Auguste Comte (1789-1857) & French Positivism

1. Auguste Comte (1789-1857)& French Positivism Presented by: Ahmad Y. Samantho Erliyani Manik

2. Comte and His Life • Born January 19, 1789 in Montpellier, French • attended the École Polytechnique, from which he was expelled in 1816

3. His Works • (1830-42) Cours de philosophie positive (Course in Positive Philosophy) • (1844) Discours sur l’esprit positif (A Discourse on the Positive Spirit) • (1848) Discours sur l’ensemble du positivisme (A General View of Positivism) • (1851-54) Système de politique positive ou Traité de sociologie instituant la religion de l’Humanité (Subjective Synthesis), vol. 1: Traité de philosophie mathématique, Paris: Société Positiviste (Comte’s last, uncompleted, work.)

4. Positivism • in philosophy, generally, any system that confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. More narrowly, the term designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857).

5. Comte’s Positivism • Comte's Positivismwas posited on the assertion of a so-called law of the three phases (or stages) of intellectual development. • There is a parallel between the evolution of thought patterns in the entire history of man, on the one hand, and in the history of an individual's development from infancy to adulthood, on the other.

6. The Three Stages of Intellectual Development • The first stage, or so-called theological, stage, natural phenomena are explained as the results of supernatural or divine powers. It matters not whether the religion is polytheistic or monotheistic; in either case, miraculous powers or wills are believed to produce the observed events. This stage was criticized by Comte as anthropomorphic; i.e., as resting on all-too-human analogies. Generally, animistic explanations—made in terms of the volitions of soullike beings operating behind the appearances—are rejected as primitive projections of unverifiable entities.

7. The second stage, called metaphysical, is in some cases merely a depersonalized theology: the observable processes of nature are assumed to arise from impersonal powers, occult qualities, vital forces, or entelechies (internal perfecting principles). In other instances, the realm of observable facts is considered as an imperfect copy or imitation of eternal ideas, as in Plato's metaphysics of pure Forms.

8. the third stage or the positive or scientific stage, knowledge is secured solely on observations, by their correlation and sequence. This last stage was distinguished by an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Knowledge could only be relative to man's nature as a species and to his varying social and historical situations. Absolute explanations were therefore better abandoned for the more sensible discovery of laws based on the observable relations between phenomena.

9. Comte's classification of the sciences • It was based upon the hypothesis that the sciences had developed from the understanding of simple and abstract principles to the understanding of complex and concrete phenomena. • Hence, the sciences developed as follows: from mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology. • According to Comte, this last discipline not only concluded the series but would also reduce social facts to laws and synthesize the whole of human knowledge, thus rendering the discipline equipped to guide the reconstruction of society.

10. Comte’s Sociology Though Comte did not originate the concept of sociology or its area of study, he greatly extended and elaborated the field and systematized its content. Comte divided sociology into two main fields, or branches: • social statics, or the study of the forces that hold society together; • social dynamics, or the study of the causes of social change. The underlying principles of society are individual egoism, which is encouraged by the division of labour, and the combination of efforts and the maintenance of social cohesion by means of government and the state.

11. SAVOIR POUR PREVOIR •  To know to predict • The idea of social engineering has already in his philosophy and it has a strong relation with the social re-organize of the industrial society

12. Religion for Comte • To Comte, religion is a synthesis of ‘dogma’, which represents the philosophical unity of scientific theories; ‘worship’, which directs sentiments; and ‘regulations’, which govern behaviour.

13. The Système de philosophie positive, which also proposes the new construction of a political synthesis inspired by religion. This completes the human unity to which the synthesis tends through loving, thinking and acting. • Religion thus becomes a super-theory of the immediately applicable unity; it permits human intervention in the historical and social dynamic, for it puts morality and politics in the service of social progress. • The Religion of Humanity is ‘proven’ because it is founded on cosmological and human knowledge, and is thus the only answer to moral and political questions.

14. While the Hegelian state is called upon to transcend the egoistic civil society by an objective moral idea, Comte wants to orient the will towards the superior reality of humanity, a subjective moral idea. For ‘Humanity breaks up first into Cities, then into Families, but never into individuals’ (1851-4: 4, 31). • Morality takes the individual into consideration; families and homelands are, nevertheless, still important to it as the necessary introduction to Humanity. In terms of its composition, the Great Being (le Grand Etre) is defined as ‘the continuous totality of converging beings’.