Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 10:03:49 -0600
Subject: Re: BHA: Flourishing, Aristotle, war




James Daly wrote:
> 
> "Progress" has been both a bourgeois and a Marx*ist* secular
> response.

"Progress" can have two different (and I think clashing) meanings. One,
traditionally called the "Idea of Progress," asserts Progress as built
into the world as it were. (As Gould points out several times in _The
Structure of Evolutionary Theory_, Darwin knew better, but the pressure
of Victorian faith in Progress caused him to fumble several times and
imply that Progress was built into the evolutionary process. Evolution
is in fact contingent, and it is pure contingency that humans rather
than dinosaurs are the current 'masters' of the earth.) History is also
dominated by contingency. And hence the second meaning of progress
(lower case): an observation that as history has developed humans have
been able to glimpse the _possibility_ of building social relations more
conducive to human happiness.

> I agree with Walter Benjamin's critique of that, and his
> substitution for it of the more spiritual concept of "redemption" (a
> phrase found in *Marx*).

I find this rather meaningless. Spirituality seems to me to be subject
to the same critique Marx made of "Providence" -- it is merely one of
many possible summaries of the facts, and instead of explaining those
facts it simply names them. Names are not explanations.
 
> Reason after all is the highest and defining human faculty. It is a
> trust that the universe of being is responsive to human values, and
> that human goodness is not ultimately wasted, as it was for the
> Sophists,

This both defames the Sophists and trivializes human struggle. The
Sophists virtually invented hope that makes sense, that is the hope that
through human struggle in a universe indifferent to humans we can build
something halfway decent for a while.

Carrol



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