Abstract

Our common notion of progress has an almost universally positive connotation regardless of the discipline it is associated with. Who could be against making economic, technological or social progress? Isn’t progress the very telos of the human endeavor? But on what terms should progress be evaluated and what does it mean to make progress in philosophy? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) frequently reflected on the notion of progress, especially as it had been evoked in the course of the early twentieth-century. While these reflections are far from systematic, much of the ambiguity of his position can be eliminated by comparing it to two vastly different notions of progress: the first, the idea of scientific progress as advocated by contemporaries such as Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), and the second, the idea of spiritual progress, as illustrated by religious authors such as John Bunyan (1628-1688). What emerges from this unlikely comparison is Wittgenstein’s clear rejection of the scientific model of progress, which aims at the transformation of society through the accumulation of knowledge, in favor of a spiritual model, which aims at personal conversion to different ways of seeing and acting in the world. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, the progress that philosophy seeks in not about building up increasingly complex explanatory theories; rather, it is a quest for lucidity at all levels, about learning to see under different aspects that which is already present before us.