Humanity improves with no fixed limit: Condorcet's Sketch

Indefinite perfectibility

Nicolas de Condorcet 1743 · 1794Enlightenment mathematician and politician, he holds that humanity can improve with no fixed limit.

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What it claims

History has a direction: the progress of the human mind, toward more knowledge, equality and virtue, with no assignable end.

Why

The laws of the human mind's development are constant and the past shows no limit to it: progress can go on.

The same idea through history

Auguste Comte1830Comte takes up the idea of a law of the progress of the human mind, but makes it a precise law in three states (theological, metaphysical, positive). He claims Condorcet as a forerunner.

In short

"Humanity improves with no fixed limit: Condorcet's Sketch" is an argument by Nicolas de Condorcet (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), Introduction and tenth epoch) on the question "Does history have a direction?" (answer: progress). Its claim: History has a direction: the progress of the human mind, toward more knowledge, equality and virtue, with no assignable end. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), Introduction and tenth epoch

Valid with an implicit premise

Condorcet wrote this book in 1793-1794, in hiding during the Terror, a few months before dying in prison. He follows human history in ten "epochs", from hunter tribes to the French Revolution, then looks at the future. His idea: if we can foresee natural phenomena because nature's laws are constant, we can also foresee the march of the human species from history. It moves toward more knowledge, more equality, more virtue, at a variable pace but with no assignable end. Note: the work is posthumous (1795) and some passages judge harshly peoples the author still calls "barbarous".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where laws are constant, the past met no limit, and the future stops or goes backward: a past regularity that proves nothing for what follows.

Valid with P4. P4 is an induction bet: it assumes that what was true of the past will remain so. Without it, one can grant that the laws are constant and that the past showed no limit, without concluding that the future will go the same way. Condorcet himself grants that progress may be faster or slower.

Analogy. A climber who has been going up a slope for ten hours without finding a summit. He can say he has met no limit and that the slope goes on. His opponents ask whether he is sure not to reach a pass, or a cliff, beyond the next ridge.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Rousseau 1750 · attacks premise 3

The progress of the sciences and arts has not made men better: our souls have been corrupted as our sciences and arts advanced toward perfection. Knowing more does not mean being better.

Condorcet replies

Condorcet Passage by Condorcet aimed at this thesis (Rousseau is not named)

Condorcet describes people who constantly complained of the decline of enlightenment in the midst of its progress, and who lamented the degradation of the human species just as men were remembering their rights and using their reason.

The debate goes on (our summary) Condorcet does not name Rousseau in this passage, and elsewhere ranks him among the thinkers who fixed the principles of the people's rights (IX, 22). The disagreement is thus not about political freedom but about morals: does knowledge make people better? Rousseau sees in the sciences a cause of corruption; Condorcet sees in them the condition of enlightened virtue. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: does progress in knowledge and techniques bring moral progress? Both authors agree on the value of virtue. Open question, taken up by Kant, Freud and contemporary critics of technology.

Thomas Malthus 1798 · attacks premise 2

Condorcet himself describes the moment when the number of men would exceed their means of subsistence and mark the limit of all progress. But that moment arrived long ago: population grows faster than food, and the resulting misery has existed ever since there has been a history of mankind. Perfectibility therefore has a limit.

Condorcet replies

Condorcet Passage by Condorcet, written before the objection

Condorcet foresees this limit himself and judges it distant. If it came, he says, nothing frightening would follow: men would then know that their obligations toward beings who do not yet exist consist not in giving them existence, but happiness.

Thomas Malthus 1798

Malthus says he does not understand this way of removing the difficulty. He reads in it an allusion to an unnatural means of preventing births, which would destroy the virtue and purity of manners that the advocates of perfectibility claim to want.

The debate goes on (our summary) Both authors agree on the logic: a physical limit would exist if population grew unchecked. They differ on when, and on the possible checks: Condorcet counts on a reason that controls births, Malthus on misery and vice (he added "moral restraint" only in 1803). The population data of the last two centuries are read in opposite ways by their heirs. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement: can reason durably master the growth of population and needs, or does nature impose a limit? Both camps appeal to the history of the last two centuries. Open question.

Schopenhauer 1844 · attacks premise 2

The idea of humanity progressing toward ever greater perfection contradicts itself: an infinite time has already elapsed before every moment, so everything that was to come with time should already be here. History does not move toward a goal: it repeats the same thing in other forms.

no reply

see the argument

No reply possible: objection raised in 1844, after the author's death (1794).

The debate goes on (our summary) Condorcet speaks of an "indefinite" improvement, not an infinite one: he himself considers (X, 45-47) that a distant limit may exist, without holding it certain. Schopenhauer's argument targets a becoming without beginning; Condorcet posits a start (the first state of civilisation, Introduction, 8) and a march of humanity in real time. Defenders therefore judge the objection out of range; its supporters answer that the reasoning applies to any progress supposed to be endless. (Our summary.)

Where the debate stands (our summary)Disputed point: does the infinite-time argument touch a progress that began in time? Defenders of progress answer no; Schopenhauer answers that history repeats the same human nature. See also his argument.