Progress

In his history of the ancient concept of progress, E. R. Dodds says that one

fundamental limitation on the idea of progress was imposed by the theory of Forms, both in Platonic and in the Aristotelian version. For Plato all progress consists in approximation to a pre-existing model; the model has existed and will exist to all eternity in the unchanging world of transcendent Forms. There is thus, strictly speaking, no open future and no such thing as invention; what we call invention is but “recollection” of a reality which is already there — nothing entirely new can ever come into being. The Platonist expressed his vision in a spatial metaphor, not a temporal one: he does not look forward like the early Christians from the Now to a promised Then, but upward from the Here to an ever-present There. For Aristotle, again, progress can never be more than the actualization of a Form which is already present potentially before the progress began. He traces, for example, the development of tragedy from rude beginnings to its complementary state; but once it has “attained its natural Form” development ceases, apparently for ever. Similarly in nature his doctrine of immutable Forms excluded any possibility of biological progress: in the absence of any conception of evolution his scala naturae is a static sequence, not a ladder of ascent.

It seems that we need a doctrine of creation, with implied eschatology, to have any real newness and invention. Without an inexhaustibly infinite God, there is always going to be some limit on human creativity. If you don’t reach natural limits, the god will stomp you down if you tread too close to the borderlands of the immortals. But since God is truly infinite, there is no bar to infinite human progress, which will “end” with man still having infinite horizons yet to achieve — which is to say, it will not end. I’m reminded of a book by a German scholar whose name I’ve forgotten, but which is about the six great ideas of western metaphysics. He points out that infinity was considered an evil by the Greeks — they wanted things bounded, controlled. The only infinite was Chaos. Western philosophy embraced infinity only after Christianity.