Comte, Auguste

COMTE, AUGUSTE. - Philosopher, b. at Montpellier on 19 Jan. 1798, d. at Paris on 5 Sept. 1857. From a Catholic and royalist family. In 1806 he entered the lycée of Montpellier, and remained there until 1814; there he lost his faith and became a republican. From 1814 to 1816 he attended the polytechnic school. Decisive for his thought was his acquaintance, made in 1817, with Saint-Simon, whose secretary and enthusiastic collaborator he became for some years: then he broke off all relations with him clamorously. The plan of his future works and the character of his mind are already visible in the pamphlet of 1822: Prospectus des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société. In 1830 the first volume of his celebrated Cours de philosophie positive appeared, of which the sixth and last volume was published in 1842. In Oct. 1844 he had his first meeting with Clotilde de Vaux (who lived separated from her husband, and died in 1846), whom he almost divinized. From this time a new phase begins in C.'s activity as a thinker, who, returning to his original inspiration reinforced by the Saint-Simonian influence, conceived his philosophical system as the premise of a vast plan of social, moral, political and religious reform: hence his Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l'humanité (4 vols., Paris 1851-54). In 1848 he founded a positive society and a kind of Church, which recognized in Humanity the new divinity, and in C. its greatest priest. In 1852 there appeared, by C., the Catéchisme positiviste, ou sommaire exposition de la religion universelle, en onze entretiens systématiques entre une femme et un prêtre de l'humanité. His last great work is the Synthèse subjective, ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l'état normal de l'humanité (1856). Not all his friends and disciples wished to follow him in this second phase: mention should be made of Littré, who was his greatest disciple, and of Mill (the correspondence with the latter and with Valat has been published in separate volumes). In his will he established that his apartment (rue Monsieur-le-Prince) should remain the seat of the new religion: there, in fact, the anniversary is celebrated by his surviving disciples. Cf. Testament d'A. C. avec les documents qui s'y rapportent, pièces justificatives, prières quotidiennes, confessions annuelles, correspondance avec m.me de Vaux (1884, 2nd ed. 1896, with an Addition secrète).

His Cours (which is on the Index, decr. 12 Dec. 1864) begins with the celebrated law of the 3 states: theological, metaphysical, positive (precedents of this idea can be traced in Vico, in D'Alembert, in Turgot, in Hegel as then popularized by Cousin). In the first period of civilization (and of every human branch of knowledge) man fantastically seeks the explanation of phenomena in the intervention of supernatural beings conceived anthropomorphically. In the second period such supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces or entities, which in each group of phenomena are given as their mysterious causes. In the positive period the human spirit, having recognized the uselessness of those notions, renounces the investigation of essences-causes, seeking only to discover, by means of observation and reasoning, the effective laws, that is, the invariable relations between facts. The relation between particular phenomena and certain general facts constitutes, precisely, the law, which is like a more constant fact, which therefore permits the prediction of particulars: savoir pour prévoir. There is no science of the absolute, but only of the relative: «Everything is relative: this is the only principle that is absolute» (thus, as early as 1817). C., therefore, can rightly be considered as the founder of positivism, which later would invade European culture, and would mark, especially with Spencer, its greatest triumph in the second half of the century. Far from any contact with Kantian transcendental criticism (ignored, or known only through the writings of Cousin), C. nevertheless finds himself coinciding with Kantian criticism in the polemic against traditional metaphysics, and in the immanentism of principles. A capital difference is this: that, while Kantian criticism saves the Cartesian principle of self-consciousness, from which the new metaphysics of idealism will take its starting point, Comtean positivism, for fear of falling back into the preceding metaphysics, denies, from the outset, any value of science to psychology, understood even merely as empirical introspection, since it is not possible (so C. expresses himself) that the brain should have as its function to think and at the same time to observe that it thinks. Observation can be made only on others. Thus, this positivism, however much it declares itself averse to every metaphysics, whether spiritualistic or materialistic, evidently inclines toward the latter.

Another no less famous doctrine of C. is that of the hierarchical relation of the sciences forming a system that goes from the simplest and most general facts, such as the mathematical ones, progressively through increasing complexity and decreasing generality, to the astronomical ones, to the physical and chemical ones, to the biological ones, to conclude finally in the social ones. Mathematics was the first to reach the positive stage; biology had entered that stage not long before; there remained to be founded "sociology," the new science (here too the memory of our Vico comes of itself). It is announced by C. as the basis and crowning of the whole system, and the proper object of philosophy. On the other hand, insofar as sociology is conceived as a particular science, needing to be brought to the positivity of the other sciences in the total system of science, it is this total system that becomes the proper object of philosophy, whose task becomes that of organizing all the sciences in a general synthetic view, dominated by a unitary concept of method and doctrine. Here the problem arises, not easy to solve, of this unity. Since every a priori is here banished, it can only be a matter of a coherence or analogical harmony of the whole.

Thus, this encyclopedia or system of science, insofar as it seeks to conclude in a sociology, transforms its previous objectivistic character into a subjectivism or humanism no longer hostile to every form of spiritualism. The concept arises of man as a historical-social formation, which draws from the environment (hence the celebrated theory of the milieu social) the reason for his intellectual and moral activity. The uncertainty of the concept of this new science, between naturalism and spiritualism, has meant that positivist sociology, in C. and in the numerous school of his followers (some, even of great value), oscillated between a biological conception and the historicist one, which anticipates more modern views, in which the idea of civilization and of properly human progress is held firm. In him, it is obvious, these views are limited to the problems of the time, in which the new ideas of an economic reform of society were fermenting, to be founded on the development of industry (no longer on military power), and on the expansion of liberal institutions. This is the period of preparation for socialism that issued in the work of Marx, as is well known.

The intellectualism of Comte's earlier philosophy, in which even social progress is entrusted to the direction of scientific knowledge, is clearly superseded, in his final phase, by the romantic motif that became predominant in it: now it is the affective element, feeling, the heart, that becomes the primary principle of human social life, and the new moral law is expressed in the motto often repeated by Comte: vivre pour autrui. In it there is also revealed the new religious intuition, in appearance frankly Christian, of humanity. Religion becomes the social organ par excellence, as that which is a life of pure love, of elevation and sanctification of the instincts proper to human nature, which would in themselves lead to individualism and egoism, whereas the moral progress of man consists in overcoming them and in subordinating the freedoms of the individual to the claims of common life. Insofar as this common life is conceived as founded on a religious sentiment, every form of utilitarianism and economism is rejected. The individual must be mediated within Humanity, which is the Grand Être, Comte's new divinity, which assures (subjective) immortality in the memory of future generations to its benefactors and worshippers, to those who have lived for the progress of civilization. The priests of this religion (the positivist philosophers) constitute the spiritual power, which must not command but guide, by means of science and moral example, the temporal power. Not perceiving the caricature to which this new religion of his exposed him, in 1851 he calmly wrote: "I am persuaded that before 1860 I shall preach positivism, as the only religion real and complete, at Notre-Dame." Meanwhile, in the amalgam of motifs at least apparently contrasting (due in large part to the historical period), Comte declares himself opposed to all Enlightenment literature and to Protestantism. He sees in the French Revolution the triumph of intellectual and moral anarchism, and he opposes the movement of the bourgeoisie as its derivative. No longer the abstract metaphysics of rights, but the new civilization will know no other right than that of doing one's duty. The productive forces of wealth will indeed be guided by science, but man in his social foundation will henceforth be represented by the proletariat, while the female class will have, by virtue of the affective element predominant in it and by its function as mother, the sacred task of keeping alive in man the sentiment of humanity.

Armando Carlini