Auguste Comte and Early Positivism

• The Intellectual Background of Positivism is the efforts in the rehabilitation of the social order after the French Revolution 1789. There are two mainstreams:
• 1. They who will return to the traditional society (political romanticists)
• 2. They who seek the new values of modernity and dream of future of the scientific industrial society (positivists)
What is ‘Positivism”?
• An epistemological doctrine that the true knowledge is only about the fact. The fact or the factual is an object that can be observed empirically with our senses. The term ‘positive’ doesn’t mean normatively, but descriptively. It means ‘the factual’.
Fact and Phenomenon
• The factual assumes that there is no the reality beyond or outside of the observable world. So, the positivists neglect the Kantian doctrine of “das Ding an sich”. For them the reality is only the phenomenal world.
Positivist View of History
• According to Comte the history of mankind develops in three stages:
• 1. Theological Stage
• 2. Metaphysical Stage
• 3. Positivist Stage
Theological Stage
• Man searched the causes of natural phenomena behind the empirical world and found the superhuman forces like idols (fetishism), gods (polytheism) and God (monotheism).
• There was a progress of knowledge from the knowledge of impersonal forces to personal God.
• The social organization was absolutism
• But this stage can be compared with the infantile stage of human person.
Metaphysical Stage
• In this stage the natural forces were not imagined as superhuman forces. They were grasped with abstract concepts like ‘cause’, ‘ether’ , ‘being’, ‘substance’ etc. There was no more God in this stage, because God was conceptualized as an abstract entity.
• The social organization was laws oriented society
• This stage is comparable with the stage of adolescence of human person.
Positivist Stage
• Man explains the natural phenomena factually, i.e. he doesn’t try to explain them through theological or metaphysical causes. So, the fall of an apple is not cause by God or by the ‘primal cause’, but by ‘gravitation’. We can observe neither God nor primal cause. They are not facts. Only fact is observable.
• The social organization is industrial society
• In this stage the mankind reach the stage of maturity of his knowledge.
Is Comte’s History factual?
• Of course he developed his historical view according to certain ideological framework, i.e. the positivist ideology. In this ideology it is assumed that only the positivism is mature stage of knowledge. And the positivist society is the purpose of human history.
The Hierarchy of Sciences
• According to Comte the mathematics is the fundamental of all sciences. So, the mathematics is the basis of the modern astronomy, and the mathematics and astronomy are the basis of modern physics. These three sciences are the basis of the chemistry, and biology. The complete and last science is sociology that assumes the other five sciences.
The Positivist Religion
• In the spirit of positivism Comte will construct a new religion like Rousseau’s civil religion. This positivist religion, so imagined Comte, imitates the catholic Church but without personal God. The god of positivist Religion is called “grand etre” (supreme being). So, Comte’s Religion has its own priests, calendar, saints etc.