Robert C. Scharff
Given his view of humanity’s future, Auguste Comte might be considered the poster child for scientific optimism. Scientific (i.e. “positive”) knowledge is, for him, the only real knowledge; its application to real-world situations will make us safe and happy; and becoming fully aware of these facts about science and about technology (he would have approved of calling them, together, “technoscience”) will make safety and happiness come all the more quickly. In other words, for Comte technoscience is nothing short of a consummating occurrence or world event – that is, the practical as well as theoretical “ending” or fulfillment of the Western intellectual tradition. According to his famous “law of the three stages,” we all begin as theologians, and under the right conditions we graduate first to abstract or metaphysical thinking, and then finally to science. Following after this intellectual development, given the necessary time lag, come the appropriate socio-political transformations – from primitive, militaristic, and theocratic communities, to societies reflecting increasingly secular and material interests organized by abstract principles, and finally to peaceful, fully industrial societies guided by a genuine knowledge of the human condition and supported by a Religion of Humanity. The task for philosophers in the current age is therefore to become positivists – that is, to become fully and reflectively aware of the historically palpable, ever more pervasive character of the emerging technoscientific era, to explain it, justify it, and see that this is taught to others.
Yet Comte’s positivist interpretation of history and its three-stage theory of development have been widely misunderstood. On the one hand, because he is famously the “founder” of sociology (he originally called it “social physics”), his account of the rise of science and its technologies is often assumed to be a causal account. It is not. Comte does not think the coming technoscientific age entails either the complete suppression of other (i.e. non-technoscientific) possibilities or a specific and predictable future state produced by our antecedent socio-historical conditions. The three-stage law is a developmental law; it is no more causally necessary that everyone ends up a perfectly positive thinker than it is that everyone ends up making identical and maximally sophisticated use of their native language. On the other hand, because of the “meta-narrative” reach of his account, Comte’s law is often construed as the linchpin of an old-fashioned speculative philosophy of history. His position, however, is neither teleological nor essentialist in the requisite sense. Although he happily regards all non-scientific possibilities as regressive and eagerly depicts philosophy’s future in scientistic terms; he does not think that progress toward this future is the actualization of something like humanity’s technoscientific entelechy. Comte’s account of the rise of technoscience is, I shall argue, something much more interesting than any of these mistaken interpretations can tell us.
Yet my aim is not just to encourage the idea that Comte’s account is interesting. In my view, Comte’s progressivist, technoscientific optimism is no mere relic of the nineteenth century. Nor should we see it as merely a theoretical stance, still held by some people, applied on some occasions, to some experiences. Comte’s account of the rise of an age of technoscience is more even than a “world view” – that is, more than a general conceptualization of the present age that we might choose or reject. It is, and Comte advertises it to be, his projection of how the good life is destined to be experienced and understood in our increasingly post-theological and post-metaphysical circumstances. As he describes it, the third stage is working itself out as the ultimate way for us to be, in its full, philosophical and practical articulation. Comte’s language sometimes makes his account seem a bit exaggerated and out of place today, yet it should also sound very familiar. It is the sort of language that many philosophers of technology (e.g. Mumford, Ellul, Adorno, Marcuse, Heidegger) complain is all too often used to define what “philosophy” has come to be since the Greeks – namely, a guardian’s discipline whose main job is to analyze and defend a “scientific” sort of rationality because it allegedly provides the best intellectual access to and power for handling everything “real” that we encounter.
Comte seems to me, then, to have contemporary rather than just historical significance. He asks what it means to “be” in an increasingly technoscientific world, and he offers an answer that is by no means dated. Indeed, Comte’s paean to technoscientific life – his portrayal of our last and most “mature” condition – still serves quite well as a description of the background understanding of most Western technocrats, as well as many Anglo-American epistemologists and philosophers of science and technology. In a way, it is entirely fair to call Comte the last honest positivist. He actually identifies and defends a human condition many others, for various reasons, still embrace but only silently and as if its normativity were self-evident. Some thinkers, most famously Heidegger, have complained loudly that this technoscientific way of being and understanding everything does not deserve its current hegemony. Yet their complaints are usually met with the objection that they are overheated and romanticist – or worse, that they are complaints typical of cultures that are already technoscientifically “developed” and eager to retain their monopoly on the social and political benefits this accords them. It is one thing to criticize this or that technoscientific excess, so goes the argument; it is another to condemn technoscience itself. Near the end this essay, I come back briefly to this controversy over technoscientific optimism and pessimism. Mostly, however, I talk about Comte. I argue that when Comte’s understanding of the scientific age is carefully recounted, it is hard to sustain the usual assumption that his conception of either the present world or philosophy’s primary tasks in this world has been surpassed. Indeed, I think Comte is the one positivist who retains his contemporary relevance after positivism as a movement has run its course (Scharff 1995). I begin from this last remark, with some comparisons between nineteenth and twentieth-century positivism.
How can I claim that positivism has real presence in the twenty-first century, let alone that its nineteenth-century version is now its most relevant form because it still deeply affects alleged post-positivists, when it is hard to find anyone who admits to being even sympathetic to positivism? The answer is obvious but not simple. Rejecting the doctrines of positivism – and even its world view – need not entail rejecting the orientation that produces them. Let me explain this point somewhat indirectly.
According to the famous logical empiricist manifesto of 1929 (Neurath et al. 1973) – the so-called Yellow Brochure composed by Neurath, et al., to celebrate Schlick’s return to Vienna from Stanford – philosophy has one main task, namely, to rationally reconstruct the epistemology of science. In carrying out this task, philosophers need make only two commitments. They must produce a formal analysis of the scientific method, and they must be empiricists about the range of this method’s application. Together, says Neurath, these two commitments express “the scientific world view” that is appropriate to philosophy.
It is, of course, this self-portrait of logical empiricism that has received the bulk of the critical attention (Neurath et al. 1985: Translator’s introduction). There is, however, another side to the manifesto that was suppressed by its authors and is less considered by its critics. After defining the scientific world view, Neurath observes that those who embrace it also typically share similar ethical, social, and political opinions. But he assures us that this fact, however interesting, is not a topic for philosophy. Philosophy is about the rational reconstruction of the method for testing propositions. It is about meaning and truth, not about the “shared sentiments” of those who happen to pursue this topic.
If we take Neurath at his word, then it is easy to conclude that logical positivism – to quote Passmore – is as about as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes (Passmore 1967: 56). Today, no one admits to being a logical empiricist. Rational reconstruction, the stress on theory verification but never discovery, the tendency to model all knowledge on nineteenth-century physics, emotivism in ethics and politics – all the main features of the positivist program have been rejected. Yet how thorough has this rejection really been? How genuinely “post-positivist” is the general opposition to logical empiricism’s scientific world view, let alone the understanding of life and world that underlies it? The answer, I think, is much less so than practicing post-positivists tend to assume. The reason has little to do with the rejection of the specific tenets of the logical empiricist program and everything to do with Neurath’s allegedly irrelevant “sentiments.”
Note first that many of the objections to logical positivism have involved criticizing some of its overt features precisely by silently perpetuating its underlying conception of science and its epistemic status. To object, for example, that the “discovery” of scientific theories is just as important philosophically as their justification, does nothing to challenge the more basic assumption that confirming predictive theories is the “essence” of scientific practice and that warrantability is the essence of the meaningfulness of all language. Similarly, to argue that there are “other” sciences with “other” purposes using “other” methods that logical empiricism ignores does nothing to dislodge the epistemic prejudice in favor of the mathematical and physical sciences, or in favor of quantification as the primary mode of scientific conceptualization. Or to give one more example, for all the criticism of logical empiricism’s explicit program, it is still not part of the mainstream agenda to ask such questions as who does science, for what purposes, at what costs, and for whose benefit. Philosophy of Science, I recently heard an American Philosophical Association official say, must never degenerate into Science Studies.
In short, opposing logical positivism’s program often remains a vehicle by means of which many philosophers, willingly or not, continue to share logical positivism’s general “sentiments.” But of course, “sentiments” is not the right term. It implies reference to something subjective and thus, at best, of ancillary interest to philosophers. The label undoubtedly served logical empiricists well, but in the glare of subsequent developments, we can no longer accept it at face value. It is just too obvious that promoting a “scientific” method of inquiry, an empiricist semantics, and an objectivist stance toward the surrounding world was important for political as well as for epistemological reasons (Richardson and Uebel 2007; Reisch 2005; Howard 2003).
More precisely, then, “sentiments,” is a philosophical misnomer. It is the term logical empiricists use to denigrate something they do not want to think about – something that nevertheless influences their thoughts on science much more profoundly than mere sentiments ever could. In spite of their disclaimers, their supposedly irrelevant “shared opinions” – opinions about the proper place of science in human affairs and about the superiority of science-mindedness in dealing with those affairs – are much more than just an accident of similar political or social attitudes. They express the general understanding of how to be philosophical in a technoscientific age – that is, they articulate a global sense of how to think about our dealings with whatever is real that has made positivists positivists since the early nineteenth century. From at least John Stuart Mill to the last logical empiricist, all would agree with what Carnap wrote in 1928. Whenever our world view faces theological or metaphysical opposition, he asserts, we can be sure that science will in the end be “set free” from religion and metaphysics. Our confidence
stems from the knowledge, or to put it somewhat more carefully, the belief that those opposing powers belong to the past. We feel that there is an inner kinship between the attitude on which our philosophical work is founded and the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in entirely different walks of life … .We feel all around us the same basic orientation, the same style of thinking and doing. It is an orientation which demands clarity everywhere. (Carnap 1967: xvii–xviii, my emphasis)
This is, of course, a funny sort of belief – philosophically irrelevant, and at the same time definitive of the right sort of post-religious and post-metaphysical thinker.
Unlike the later positivists, however, Comte has a name for “the intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself” everywhere. He calls it the positive spirit, and he is eager to make it THE philosophical topic. Being “oriented” toward “clarity” is of course essential to it. When positivists after Comte attempt to interpret their scientific world view in overt and entirely epistemic terms, they may succeed in deflecting attention from the “spirit” they “feel all around them,” but it is precisely because they already understand their circumstances in terms of this spirit that their world view seems self-evident to them. Here is the reason I want to call Comte philosophically more “honest.” How the logical empiricists actually understand the present age is not so different from Comte’s own. For Comte, however, it is a philosopher’s obligation to reflect upon and defend this understanding – to answer the question, as one might phrase it, of how one becomes and why one should be a positivist in a post-metaphysical age. Later positivists “believe” and want us to “share” their objectivistic conviction that a contemporary philosopher’s proper outlook is formalist, neutral, decontextualized, and epistemically “monological” – that, in Thomas Nagel’s phrase, one must aspire to philosophize from Nowhere (Nagel 1986).
The hard truth is that the more firmly and unreflectively the later positivists embraced the “scientific world view” and suppressed their “sentiments” as extraphilosophical, the more obvious it became that their neutral/objectivist standpoint is nothing of the kind. Positivism was never a philosophy from Nowhere. It has always been in fact a very determinately historical movement. This is what has come to seem obvious from the doctrines it produced. All of the logical empiricist doctrines – the formalistic reconstructions, the verificationism, the pinched and dated accounts of scientific practice, the reduction of values to expressions of feeling – are out of fashion. Yet all of them can and have been rejected … by self-described post-positivists who remain just as objectivistic as any positivist.
The harder truth is, then, that if there is no objectivist epistemology, there can also be no critique of it in objectivist (or what ontologically amounts to the same thing, anti-objectivist) terms. Critics who do not see this end up arguing positivistically against the logical empiricism program – as, I think, many post-positivist, phenomenological, and pragmatist philosophers have in fact unwittingly done. Hence, the title of my book on Comte is also a slogan. I reconsider Comte “after positivism.” My point is that even if all the items in logical empiricism’s explicit program have been thoroughly trashed, and even if its underlying “sentiments” have been criticized as well, one might still be tempted to conclude that positivism merely failed to become as ahistorical and objectivistic as it intended or that such a View from Nowhere is only appropriate when scientific concerns are at issue – and thus keep alive in one’s own criticisms the idea that such a world view is possible.
Here is where a reconsideration of Comte can help. In the first place, for him positivism expresses a general intellectual orientation, not just a belief, feeling, or sentiment. As such it is something to explicitly reflect upon, and when we do so, we see that rather than constituting a rejection of the earlier orientations of theology and metaphysics, it accomplishes its purpose by preserving and transforming them. Indeed, precisely by recognizing that all three are general orientations rather than theories or beliefs, we see that none of them are “options” that one might choose or set aside at will. Hence, Comte regards positivism as the articulation of an orientation that he already discovers himself to be developing in the midst of socio-historically determinate surroundings – rather like the way we discover at a certain point that we have and are developing a native language. We can use it, adapt it to perceived new circumstances, become reflective about it, even imagine having a different one, but we cannot simply walk away from it in favor of another choice. Considering positivism in this way can help us to think through what even the loudest critics of positivism have often seemed insufficiently radical to acknowledge. No only do both positivistic and anti-positivistic “sentiments” belong to the same basic philosophical orientation, but both encourage the idea that the philosophy might still actually come to be conducted as if from Nowhere if we only try harder.
Two further preliminary remarks. First, in this essay I approach Comte primarily through the epistemically oriented and scientifically interested arguments he lays out in his earlier Cours de philosophie positive, and I relate them primarily to recent work in the Anglo-American tradition. Another recent study begins with Comte’s later conception of a secular “Religion of Humanity” (developed especially in the Système de politique positive) and relates it primarily to recent work in the French and German traditions (Wernick 2001). For any approach to Comte, however, one’s companion should be the indispensable intellectual biography now being completed by Pickering (Pickering 1995, and forthcoming).
Second, I have been talking so far as if Comte and the later positivists all focus first and foremost on science – which might suggest that “technology” is simply their blanket term for all the applications of science. This is indeed the view of many positivists, but I will try to show that it is not Comte’s. Technology is, for him, actually the prior phenomenon because it is in our technological practices – both before and after the rise of modern science – that human beings express their most fundamental ontological sense of what there is and what they want. What we now call science is simply the last and the most successful vehicle for enacting this sense of things. Hence, I will use the term “technoscience” wherever the context is contemporary, with the assumption that it is no longer possible to imagine a world in which technology in any sense might still be experienced as a phenomenon separate from science.
How does Comte understand the present age? John Stuart Mill, in his correspondence with Comte, complains that telling the story of what came before science is a waste of time. We are already in the age of science, Mill asserts. Explaining how we got here is a bit like reporting on a finished race as if we did not know its winner. Mill, like the logical empiricists, “feels” the scientific spirit all around him. But Comte does not. The present age, he says, is going to be the age of science. He thinks of himself as living in the period of transition between metaphysical and scientific understanding. A positive philosopher is therefore obliged to defend this transition, by explaining what scientific thinking is and why it is superior to the thinking typical of previous ages.
Yet defending the transition to a scientific age is not the only reason Comte has for discussing theology and metaphysics. Making “science” intelligible depends upon comparing it with these earlier sorts of intellectual practice. Ideas, he says, can only be understood through their history. The idea of science is no exception. Science did not and does not result from merely turning our collective backs on, in Carnap’s phrase, what belongs to the past. Scientific thinking is actually a transformation of theological and metaphysical thinking, not a rejection of them. The superiority of scientific theories lies precisely in the fact that they do the same thing as theological and metaphysical theories, only better. All our thinking, from the very start, has had two related aims – namely, to make it possible for us to control nature and organize peaceful societies. As it turns out, only the “positive” knowledge generated by science can fulfill these aims.
Comte’s conception of the “positivity” of positive philosophy is rich and multifaceted, in comparison to the pinched and reductive meaning given to it by later positivists and reinforced by the expositions of them by their critics. In the Discours, Comte explains that “positive,” as it applies to his philosophical orientation, should be understood as having at least six interrelated senses – that is, positivism is concerned with what is (a) real (i.e. actually accessible to the human intellect), (b) useful (to the genuine improvement of the human condition), (c) certain (as opposed to encouraging indecision), (d) precise (as opposed to vague), (e) constructive (as opposed to the “negative,” or merely critical, divisive, or skeptical), and (f) relative (in the sense of always responsive to the degree and kind of evidence, not prone to make absolute and unmodifiable claims) (DEP: 126–30 [64–71]). Comte’s Système, in keeping with his later addition of benevolent love to the earlier slogan of “order and progress,” adds “sympathetic” as a seventh meaning (SPP1: 58/45). His point, of course, is that only third-stage, mature reasoning is in a position to fully recognize the meaning and value of all these characteristics taken together. For example, by ignoring the sixth and seventh meanings, one can exaggerate Comte’s view of the power of social scientific laws – claiming they tell us what is “bound to occur” and thus making the idea of social reorganization either deterministic or “prescriptive” in a way that Comte would have found metaphysical (Singer 2003: 9–10, 32–5).
Cognition in the positive sciences is successful, then, because it seeks the kind of theories that affirm the results of disciplined observation, rather than merely criticize and oppose the claims of others or engage in abstract and empirically ungrounded speculation. As the italicized words and phrases suggest, evaluation of both the structure and the function of science must include a careful and sympathetic analysis of how prescientific philosophy tries but falls short of achieving these same aims. Comte defends this position in many places over several decades, but always in terms of his famous three-stage law. Here are some of the details (Scharff 1995: 73–91, 1991: 184–99).
According to Comte’s law, “by its very nature … human intelligence in all its inquiries must of necessity pass successively through three different theoretical stages: the theological or fictive, the metaphysical or abstract, and the scientific or positive” (CPP1: 1/1–2). Though of course, Comte could not yet explicitly say so, his conception of human intelligence is what we now call developmental. When he calls science, like theology and metaphysics, an “état,” it is therefore better to translate this “stage” rather than “state,” since he conceives of all three as a series of emerging, not static conditions, both in themselves and with respect to earlier and later conditions. Hence, simply criticizing theology and metaphysics in the name of science would be a bit like criticizing the grammatical limitations of a two-yearold from the standpoint of an adult language user. Moreover, although the law is undoubtedly first and foremost about human intelligence, it is not exclusively about cognition. To really know the comings and goings of our surroundings involves cognition, imagination, feeling, volition – in a word, all the capacities that function together to constitute human intelligence. Moreover, the aim of knowledge is to give us “prevision,” that is, comprehension of the principles of natural and social activity. The practical employment of these principles as we have come to know them so far has already begun to dramatically improve our lives and promises to continue to do so.
Comte’s account of the rise and development of the extant natural and life sciences, and his projection of the possibility of genuine social science as well, must be understood within the context of his larger story about human biological, social, cultural, and political development. The three-stage law shows us what we may still become, given what we have already been. It is not just about human thought considered abstractly or structurally or in itself. It is about the way strictly intellectual (he sometimes uses the older term, “spiritual”) developments ultimately influence practical and social (“temporal”) activity. “From science,” says Comte, “comes [genuine and efficacious] prevision; from prevision comes [genuinely productive and satisfying] action.” I have added in brackets what applies specifically to the third stage. The positivist slogan, “Order and Progress,” articulates this principle. In 1889, “Ordem e Progresso” was incorporated into the new national flag of Brazil by an intelligentsia that was at the time strongly influenced by Comte’s social theory. The idea is that science provides knowledge of the natural and social “order,” and the applications of this knowledge facilitate “progress” in real life. In the Système, Comte goes still further, adding a third idea to the slogan. He comes to think that from the improvement of our natural and interpersonal circumstances, there will eventually arise a similar improvement in our affective life, and self-centeredness will begin to give way to universal and benevolent “love.” The reason is simple enough, he explains. “We grow tired of thinking, and even of acting; we never tire of loving” (SPP1: 1/1).
Regarding the original positivism of Comte, then, it would be wrong to interpret his analysis of human rationality as an “epistemology” in today’s familiar sense of providing a theory of knowledge, truth, and/or warranted belief. He would find what we now call epistemology deficient in at least three ways – namely, as suffering from an excessive tendency toward formalization (i.e. where the topic is the way to reason and the criteria of rationality), as overemphasizing the present (i.e. where only what we twenty-first century Westerners in “developed” countries think about the topic carries real philosophical weight), and finally as displaying a certain narrowness and reductiveness (i.e. by typically starting with the proper functioning strictly of cognition and deeming the consideration of “contextual” issues at best optional and at worst diverting). For Comte, by contrast, the most important philosophical feature of any thinking – theological, metaphysical, or scientific – is that it is a human activity, a way of interacting with our surroundings. We must understand that it occurs successively in three ways, and that these represent three successive global “approaches” to our overall circumstances. Comte calls these approaches “ways of philosophizing.” Each arises from a distinctive sense of experiential encounter with our natural and social surroundings, and this general sense is articulated in a distinctive type of theorizing (Comte uses the old-fashioned term, “speculation” for all three types). The later stages build on the strengths and struggle to overcome the weaknesses of the previous ones, and the ultimate measure of their success is what they enable us to do with the natural and social world.
Comte’s law is designed to illuminate these developments from several perspectives. Psychologically, it identifies the main stages of individual intellectual growth. Epistemologically, it explains how each science realizes its ultimate aim by passing through the stages appropriate to it. Socio-politically, it depicts the rise of human societies in their religious, military, industrial, and legal activities as following, with a time lag, intellectual progress. Historically, it depicts the stages and their sociopolitical expressions in the whole of humanity over time. Finally, behind all these analytical perspectives, there lies an idea of human progress that Comte himself may be happy about but which he believes in any case represents the inevitable developmental tendency of our species. In discussing each stage below, I emphasize especially Comte’s general historical articulation of them, but also mention in passing some of the manifestations of these stages in the lives of individuals, in the development of the specific sciences, and the socio-political changes.
For Comte, famously, theology constitutes our necessary intellectual “childhood.” Yet if his claim is well-known, his interpretation of it is often misunderstood. Primitive cultures, young human beings, and fledgling disciplines may all begin by thinking theologically, but for Comte, this does not mean either that their fundamental motivations are different from those of mature cultures, adults, and established sciences or that their superstitions and god-talk are merely about some non-existent entities in which grown-ups eventually stop believing. For Comte, as I explained above, all human thinking in all three of its stages, whatever else it may be about and whatever other effects it may have, is rooted in the same basic motivation – namely, a markedly optimistic desire to sustain or restore natural harmony and social peace.
Between the lines of all Comte’s descriptions of intellectual and social development, one can see this implicit understanding of how it has been and how it is supposed to be between human beings and their surroundings. Under primitive intellectual conditions, we confidently assume that nature is predictable and at least benign, if not always actually supportive. Day is supposed to follow night. Mountains are at worst supposed to rumble, but not to spew lava over whole villages. There is supposed to be enough to eat. People are supposed to be able to live together. Pleasure is supposed to supplant pain. It is not that there are no surprises or mysteries; but what surprises and mysteries we do encounter are supposed to be either enjoyable or soluble or at least tolerable.
Of course, just a few days of life and a few years of social existence tell us that things are not always so easy; and in “maturity,” we know very well what a struggle it always is to make things right and how rare it is when harmony and peace really predominate. For Comte, however, human beings never regard this struggle as completely devoid of a sense that things can be fixed. In other words, what we now call scientific optimism is for him not something essentially scientific at all. We might better call it ontological optimism – that is, Comte’s interpretation of how humans always understand things to “be.” As I will explain in a moment, this positive sense of things is easiest to detect in his defense of the “maturity” of the scientific stage; but it also informs, if not so obviously, even his conception of the religious ideas and practices of our youngest selves and most remote ancestors.
In primitive human life, according to Comte, cognition begins in experiences of mysterious and disturbing ruptures in what is otherwise taken to be a predictable world. Things just keep doing the unexpected and threatening. Reactions to these events are at first spontaneous – and, of course, largely a matter of instinct and emotion. Both historically as a species and as individuals, we initially lack both reliable theories about our surroundings (which, after all, would have to be based on previous observations) and fruitful observations (which would need guidance from reliable theories). We would thus have forever remained in an intellectual “vicious circle,” were it not for the “spontaneous conceptualizations” of primitive minds. In the beginning, instinctual/emotional reactions to the unexpected encounters serve as the substitute for the sort of disciplined, data-collecting “observations” that could provide us with real science; and the imaginative speculations to which these reactions give rise are the substitute for what scientists call “theories.” Afraid or awestruck in the presence of some apparently uncontrollable natural force (e.g. an eclipse, earthquake, or epidemic), people are excited by these feelings into thinking about the actually experienced thing itself as having a frightful or awesome countenance. And since at this point we lack the needed theoretical repertoire, all of our resulting conceptualizations of such experiences tend to depict the frightful or awesome thing as alive with power or energy analogous to but (given the evidence of the present encounter) greater than the human will. The formation of such analogies is the first sign of philosophical activity. It is designed to “explain” the strangeness of unexpected events; and primitive speculation makes variations on the image of the human will because what is sought is the “cause” of the occurrence, and the only causally effective power with which the primitive mind is directly familiar is experienced in its own acts of choosing.
Animism, or fetishism, is thus the earliest form of theology. It emerges as a direct, experience-based, imaginative response to surprising and disturbing encounters with our otherwise routine and predictable surroundings. Like all subsequent forms of philosophy, it is also thoroughly practical-minded in its intention. It aims to restore sense and order to a temporarily disrupted existence – so that we can get on with life. By giving us guidance for ritual and social interaction, theological speculation, even in this most archaic form, thus grounds our original form of universal praxis. It is no exaggeration to say that, for Comte, prayer and ritual are essentially our first technology – i.e. our first global effort to accommodate and restore the disrupted relations that stimulate our initial speculations.
Over our lengthy period of “infancy,” however, the ultimately unacceptable character of these spontaneously produced, fetishistic “theories” becomes all too evident. As accounts of disruptions in our “normally” harmonious relations, they imply that our true condition is one of total subordination to arbitrary external powers. If these disruptions are in fact just manifestations of a world full of entities with “wills” of their own, then fetishism neither explains this world nor promises any relief from undesirable surprises. According to its theories, things just do what they do, and we are powerless to stop them. Such a conclusion, argues Comte, is both intellectually unsatisfying and pragmatically intolerable. Indeed, in the aggregate, our experience does not seem to square with this negative double conclusion. It is not clearly the case that unexpected events “just happen” (i.e. are always merely arbitrary expressions of power); nor does it seem obvious that events are always out of our control. As the mind ponders these matters, it gradually turns from fetishism to polytheism.
Polytheistic philosophizing differs from fetishism in several ways. As just noted, it is stimulated not only by feelings of awe or fear but also by a growing sense of dissatisfaction with fetishistic responses to these feelings. As a result, the mind begins to employ the imagination to speculate about other more promising conceptual responses and eventually settles on the possibility of explaining events by conceiving them as driven by “hidden causes” – that is, invisible gods that control not just this or that particular event but whole classes of similar events (e.g. the sun god is responsible for the behavior of the sun generally, not just one eclipse). For the polytheist, it is not the experienced thing that has the mysterious power; it is the god or gods “of” such things that is controlling them. Eventually these controlling hidden causes are systematized into a pantheon of invisible gods who are pictured as presiding together over the natural and social world.
In Comte’s account of polytheism, and especially in his comparisons of it backwards toward fetishism and forward toward monotheism, we can already see the outlines of the case he ultimately wants to make for scientific thinking. On the one hand, in contrast to fetishism, polytheism shifts the focus away from the “existent” things we experience to the “phenomenal generalities” (i.e. the awe- or fear-inspiring kinds of actions or motions) whose manifestation in the appearance of these things catches our attention in the first place (or so we imagine). This alteration of attention is crucial for all later cognitive advancement, because it suggests for the first time the possibility of systematic intellectual abstraction: Never mind the things we see. What makes them the kinds of things we see?
At the same time, this abstractive move seems paradoxically to draw the world closer to us both theoretically and practically than fetishism does. Theoretically speaking, if control of the phenomenal generalities of things is a function of divine wills instead of arbitrary material forces, this suggests that the true course of things is determined by beings (i.e. the hidden gods) analogous to ourselves (for we know from our own case what it is like to will something according to a plan or purpose). And practically speaking, if what we experience are not just the things themselves operating mysteriously and arbitrarily, but things that are under the hidden control of the wills of gods who seem in principle to be comprehensible, then the world is a potentially predictable place after all. Perhaps, with sufficient reverence for these gods and some understanding of their purposes, they may modify the course of future events in a friendly direction, especially if one suspects that these gods might care about us. However, the deepest scientific implication of this theoretical and practical transformation does not fully come to light until much later. For when the polytheistic mind conceives the restoration of satisfying relations between ourselves and the world as depending on our understanding the wills and purposes of the gods, it makes spontaneous use of what we in retrospect recognize to be the prototype of the modern epistemic model of thinking subjects seeking the right theories about the world regarded as external object(s). In our terms, the polytheistic mind is learning how to think representatively and how to set up a correspondence model of truth.
On the other hand, the speculations of polytheism are still at best mere creations of the imagination, intimately expressive of and responsive to our immediately felt everyday experiences. If this makes polytheistic theories practically appealing, it also causes them to remain conceptually unclear and inconsistent. (Think of Socrates asking Euthyphro if he really believes all those stories about the gods, their enmities, and their follies.) When dissatisfaction with the conceptual limitations of polytheistic theory grows strong enough (e.g. when the very idea of more than one “supreme” being comes to seem hopelessly illogical), genuinely rational concepts begin to displace imaginative “images,” and the transition is made to monotheism. According to Comte, even monotheism, like all forms of theology, originates from feelings or instincts stimulated by everyday experiences of the unexpected, but unlike the earlier forms of theology, its theories reflect reason’s success in gaining the upper hand in responding to these experiences. Even superstitions that survive into monotheism are given some sort of “rational” gloss; and the imagination is only permitted to contribute to the production of accounts of divine causality that are logically and coherently organized and in which the whole surrounding world is conceived as a single cosmos. For the first time, the developing human mind succeeds in working out a genuine “system” of knowledge. There is a cosmos, or universe, and it is created by, or is at least under the power of a single god who acts, not capriciously as in earlier theologies, but in accordance with a set of universal and invariable laws.
From one angle, then, monotheistic theology is an obvious “intellectual” improvement. Its cosmology is rational and systematic – at least to the extent allowed by whatever feelings and commitments to superstition and authority are definitive for a given religion – and its rituals and codes of behavior allow for more consciously rulegoverned and orderly communities. In the end, however, Comte is not very kind to monotheism. He admits that against the imaginative and illogical character of earlier forms of theology, monotheism is the inevitable corrective; yet its resulting picture of things is, in ways that are not obvious at first, deeply unsatisfying both theoretically and practically. On the one hand, although monotheism’s theories about how God’s laws work may be logical, these theories themselves remain incurably vague and abstract – which is not really surprising, since for monotheists the whole point is simply that they are God’s laws. “God did it” may comfort those who feel that their ultimate divinity, being ultimate, is by definition capable of doing anything; but it is not much of an “explanation.” On the other hand, speaking in terms of practice, the god who applies these laws seems increasingly remote from human affairs. It is with monotheism, not polytheism, that cosmological and ethical theories grow “other-worldly.” Indeed, in Comte’s unflattering portrayal, the very point that the monotheistic mind comes most to insist on – namely, that there is an essential disjunction between divine and human natures – virtually guarantees that its theories will undermine all sense of fundamental (albeit sometimes disrupted) intimacy which lies at the heart of our original experiences of the surrounding world.
Nevertheless, Comte’s purpose in these criticisms is not to denigrate monotheism; it is rather to sympathetically reconstruct its place in our intellectual development in order to see how it is both necessary and surpassable. It is therefore important to see both that monotheism is, from the standpoint of what comes before, a kind of completion of this first intellectual stage, and also from a developmental standpoint, the beginning of inevitable “decay” for the theological era. Once the polytheistic imagination awakens reason, monotheistic speculation is ultimately forced on us by our sense that, for all its mystery and variety, the surrounding world is one “connected” whole. In the theological stage, however, the search for an intellectual system that articulates this “urge to unity,” is almost wholly abstract and purely conceptual, and it is actually achieved at the expense of our more primitive and lived experience of the connectedness of all things. Comte sees monotheism as thus both intellectually unavoidable and a kind of betrayal of the admirably concrete and intimate sort of original relatedness to our natural and social surroundings – a betrayal that will not be undone until the mind matures enough to understand the need and the value of experimental observation.
Signs of such maturity are, of course, only rudimentary at this stage. Unavoidably, the stimulus of instincts, feelings, and reliance on superstition still functions in place of genuine “observation.” To the immature mind, the “mere” recording of resemblance and succession, which scientists understand is the key to real knowledge, simply cannot seem important enough to attract any sustained attention. At this point, Comte explains, the mind must be “overstimulated” – that is, feelings and imagination must stir our intellectual powers sufficiently to make it seem possible for us to understand our surroundings by solving life’s greatest mysteries (e.g. why things happen, what’s “behind” the appearances we see, why we’re here, what happens after we die). No answers to these Big Questions are ever found, yet the search for them is what drives our first attempts to subdue the unknown and mysterious by means of thought. Monotheistic speculation shows the mind that logical and systematic theorizing is possible, just as the earlier theological substages made us aware of our feelings and the power of our imagination. All of these powers will eventually figure properly together in the pursuit of scientific knowledge; but if we are ever to understand what this means, we must develop and maintain an appreciation of the functioning of all our intellectual powers, not just focus on rationality in the narrow sense of cognition. (So, for example, Comte would side with post-positivist and science studies critics of logical empiricism’s rigid, internalist division between the “mere” discovery of scientific theories and the philosophically “essential” issue of their justification. For him, as for these critics, this division is based on a bloated and unhistorical sense of the power and role of cognition in scientific practice.)
In the end, no theological conception of our surroundings can be intellectually satisfying, since it inevitably depends more on feeling and imagination than on reason; and it is precisely monotheism that demonstrates this. Consider this final form of theology long enough, and it will gradually dawn on us that if there is such a thing as cosmic necessity, then the mind’s real subject must be the laws of this necessity and not the fact that any god happens to make use of them. The political parallel of this intellectual insight is, of course, the idea – worked out especially in Christian terms – that it is possible to conceive of a viable social order independently of a divine one. Out of the distinction between the City of Man and the City of God arises the Enlightenment idea of an entirely secular state that God does not supervise. In secularizing the ideas of cosmic and social order, the mind begins to experience its power to overrule all appeals to feeling, superstition, and religious authority. With the emergence of this theoretical – and eventually also practical – realization, thinking turns metaphysical.
Comte’s idea of metaphysics and the metaphysical era has also been widely misinterpreted. Unlike the later positivists, he does not define either theology or metaphysics in dismissive scientistic terms, or regard their theories as cognitive nonsense. His conception of observation is more Jamesian than Humean (William James famously described British empiricism as “not very empirical”), and he is no semantic monist about worldly knowledge. He “observes” that both theology and metaphysics are products of historically developed, perfectly meaningful activities that ultimately prove unsuccessful but without which there could have been no science. Indeed, to put this issue in more pointed form, what Comte says about the necessity and limitations of theology and metaphysics actually provides the rationale for the later positivists’ silent and ungratefully dogmatic assumption of the superiority of science. To Comte, the most important thing to notice about metaphysical thinking is that it helps the mind liberate itself from its original tendency to invest all speculation about our surroundings with the feeling that something extra-natural – something divine rather than worldly – controls them. In a word, metaphysics helps the mind make the transition from supernaturalism to naturalism. To see how this liberation takes place, one must understand why the metaphysical era has earlier and later phases, but no actual substages like theology.
In its earlier phase, the intellectual tendency already discernible in the movement from polytheism to monotheism is simply brought to completion. Monotheism itself is criticized in the same way that monotheism criticized polytheism, namely, by showing that monotheism’s own theories are no less vague and inconsistent than those of polytheism. Reduced to its barest essentials, “God did it” is no more intellectually satisfying than “the gods did it.” Monotheistic ideas of how these forces operate must therefore be rejected in favor of detailed, logically coherent, naturalistic theories. At first, however, metaphysical theories still shared the theological assumption that worldly events are run by hidden (i.e. unobservable) forces, and that these forces are manifestations of God’s power.
In the later phase of metaphysics, “Nature” tends to replace “God” as the entity possessing this ultimate power, but this Nature continues to be understood, as God had been, as a “vague, universal bond of connection for all phenomena.” On the positive side, however, this substitution completes the revolt of reason against supernaturalism. It not only naturalizes the idea of ultimate power, but it shifts the focus away from this power and toward the law-likeness of natural phenomena themselves. Even in early metaphysics, the topic of greatest theoretical interest is not God or Nature – call it what you will – but the specific “laws” that explain systematically how all the particular hidden forces actually operate. Theological systems always stress that the laws of the cosmos are the laws of God, and wonder why God wants things the way they are. Metaphysical systems tend to focus on the laws themselves since, cognitively speaking, it adds little to say they are laws of Someone or Something.
Yet in Comte’s view, it is ultimately not the substantive theories of metaphysics but what happens to the mind in developing them that matters most. To understand the “transient utility” of metaphysics is to see how its ‘hybrid concepts” – that is, its naturalistic ideas about hidden powers – prepare the maturing mind to concentrate exclusively on the world’s phenomena themselves. Metaphysics, in its “essential instability,” presents a Janus-face. Its reasoning is too independent to be theological; yet its theories are too theological to be scientific. On the one hand, metaphysical concepts differ profoundly, and positively, from theological ones insofar as they subordinate feelings and imagination to purely rational-logical considerations. Theology has substages, because theological reasoning is related to feelings and instincts in three different ways. Looking back on all this with a liberated metaphysical mind, feelings and instincts obviously do not qualify as a genuinely “observational” basis for theorizing. Yet they did at least guarantee for all theology a concrete, experiential relation with the world. And that, on the other hand and negatively, is precisely what is not true of metaphysics. No metaphysical system expresses any kind of experientially distinctive relationship to worldly phenomena. In spite of its often irreverently naturalistic tone, metaphysics remains at bottom simply a collection of naturalistic variations on theological themes – expressed, to be sure, through concepts that are clear and logically related, but also with no empirical anchor to sustain them. In metaphysics, the abstract systems of theology simply morph into equally abstract but largely secular conceptual schemes.
It is this combination of intellectual irreverence and emotional-experiential remoteness that makes metaphysics interesting to Comte. For in these two characteristics, one can recognize both the positive developmental significance of the metaphysical era and also its inability to ever mark more than a “transitional period.” Freed from all constraints but those of reason, the metaphysical mind is at home with mathematics and logic; but this is also the sort of mind that produces theoretical systems whose wildly unsatisfactory character eventually becomes too obvious to miss. The problem is that there will inevitably be too many such systems. For once a metaphysical theory is deemed “reasonable,” there is no further means for deciding between it and any other equally reasonable metaphysical theory. With nothing analogous to theology’s feelings or instincts or superstitious reliance on authority to hold them back, liberated metaphysical minds are able to produce an endless stream of complete, logical, coherent … but also incompatible … conceptual systems. During the time of its initial ascendancy, metaphysicians can rightly brag about the intrinsic educational value of being able to reason abstractly and independently while at the same time maintaining a naïve, realist faith in one or another favored theoretical system about the world’s causes and purposes.
Yet later, when intellectual ties with theology grow “feeble,” the nominalistic character of all metaphysics becomes glaringly obvious – its ideas having become “so empty through overly subtle qualification that all right-minded persons consider them to be only the abstract names of the [natural] phenomena in question” (CPP1: 14/8). For example, Comte would have regarded all the later realism/anti-realism debates and skeptical arguments about the existence of an external world incurably pre-scientific, i.e. metaphysical. “If popular good sense had not long ago pushed aside the absurd metaphysical doubts … [for example] as to so fundamental an idea as that of the existence of external bodies we may be sure they would still survive in one form or another; for they have certainly never been decisively dissipated by any argument” (DEP: 11/17). The point, of course, is that “metaphysical” doubts can never be dissipated, because they are not anchored in anything that really matters to life. How could they be? Comte shares Kant’s view that the scandal is not that we have failed to find but that we are still looking for, say, proves that there is an external world. He does not, however, agree with Kant’s response. To actual people, busy discovering what the world is like and how to live in it, who cares?
In short, the metaphysical spirit is best regarded “as a kind of chronic distemper [maladie chronique] naturally inhering in our individual and collective mental evolution between infancy and manhood” (DEP: 11/17). It is the spirit of the teenager. Of course, it is a good thing to learn to think against the influence of feelings, imagination, dogma, and appeals to authority; but a mind that is merely liberated can never successfully be anything more than critical. It is always “reasonable” to doubt and to argue, even in the face of “good sense,” for it is always “logically possible” for real situations to be otherwise. Yet when a metaphysical mind continues to insist on this point – when it continues to argue about the logically possible even when it is a question of explaining our natural and social relations as we actually (or might realistically) live them – human reason reveals that it is ultimately unfit to be its own authority. Strictly speaking, “the metaphysical spirit properly so called … can never be anything but critical,” which is both its glory and ultimately its undoing (DEP: 42/68, my emphasis).
Comte stresses, however, that it is easy to misinterpret this observation. John Stuart Mill, whose own writings dwell almost exclusively on the unscientific character of metaphysical theories, concludes that the sort of “dialectics and negative criticism” necessary to a liberated mind must be features of scientific, not metaphysical thinking. He takes Comte to task for giving metaphysics too much credit (Mill 1969: 278, 404). In this, Mill foreshadows the later positivist tendency to collapse the distinction between theology and metaphysics, relegate them both to the pre-scientific past, and move on to the epistemology of science. We have seen the consequences of this philosophical tunnel vision: At first, the only sort of reason that subsequently seems to deserve the name is the cognitive/calculative rationality one utilizes in mathematics and empirical science. One’s earlier experiences of theological and metaphysical thinking are simply suppressed – until at some point, they re-emerge in the form of a free-floating urge to be “skeptical” or in certain moods, to turn away from Rationality in order to “believe” or poetize.
Even without the benefit of our hindsight, however, Comte could see Mill’s mistake and told him so. If one simply begins with an analysis of scientific epistemology, one takes no note of how the mind learns to accept the “relativity” of positive knowledge (limited as this knowledge always is to the degree of assurance afforded us by the amount of evidence we have gathered); and in the absence of an understanding of this point, one may fail to appreciate the fundamental difference between the empirically based cautiousness of positive knowledge and the ultimately metaphysical character of skepticism. Comte would thus have been amused by the twentieth-century obsession with the “problem of skepticism” among analytic philosophers. An epistemology that makes this problem a central issue is the product of a mind that never grew up. It is the problem of a metaphysical mind – one that is still more in love with certainties of logic and abstraction than with the probabilities of laboratory experiment and field research, a mind that in its “obstinate proneness to argue rather than observe,” remains more interested in the dissolution of theoretical claims that in “truly scientific work” (DEP: 8–10/12–15). For a mind that continues to mature, however, the power to remain obstinately logical eventually becomes an embarrassment; for it reveals the dirty little secret about “pure reason” – namely that, left entirely on its own, it can always find “grounds” for undermining every affirmation. Provided they are not suppressed in a futile effort to achieve instant maturity, experiences of this limitation eventually drive stubborn adolescents toward adulthood … and inquiring minds spontaneously toward science.
In Comte’s view, then, it is philosophically (not just psychologically) important to see why the move toward embracing the value of “observation” cannot be a Carnapian leap to positivity at the expense of theology and metaphysics. Even in the earliest portions of the theological stage, we develop a generalized awareness that at least in some of our experiences, there are obvious, “perceivable” regularities requiring no special explanation. The world and other people are usually there, where and when I see them; things usually happen in expected ways; I can usually raise my arm when I want to, and so forth. Hence, Comte sees the move toward scientific reasoning as a conscious but radically chastened return to an early, “instinctively” employed savvy about our surroundings – or more formally, as a deliberate and “methodological extension of universal sensibleness [sagesse universelle]” (DEP: 44–5/71–2). Experiential encounter is now developed into, not replaced by “observation”; and attention to how things “usually” are is transformed into an appreciation for statistical probability. Occasionally, Comte even calls the turn toward observation in disillusion with metaphysics a “radicalization of fetishism” (SPP4: 204/180).
To explain what genuine observation is, Comte describes positivism as steering a middle course between the extremes of “mysticism” and “empiricism.” Positivism is opposed, of course, to abstract speculation. As Comte famously asserts, “All competent thinkers agree with Bacon that there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts” (CPP1: 8, 34/4, 20). Reason’s efforts to transcend sense never lead to anything but mysticism. Yet this does not mean that Comte’s positivism is either inductivist nor sensationalist. Contrary to long-standing opinion, he is just as opposed to the “[mere] empiricism” of eighteenth-century thinkers like Condillac (or Hume) as he is to mysticism (CPP3: 626–7). The false assumption about Comte’s allegedly Humean empiricism begins early and runs through the entire development of later positivism and beyond (e.g. Carnap 1936: 420; Sellars 1939: 26–7; Peirce 1984: 126–7; Habermas 1971: 74–5).
The problem, says Comte, is that mysticism and empiricism both distinguish too sharply between scientific theory (i.e. third-stage “speculation”) and observation (i.e. third-stage “experience”), because each in its own way misunderstands what these are. We can put the point this way. Cartesians and Baconians are each right in what they affirm and wrong in what they reject. On the one hand, Descartes is right to stress that reason has the power to free itself from feeling, prejudice, and authority – as it already started to do in the second stage, for the sake of logic and mathematics. Yet the Meditations can seduce us into believing the mind has the power to discover nature’s most fundamental laws all by itself, and believing this, we fall back into metaphysical or even theological speculation. On the other hand, Bacon is right that pre-scientific rationality falls hopelessly prey to various (theoretical) “idols.” Yet a purely Baconian inductive procedure – by itself and without the independent resources of reason – is little more than a “barren accumulation of unconnected facts,” a “mere” empiricism and not yet science. When the mind reaches maturity, it already understands that Descartes-plus-Bacon cannot be the model for truly productive knowledge; for even in pre-scientific times, reason and experience work together in human affairs – for example, in solving the vicious circle of being initially without either facts to guide theory or theory to inform the gathering of facts.
In Comtean positivism, then, mature/scientific reasoning is not more or less but only differently dependent on experience, and not more or less but only differently speculative. “Observation” has for its “objects” everything from stars and molecules to language and social customs – in a word, anything and everything that can, albeit under ever improving technical conditions, actually be encountered. The problem with “experience” as it is understood in pre-scientific times is that it is often a sloppy combination of observation plus felt, imagined, or dogmatically assumed extras. The tree really does burst into flames when lightening hits it, but that doesn’t mean the tree’s spirit is threatening us. The sun actually does rise in the East and set in the West, but that doesn’t mean it’s being carried across the sky in a chariot. And it really does seem as if everything hangs together with everything else, but that doesn’t mean Somebody planned it or Something has this as Its purpose. Conversely, the problem with “experience” as it is understood in early modern times (and by those later so-called empiricists who, like Russell, wish Kant had never lived), is that it is still based more on an anti-metaphysical urge to avoid sloppy combinations of observation and assumed extras than it is on a scientifically informed idea of what observation can actually be. No one, for example, actually encounters only redness-here-now, so that one then faces the daunting task of “inferring” that this sense data belongs to a ball. One must be trained to think this way – by ignoring what one already observes in favor of abstract theories of sensation and perception. Comte likes to imagine that such theories will some day be ridiculed in plays.
In the end, then, once we have struggled through the successes and failures of theology and metaphysics – and thereby learned the difference between actually encountering something and feeling, imagining, or abstractly speculating about it – we can understand what it is like to pay greater attention just to the experiential encounter, before and without allowing ourselves to have an attitude toward or draw any conclusions about it. Once the mind understands, in a positive spirit, the value of experiential encounters as such, it also sees what successful theorizing about these encounters must be. From our individually and collectively having been theologians and metaphysicians, we realize that what we have always wanted is a system of knowledge that facilitates a predictable and livable future; but we also see from the failures of our theological and metaphysical speculations that obtaining this knowledge really has nothing to do with worshipping mysteries or finding hidden powers behind what we observe. Instead it involves attentive and thorough processing of what we actually encounter, which is a matter of seeing and recording the comings and goings of encountered things and then calculating what we might expect from them (and things like them) in the future.
Comte’s conception of observational procedures is thus interestingly different from that of logical empiricism (Scharff 2002: 30–4). He is no rational reconstructivist, bent on telling practicing scientists what they are doing methodologically when they get it right; nor is he a special advocate of mathematical models of reasoning and “experimental” methods of observation. Indeed, Comte regards any systematic formalization of the method of science as metaphysical. One can of course study, say, how induction works in experimental physics, or classification, in biology. But no general account of induction or classification can do more than “supply general indications” and “mark out a direction to follow,” and it will always remain “incompetent … to furnish solutions” for how scientists should conduct their research (SPP1: 518/419). It is essential to positivism, says Comte, that “logic never be separated from [the actual practice of] science.” Only in this way can we make certain that scientific procedures run the gamut from ordinary (but instrument-aided) perception, to experimentation, classification, and historical reconstruction, depending upon the kind of observation most suitable to the particular science, and given its current level of maturity and its specific subject matter. So, for example, there is a time when a developing science can do no better than carefully record phenomenal events in the hope that this at least might suggest to us an hypothesis that (in the early modern sense of systematically synthesizing the results) “verifies” them. Astronomy begins to separate itself from astrology in this way. In the earlier parts of his Cours, Comte identifies three basic scientific procedures, namely, the direct examination of phenomena as they “naturally present” themselves (“observation proper”), experimentation, and comparison (e.g. CPP2: 7–8, 19–21). In later discussion of social science, however, he identifies the “historical method” (i.e. the “comparison of the various consecutive states of humanity”) both as the “last part of the comparative method” and as a separate “fourth mode” that forms the “very basis” of social science (CPP4: 449–68), making it in the latter case the model for Mill’s “inverse deductive” method in his Logic (Mill 1973–74, VI: x, pars. 4–8).
It is not anachronistic to depict Comte arguing about the dangers of methodological formalism a century before there were any logical empiricists. He already had Mill’s System of Logic in front of hiIm, and he makes it perfectly clear why he thinks there can be, at most, only temporary value to works like Mill’s. Mill complains that Comte gives the Logic “high approval,” without becoming “indebted to it for a single idea, or influenced [by it] in the smallest particular.” Instead, he says, Comte continues to take a largely descriptive and often anecdotal approach to the scientific method, and this shows that he is “not so solicitous about completeness of proof as becomes a positive philosopher” (Mill 1969: 293n, 294). Comte, however, takes this rebuff as a complement. Sounding more like a twenty-first-century post-positivist than a colleague of Mill or the great-grandparent of Reichenbach and Hempel, Comte opposes in principle the very intention of works like Mill’s Logic, if such works are understood to be setting forth (in Mill’s phrase) an “organon of proof.” Such projects are misconceived both theoretically, for implying that there is an “essential” set of formal-logical rules for the conduct of science, and also practically, because the very offering of such an organon threatens to straitjacket scientific activity itself (Scharff 2002: 61–3).
To see what is at stake here, consider the following. In his introduction to the Logic, Mill addresses the potential objection (probably originating with Thomas Carlyle) that just as we cannot learn how to use our muscles by studying anatomy, we cannot learn to think scientifically by studying logic. Mill replies by rejecting both ends of the analogy. In thinking as in exercising, he argues, we must learn to distinguish those moves we ought to make from those we ought not to make. This reply is, in its own way, perfectly sensible, but for Comte it misses a crucial point. Granted that, for example, weightlifters can save themselves a lot of grief by exploiting the knowledge of physical therapists. But this knowledge can only make them healthier, not better weightlifters. (And I assume that Mill would agree that injecting steroids does make them “better” in the requisite sense.) Similarly, knowing the rules of reasoning cannot make a scientist good at anything except maybe those canned experiments in Physics 101.
For Comte, an appropriate analogy to use against Mill would be that of a budding scientist to, say, a chess novice who imagines that competent (not to mention expert) play can come from knowing and applying all the game’s rules. At the very time when, as Comte tells it, a nascent scientific mind is finally learning that the power of reason must be neither underestimated nor let loose on its own but rather always be coordinated with observation, the last thing this mind needs to hear is that scientific activity is a matter of following “rules.” As usual, it is the emerging positive mind in the context of its socio-historical development – not, say, a Cartesian ego objectivistically setting out a foundation for itself in a self-possessed mental Nowhere – that Comte is describing when he offers his lengthy accounts of actual episodes of scientific observation, experimentation, and theory construction instead of pushing organons of discovery or proof.
In keeping with this anti-formalistic stance, Comte urges that all observational procedures be understood as nothing more than “perfections and extensions” of ordinary practices. Thus, on the one hand, every mind sensually encounters its natural and social surroundings. Scientists, however, are guided in these encounters not by feelings or imaginings of what must be there but by the idea of carefully and directly examining what is “phenomenally” present. On the other hand, all of us try to explain what we encounter. As Comte says, true science “dispenses with observation as soon as phenomena permit,” since its ultimate aim is to “deduce the greatest number of results from the smallest amount of immediately given data.” Scientific explanations are better at this simply because, instead of letting their encounters be interpreted in light of common prejudice, superstition, authority, or mere logical coherence, scientists always “attach” observations, at least hypothetically, to some law. It is in the nature of this connection (i.e. between experience construed as observational encounter and speculation, as attaching hypotheses) that the principal difference lies between the theorizing of scientists and ordinary persons (CPP4: 417–19). Like the ordinary person does implicitly, the positive scientist embraces explicitly the primary aim of all knowledge, namely, “seeing for the sake of foreseeing” – “studying what is, in order to infer what will be, in accordance with the dogma that natural laws are invariable” (DEP: 17/26). It’s just that scientific hypotheses actually make successful inferences.
Comte’s use of “dogma” here is revealing. Science, he explains, routinely employs a dogmatical method (méthode dogmatique). For example, when a scientific theory (or set of theories) is employed as a starting point for further research, at that moment one treats the theory as if it were sacrosanct – that is, as if (a) it were already complete and had sprung fully developed into the mind, and as if (b) it were never to need modification on the basis of further research. But of course this is never really the case. There is in fact a “genuine imperfectness” to all theorizing. No matter how “natural” a scheme may seem to be, it has and continues to have a genesis, and it necessarily involves cognitive selection – that is, a kind of intellectual impounding (renfermer) of actual phenomena that depicts them, “if not arbitrarily, then at least somewhat artificially” (CPP1: 78/46; see Scharff 2002: 100–5).
Here, Comte’s sort of positivism pays large dividends by taking a “descriptive” rather than a (re)constructive approach to scientific practice. For he can explain why it is methodologically acceptable in scientific practice but epistemologically unacceptable for philosophers reflecting on this practice to “forget” the artificiality and selectivity of its speculations. When philosophers of science lose or suppress the fact that all thought arises out of and constitutes a response to our encounters – or worse, when they develop justifications for doing this on purpose – they also obscure the fact that the real point of “seeing for the sake of foreseeing” is not theoretical. To carry forward the image from my earlier discussion of theology, we might say that as a substitute for monotheism, metaphysics is ultimately a practical failure and science, a success. The metaphysical ideal of universal praxis is at best (and revealingly, mostly in its earlier period) the “contemplative” life and at worst (and especially toward the end), the love of analysis, argument, unified systems, and formal rules as such. Hence the inevitable practical result of metaphysics is that, whenever changing hearts and minds is the goal, force must replace intellect. Appeals to reason come to nothing by themselves. Even crazy or paranoid world views can be completely “logical.” And there is no real difference between fighting wars of conversion because God is on our side and fighting wars of liberation because we know what True Freedom is. Neither theological nor metaphysical abstractions can make human existence better.
As noted above, however, Comte argues that for a mature mind, although reason is not destined to be a slave to feelings or to alleged revelations, it is unfit to be its own authority. Field by field, scientific naturalism (which explains mechanistically how things work) replaces metaphysical naturalism (which can only conjecture teleologically why things work). Here again, there is an interesting contrast between Comtean and later positivism. One might argue that to the extent that current philosophical talk about naturalism rests on dated images of science and scientific procedure – images that owe more to the epistemic dogmas of logical empiricism than to any socio-historical information about science as it is currently and successfully practiced – today’s so-called naturalism has in fact remained metaphysical (Rouse 2002b). For Comte, in contrast, the “naturalistic turn” in the scientific enterprise develops and continuously transforms itself primarily in response to experiences of the limited socio-historical efficacy of metaphysical (and later, fledgling scientific) reasoning, not out of any general respect for formal epistemological demands.
Central to this developmental process is the organization of the individual sciences in a hierarchy – starting with mathematics, the simplest and most abstract, and ending with sociology, the most complex. Philosophically speaking, concludes Comte, it eventually becomes clear that sociology is destined to constitute the most important science. In two ways, this conclusion shows how Comte gives life not epistemology the last word. We have already noted that he interprets all science in terms of an ultimately practical motivation. Now we see that he treats the hierarchical arrangement of the sciences in a way that reflects this motivation. Sociology (or really, what we would now call social science) gets its special significance not, as he puts it, “objectively” – that is, from some epistemic criteria of right reason – but “subjectively,” from the needs of feeling, social sensibility, and altruistic love. For it is the understanding of social behavior that will ultimately lead to the establishment of peaceful, prosperous societies (Grange 1996: 267–332; Wernick 2001: 27–36). Comte’s life-long “subjective” (i.e. ethico-political) interest in fostering the establishment of sociology is only one of several indications that his conception of the hierarchy of the sciences is not reductivist, in the manner of logical positivism (Manicas 1987: 60–2). Not only do astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and social science all have their own (increasing) levels of complexity and their own distinctive methodological forms of observation; their ultimate worth lies not in the knowledge they obtain but in what, taken all together, can be done with it. Positive/scientific knowledge thus forms the basis of the third and final form of universal praxis – namely, a truly global and scientific technology that effectuates the sort of normalizing of natural and social relations that we have always sought.
I have stressed here, as Comte often does himself, what we might call the intellectually “revolutionary” character of the transition to the positive stage; but we should remember the generally developmental character of his interpretation of this transition – and thus, in contrast to later positivism, the greater sophistication of his account of the rise of science. He insists upon recognizing, for example, that there is a sense in which the mathematicization of nature, so crucial for the move to science from theology and metaphysics, was already a prominent medieval idea (Dear 1995). He knows also that this same medieval era was already a time full of mechanical devices and displays of the love of gadgetry that had (as yet) nothing to do with the desire to obtain instrumental knowledge of the surrounding world (White 1962). Nevertheless, Comte argues that the “sense” of all this in the present age is ultimately to be understood by recognizing that the scientific stage constitutes the fulfillment of an ultimately practical aim through a surpassing of the intellectual methods used with limited success in the first two stages. It is its superior capacity to fulfill our desire for harmonious natural and social relations – not something “essential” about the positive method or style of thought – that justifies the coming dominance of scientific thinking. There is nothing fundamentally misbegotten about metaphysics or theology. In every phase of intellectual development, the goal is “a conceptual system concerning the totality of phenomena” that would permit us to understand our surroundings well enough to order our lives effectively. In each phase, this goal is pursued by the best means thought to be available at the time.
For a Comtean positivist, then, the familiar stories about philosophy’s origin are quite misleading. Theologians and metaphysicians tell us that philosophy originates in feelings of mystery or in intellectual wonder, respectively, and it is undoubtedly true that for a time, both motivations are indispensable stimulants to speculation. In the theological stage, the mind is stirred by the great unknown to overcome the vicious circle of being initially without either theories or data and to set our faculties to work making sense of things. Metaphysics, once begun, ultimately succeeds in showing us the power and possibilities of genuinely free reasoning. Yet in the final analysis, both theology and metaphysics are just as much pursued for the sake of prevision and for the sake of satisfying human needs as science. Thus, science is related to modern technology as theology and metaphysics are related, respectively, to worship/ritual and contemplation – namely, as a comprehensive theoretical basis for a universal form of praxis. Without passing through these two ultimately unsuccessful stages, science can neither be successful nor self-aware of what makes its success possible; and once scientists become reflective about the nature of their success, they will also understand that human nature is at bottom neither theological nor metaphysical nor even scientific but … practical.
Here, then, is my (much abbreviated) case for the superiority of Comte’s positive philosophy over that of the later positivists. For everyone from Mill and Mach to Reichenbach and Ayer – and for many others later, albeit less militantly – philosophy’s main topic is the epistemology of science, and this is no place for something like Comte’s three-stage law. From their viewpoint, his law expresses an interest extraneous to science. Either it is part of some master-narrative about what science means (in which case it is merely abstract speculation), or it makes a cluster of empiricalsociological claims about science. In the latter case, it is asserting factual claims about real events that must be evaluated by science; and even if (as seems unlikely) these claims turn out to be true, they can offer no grounds for philosophical judgments about science. In a word, later positivists turn their internalist guns on the likes of Comte. To them, his “defense” of positive philosophy can only amount to confusing either empirical or “subjective” (i.e. introspective, personal, or anecdotal) beliefs about science with the “objective” reconstruction of what science essentially is.
Comte, however, would not recognize this forced option between “mere” personal/ socio-historical accounts and “genuine” epistemic analysis, and to the extent that it makes sense at all, he would object that it has things backwards. When Mill banishes all “outlying” historical issues from his “correct analysis of reasoning,” or Reichenbach vows to “look through” the “superstructure of mists and wishes” lying “above” ongoing scientific research so that he can analyze the latter’s “supporting structure” (Reichenbach 1938: 403–4) – that is, when later positivists restrict themselves to analyzing scientific rationality “in itself” or in its “essence” and ignore what they define as the merely “subjective origins” of knowledge in order to develop a “constructional system … identical for all observers” (Carnap 1967: 7) – they behave as if becoming philosophers of science means transcending the very life in which science could even matter, and conducting the analyses of scientific procedure as neutral and decontextualized minds. For Comte, however, this behavior is both irresponsible (because it abdicates positivism’s duty to defend itself) and ultimately self-deceiving. Comte might even be amused by the irony in the fact that philosophizing about science in the manner of the later positivists is clearly “metaphysical” in his sense of the term. No actual phenomenon answers to the name, “scientific reasoning as such”; and there is no such thing as a contextless analytical mind.
For Comte, then, our only real option is to philosophize about positive thought from within, not from above, life in the present era. His talk of the positive stage as one of intellectual maturity is often taken to mark him simply as a somewhat more candid analytic epistemologist – one who knows, as Habermas puts it, that positivism’s “real job” is to “justif[y] the sciences’ scientistic belief in themselves by construing the history of the species as the history of the realization of the positive spirit” (Habermas 1971: 72). But this PR conception of positivism – though it captures the spirit of the self-reports of later positivists – is un-Comtean in two ways. First, it mistakenly assumes that Comte thought of his era as already in the third stage, so that a good positivist is just representing an extant condition. As explained above, however, Comte in fact sees us as living toward, or making the transition into the third stage; and he regards the defense of positive philosophy as facilitating this process. Second, the PR interpretation assumes Comte thought there could actually be a formal/ahistorical organon of proof (Mill) or a rational reconstruction of the “essentials” of the scientific method (the logical empiricists). This is simply false. Sounding more like a contemporary post-positivist, Comte argues that the analysis of scientific rationality is inseparable from a determinate philosophical understanding of scientific practice as a distinctive sort of human activity. In his view no philosophy, not even positivism, succeeds in placing itself after, or beyond its inheritance; hence, no fully “mature” philosophy sees itself establishing the “essence” of anything in abstraction from its surroundings and inheritance.
Comte’s reflective candor makes him more interesting today than his successors. He is not more or less committed to a substantive philosophical position than the later positivists; rather, he thinks it is wrong to be silent about it. Yet perhaps even more significant is the nature of the position Comte defends as positivistic. Like the later positivists, Comte does of course think science is epistemically superior to theology and metaphysics. Yet from his earliest writings, he describes this superiority in expansively worldly and humanistic terms. Instead of sometimes confessing to having “sentiments” about it, Comte argues that scientific reasoning is the form of thinking which can truly satisfy our deepest desires – but only if we cultivate an explicit awareness of what we are doing. His argument thus has two parts, one historical, the other analytical.
First, look at any culture in any part of our history. We humans have always wanted to know what makes things be and act as they do. Indeed, says Comte, this craving for an understanding of the laws of phenomena is so strong that in the midst of any particular struggle for it, we tend to block out every extraneous condition and immediate practical interest in order to focus solely on the matter before us. Even now, were we to find it impossible to “arrange facts in an easily comprehended order” using scientific concepts, we would inevitably resort to theological or metaphysical ones, so that at least we had some sort of explanatory scheme for what we observe. Yet our “natural desire” for knowledge and our displays of single-mindedness in the actual pursuit of the truth are not evidence of our desiring “knowledge for its own sake.” Obtaining knowledge – and this is the second part of Comte’s position – always has a practical point – namely, to facilitate our control of nature and social reorganization. Once this control and reorganization are well under way, we can expect a civilization in which “feeling gains primacy over intellect,” a shift occurs from self-centered and individualistic social theories to a more communal viewpoint, and a “Religion of Humanity” begins to form where love, altruism, fellow-feeling, and respect come to be understood as higher values than Order and Progress alone (Wernick 2001: 32–47). All of this may not be what one thinks about in the midst of searching for knowledge, but it is what gives the search its fundamental sense. Scientific understanding is thus the mark of intellectual maturity precisely because its kind of comprehension of the natural and social world makes possible a technology that really works. It is in relation to this practical technoscientific dream that I think Comte is most worth reconsidering – precisely because we still share it, but no longer with our whole hearts (Scharff 2003; Scharff 1998). In closing, then, let me reconsider Comte’s dream, not from his viewpoint but from ours.
Comte, to repeat, interprets his third stage as the final stage. This seems to him settled by the fact that science is a culminating occurrence – that is, a successful resolution, at least in principle, of all the insoluble problems of the earlier stages. The Big Questions are retrospectively understood to deserve responses of awe, wonder, a sense of mystery, and good literature, not a vain search for The One Theoretical System. Real knowledge involves the proper combination of all our faculties, and these faculties cannot properly function together if there is nothing to observe. Yet when the Big Questions are simply appreciated and the whole quest for knowledge is confined to the comings and goings of the observable world, the payoff becomes obvious. The third state is an ending that cannot and need not ever end, because one finally understands that real knowledge is only “relative” to whatever evidence we have so far obtained from whatever observations we have so far recorded. Lacking a Divine Perspective from which everything could be observed completely and simultaneously, we see that our knowledge is never “absolutely” guaranteed by the a priori authority of feeling, faith, or reason; and realizing this leaves us with the benefit of always being ready to handle new disruptions to the natural and social order with modified theories and further observation.
Yet there is in retrospect something disconcerting about the way Comte conceives the third stage. It is not that he refuses to think past the age of science; he never entertains the thought at all. He never asks, Could there be a fourth stage? and then answers No. He never considers “after the third stage,” even as a purely logical possibility. There is, I think, a very good reason for this. Put bluntly, Comte has no experiential reason to conceive such a possibility, and it would never occur to him to do philosophy by entertaining purely logical ones. For him, there is nothing to observe that seems to fall outside the pattern of explanation set up by the three-stage law. He speaks out of an understanding and at a time when technoscience is still more promise than actualization, and when pre-scientific thinking is still mostly seen as ill-fated and ineffectual rather than meaningless. It is not that Comte is theoretically or socio-politically committed to thinking dogmatically only in terms of three stages and no more. Rather, in keeping with his sense that philosophizing happens within the living of life not from above it, he carefully conceptualizes the arrival of the third stage entirely in terms of an experienced sense of its arrival; and in this “culminating” form of its arrival, there simply is no fourth stage.
In a word, he simply has no real motivation to think beyond an internalist vision of the third stage. “Within” the context of Comte’s experience and thus “for” his philosophical reflection, the third stage is what life predominantly promises to “mean” – ontologically, epistemologically, and practically. For him, science is actually becoming the successful, comprehensive cognitive response to that sense of Reality (i.e. the world as mostly benign, predictable, and thus at least restorable to an accommodating condition given our proper response) which originates in primitive life. For him, the scientific response promises to really be a global, open-ended articulation without a terminal point. He thus understands the move from theological/metaphysical to scientific responsiveness as what Heidegger calls an eventuation, not an event. For Comte, when practice is guided by a scientific rather than a theological or metaphysical articulation of our experience, life can really be what it most deeply and essentially is when we make ourselves part of this endless “maturation” process. In Comte’s milieu, the very idea that in its eventual unfolding, the positive stage might mark out an essentially oppressive and occlusive ontological site would have seemed like utter nonsense to him. Slogans like “science doesn’t have all the answers, yet,” and “every human problem has a technological fix” still retained their innocence.
Today, of course, these slogans do not seem so innocent. For Comte, the prospect of an entirely technoscientific age could still be an entirely “positive” projection; and it is unfair to call this idea utopian. But today, it is no longer a projection, and it is hard to depict its realization as anything better than ambiguous. In a late essay, Heidegger asks whether “the world civilization just now beginning might one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole criterion of our journey through the world” (Heidegger 1993: 437, my emphasis). Comte could never ask such a question, because he could not consider the “overcoming” of what had not yet arrived. It would have made no sense to him to ponder the need for additional, post-technoscientific “criteria” for our journey through the world. To him, the emergence of science and its technologies could only be a happy and thoroughly progressive eventuation. With nineteenth-century eyes, he happily concludes that a “scientific view of the world” is therefore the only plausible position for enlightened minds.
Today, however, this same conclusion – whether actually defended or simply assumed – seems strikingly old-fashioned and out of touch. It is difficult to ignore the depressing, retrograde, and dystopian threats that often seem just as constitutive of technoscientific life as the many happy outcomes Comte predicted. It now makes very good sense indeed to ask if there are technological problems that do not have technological fixes. Can we, for example, just engineer our way out of air and water pollution? Is human mentality really best understood by closely following the latest conceptual revisions in cognitive science? (Is it e.g. an accident that the currently most popular idea of “intelligence” tends to define it reductively in terms of manipulating abstractions and rapidly processing information – as if we were just fleshy computers?) Are there important ways of thinking about human health that a scientistic or “medical” model of care can never articulate? (Is it e.g. merely a correctable bad choice that the US health care system is built around the idea of fixing what goes wrong rather than preventing it in the first place?) Or, finally, are there perhaps what used to be called spiritual concerns for which “artistic” celebrations of awe and mystery are really beside the point?
For Comte – and for many of his later sympathizers and inheritors, candidly or not – these questions are just “immature.” The very idea that there could be extra-technoscientific issues in life tends to be seen as ontologically unworthy and regressive. To be really educated and informed, one simply must be, as contemporary analytic philosophers often say, some sort of naturalist. For the only “known” alternative to naturalism is the return to some sort of super-naturalism. Yet in my view, one need not be a Heideggerian – or something like one of Comte’s recalcitrant theologians or metaphysicians – to be suspicious of this line of reasoning. Should we continue to assume that positivism – that is, a position that rests upon the idea that something like Comte’s ever-improving technoscientific existence is the ideal human situation – still constitutes the appropriate philosophy, now that this age has arrived? Not, as Heidegger nicely puts it, if our experience of being in it has become at least as “distressing” as it is satisfying.
It is often objected that Heidegger’s take on the Western tradition, allegedly like that of his whole generation of anti-Enlightenment romantics, is incurably and unjustifiably dystopian. Yet surely it is now possible – in life, not in the head – to find Comte’s brand of technoscientific optimism profoundly unsatisfying. Is it really self-evident that we humans are by nature primarily interested in manipulating the cosmos and fostering social control, and by nature ultimately satisfied to reduce the Big Questions to artistic mysteries? Much of humanity’s interest in order and control seems driven more by circumstance and by power-hungry people than by something hard-wired into human nature. Comte assumes that, in line with the idea that every problem will eventually have a technological fix, social science will finally inform us about how to live, and the political task of bringing such science to the rest of us will be accomplished by “experts” whose only motive is a desire to improve humanity’s lot. Comte can still, with a straight face, call these experts social engineers (CPP1: 67/41) – just as Marx a little later will call them scientific socialists. These are nineteenthcentury ideas, but they are also strong parts of our continuing inheritance. To the extent we find their technoscientific optimism overdrawn, we need to ask, Can there to be something genuinely “beyond” the era Comte regarded as an ending that can never end? What would this mean?
Unlike the later positivists, a twenty-first-century Comte would in fact understand and welcome this kind of question. He would recognize it as a properly philosophical question about how to interpret what he calls a “stage” of human life – that is, a whole general way of existing, involving a pervasive sense of what things mean and what we should do about it. He would even agree that if it were ever to become necessary to ask whether the positive stage is really the sort of “ending” it initially seemed to be, this is not a question that can be addressed piecemeal, occasionally, between the lines, in strategic discussions focused primarily on how to plan, control, or conceptually clarify this or that specific methodological or practical problem. Of course, taken one way, a global critique of this vision is a silly one. Even in the capitalist/democratic West, there is obviously something profoundly right about Comte’s projection. It remains, in some sense, both a true and a “developmentally” necessary picture of what is in fact occurring. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it even makes sense to consider remaking the world so that it is not (or is no longer) technoscientific. As Heidegger says, one can imagine or logically cognize the idea of an entirely non- or post-technoscientific existence; but one cannot really think it. Moreover, depending upon who asks and who is listening, the question can also sound arrogant and chauvinistic. It is easy for North Americans and Western Europeans to sit in the comfort of their “developed” world and convince themselves that their experience of the drawbacks of the kind of life they already live is a good reason to stop the rest of the world from becoming more technoscientific. I start, however, from the Comtean premise that a thoroughly technoscientific existence, extended to ever more of the world, is no longer merely an option. Yet even supposing Comte is right about developmental necessity of such an existence, it is hard not to notice that today – for pretty much everyone, everywhere – it is virtually impossible not to see a threatening and destructive side of the very same eventuation that simultaneously promises – and in fact already delivers – so much good.
But isn’t all of this obvious? Do we really need elaborate references to Auguste Comte and his law of three stages to consider the matter? Here, I think, Comte’s own observation is telling. No idea, he says, can be understood apart from its history – and this is no more powerfully true than when it is denied. Comte’s positivistic idea of humanity’s third stage might therefore best be seen, not so much as dead as something that continues to function underground, as a legacy. It still represents, we might say, a general way of being oriented in the world that is so widely and routinely “sensed” that it often disfigures contemporary debates about science and technology without being noticed. Despite all the recent fuss about the necessary demise of grand narratives, we might well regard positivism as such a grand narrative – as indeed THE current grand narrative of most of the developed world. Rather than dismiss it as merely a latter-day version of the old speculative philosophies of history, we might better call it a kind of philosophical vampire, something “undead that still haunts our concepts and interpretations of nature, culture, and science” (Rouse 2002a: 63). Rouse’s description of the haunting process lends itself well to the sort of global diagnosis I have in mind. With increasingly malignant results, the Comtean idea of technoscientific life as the age of humanity’s “maturity” continues to impede critical inquiry about the problematic character of our age – not because the idea is still widely embraced or because many still believe the specific doctrines initially derived from it, but precisely because it continues to operate quite generally in the thinking of so many who are certain they have rejected it.
Comte’s progeny compounded this problem by calling his sense of things mere sentiment. For this made it seem as if “the scientific world view” is something inconsequential that philosophy could safely ignore. One result has been the widespread emergence of a false confidence among philosophers of science and technology who think that they have simply decided to be post-positivistic. We have left all grand narratives like positivism behind, they say. All general expressions of technoscientific optimism or pessimism are being avoided, and all traditional essentialist talk of Science or Technology Überhaupt are things of the past (Zammito 2004). In their place, we are all becoming engaged in science studies (Rouse 1996), or in empirical (Verbeek 2001), or phenomenological (Ihde 1990), or pragmatist (Hickman 2001) analyses of actual materials, or practices, or scientifically/technologically mediated experiences.
Yet this picture of contemporary philosophical debate is neither accurate nor innocent. It leaves silently in place an inherited technoscientific optimism of earlier times, even if it no longer explicitly receives self-congratulatory, Carnapian praise for being “the basic orientation … with which we all feel an inner kinship.” Reconsidering Comte offers us the possibility of developing a more reflective and candid self-understanding of our own. However much it may look like a speculative principle or empirical theory, his three-stage law is above all a reflective account of what he expects it will be like to live ever more technoscientifically in the midst of things. Made explicit again today, his account might serve as a stimulus for our own critical reconsideration of this kind of life. On the one hand, Comte certainly shows us what such reflective accounts are not. He exposes the folly of clinging to the ahistorical and objectivistic idea that we have made and must now maintain a clean break with the pre-scientific tradition, or of dreaming that we might move past our troubled era into some post-technoscientific heaven. Both of these ideas are useless exercises in “metaphysics,” out of touch with actually experienced circumstances and thus insensitive to what it might take to revise or transform these circumstances. On the other hand, Comte himself interpreted all experiences of intellectual dissatisfaction in then-contemporary life – that is, all experiences of not feeling “at home” or of not being ourselves in a world still mostly conceived theologico-metaphysically – as problems that would be solved technoscientifically. Suppose we cannot do likewise?
In short, rereading Comte now that the age he anticipated seems to have arrived, can we still be content with assuming, as he did, that our most satisfying future lies in more of the same under optimized conditions? Is Comte right about “developed” Western civilization – namely, that it is moving inevitably toward the fulfillment of all of our most fundamental material and spiritual needs? If we find ourselves dissatisfied in principle with this alleged fulfillment, yet are unwilling to return to the bad old days of theology and metaphysics, what would most need to be reconsidered is Comte’s dream itself and the understanding of humanity that drives it.
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