Progress and Regression

Jaeggi (A Critique of Forms of Life), a philosophy professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, tackles the “notoriously problematic” definition of progress in this astute if sometimes opaque analysis. Rather than being confined to material accomplishments—the discovery of penicillin, the invention of the computer—progress, in the author’s view, is a continual “process of enrichment” guided by an expanding and increasingly complex “understanding of the situation” being examined. Furthermore, this process relies on “meta-reflection on what came before and how it was handled,” and necessitates overcoming “imperfections, deficits, imbalances, blockages to learning” that stifle change. Jaeggi is less interested in how local or intergroup conflicts are resolved than considering what it might mean to pursue a type of progress that could help to refine the “principles and institutions regulating human existence” and thus embody “the possibility of different worlds.” Jaeggi’s aspirations are unapologetically capacious and her argument thought-provoking, though her focus on the abstract can seem in tension with elements of the argument. For example, despite noting that “context-sensitive understanding and analysis are practically a prerequisite for incisive critique,” concrete examples of real-life social progress, conditions that enabled it, and its effects are few. Still, it’s a rigorous consideration of what it means to move forward. (Oct.)