Condorcet and the Progress of the Human Mind
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Tuesday 17 September 2024 is the 281st anniversary of the birth of Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, also known as the Marquis of Condorcet, and usually known to posterity simply as Condorcet. He was born in Ribemont in Picardy, on this date in 1743.
In my episode on Herder I quoted Arthur Lovejoy, who wrote an essay on what he called the progressivist philosophies of history in late 18th century by Lessing, Herder, Kant, and Schiller. Lovejoy only considered Germanophone philosophers in this essay, but at the same time as these Germanophone philosophers were working on their progressivist philosophies of history, Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, and Guizot were also formulating progressivist philosophies at about the same time in France. Also at about the same time, Joseph de Maistre, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Arthur de Gobineau were formulating their own philosophies of history, but I wouldn’t call these efforts progressivist. Joseph de Maistre is probably the best instance of a reactionary to have ever drawn breath.
Cordorcet, then, belongs within the previous tradition of French philosophy of history, originating in Voltaire, who was the first to explicitly call philosophy of history philosophy of history, and then passing through Turgot to Cordorcet, and then from Condorcet to Guizot. Almost a half century before Condorcet wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, Turgot wrote “A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind” (1750). In this work Turgot wrote:
“At last all the shadows are dispelled: and what a light shines out on all sides! What a host of great men in every sphere! What a perfection of human reason! One man, Newton, has subjected the infinite to the calculus, has revealed the properties of light which in illuminating everything seemed to conceal itself, and has put into his balance the stars, the earth, and all the forces of nature. And this man has found a rival. Leibnitz encompasses within his vast intellect all the objects of the human mind. The different sciences, confined at first to a small number of simple notions common to all, can no longer, when as a result of their progress they have become more extensive and more difficult, be envisaged otherwise than separately; but greater progress once again unites them, because there is discovered that mutual dependence of all truths which in linking them together illuminates each through the other; because, if each day adds to the vast extent of the sciences, each day also makes them easier, because methods are multiplied with discoveries, because the scaffolding rises with the building.”
Turgot also wrote an essay on universal history in which he predicted the indefinite advancement of scientific knowledge. Cordorcet took up both of these themes found earlier in Turgot, and extended them. And, after Cordorcet, Guizot wrote History of Civilization in Europe, based on lectures that Guizot delivered at the Sorbonne. For those who associate the so-called “cult of progress” with 19th century England, Guizot is a revelation to read, as Guizot defines civilization in terms of progress in four thought experiments in the first chapter of History of Civilization in Europe. There is a sense, then, in which Guizot is a continuator of the project of Condorcet, who defined the entire history of humanity terms of progress, and this, in turn, grew out of Turgot’s work.
Condorcet was a royal official, but he came to be deeply involved in the French revolution. When a rival faction in the revolution came into power, Condorcet became a hunted man. While living in a safe house and evading the authorities, he wrote a remarkable work that sets out a definitive statement of the Enlightenment philosophy of history, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain). Condorcet was eventually captured and thrown into prison, dying under mysterious circumstances. It is not known if he was poisoned by his jailers, took poison himself, or died of natural causes.
Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain), which was posthumously published in 1795, is divided into ten sections, which Condorcet identifies as an account of ten epochs. Each of these epochs represents a stage in the development of the human mind, and a threshold of development attained. Condorcet wasn’t the first to attempt this kind of speculative prehistory. Henry Home, Lord Kames, an elder contemporary of Condorcet, had done something similar in his Sketches on the History of Man (1774), in which the whole of human history is decomposed into the four stages of foraging, pastoralism, agriculture, and trade integration. Kant had also done something similar in his “Speculative Beginnings of Human History” from 1786. Kant, like Condorcet, was more interested in the development of the mind than was Lord Kames in his history, but Kant’s account was only a short paper. Obviously, this was a theme that interested the Enlightenment. We can think of it as the Enlightenment attempting to understand its own origins by tracing the development of the human mind through history.
Condorcet’s treatment of this theme is more elaborate and more detailed than either Lord Kames or Kant. Condorcet begins his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind with a few paragraphs on epistemology, which is appropriate since Condorcet is seeking to write a history of the human mind:
“This picture… is historical; since subjected as it will be to perpetual variations, it is formed by the successive observation of human societies at the different eras through which they have passed. It will accordingly exhibit the order in which the changes have taken place, explain the influence of every past period upon that which follows it, and thus show, by the modifications which the human species has experienced, in its incessant renovation through the immensity of ages, the course which it has pursued, and the steps which it has advanced towards knowledge and happiness. From these observations on what man has heretofore been, and what he is at present, we shall be led to the means of securing and of accelerating the still further progress, of which, from his nature, we may indulge the hope.”
Condorcet’s first of ten epochs is tribalism. The second epoch is pastoralism transitioning into agriculturalism. The third epoch covers from agriculturalism to the invention of an alphabet, which implies written language. The Fourth epoch is ancient Greece, which Condorcet treats as the origins of the sciences. The fifth epoch further discusses the development of science and philosophy, but Condorcet treats Rome as already the beginning of the end for ancient learning, and the fifth epoch ends with the decline of science. The sixth epoch is from the dark ages to the beginnings of the revival of learning at the time of the crusades. The seventh epoch runs from the revival of learning through the invention of the printing press. The eighth epoch culminates in the dramatic overthrow of the yoke of oppression under which science had been laboring. For Condorcet, this seems to be the meaning of the scientific revolution. The ninth epoch takes us up to Condorcet’s own time and discusses the work of his contemporaries. The tenth epoch is about the future progress of the human mind.
Condorcet was one of the great advocates for the indefinite perfectibility of man, i.e., the idea that humanity can continue to perfect itself indefinitely into the future. Arthur O. Lovejoy, whom I mentioned earlier, said of Condorcet’s perfectibility:
“The term ‘perfectibility’ to which — though it was apparently invented by Turgot in 1750 — Rousseau probably did more than anyone else to give currency, became the catchword of Condorcet and other subsequent believers in the reality, necessity, and desirability of human progress through a fixed sequence of stages, in both past and future.” (Essays in the History of Ideas, p. 25)
This comes out most clearly in the final second of Condorcet’s last work on the future progress of the human mind. Part of what makes Condorcet’s Sketch so remarkable is how accurate he was in foreseeing the future of science. He acknowledged the human limitations to the future progress of knowledge, but these limitations can be addressed by a more precise scientific language, improved taxonomies of knowledge, and making education available to everyone. He sketches how all of these things can be done.
By and large, most of this has in fact been done over the past quarter millennium. Much of the progress that Condorcet imagined has happened, and largely as he imagined it. Condorcet even attempts to see beyond this process of the development of knowledge and industry and to imagine the potential problems of the society of maximized abundance on which these developments seem to converge. In doing this, he anticipated Malthus:
“It may, however, be demanded, whether, amidst this improvement in industry and happiness, where the wants and faculties of men will continually become better proportioned, each successive generation possess more various stores, and of consequence in each generation the number of individuals be greatly increased; it may, I say, be demanded, whether these principles of improvement and increase may not, by their continual operation, ultimately lead to degeneracy and destruction? Whether the number of inhabitants in the universe at length exceeding the means of existence, there will not result a continual decay of happiness and population, and a progress towards barbarism, or at least a sort of oscillation between good and evil? Will not this oscillation, in societies arrived at this epoch, be a perennial source of periodical calamity and distress? In a word, do not these considerations point out the limit at which all farther improvement will become impossible, and consequently the perfectibility of man arrive at a period which in the immensity of ages it may attain, but which it can never pass?”
The concern for population outrunning the food supply is a classic Malthusian concern, but Condorcet is also concerned that the same state of affairs could lead to the decay not only of population, but also of happiness, and with this observation we can say that there is also a sense in which Cordorcet in this passage anticipates the repugnant conclusion. The repugnant conclusion, also called the paradox of mere addition, was first formulated by Derek Parfit in 1984:
“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living”
A large literature on population ethics has already grown up around the repugnant conclusion, which incorporates a great many assumptions, including a lot of utilitarian presuppositions that don’t even figure if you reject utilitarianism. But this has been a highly active area of philosophical research in recent decades, and it’s worth noting that some of these problems of population ethics were already being anticipated in the eighteenth century.
Even though Condorcet focuses on the progress of knowledge, his interests aren’t limited to science. As a man of the Enlightenment, he imagined the scientific method being applied to metaphysics and morals no less than to science, and with this coming scientifically-driven progress in philosophy and morals, human beings would not approximate perfection in knowledge, but also in our moral life. Condorcet also advocates for that familiar feature of Enlightenment universalism, a universal language. Since his time many universal languages have been formulated, the most well known among them probably being Esperanto, but none have caught on in a big way. However, if we limit ourselves to science, mathematics and metrology have become universal languages for the sciences, so there is a sense in which we have realized the dream of a universal language. He also imagines indefinitely extending the human life span.
Condorcet was a man who was straining of the limits of his time, and, for him, the future, the progress that it promised, couldn’t come soon enough. When I was reading Condorcet one of the beatitudes came to mind: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” Certainly Condorcet was a man who thirsted after righteousness. And of course he denounced superstition and the terrors of religion throughout his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, but it’s the same thirst for righteousness however we clothe it.
At our present juncture in history, the thirst for righteousness is perhaps among the least understood and least appreciated facet of the human mind. After the disasters of the twentieth century it’s become difficult for us to square these events with the thirst for righteousness, but this failure to understand what happened, and what went wrong, is a function of our moral parochialism. The thirst for righteousness has created what is best in human history and has been responsible for what is worst in human history. The two can’t be separated. It was the thirst for righteousness, and often in the form that Cordorcet embodied, that created the conditions of the twentieth century and drove the worst atrocities. Montaigne said as much about the Thirty Years’ war, when he said that men, in trying to turn themselves into angels, instead transformed themselves into beasts. It was the same thirst for righteousness that led to a widespread revulsion toward the atrocities of the twentieth century, much as Europe was repulsed by the violence of the Thirty Years’ War and the reaction against this bloodbath led to the Enlightenment that was so ably represented by Condorcet.
It’s difficult to recapture the moral tenor of these times, but Condorcet and a few others give us a bit of a hint of what it was like. If you read the sermons of Joseph Butler, often known as Bishop Butler, among the greatest of English moralists and another elder contemporary of Condorcet, you’ll find a moral theory that no one during or after the twentieth century would have or could have conceived. As difficult as it is for us today to appreciate Butler’s moral theory, Butler was probably closer to the truth of things than we are. Bishop Butler’s view of human nature, which Cordorcet shares in some ways, explicitly recognizes and builds on the thirst for righteousness.
It’s difficult to us to so readily recognize the thirst for righteousness because we are living in the aftermath of a catastrophe, a manifestation of what Mircea Eliade called the Terror of History, and it’s left us dazed and confused. We have learned, to our sorrow, that the desire to be good is all too easily perverted, and perhaps even more easily taken advantage of. We haven’t yet figured out what to do with this knowledge. Condorcet knew exactly what he wanted to do with the knowledge that the Enlightenment was producing, and he knew, or thought he knew, exactly the future that this knowledge promised. Unfortunately, we can’t be so confident, either in our knowledge, what it means and what it portends, or in our future.
