Omnium rerum mensura est homo: et earum rerum, quae sunt, exsistentiae [mensura], et earum, quae non sunt, inexsistentiae
(Man is the measure of all things: of those things that exist insofar as they exist, and of those things that do not exist insofar as they do not exist)
Protagoras
With this quote, Protagoras gives to the student of philosophy, guided by Clio, one singular lesson: Relativism is always absolutism. Now, in this our age, Benedict XVI coined the expression “dictatorship of relativism”. Samuel Francis called the present age, with a more swashbuckling wit, “anarcho-tyranny”. An illustration of Protagoras’s lesson is Auguste Comte. Auguste Comte was a relativist, one must confess that he was not what is commonly thought of as a relativist, no, he was rather one in the long tradition that goes back to the supra quoted Protagoras. Auguste Comte, who is, by the way, the topic of this lesson, considers dictatorship the best way to transition from our chaotic situation to the last stage of evolution and of normalcy, and he considered anarchism to be identical in scope, scale and evil to the theological Antichrist.
The variety of views psychologically and logically kept inside Auguste Comte’s cranium can be understood only if one understand what Comte proposed so as to take man out of the age of revolution, deconstruction, and mere negativity: Positivism. Yours Truly has been requested both by his own intellectual hygiene, and by his conscience to make a a properly synthetizing clearing of the misunderstood philosophy of positivism, of positivistic orthodoxy understood on its own terms. Protagoras is the optimal point of departure, because there has been, since Comte entered the state of halved living he is in, much ado and murkiness surrounding the concept of Positivism. Auguste Comte, the Priest of Haunted Humanity (PHH) has part of the blame, he does never define, not as us mortals do by putting a difference next to the genus the most essential word of his entire system: Positivism1. No, he rather prefers to give some notes, some broad strokes of what positivism is, so that we can all understand by “positivity” a variety of things such as utility, scientism, humanism, altruism, antimetaphysicalism or agnosticism (Discours sur l'esprit positif). With this murkiness of his, of a continental scale, Comte surely made allowance for future academics and wannabes to make his work digestible with their writs and their articles for a broadened Humanity. The text in front of you is a humble contribution towards gaining a wage by making a murky thinker digestible to other people. The beard is messy and it is too long, “positivism” both in Comte’s work and in the broader positive tradition is a beard too long to groom: It needs trimming. And when it comes to trimming beards we all know that William of Ockham is our man. If we use the marvellous tool Ockham took from Aristotle, Ockham’s razor, and apply it to all the mumbo jumbo this High Priest has going for him, if we speak as Nominalist that is, positivism is discovered to be but one principle:
Everything is relative; and only that is absolute
Positivism is, essentially, not scientism, positivism is definitely not empiricism, positivism is not a revolutionary ideology, positivism is not liberal nor socialist, it is not retrograde nor progressive, it is not dialectic, more than Hegelian, it is beyond Kant in a more radical way than Hegel dared, he is Hypokantian. No: Positivism is relativism, and relativism is positivism. If you, traveller, dare reading Comte’s discourse, the Haunted Priest of Humanity will not give a definition of his most fundamental concept, the principle of his philosophy: Positive. He will use “positive” with the same murkiness that idealist philosophy often uses the only German word philosophy majors need to know and use to appear cultivated in that fine tradition: Geist. But fear not, reading beyond this writ will not be needed, Yours Truly has a simple trick, he has the key to understand Auguste Comte.
Please, enjoy your stay.
The naturalist trick, words on method
What sort of method, what historiographical school, movement or tendency is best suited, from those displayed on the menu of historical enquiry, so as to truly comprehend Auguste Comte? If you remember our last lesson, we learned there that Auguste Come cannot be classified neither among dead nor among living beings, he is a rara avis, a genus of his own, theologically we would need to bring Limbo back from hypothetical conjectures to common parlour of theologians if we wanted to find a fitting category for the PHH.. Sadly, the teaching of Limbo would be a waste here, since Auguste Comte is not a baby, not anymore. One can leave the supernatural metaphors on the roadside. We are, after all, operating within historical categories, we are in the sphere of Clio, we are dealing with the deeds and thoughts of a great man, not with his limbs and corpse. Therefore, we need to tread carefully so as to not take too much from theology, this man was, after all, an apostate.
It is true, a metaphorical limbo is beside the point when it comes to classifying Auguste Comte, because we need to follow a different metaphorical path: the naturalistic method, but one understood in a heterodox manner, even for a naturalist. The sciences, the plurality of sciences that cannot be but by economy of language reduced to a so called “Science”, are not fond of metaphors. Metaphors are, after all, analogies that make use of that which is apparent in all things, and do so to reach some level of profundity by appeal to the similarities of those same things, per visibilia ad invisibilia. One science, however, is occupied with both sides of the spectrum, with appearances and ends, a science cannot go from one to the other, but specialize and conquer a single field. History is also a science, here is our naturalism: To understand that History is already a science. History has been scientific longer than most of her sisters a grown up family member, because, long before Newton, there was Thucydides. And for those less classically inclined, those more Latin and less Hellenic, the Italian Renaissance already gave illustration to the maturity the historical science had reached already by the end of the Middle Ages.
Other common criteria of “science” can and do, in truth, apply to history2. If change is essential to science, then surely history is the most essential science because it is essentially revisionist. History never ceases to destroy what preceding research once laid down; upon the wastes of ancient masters builds Clio. If the sciences differ from philosophy because the sciences are more technical, then history is more scientific than any natural science, because it was first an art, it was wordsmithing, it was a part of grammar; and rhetoric, the art of command, took from History its arsenal, until social engineering replaced both. If the sciences deal with particular fields and not with the transcendental universality of what is real, then history, that covers exclusively singular events, is the most scientific of the whole bunch and stock of them. Since History, when we stop and think about it philosophically, fills all the criteria so as to be a science, one can but wonder why we are so hesitant, as civilized people, to include history among sciences, together with chemistry and law, why we hesitate pairing it with the teaching of philosophy of science or history of science courses.
To this question there is a simple explanation, a explanation that is a very important tag, one needed for something to be scientific, for contemporary tastes: Progress, i.e., asymptotic development and refinement of knowledge by repeated verification and/or falsification (scientific progress that is). Of such a procedure, of progression, does History not show but its absence. Because, while historians can argue to their heart’s content if History progresses, regresses or stays still, they can all agree that, when it comes to the status, order and flow of their science, the progress of their scientific knowledge, they have only to say ignoramus; that is, they can only say that it is impossible for them to know if man has taken a step back or one forward as it pertains to historical knowledge. A more profane but equally relevant cause of the hesitance of historical inclusion among the sciences is that History cannot be used to make a bridge, no, with History we get no infrastructure, because History does not build bridges, it kills gods.
There is need for understanding, the science of History was made aware of its epistemological status, it became scientifically mature, the moment it was confronted by vulgar positivism3 and the historicism rampant in the age of Romanticism. Parallel to how philosophy reached its critical point with Kant, the XIX century was the time when history had its own “Critic of Pure Reason”. This century was called by Auguste Comte, in similar fashion to how David Hume considered his own XVIII century, the century of History. A last parabolical trajectory in this story is, as is much better known, the appearance of Darwin and the whole phenomenon of evolutionary disputations surrounding and accompanying his work, a phenomenon still permeating our discourse. These three trajectories (the appearance of Kant, the maturity of history as a science and the point of departure for our contemporary comprehension of biology) converged and, in turn, gave us the spiritual background of Progress, of Progress in all directions, shapes and forms, be it technical, political, artistic, scientific, cultural. There is ritual to History, because History requires a habitual effort, a continued exercise, to bring forth what truly is present and call it back from times past. To truly understand Progress, then, be Progress a concept that became a myth, be it an actual phenomenon that became increasingly harder to verify, one cannot appeal to a single cause, to a simplistic account. As is known, Leopold von Ranke gave us the great truism that every time is equidistant to God. Every epoch, every age has its animating spirit; the one we are leaving, the one that Comte entered, is the age of Progress. We cannot appeal to a single cause, but we can try to find what makes all the different causes that are concurring simultaneously be part of the same age.
Surely the idea of progress goes way back? Has Sych not read, for instance, the poet Lucretius and his work rerum natura? Is not the Enlightenment and its optimism the true time of progress, not the romantic era where pessimism about Progress is so common? And more importantly than all this, what relationship does this mixture of philosophical rumblings and historical considerations have to do with each other? In order, yours truly must say that the first two questions are fair (after all, he himself has called them forth), and they deserve a treatment of their own, but for now they are work in progress. When it comes to the last question, it is an important one, because to study the historical figure of Comte it is best to do so on his own terms, that is, according to the style of his own spirit, which was to dream of history, labelled sociology (hiding behind philosophy of history) as the ultimate science, . This is meant not to avoid objectivity, but to properly formalize our object. There is no historical character without an historian, quoting oneself, the truism goes: History is made up of those that write and make it. Being Sych the one writing about Comte, it is proper that a good path, a method is found. Therefore, when we have at hands the father of evolutionism, the true father, in the philosophical sense, that Darwin read after his travels and before the development of his theory of evolution, we need to take into account that Comte is not made by Darwin, but Darwin made by him. Comte is a bridge, maybe THE bridge, between 1789 and 1848, between the two types of revolutions, he was, after all, the follower of Saint Simon, who was the father of socialism, or the grandfather at least. Comte was not a man trained in letters, in courts or among poets, he was a man trained at the École polytechnique, he was a polytechnician of a truly Napoleonic institute, closer by his studies to the modern social researcher and engineer than to any other savant of bygone eras. He was, and this is of the utmost importance, truly aware of Progress, because he could reflect upon the XVIII century, upon the Enlightenment and its consequences, of disaster or glory. The Enlightenment probably did substantial progress, but there is only Progress when such a phenomenon is recognized, reflected upon and finally written about; such a task was the one given by Clio to the Romantics.
History is written by those who write it, and the romantics, wrote the history of the Enlightenment. This must be kept mind so as to be able to find a way to make contact with the world of spirit that Comte inhabits. The history of history (historiography) gives us, with Comte, the effort of synthesizing enlightenment philosophy of history (Condorcet), revolutionary politics (Saint Simon) and a reflective and pessimist reading of the revolution (a reflection based on Joseph de Maistre, whom he considered his true and retrograde master). Comte mixed and brew with this distinct elements because he lived in the age of Romanticism, where the same universal laws of logic and reason did apply, but the combination of events, circumstances and ideas gave a different spirit to that period, one different from the XXI century. Comte was a synthetic historian that combined the natural sciences, specially biology, with the human sciences. Therefore the best way to understand him is to enter his world, the world he inhabited, and therefore we need to do true and authentic synthetic history. We need to do history not culturally like Burckhardt, not morally like Acton, not economically like Marx, not politically like Ranke, but sociologically, as if the science of man and the science of life were on a dualistic continuum, like the Priest of Haunted Humanity.
It is imperative to write the anatomy of Auguste Comte, in the must historically “literal” sense; this writ is a lighting course of such an operation. Therefore, we need to be a naturalist historian, a historian naturalist, a physician doing history and a historian doing forensic research. We need to carve and rip, open and cut out this unalived-undead man. We will start our course tracing the origins of this organism (Kant); afterwards, how its system functions statically (David Hume); lastly, we will see it dynamically, in action, in time and not in pure spacey (the law of three stages).
Kant, homo clausus and DNA: The origins of species.
Yours Truly does not pretend to be a biologist, but, as everybody, he has picked up one word from the biologist’s lingo, and that word is DNA. Much spookstery exists concerning this word, concerning genes. Socio-biology is the utopia of many a social scientist (and the trespassing impertinence of most contemporary biologists). There is no need in repeating the truism that, for the time being, no casual relationship between human action and a naturalistic account of man has appeared (Ludwig von Mises), not one with the ability to predict market processes by cutting open an entrepreneur’s cranium.
What is certain, is that, when it comes to the field of intellectual history, the history of ideas, a far more precise evolutionary stream can be found than in any of the manuals biologists are fond of can. When it comes to the lineages of modernity, when it comes to the DNA of modern thought, all problems, all links, all effects are solved, related and explained, by the existence of Immanuel Kant.
What Kantian philosophy is we all know, we have all heard and forcefully followed it, maybe even left it behind. When it comes to Immanuel Kant, he is to us like homo neanderthalensis: He is in us, in our pool, tracks and story. The question is if we have realized that he is, somehow, encoded into our being. Behind The Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohammed, the largest man for the West, the world by extension, is Immanuel Kant (always speaking historically). When it comes to ideas, History is more biological and physical than it is logical, this has been often repeated: We are concerned with the force of ideas. Be it so, the case is that Kant is found at every stage of the contemporary age’s evolution somehow, somewhere.
August Comte knew this only too well. He knew this too well because he was impregnated with History, he did not run away from the truth that we all come from a more brutish and primitive animal, he had no hatred of any of his ancestors, au contraire: Comte is the man who, if genetics had been then discovered, would have tried to get his personal lineage traced all the way back to star dust or, aptly called, cosmic blobness. He would love every step, every stage of such a investigation. But, as he himself said, the epoch immediately precedent to one’s own is paramount so as to understand what is happening in all ages present. For Comte, the previous stage of evolution, the door and Janos, was Immanuel Kant.
Without giving a full account of the comtian philosophy of history, we can at least say that August Comte considered Kant to be a closure, not an overture. Kant is the man who ended abstract thought, making way for useful, that is, scientific knowledge. Kant was the metaphysician who admitted that metaphysics was a waste of time and speculative means. But to understand the significance of Kant we most keep two things in mind.
First, Comte is always speaking in future tense, so much so, that he wrote one of his work from 1928. When Comte is saying that metaphysics is dead, or Christianity is dead, or anything is dead, he is talking in future tense. For him, time was not presence, no, that would be Saint Augustine’s School. But, more importantly, time was neither structured on a horizontal line as “past-present-future”. For Comte time was one stream of light, one powerful beam piercing everything, a train, if you can catch it. Time is for the orthodox positivist past-future-present; the present being a glimpse of lighting. Therefore, when Comte considers Kant a closure, he was not saying that, just by being written the Kantian philosophy, Metaphysics was abolished. In Comte’s view, his age was a transitionary phase between philosophy, as classically understood, and a coming understanding that he already had grasped by both external and internal observation. That Comte speaks in future tense gives us, when made aware of it, a excellent tool in this our dissection of his brain.
Therefore a second point is in order: Auguste Comte was not “postphilosophical”, he was not in any way postmodern. If someone believes that the great tales, the classical systems are just dead he is, from Auguste Comte’s point of view, historically illiterate, a solipsist and an abortive positivist. Auguste Comte, and mark this with fire, was a counterrevolutionary, literally, he was a pure counterrevolutionary, one that wanted only to find a way out of the revolutionary age, nothing more, nothing less. And read attentively: I said counterrevolutionary. In Auguste Comte’s view, one cannot simply say that he is no longer a metaphysician. If Comte could, he would write at present, so as to not be mixed with his nominal inheritors, “Why we cannot help calling ourselves Kantian”. The great principle by which Auguste Comte interprets History is continuity; so much so that he went beyond cultural Christianity; so much so that he considered Christianity revolutionary. And he was right in calling Christianity so: Christianity, by believing that the previous pagan religion was just hidden demon worship, had forsaken itself to self destruct. He was different from plain historicism, that would appear towards the end of the XIX century, because he was consequent: If you want to be “culturally Christian” you most also oppose the Christian tendency to, by considering Christianity the only true religion, discontinue older religions and, by extension, legitimize the Revolution (because for Comte the calendar was built upon what was before and what was after the French Revolution, as for most people nowadays; nothing more, nothing less).
Keeping these two points in mind, we can understand that Comte considered Kant the closure of a certain type of thought and, at the same time, understood the importance of not simply giving such metaphysical thought up. This might sound like a contradictio in terminis; and may Yours Truly give leeway for a reminder: The great positivist moto is, after all, Order and Progress. “We do not give up on Kant, we neither retreat to being mere Kantians, we keep him with his historical contribution and go beyond, plus ultra” This is a simple way to understand Comte’s Kantian inheritance and, more generally, his whole approach to philosophy. If Auguste Comte had a problem with the Crucifixion, it is with how it breaks and tors apart History.
What specific and essential influence has Kant on Comte? The same we have stated previously: Being the closure of Metaphysics. Kant is considered by the PHH to be the dusk and dawn of ages. Why so? Because of Kant’s affirmation that we cannot know the essence or reach the noumenal reality of reality and because of his legislative, contrary to a aetiological-metaphysical style, i.e.: That we know only laws and inform what we discover with them, and we accept this to be the limit and greatness of knowledge, without ever solving the adolescent obsession with transcendental and useless questions. There is, however, two ideas that permeate Comte, two ideas that Kant impressed on his cerebral grey matter:
First and foremost the idea of progress. Are you saying that the idea and concept of “progress” is of Kantian coinage? Are you just going to ignore the Elephant in the room that is Condorcet? May an explanation be in order?
Kant did not make up the idea of progress, he found it around him converging, he also found it in the world he inhabited. Kant is not only the closure of metaphysics, he is Janos, remember that: Kant is Janos. Kant opens the way up for a view of the world that is timely, that is, a view of the world were processes are of the essence (if there are such things) and not ethereal eternities.
Idea for a Universal history from a Cosmopolitan Point of View is fundamental to understanding Comte because there you find both the primitivism of Rousseau and the futurism of Wells. History has to be progressive, not because it is, but because it ought to, because humanity is, by its self-imposed categorical imperative. This is the soul of Whig and Enlightenment worldview, never forget that. Everything, all the old problems, need to be solved, specially morality, by time, this is, by “history”.
Kant thought so, may I say properly, he had to think this way because, for him, what is true is the Will, this is the other idea that Kant permeates Comte with. Yours Truly will avoid considering here if Arthur Schopenhauer was truly the prophet of Kantian philosophy, he will avoid giving his opinion about the true spiritual essence of Kantian denke. What will be said is that, for Kant, pure speculation cannot fix the great metaphysical questions. The soul is immortal, the existence of God or of the world all are practical and not speculative questions. This realizations, that these questions are truly practical questions, sets him a universe apart from Saint Thomas and Aristotle, for whom contemplation was not rest, but the highest form of action. It sets him truly apart because, from this point on, doing our duty will do more than thinking about it, Kant dixit. And where do we look when it comes to practical affairs? To History. And, if the Will and its Imperative are not only relevant but more truly at the centre of man’s questions than pure reasoning, then certainly they are essential for his becoming, essential so that man can become man. To look at History as Progress only makes sense when we believe God, the soul and the universe are practical and not speculative affairs. There is no progressivism without first giving the Will precedence over pure reasoning
Truly you can give more to us than some rebranded resumé of a normie philosophy course? Since you ask, one can but give two for one, might that be enough supply for any demand. Until now, the great genetic code, the modern lineage, the DNA of Auguste Comte has been explained, now we need the monster that breed him. Pleasantries being beside the point, raise your hand and salute David Hume.
David Hume: Kant’s bully
If Schopenhauer is considered Kant’s prophet, then David Hume is the man who stole his lunch. David Hume is the bully of our story. David Hume makes it so that one can define Critical-Kantian philosophy the same way neoconservatism often is: If a neocon is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality, then a Kantian is a metaphysician (in the Comtian sense of the word, i.e., a philosopher) who’s been mugged by David Hume.
It is common knowledge and personal acknowledgment of Kant that he considered David Hume, in dramatic fashion, the man who woke him up from his dogmatic slumber. As we said, the Kantian is mugged by the Humean, this being so, it is proper to ask what the Kantian is minus Hume, it is simple: The Kantian philosophy minus Hume gives us a rationalism. Kant considered that Hume made him abandon the comfortable and innocent rationalism of his youth, of his youth because, as the PHH will explain infra, children pray to God while adolescents ponder about his existence, adults have to work.
There is no point in explaining or discussing David Hume’s influence on Immanuel Kant, that is a task for the objective historian, not for the sociologist of ideas. History is what transcends time. What did Auguste Comte take from Hume? Everything, in a way, but put in clear fashion: Hume is the overture of Positivism.
Immanuel Kant is the dusk of metaphysics, David Hume is the dawn of true knowledge. According to the words of Auguste Comte, he was a follower of Hume who just added Kant into the mixture. Here, however, we most disagree with the High Priest, it is true that he never, admittedly, read Kant, he neither read romantic and idealist German philosophers, he went so far that, at a certain stage in his life, he stopped reading other thinkers so as to keep his mental hygiene. Surely then, a read philosopher like Hume has more influence upon another than one who’s just heard about by coming news like Kant? Thinking this way might seem common sensical, but it is out of step with naturalistic historiography. We must put Kant before Hume simply because Kant is Kant. While some analytic philosophers might try to make it seem as if Hume is more important, this cannot be accepted. Hume is a giant, but Kant is a god (even if the giant might have made the god). The DNA tests are unfalsifiable: Kant weights heavier on Auguste Comte than David Hume, because he is Kant.
Hume is the reader of the Kantian system needed by Comte, he has a quality without which Kant’s weight would be felt differently, entirely different, of another world, on Auguste Comte. The quality of Hume is the opposite of a purely Kantian one, a quality that makes Kant historically as pervasive as he is influential: ambiguity. Kant is ambiguous
Kant is, in a baroque sense, Janos, he is ambiguous. Kant never commits entirely to a position , his danger and greatness is that he neither gives entirely in nor entirely up Metaphysics. He cannot open anything because, taken by himself, sub specie aeternitatis, he is just immobile, at a perennial crossroad. Kant freezes in time, if taken outside of his historical process, because he does not know what to do with his cake: He cannot give up upon finding some minimal solution to the great questions, but he cannot take them up scientifically. Kant wanted to reach a equilibrium where Metaphysics could survive and die, survive as activity and die scientifically. This is weakness, it is weakness to Comte, and Hume would agree.
David Hume, on the other hand, was the great sceptic, he believe there were no causes and that there were no point but to burn all books that show concern for metaphysical inquiry. Hume was a negation of Metaphysics Surely he cannot be used as material or as a block for any building, since he is just a demolition brand? And this is the point where you need to study the spirit of positivism, because we are reaching its medullar and critical body part.
Hume takes a knife and cuts out the metaphysician from Kant, when read backwards (as if Kant was before Hume chronologically, because he is before him historically) this means that there is no point in finding the origin of the human tendency of searching for and attributing causes to the things we encounter. There is no point in searching for God, even in practical reasoning, nor for the soul. All this questions are questions not concerning human understanding, not truly, but concerning human morals, that is, our nature, that is, what we usually do. For Kant they were intelligible questions, for Hume they had to be explained by understanding the human passions, thymologically (=psychologically).
David Hume has the brilliance of using the experimental method and, by its mediation, also that of cutting through metaphysical chitchat. Kant, in a way, after reading Hume, tries to return back or find a dignified place for Metaphysics, in a way, he cannot bring himself to accept its death, Kant is scared. To this transcendental question, Hume would give a psychic explanation, starting from human habit and custom and not from a priori reasoning about deep depths of metaphysical inquiry.
At heart, there is no point in reading David Hume as an epistemologist, too common a reading among Anglo-Saxon philosophers of science. The problem with analytic philosophy is that it has forgotten its origin and, because of that, has forgotten why it does what it does, why it ponders about human language and logic so much. For David Hume, the point was not to see if science operated by appeal to causes or by verification, because, if you think of it, when we ask why we tend to attribute causes when we try to explain something, by definition, we are already searching for a cause. From Hume’s point of view, we cannot avoid appealing to causes, it is what it is, it is part of our nature, which is historical. That we attribute causes is a brute fact which must be explained by use of the experimental method and by a positive study of man, not transcendentally. The point was not to end morality or science, because Hume understood that transcendental questioning, going beyond the fact of our habits and thinking about the ought of our thinking would bring mankind to the brink of suicide. What David Hume was trying to do is to explain this human tendency towards aetiology, study of causes, by social, moral and empirical connections, because he was fully committed to the principle that activity, the active life, is more important than living by mere speculation. There is no such thing as pure speculation, not for the Humean mind, instead, there is repeated speculation, a human feature. There is no need to prove that our brain is doing the work, we just have to look at how humans “work”… We just need anthropology.
David Hume was trying out a new and historically unique philosophical path, because of that, he was opening up philosophical enquiry beyond metaphysics. This effort, made clearly manifest by just looking at the title of any of his books, is by our contemporaries too often forgotten. If we just do logical framing and grammatical analysis the essence of our enquiry, then we are not thinking like David Hume. David Hume was analytic, not egocentric.
Convergence: Science fiction
Comte was always speaking in future tense, he was not speaking, as it pertains to any recorded previous philosopher, of what there is, but of what there is going to be. Knowing this fact, what did he take from Kant and Hume? More importantly: How are they living rent free in Comte’s mind (because living rent free in someone’s mind is being historical, put bluntly).
From Hume he took what philosophy was to become, it was to truly be impregnated with the experimental method, not submit to it, but to truly reach what they, in their limited sphere, aspire to become. Philosophy was to understand all the great questions practically, by looking at what man does, what he intends, what he feels and wishes, not so much because man is at the centre of reality (this might be the case, but it is not the most essential) but because activity is of the essence, not speculation, and this statement needs to be lead to its logical conclusion. In Kant, he found the true elaboration of how science works, of course, understanding that they work not by a priori reasoning so much as by a positive method. This is the important different: That man cannot go beyond the association of phenomena (because this is what Comte understood as a scientific law) is an optimistic affirmation of life, not death.
After we swallow the hard pill that some questions have no answers, we do not simply stay behind the gates of our transcendental reason, au contraire, we actually open up to what there is. According to Comte, science is not united by a priori reasoning, there are sciences, not science, what unites them is a method, and behind the method is a spirit, beyond the spirit is man doing various sciences at one time. This man is not closed behind the gates of time and space, he is opening up to the differentiated knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and physiology.
And he is opening up to sociology. For Comte, the philosophy to come is sociology. Sadly, to our contemporary ears, to call Talcot Parssons the true philosophy of the future would be comical, if it was not tragical. Clio has been ironic towards Comte, cruelly so. But when one understands what sociology is in Comte’s mind, one understands that his is a scientific revolution much greater than Newton or Darwin, one understands that sociology, and not iPhones, are going to kill metaphysical wearisomeness. Because sociology is going to make David Hume look like a scholastic.
Now it is made manifest that Comte’s has a Kantian genus and a Humean difference. Putting it bluntly, he goes beyond Kant by committing himself entirely to phenomenon, and he takes the “practical” as more fundamental than the speculative, going so far and being so consequent so as to burn the corpse of metaphysics driven around by Immanuel Kant. Comte is the continuation of Kant by other means, but sometimes Jupiter kills Cronos, Janos is cut in half.
Dynamo in three courses
Up to this point everything told as been obscure knowledge for the layman, details known by those who have by speciality the monography of August Comte, but this last point will touch upon the part every layman must have heard about Comte: The law of three stages.
Normally, all courses start with the explanation of Comte’s law of three stages, that is, they start with the main course, not with starters. To say that Comte believed man at first to be animistic (everything is one great living and magic totality), then polytheistic, finally monotheistic and, after that, metaphysical positivist; to say that man goes from transcendent to abstract to concrete; from military to industrial with defensive in the middle; to say this is a cheap way to gun down Auguste Comte as a lunatic. Comte was most definitely a lunatic, but him being one is entirely uninteresting, immaterial, knowing his lunacy has the only advantage of making him somewhat humane. Thanks to Yours Truly carefully laying out the naturalistic method he is going to use and fulfilling that plan we can get to the law of three stages and actually explain what this organism works like. So as to properly understand the law of three stages, much ado about the XIX century, Kant, Hume, the Enlightenment and Romanticism had to be put before, not after the treatment of this Law.
Without this careful method we end up mixing Comte with Carnap and with Durkheim. Now that we know the genealogy of Auguste Comte, with this family tree, we see, in contrast, that Heidegger’s effort to do history as history of being, and ending this story with the victory of Technic, is, essentially, a retelling of the law of three stages. The difference being there being tears or a smile when telling the story.
Therefore, being justice made to Auguste Comte, being the century manifest, then be the law manifest. In order and with clarity, the law of three stages must be understood to be, essentially, three things. First and foremost, it is a perfect research program, one that lays out a explanation of universal history that can be verified, tested, explained, systematised and made precise by continued and persevering research.
Does Yours Truly believe the core of Comte’s law is the philosophy of science of Imre Lakatos? It would not be proper to consider the law of three stages as identical to the research program epistemology we have now. Truly, the blueprint for such a contemporary epistemology is the Comtian program, it is a blueprint that has been maltreated and gone to waste by succeeding waves of fashionable and timid positivism and, yet, a blueprint.
The Romantic Age gave us the mature philosophy of history. In the first half of the XIX century, every speculatively inclined person had one, had a philosophical history taken from protestant mystics like Böhme, alchemy or some other strange and edgy corner of recorded History. What sets Comte apart from his contemporaries (I am thinking, particularly, of what sets him apart from Fichte or Hegel) is that his philosophy of history is completely verifiable, it does not need intuition or a priori reasoning because everyone can grasp its truth by internal and external observation. Is it not, to make such a naïve claim, as it stands, ludicrous? If one reads the PHH one will see how he follows his bold assertions with the admittance that “such and such claim needs to be verified by some positivist” in the future. In this philosophy of history, as in all Continental gibberish, the Scholastic principle can be applied: Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur, which translates as “You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment”.
It is verifiable because, as Comte always insisted, it is neither mystical nor empirical, but in between, it is a positive claim. With this claim of positivity, we are getting the gist of the Comtian anthropology: Humanity needs to have a theory so as to explain phenomena. This oration, with Yours Truly’s analysis, will finally reveal why the law of three stages is a research program:
The same way metaphysicians like Aristotle need “being” and theologians need “God” and his revelation (or as Comte would phrase it, “will”) the sociologist cannot start with pure observation, there is no empiricist in recorded history, man needs to start with a theory that explains what he has in front of him. The law of three stages, remember, is the cornerstone of sociology. Before sociology we would explain society from the point of view of God, from the point of view of Nature, or any other thing that is not society. Now, with the law of three stages, we have a theory that allows us to explain the social world in a properly social way. In Aristotelian lingo (Sych is an Aristotelian after all) “sociology is the study of society qua society”. But we need to get even deeper, the iceberg keeps on giving. Sociology is for Auguste Comte what for us is philosophy, it is reflected thinking, deep thinking, meditation, it is true theology.
There will always be a world encompassing theory guiding human action, action and what action brings, i.e., feeling is more important than theory. Therefore what we need is not to verify our assertions by developing one method to rule all methods, like rationalist would do, we can neither, however, simply take things on their own terms, as they are given, because things do not interpret themselves. If we do not develop a positive theory, Theory with capital T, of society, then a metaphysical or a theological explanation will outcompete the positivistic worldview. Comte is in for a competition, he is truly in the marketplace of ideas, he is a sportsman. Comte understands that, before we study history, we need a theory that encompasses it entirely and relates all its parts without keeping some of them out by giving a privilege and special importance to some epochs, he also knows that all theories have before hand justified themselves by something that is not history (eternity, being, the human soul). Many could say that this law is a free starting point, the same way God or nature is, but which point is not a free starting point? Why do we start with being as such, why do we start with God, why do we start with empiricism (because basing our knowledge upon sense experience is, as we all know, a theory after all). What makes Comte’s theory the Theory is that it does not explain away Society or History, but takes them on, on their own terms. In Comte’s mind, the classical idea of “cause” is not a habit, it is a cheap trick to avoid explaining ourselves, he is not saying God is a bad hypothesis, he is saying causation is not verification, that causation is a brute fact of human development and of a man’s process of becoming man. Comte is not saying that his point of departure is freely assumed, he is saying it is always taking into account all the literature on the topic, he is taking God and Nature into considerations, as parts of our world encompassing theory, as part of our actions and feelings, as parts of the Human World.
Therefore, the law of three stages is a research program, but a research program is a pragmatic principle, it gets the ball rolling, we need something more. Therefore, the law of three stages is the law by which sociology, the queen of all sciences and last to appear, works. May we see what this law entails? This law is a law, as has been said, that talks of society, the object, socially, in a subjectively satisfactory way. To talk socially, Comte realizes, is to talk historically. History works analogically to biology, they both study living things, history is the life of man, and what else is man but his life?
To give a crash course, Comte states that when we look at ourselves and we look at the things around us we see history going throughout three stages. First we are children, children are theologians, because theologians explain phenomena by appeal to imagined principles; first we believe everything is personal and volitional, the same way we have personhood and will, at this age, sacredness surrounds everything. This stage is already a perfect theory, but it needs to, sadly, be superseded, so as to allow us to truly explain phenomena, therefore, by a sort of economical law, the theory goes from including everything, to somethings, to one thing explaining everything, that is: The infancy of Humanity, the theological stage, has three substages that are animism, polytheism and monotheism. Much can be said about this three stages (Comte does for instance say that polytheism has the best art, animism answers the nature of man and monotheism is philosophical and asocial, egoistic). At the end of the process, when we are grown ups, man explains everything by laws, without pretending that there is something more to them, to uncover this laws imagination and reason become disciplined and can, therefore, actually rule over reason, at that point the heart (a organ Comte takes from Blaise Pascal) can take over the brain, so to speak. At the end of the process, man becomes man because he knows there are laws and there is no cause, because causes are a type of explanation given in history and explained by sociological laws. In Comte’s view, the metaphysical error is to put reason above devotion (this he takes from de Maistre, experts disagree about how much of the Maistrean influence is extrapolation and how much is true to the original, his relationship to Joseph de Maistre is like that of Schopenhauer to Kant, eerie for sure). In the middle of this process, at puberty, there is metaphysics, or criticism, or abstractedness, or negativism; at that age we just to make weak and abstract theology, we do not stop being children, we just stop being good at it. The three stages are the stages of one being: Humanity, and supposes a principled continuity through the process, a continuity of past, future and present, a continuity of Humanity becoming mature and, in turn, giving itself a proper religion, according to its heart content. When Humanity makes its own religion finally the will outcompetes the intellect, because the will, at heart, is devotion, which reason impaired. Comte often repeated that over time man becomes more and more religious.
With this law, which can be given a longer or a shorter expression depending on the patience of the alumni at hand, we discover what Comte thinks history and History is. First and foremost History is comparative, it is a comparison, History compares: History compares all the stages ones with the others so as to see the end, the future terminus of the process. This he said: Savoir pour prévoir, afin de pouvoir. By comparison we relate the whole of Humanity’s History past, future and present, we go through it. Secondly, History is development, in comtian lingo, it is Order and Progress. It is Order, that is, it is a continuum where all the stages with all its moments need to be included (Comte considered Christianity revolutionary because it tried to break with the pagan religions, he was truly a lover of continuity). Development, as we are on the topic, never stops, we do never get closer to the big questions, History is one fat child that never stops eating, because the pleasure of Humanity is its perennial growth. Progress then, has no end, would be metaphysically naive, progress, or rather, progressing, is what man is meant to do.
History is always the history of something, History is not a category of reality for Comte, because, simply put, there was no such thing as “reality”, instead, there is Humanity, which is, in turn, a totality, because a totality is complete relationship of everything. Evidently we all know that history implies past events, agents, occurrences. But what are we giving account of? What is the object being recorded? Is it one big mess of events that we put together as if they were related? Is it a story of a mortal search for immortality? Is it about God and man? There are as many answers to this questions as there are Presocratics, like with the latter, every historiographical school gives primacy to one element of the explanation, not to the whole. Here, we must return to the principle, and ending, of the comtian philosophy: relativity. Third and lastly, the law of three stages is the spirit of positivism. We need to complete the dissection of the creature under observation, life is still, taken by itself, unreachable to the positive sciences, biology talks of life by tools different from life. Only philosophy knows what life is: Vivere viventivus est esse, to be alive is to be for the living. This is naturalist history, not natural science, there is no historical body without life, and there is no life without breath, without spirit. History must be explained not by its elements but as a whole, and the whole is found in the spirit inhabiting it.
There is no one principle of History, except relativity. Comte is a nominalist and a son of modernity, as the Thomists in the audience already know, this implies a bad case of allergy to the reality of substance, to things in themselves as Kant would put it, and, over time, it implies putting the subject at the centre of enquiry, it implies egocentrism. Comte was not a Rationalist, but he considered himself a Rationalist the same way he considered himself a Christian and a Pagan, because he was related to all of History. Let us get to the essential, there are no substances, no metaphysical Nature, there is no God coming to save us, there is no cheap empiricism or criticism, we are left with a sum of things that are frustratingly, inexorably, nomically related, we have in front of us spirit. History is the history of the Spirit, and the Spirit is Humanity. There is no one principle to history, there is just the association of equivocal phenomena. And what are the related phenomena related to? To relationship itself, because to be spiritual is to be related, that which is keeping track of all the different biological, physical, astronomical, mathematical, psychic and social phenomena, and also keeping track of the fact that this things are being measured, counted, studied, related, is spirt. Humanity is the measure of all things, it is the not a substance, like the Nature of Spinoza, but a relationship inside of which all associations of mind, matter and life concur.
Hold up a minute, is this not familiar? Have we not heard hundreds of times that History is the history of spirit, that is like the whole theme of Hegel? Starting by the end, it should be known that Comte, who never read Hegel (mental hygiene is precious, so he avoided reading other thinkers), thought the author of The Phenomenology of Spirit was a more philosophical, i.e., less pure expression of his own positive philosophy. What Comte has in common with Hegel leads us to the other question: Auguste Comte was a romantic. For Auguste Comte philosophy is no private endeavour, he hated the idea of ideas being private, for Comte, his ideas were but the ideas of his age given proper manifestation (Comte hated Christianity, had affection for “Catholicism” and despised Protestantism).
Spiritualism is the fashion of romanticism. History is written by those who write it, sadly, one very common incentive to become a historian is to be a sexless politician (Nietzsche dixit), History is written by those who write it, and it is often the case that losers cannot make history, so they write it. The romantics, with all their differences, had one thing in common: They were losers. And do not mistake a looser for a underdog: Christ is the latter, Judas the former.
The basing of Romanticism aside, Comte was with the whole romantic peerage a rabid spiritualist, spirit was his research and quest. What he found out, however, is what the butt of the joke is. It is, as you know by this writ, the case that the XIX century gave us the maturation of historical epistemology, and it gave Romanticism. Comte saw in and beyond them a common regularity, a treasure map glittering by the saliva it makes our mouths emanate. Comte understood that spirit could not be a substance, something “metaphysical”, he understood it could neither be something theological, not purely, it needed to be refined, it was something only hinted at by theologians and reactionaries. What spirit is is, essentially, Humanity, but not humanity, humanity is what relates to man, but for Comte, man is reality itself, with all that can be known and acted upon. You must remember that Comte does talk of “positivism”, from time to time, so as to spare, but what Comte truly is talking about is the Positive Spirit. Positivism is not, at heart and bottom, a theory of knowledge, it is but in its infancy a research program, it is the seed of everything, and more than that He himself was the PHH, the Priest of Haunted Humanity understanding that the only true religion was the one made by man for Man, corresponding to the dignity and worth of Humanity, the whole integrated by our knowledge and our action (and, since we are the ones measuring, using and adoring everything, Humanity includes in a way all mathematical, astronomical, physical, chemical, biological and sociological laws, associations and things4). History was, then, the history of humanity, the closing chapter of Humanity, humanity, then, is more eschatological than historical. Humanity does not become itself when it substitutes man for Man, nor when it takes the place of God, no, it becomes Humanity not when God and man are dead, but when they are forgotten.
It is true, if one reads his books he will often use different words to convey what Positivism is, but he will not define it. What he does is describe its main properties, that it is practical, relative, historical… It therefore becomes almost impossible to know what he means by the defining word, the essence itself, of his philosophy. Therefore, this commentator of Comte considers it essential to understand that Positivism is Relativism.
History, with capital “H” is the reality of history, which is as real as rocks, plants or arguments, but in its own realm. On the other hand, history, without capital “H” is the science and art of history. While the reality of History and the science of history cannot be separated, nor would it be good that they were, as the universe and a natural science, they cannot be mixed together.
Vulgar positivism: At some point, all ideas become accessible to everyone, and goes from philosophical, scientific and dialectical playing fields to those sophistic, pathetic and rhetorical. When this happens to the philosophy of Auguste Comte and, more broadly speaking, to orthodox positivism, we get vulgar positivism. In the case of positivism, the idea commonly associated with it, that of being essentially scientism or scientistic reductionism, is built upon views of people that Comte considered abortive positivists. Make with that what you will of the Vienna Circle.
Positivism can sound like a social pantheism of sorts, that Comte does not want men to love each other, but for all men to become one Man. This is not the case, not if looked at from a Comtian point of view at least, because it assumes there is such a thing as substance. We do not know if there is a substance, such a question is a waste of time, what our senses and even the different sciences show us is a unmixed array of phenomena. What happens is that man, by his activity over nature and with other men, is able to make a whole out of all things. A whole is not a substance, but a bundle of relationships larger than the individual relationships; beyond all related phenomena there are, simply put, brute facts. That being said, the concept of “Humanity”, deserves a post of its own, because it is the core and heart of true positivism.