Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was a French philosopher who founded a school of thought he called Positivism. He has been mostly ignored over the past century, but in the later 1800s he was hugely influential. This was especially true around the periphery of European civilization, such as in Latin America (Brazil has a Positivist motto on their flag) and in Turkey, where the "Young Turks" who created the new, secular state after World War I were big fans.
Comte was a mathematician and something of a scientist, but Positivism is not a philosophy of science. It purports to be a philosophy of everything. Comte laid out the stages of human civilization and the corresponding stages of human understanding, (animism = primitive, monotheism = medieval, etc.), provided a biological basic for morality, developed lists of the things needed for human happiness, even tried to produce a scientifc model of romance.
But mainly Positivism is a philosophy of society and governance. Comte was obsessed with the question of how societies could be run, since the Revolution had swept away everything that depended on God or inherent respect for royal or aristocratic authority. Comte posited that: 1) science (broadly defined) is the sum total of human knowledge; 2) therefore, society and government should be remade along scientific lines. His major work was called the Plan for the Scientific Work Necessary to Reorganize Society, otherwise the First System of Positive Polity. He coined the world "sociology" for this new discipline of applying scientific principles to social questions. He thought he had proved that sociology was the culmination of all human thought – since the scientific is the highest stage of knowledge, and human society the most complex and important thing to which we can apply science – and that applying his principles to social questions would lead to human perfection.
Later in life Comte changed gears and decided that his newly remade society needed religion. Since all god-based religions had been smashed by science, the new religion had to be based on real things, in particular science and human nature. Many people who had admired Comte's early work (such as John Stuart Mill) thought he had gone mad and denounced this turn toward scientific spiritualism, but the new humanistic faith did gain tens of thousands of followers. Later in life he really did go mad, and he died before he turned 60, leaving behind notes for several unfinished books.
It is hard for a 21st-century person to take Comte seriously, but it is also hard for us to refute his basic principles. If you agree that science is our most impressive system of knowledge, and that we should organize our society along the lines that will most promote human happiness, what's not to like?He does not seem to me a malicious man, but he does seem to have lost a sense of proportion. Yet that is perhaps a tragic result of making a Faustian bargain. Those people in the western tradition who are really under the misapprehension that they have the capacity to unify all of knowledge and to account for all previous logical and historical developments leading up to them have made a pact with the devil. It is literally insane to believe that you can do that. And to attempt to do it is in some ways noble and heroic in the Greek sense, in the sense that it is full of hubris and there is a certain sort of sin or pride in that, and at the same kind there is a kind of tragic nobility to it. He is trying to do more than anyone could possibly do. He has constructed a cold and austere and harsh Cartesian universe, and at the same time he longs for a sort of Pascalian moral order, and the problem is that the human mind just isn’t big enough to do that. So you see him in a kind of tug of war between his desire for moral order and his desire for logical clarity and the problem is that he pulls so hard in this tug of war that the rope snaps, and alas we have here a tragic, Faustian figure who might have been a great man intellectually but never realized his tremendous potential because of his unfortunate lapse into madness.
Good article on Comte at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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