Transcript Auguste Comte and Early Positivism - Bayt al

Auguste Comte and
Early Positivism
French After the
Revolution
• 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.