>>24704557
>>24704598
Progress is imagined. Progress towards what? Progress, even in so far as you define it as the net of all discourse in literature, is completely imaginary. It is a philosophical random walk, sometimes regressing, sometimes progressing towards an imagined position. Why any given society is structured the way it is, and not any other way, is the result of circumstance; How or why the Eastern Roman Empire repelled the Sassanid Empire is not so much a result of the progression of intellectual discourse but of unpredictable circumstance. Had the Sassanids an ever so slight advantage in military strength, the whole of Western society would have diverged towards an entirely new path, the progression of which would not in the least reflect our own. No less, the inhabitants of such a world would be able to define it in terms of some Great Conversation, some Great Historical Progression, that led them to their present state.
>Aristotle and Plato and John Philoponus set the stage,
they would say,
>for the Great Zarathustran Enlightenment!
Engagement on the intellectual level is a matter of political rhetoric. Why should one's ideas be bound by historical developments? That we are building on a wealth of knowledge is entirely imagined. None of prior discourse on human rights, labour, economic theory, or political philosophy as a whole are relevant when one simply disregards these "shared" values.
I have a particular disgust for this sort of false historicism. Rather than a Great Conversation, it is better to think if it as a continual arena of court cases, each decided purely as a battle of rhetoric. The particular judges, jurors and lawyers always have this specious narcissism about them—as if they were the culmination of some grand enterprise of Justice, not realizing that the very reason they believe so is that their values were shaped by the precedents set before their births. The law set the stage for their beliefs about law, and they continue to perpetuate the very same beliefs circumscribed by their system.
Never once did any one progress closer to or further from any particular goal. When the courthouse is raised and the books burned, nothing remains. "Human rights" may be trampled over by Type 59 Tank, Democracy may be despoiled by football fanatics who have never once read a book, or worker's revolts may be quelled in camps. The various Republics of classical antiquity had the very same bedazzled Socialists calling for land reforms, or reactionary fascists looking fondly on the Lacedaemonian system.
The connection from Draco, to Plato, More, Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Proudhon or Marx is entirely imagined. Engagement with "progress" is a form of rhetorical warfare, and there is no reason to engage in leftist, or any, dialectic aside from this particular form of warfare. There is no progress.
