Comtes Positive Philosophy - Essay Example

Comte’s Positive Philosophy The amount of people who believe that science can fully justify perception of this world is rapidly increasing nowadays. In fact the theory that claims that science can substitute religion in composing world view is called positivism and was created in 19th century by Auguste Comte. Moreover, since then it has caused heated discussions on the topic. The problem is that the theory pretends to be original and unique but in closer consideration it frequently refers to some principles it denies, which makes the theory non-covering all the required aspects to be fully perfect. First of all, it is important to notice that Comte’s positivism wasn’t just another attempt to create an original world view theory in order to create new epistemological realm as it frequently happened. Comte came to the theory through a deep analysis of social phenomena and their consistent patterns. As he is considered to be one of the founders of sociology, Comte’s philosophy was strict and mathematic-based. But even though his theory looks argumentative and reasonable it has never been completely accepted in scientific circles and stayed just another philosophical point of view (Turner 273). The reason for this is that Comte’s theory denies such thing as religion too strictly, which is quite strange considering the fact that, first of all, Comte was a sociologist, so his denial of religion poses the question: how a social scientist couldn’t manage to notice the crucial importance of religion in social life. But this is another question to arise. Comte’s view on positivism was reasonable in some way. He thought that positivism is the best way (probably even a method) to determine the logical principles of human intelligence, which is supposed to lead to the reasonable validation of empirical sciences as the fundamentals of epistemology and truthful knowledge. Thus the only way knowledge can be obtained is by creation of new hypotheses, their either verification or refutation by experiment, and reshaping them relatively to what they explain and reveal (Acton 291). In fact the stages below are the ordinary scientific methods of verification of theories which transfers us to the first problem of positivism as empiricism-based theory. It is obvious that empiricism theory has a lot of disadvantages which cause doubts in scientific and especially philosophical communities. The first reason why positivism fails using empiricists’ methods is the criteria of truthfulness which are totally relative as we deal with human perception. The point is that humans all are subjects and their perception can also be different, so this can cause some doubts regarding the sciences that cannot be proved by scientific objective experiment. For example, Comte’s beloved sociology deals with humans and the consistency of their development, but how can we deal with an unpredictability of a human factor? How objective experiment can make conclusions about such relative phenomena? The question has no answer. Still Comte would argue that sociology deals with global factors and consistent patterns, but there is no way we can start analyzing global issues without understanding of the particular ones (one of the main Aristotelian principles). The logic of Comte’s theory concludes that positivism is the best method and the theory is precise and applicable. As a social philosopher he analyzes historical tendencies of social development and formulates the stages of human intelligence development. The point is that through his social analysis Comte notices a great fundamental law of epistemology: “Each of our leading conceptions, - each brunch of our knowledge, - passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive” (Gardiner 133). This means that human mind consistently uses the three methods of thinking while discovering and analyzing the phenomena of this world in order to fixate them later as concrete knowledge. In theological stage human intelligence addresses its explorations to the fundamentals and origin of the things and appearances of the world, striving to some fictional absolute knowledge. The reason is that on this stage human mind considers things in existence as some creations of a mystic divine force that arbitrarily interferes into the world and supernaturally changes the state of things. On the Theological stage human mind passes three religious stages: fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. Metaphysical stage is a bit transformed Theological stage as humans keep trying to find the reasons of the existing things, but now human intelligence doesn’t strive to the absolute knowledge, it operates with more abstract concepts and substances. Actually this stage is more destructive than the first one as it criticizes almost all the phenomena and doesn’t create any constructive precise ideas (Gardiner 135-136). The first two stages are supposed to lead to the logical conclusion that positivism (the third stage) is the most reasonable stage of human mind development as in positive stage intelligence perceives the failure to perceive absolute knowledge. So it refuses to explore the origins and reasons of the existed world and stops looking for inner fundamentals of things. Instead of this wrong approach intelligence explores the logical reasoning of general laws of nature, appropriately combining both reasoning and observation (in other words theory and practice). Eventually it is supposed to lead to the complete understanding of all the phenomena of the world by finding logical connections between them (Watson 203). The idea of the stages seems to be not that confident. Indeed Comte formulates his theory based on deep analysis of social developmental tendencies, but in fact the two first stages are described as weak ones when the positive stage is considered to be the savior of the world epistemological situation. But it seems to be vice versa as the positivism in this gradation more looks like desperate attempt to exclude supernatural from this world as some phenomena which is a result of wrong interpretations of inexperienced human intelligence. It gives a reason to think that the only problem is that there is no science that can explain metaphysics, that’s why science decides to ignore it. This point makes Comte’s theory particularly weak as it causes a lot of criticism. One more important detail in Comte’s arguments is that he often claims not only against exploration of fundamentals of the world but also that science should stop analyzing reasons and causality in general. In this way all the questions “why?” that consider origins must be replaced with question “how?”. This exclusion of causality raises the question: how is it even possible to explore connections between things and look for the general laws of nature if we miss the origins of this nature It is scarcely a good idea just to ignore the things that don’t fit the exact theory. Even if we admit that science can explain everything and it is enough to use science to find both general and inner connections between everything in this world, then what are we supposed to do with the phenomena that can’t be explained by science? That is the reason regarding why Comte’s theory met a huge theological critique in nineteenth century (Cashdollar 64). The essential thing in Comte’s third stage of intelligence development is that in positive level intelligence totally overturns its orientation from the Theological and Metaphysical stages. Positive science is aimed to perceive not facts but laws which would explain the connections between things, which is why nothing can be explored if it is unperceivable and can’t be proved logically. The argument is quite reasonable as it means that there would be no science without existence of some general natural laws, and if they exist than it is possible to inquire them in order to learn how to predict the phenomena of this world in rational way. In his Positive Philosophy Comte proceeds from the point that subsistence, including human being, is united and hierarchical. On such basis he formulates his famous classification of sciences which includes the following six sciences: Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Sociology (Gardiner 146). Each of the sciences is a kind of scale regarding the previous one and takes some methods and principles from the previous science in the grade adding some new ideas – and that’s how science develops itself. Each of the sciences of the gradation transfers to other natural sciences. In their development all sciences pass the three stages mentioned above and on the positive stage they actually become real sciences. The principle according to which Comte places the sciences on the certain positions is concerning increasing complexity and decreasing generality, which means that Physics considers the most general phenomena which affect all the existing things and Sociology deals with the most specific and complicated matter. The same thing as we mentioned analyzing positivism in general happens here. Why Comte doesn’t include Philosophy and Psychology into the list of sciences? As it turns out that none of the mentioned and possible sciences leads to either Psychology or Philosophy. The point is that Comte doesn’t consider Philosophy and Psychology as branches of learning at all. For him Positive Philosophy is a kind of method that collects the most general laws of nature and generalizes the results acquired by different sciences, creating connection between them. The absence of Psychology among the scientific realms can be explained with few reasons. First of all the psychology of 19th century was focused mostly on self-observation which wasn’t reasonable enough to be taken into consideration as normal science. Moreover, Psychology deals with subjects, which means that any general law can’t be formulated there. And again the same problem appears: if Psychology can’t be a science as science works with objective things then how can we explore personality? There is no way personality can be explained even by Sociology as there always are exceptions concerning the issue. The fact that Sociology, in Comte’s opinion, is the “mother” of sciences is quite contradictory. Indeed Sociology is very scientific according to Comte’s criteria of science, but placing it on the top of sciences has caused a lot of discussions in academic circles (Lewisohn 315). Probably, Comte decides to do so because Sociology is actually his invention, but it is neither the most specific nor the most complicated realm of science as obviously, for example, philosophy also deals with complicated ideas, or logic formulates the most crucial thing – the laws of reasoning etc. It turns out that Comte uses philosophy and logic to justify his arguments but accepts them mostly as methods but refuses their scientific character. It leads us to the very important question of scientific criteria as far as the positivism theory is based on science, doesn’t it? But the matter of criteria is to answer the question: “what is it?” and obviously in order to answer it we need to know the essence and origins of the questioned object. According to Comte’s Positive Philosophy this would lead us to the Metaphysical stage of development, but the problem is that these questions will arise every single time we start analyzing the phenomena of this world. So nothing would be ever finished on the Positive stage which in fact looks like vicious circle. But out of this nuances, Comte’s gradation of sciences makes sense as this is quite reasonable to combine and connect scientific methods in order to get as objective result as it is possible. Even though this result cannot be completely objective as it would be constructed by subjects and their subjective perception. In addition even if we accept that everything can be perceived by reasoning and experiment still in which way will we explain supernatural appearances? Comte’s Positive Philosophy claims that science should be in the center of perception and knowledge justifying. Still the theory has many loopholes that can be easily questioned which would lead them to the things they actually deny. For example, how can we analyze the things that cannot be explained by science, or why Comte’s theory leads to the vicious circle in perception if it is considered to be one of the most reasonable and scientifically strict theories in philosophy? Works Cited Acton. H.B. “Comtes Positivism and the Science of Society”. Philosophy. 26(1951): 291-310. Cashdollar, Charles D. “Auguste Comte and the American Reformed Theologians”. Journal of the History of Ideas. 39(1978): 61-79. Gardiner, Patrick. Nineteenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968. Lewisohn, David. “Mill and Comte on the Methods of Social Science”. Journal of the History of Ideas. 33(1972): 315-324. Turner, Mark. “Defining Discourses: The "Westminster Review", "Fortnightly Review", and Comtes Positivism”. Victorian Periodicals Review. 33(2000): 273-282. Watson, D.R. “A Note on Clemenceau, Comte and Positivism”. The Historical Journal. 14(1971): 201-204. Read More