COMTE, AUGUSTE. – Philosopher, born in Montpellier on 19 January 1798, died in Paris on 5 September 1857. Of a Catholic and royalist family. In 1806 he entered the lycée of Montpellier, where he remained until 1814; there he lost his faith and became a republican. From 1814 to 1816 he attended the École Polytechnique. Decisive for his thought was his acquaintance, made in 1817, with Saint-Simon, whose secretary and enthusiastic collaborator he became for several years; then he broke off all relations with him in a sensational manner. The plan of his future works and the character of his mind are already visible in the 1822 pamphlet: Prospectus des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société. In 1830 the first volume of his celebrated Cours de philosophie positive appeared; the sixth and final volume was published in 1842. In October 1844 he met Clotilde de Vaux for the first time (she was living separated from her husband and died in 1846), whom he almost deified. From this time there began a new phase in the activity of the thinker C., who, returning to his original inspiration, strengthened by the influence of Saint-Simon, 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 Humanity as the new divinity and C. as its high priest. In 1852 C.’s Catéchisme positiviste, ou sommaire exposition de la religion universelle, en onze entretiens systématiques entre une femme et un prêtre de l'humanité appeared. His last major work is the Synthèse subjective, ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l'état normal de l'humanité (1856). Not all his friends and pupils wished to follow him in this second phase: Littré, who was his foremost pupil, and Mill deserve mention (the correspondence with the latter and with Valat was published separately in volumes). In his will he stipulated that his apartment (rue Monsieur-le-Prince) should remain the seat of the new religion: there, in fact, the survivors of his pupils celebrate the anniversary. 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, decree of 12 December 1864) begins with the celebrated law of the three stages: theological, metaphysical, positive (precedents for this idea can be traced in Vico, D'Alembert, Turgot, and Hegel, then disseminated by Cousin). In the first period of civilization (and of all human knowledge), man fantastically seeks the explanation of phenomena in the intervention of anthropomorphically conceived supernatural beings. In the second period, these supernatural agents are replaced by abstract forces or entities, which are posited in each group of phenomena as their mysterious causes. In the positive period, the human spirit, having recognized the futility of those notions, renounces the investigation of essences-causes, seeking only to discover, through 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 and therefore makes possible 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 absolute principle” (so, as early as 1817). C. may therefore rightly be regarded as the founder of positivism, which would later invade European culture and, especially with Spencer, achieve its greatest triumph in the second half of the century. Far removed from any contact with Kantian transcendental criticism (ignored, or known only through the writings of Cousin), C. nevertheless coincides with Kantian criticism in its polemic against traditional metaphysics and in the immanentism of its principles. The fundamental difference is this: whereas Kantian criticism preserves the Cartesian principle of self-consciousness, from which the new metaphysics of idealism would take its point of departure, Comtean positivism, for fear of falling back into the preceding metaphysics, denies from the outset any scientific value to psychology, understood even merely as empirical introspection, since it is not possible (as C. puts it) for the brain to have the function of thinking and, at the same time, of observing that it thinks. Observation can be made only of others. Thus, although this positivism declares itself opposed to every metaphysics, both spiritualistic and materialistic, it evidently inclines toward the latter.
Another doctrine of C., no less famous, is that of the hierarchical relation of the sciences forming a system that proceeds from the simplest and most general facts, such as mathematical ones, through progressively increasing complexity and decreasing generality, to astronomical facts, then to physical and chemical facts, then to biological facts, and finally to social facts. Mathematics was the first to reach the positive stage; biology had entered that stage only a short time before; what remained was to establish “sociology,” the new science (here too, the recollection of our Vico arises naturally). C. presents it as the foundation and crowning achievement of the entire system, and as the proper object of philosophy. On the other hand, insofar as sociology is conceived as a particular science in need of being brought to the positivity attained by the other sciences within 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 into a general synthetic view, governed by a unitary concept of method and doctrine. The problem of this unity, not easy to resolve, presents itself here. Since every a priori is excluded here, it can involve only an analogical coherence or harmony of the whole.
Thus this encyclopedia or system of science, insofar as it seeks to culminate in a sociology, transforms its preceding objectivist character into a subjectivism or humanism no longer hostile to every form of spiritualism. The concept arises of man as a historical-social formation, who derives from his environment (hence the celebrated theory of the milieu social) the basis of his intellectual and moral activity. The uncertainty surrounding the concept of this new science, between naturalism and spiritualism, meant that positivist sociology, in C. and in the numerous school of his followers (some of them also of great merit), oscillated between a biological conception and the historicist one, which anticipates more modern views in which the idea of civilization and properly human progress is maintained. In him, obviously, these views are limited to the problems of the time, when new ideas for an economic reform of society were fermenting, to be founded on the development of industry (no longer on military power) and on the enlargement of liberal institutions. This was the period of preparation for socialism, which issued in the work of Marx, as is well known.
The intellectualism of the preceding Comtian philosophy, in which social progress too is entrusted to the direction of scientific knowledge, is decisively superseded in its final phase by the Romantic motive, which has become predominant within it: now it is the affective element, feeling, the heart, that becomes the first principle of human social life, and the new moral law is expressed in the motto often repeated by C.: vivre pour autrui. In this there is also revealed the new religious intuition of humanity, apparently genuinely Christian. Religion becomes the social organ par excellence, as that which is the life of pure love, of the elevation and sanctification of the instincts proper to human nature, which would in themselves lead to individualism and egoism, whereas man’s moral progress consists in overcoming them and subordinating the freedoms of the individual to the requirements of communal life. Since this common life is conceived as founded upon a religious sentiment, every form of utilitarianism and economism is rejected. The individual must be mediated within Humanity, which is the Great Being, the new Comtian divinity, which assures subjective immortality, in the remembrance 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, through science and moral example, the temporal power. Unaware of the caricature to which he was exposing this new religion of his, in 1851 he calmly wrote: “I am convinced that before 1860 I shall preach positivism as the sole real and complete religion at Notre-Dame.” Meanwhile, within the amalgam of motives that were, at least apparently, contradictory (owing in large part to the historical period), C. declares himself opposed to the whole of Enlightenment literature and to Protestantism. He sees in the French Revolution the triumph of intellectual and moral anarchism, and opposes the bourgeois movement as its derivation. No longer the abstract metaphysics of rights, but the new civilization will recognize no other right than that of doing one’s duty. The productive forces of wealth will indeed be guided by science, but henceforth man in his social foundation will be represented by the proletariat, while the female class, because of the affective element predominant in it and its function as mother, will have the sacred task of keeping alive in man the sentiment of humanity.
BIBLI: For the works of C., and their subsequent editions, for the correspondence, manuscripts, and other documents, cf. H. Gouhier, La jeunesse d'A. C. et la formation du positivisme, I, Paris 1933, p. 294 ff., and III, there 1941, p. 421 ff. Also for works on the philosophy of C., V. op. cit., I, p. 251 ff., and III, p. 425 ff. Gouhier’s work is predominantly historical in character, limited to C.’s youth and his relations with Saint-Simon. Among the other works, the following may be mentioned: E. Caird, The social philosophy and religion of C., Glasgow 1885; L. Lévy-Bruhl, La philos. d'A. C., Paris 1900; E. Seillière, A. C., there 1924; Ch. de Rouvet, A. C. et le catholicisme, there 1928; P. Ducasse, Méthode et intuition chez A. C., there 1939; H. de Lubac, A. C. et le christianisme, in Le drame de l'humanisme athée, 3rd ed., there 1945, pp. 135–278. Armando Carlini