop. Comte’s abnormally short legs made people call him ugly, and troubled his relations with women. One of his first amorous adventures was with a prostitute, Caroline Massin, whom he married in a civil ceremony—in order to have her removed from the police register.