AUGUSTE COMTE: BIOGRAPHY, THEORIES, CONTRIBUTIONS, WORKS - SCIENCE - 2024

Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) was a French philosopher known for having been the forerunner of a current that is known as "positivism" or positive philosophy, as well as sociology, which he elevated to the category of science.

This thinker has been noted as the first scientific philosopher in history and his reputation was at the highest during the 19th century. Although his family was both Catholic and monarchical, the influence of the French Revolution marked him. The historical moment in which he grew up gave Comte the necessary impulse to move away from religion and the king.

Auguste Comte, Unknown author,, via Wikimedia Commons

He attended the Polytechnic School (École polytechnique) in Paris, where he took a special interest in mathematics and astronomy. Although he was later expelled from that institution, Comte remained in the French capital and survived by working as a tutor.

From 1817 he served as secretary to Henri de Saint-Simon, who was a great influence on his philosophical thought.

For most of his life Comte depended financially on his friends, since his income was very low. Among those close to him were figures such as John Stuart Mill and Emil Littré.

He spent his last years trying to turn positive philosophy into a new faith. He used as a model for his new church Catholicism, which he had renounced early. However, in the religious proposal put forward by Comte the saints were political philosophers and other important personalities in history and the supreme being that was praised was humanity itself.

The influence of Auguste Comte's work was particularly intense in Latin America, especially in Mexico and Brazil.

Biography

Early years

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte was born on January 19, 1798 in Montpellier, France. His father was a public servant in charge of collecting taxes named Luis Augusto Comte and his mother was Rosalía Boyer.

He was the eldest son of three brothers born into a Catholic and monarchical family. He came into the world while his country was being shaken by the revolution. At that time the passions for republicanism were intense in French society.

Auguste from a very young age rejected the religion of his parents as well as their political ideas. He was a bright young man with a rebellious nature; As proof of this, it is known that in 1814 he was admitted to the École Polytechnique de Paris, when he was only 16 years old.

Although that institution was born as a center for military studies, with the passage of time it became one of the most important academies of advanced sciences in the country. It was precisely this particular that Comte was really interested in.

Some of his most prominent mentors during this period were Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, and Pierre-Simon Laplace. It is also known that the young man's favorite subjects were mathematics and astronomy.

Youth

During 1816, Auguste Comte was expelled from the École Polytechnique in Paris because of his political affiliations. Republicanism was not appreciated within the institution after it was reformed on the foundations imposed by the Bourbons.

After spending those two years in Paris, Comte knew there was no place for him in Montpellier. That is why he decided to settle in the capital where he began to earn his living working as a private science tutor, especially mathematics.

It is thought that during that time Auguste Comte was interested in traveling to the United States to occupy a position in an institution that Thomas Jefferson was planning to open in the American nation.

Also then Comte became interested in learning philosophy and history in depth, which he did largely on his own.

Saint-Simon

In 1817 Auguste Comte got a job as secretary to Henri de Saint-Simon, one of the theoretical founders of socialism. Specifically, that French philosopher stated that the most powerful groups in society should be scientists and industrialists, that is, the technocratic system.

The central ideas of Comte's thought are highly influenced by Saint-Simon's approaches. In those years Auguste Comte got in touch with the Parisian intellectual elites, who were close to his boss and intellectual mentor.

During this period Comte published some of his ideas in the media that Saint-Simon had at his disposal, but he never signed them. Not everything was going well between them and the intellectual discrepancies were deepening with the passage of time.

In 1819 Auguste Comte published his first signed text: General separation between opinions and desires.

The final break between Saint-Simon and Comte occurred in April 1824, after seven years of collaboration.

In any case, the influence of the former was difficult for the latter to remove. This was visible in the work carried out by Comte after the professional and personal separation between the two.

Positive philosophy course

Shortly after the collaborative conclusion with Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825. At that time financial difficulties were intense for the newly formed couple.

Comte relied heavily on the generosity of his friends. His wife had to face the hardest moments of her life together with him, even she had to practice prostitution for a time to help with the family income.

In April 1826 Comte began to teach his Course in Positive Philosophy, which was joined by many members of the most recognized intelligentsia at the time. That was the case for men like Alejandro de Humboldt, Jean-Étiene Esquirol, and Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville.

Mental problems

After the third session of his lectures related to the Course in Positive Philosophy, he had to stop. The main reason for this forced hiatus was Comte's health problems.

He was admitted to a mental hospital from which he emerged stable, but without having been fully cured. The doctor in charge of treating him had been Dr. Esquirol, one of the listeners in his class.

Both the reins of the home, as the care of Comte happened to be in the hands of his wife Caroline since the philosopher was sent to his house.

During 1827 there was an attempt on the part of Comte to end his life when he jumped from the Bridge of Arts towards the Seine River. Fortunately, the philosopher was rescued before he achieved his goal of committing suicide.

A year later, when he was already recovered, he continued giving his lectures and preparing his philosophical material.

His proposals had an excellent reception and he was invited to the Royal Athenaeum to repeat them in 1830. Since then he began to publish the six volumes of the Course in Positive Philosophy, and the series was completed in 1842.

New relationships

Until 1842 Auguste Comte worked as a private tutor and also as an examiner and teacher at the Polytechnic School. The discrepancies that arose between the philosopher and the director of the institution led to Comte being fired; also that same year he divorced Caroline.

He spent a brief stint in prison after refusing to do his military service in the National Guard.

John Stuart Mill read Comte's works and in 1841 felt the need to get in touch with the French.

After Comte lost his main income, which was his teaching position at the École Polytechnique de Paris, some friends and supporters supported him financially. Among those patrons were Mill and Emile Littré, who had been his student.

In 1845, one of Comte's most important relationships emerged: he met his great love, Clotilde de Vaux. She was a French aristocrat and writer who, although physically separated from her husband, was still married.

The relationship between the two never went beyond the intellectual plane, despite the deep mutual idyll, but Clotilde had a profound impact on Comte's ideas from 1845. The tuberculosis that afflicted her separated them definitively in 1846, the year in which she died..

Positivist society

After the death of Clotilde, Comte also lost another important relationship in his life: that of Mill. The Englishman could not bear the moral superiority and arrogance that Comte began to display with greater determination and decided to suspend his correspondence.

From his youth, Auguste Comte's financial situation was very precarious, but since he broke up with Mill, he became critical again. He started a group called the Positivist Society, which he later tried to turn into a kind of religious cult of humanity.

That same year Emil Littré promoted a kind of subscription to collaborate financially with Comte, whose collaborators were those interested in the philosophy of French.

In 1851 he supported the coup of Napoleon III, but then Comte did not feel pleased by the system he established and returned his intellectual support to the ruler Nicholas I who served as tsar of Russia.

Between 1851 and 1854 he published the four volumes of his System of Positive Politics, in which he gave his final form to his approach known then as sociology.

Last years

Although he continued working on different projects, the religion of humanity began to be his main interest and occupation. On the basis of the Catholic system Auguste Comte created a new religious order in which he himself served as pope.

He made sacred texts, temples and saints, among which he counted his love Clotilde de Voux and other great characters such as Newton, Julius Caesar, Dante or Shakespeare.

During 1856 he published his last work which he called The subjective synthesis. During this period many of his former followers and students turned away from him, as his interest in the new religion became obsessive.

Death

Auguste Comte died on September 5, 1857, in Paris, France, from stomach cancer. The philosopher was buried in the Peré-Lachaise cemetery.

He had spent his last days immersed in poverty and socially isolated as a result of his own character with which he gradually alienated all his friends.

Although he was perceived by many as ungrateful and self-centered, he devoted all his intellectual efforts to contributing to a system that pursued the understanding and progress of humanity.

Although his theories had a great reception and a wide impact during the 19th century, Comte was practically forgotten the following century.

His Brazilian admirers, a country where his theories deeply penetrated the population, ordered that a statue be built for him in the cemetery where his remains rest.

Training

It is necessary to delve into the historical context in which France, as well as the rest of Europe, found itself during the intellectual formation of Auguste Comte.

When he was born the French consulate was in power with Napoleon Bonaparte at the head and he grew up with the Corsican as emperor. Then, during his academic years, the monarchical restructuring was carried out with Louis XVIII in command.

When the École Polytechnique de Paris had to adapt to the new government of the Bourbon king, Comte and many of his colleagues who showed republican sympathies were expelled from the institution and were not admitted again.

It was in those same years that he met Saint-Simon, who managed a series of periodicals under the protection of freedom of the press that was being implemented by the new sovereign.

From that space Saint-Simon was in charge of spreading ideas favorable to scientists and industrialists who were oriented towards the socialist current. In this way he earned the position of intellectual founder of the technocracy.

Intellectual influences

Within the framework of the Industrial Revolution, theories such as Saint-Simon's emerged. At that time, Europe was going through various social, economic and technological changes. The philosopher considered that eventually the industry would permeate all areas including social relations.

Consequently, Comte thought that the great wars were over and that the military and authoritarian model was exhausted. The French thinkers separated because Comte claimed that Saint-Simon tried to steal one of his works and publish it without giving him any credit.

Although the influence that Saint-Simon had on him was very important to Comte's thinking, the young man wanted to find his own theoretical body without tutelage. Other of Comte's philosophical influences were authors such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant.

First approaches

Until Auguste Comte, those who wrote about knowledge did so from a psychological perspective, since they drew the limits of knowledge alongside the limits of the human mind.

What was revolutionary in this Frenchman's approach was his way of approaching knowledge through methodology and epistemology. Comte stated that knowledge must be examined from a historical perspective and not from the individualities of human beings.

Comte's theories

Positivism

This philosophical current emerged as a direct product of the conferences and reflections on knowledge that Auguste Comte manifested in his Course on Positive Philosophy, which he began to teach in 1826, but which was published between 1830 and 1842.

For the French philosopher, the center of his course should be the demonstration that a science was needed whose focus of study was society. He also wanted to show that the different sciences were different edges of a whole.

That is to say, for Comte science should not be approached as an element within philosophy in general, but was itself an object.

Law of the three stages

Auguste Comte developed a proposal that knowledge went through three differentiable and progressive stages:

In the number one position was the stage that, according to Auguste Comte, should be known as "theological". This is one of the most basic processes and consequently it focuses on simple purposes such as the nature of being and phenomena, as well as their beginning and end.

It was focused on concepts and absolute responses in which everything was reduced to black and white, because all things were considered a direct product of the action of some trigger. Furthermore, in social history this is equated with military and monarchical societies.

The next stage was the "metaphysics" in this supernatural agents are not conceived, but essences that produce the visible effects. It is a necessary temporary and transitory evolutionary stage, it is characterized by reasoning and tends to research.

It is precisely in this intermediate process that the fundamental questions can be raised, as well as other doubts about the reason for things.

This stage corresponds to the legal justification of society, Comte related it to the Enlightenment, in which concepts such as the rights of man made their way.

Third, Comte suggests that he should move to the stage that he christened "positive." The researcher who reaches this stage has already accepted that it is not feasible to find absolute answers. After assimilating this, the objective becomes to know the laws that govern phenomena.

In this stage in which scientific reasoning dominates, relationship through observation and comparison is used. This last level corresponds to the industrial society in which Comte lived.

Sociology

The concept raised by Auguste Comte refers to a unified social science. He wanted to explain his present with her, while allowing the development of the future of societies to be planned in an orderly manner.

Although he was not the first to use the word that names this science, it is considered that the term was coined by Comte. This is because he was the one who gave it the most widespread meaning and elaborated in the best way the ideas around “sociology”.

For the French philosopher, positive philosophy had one objective, which was to ascend the study of society to the third stage of knowledge.

In this new science that addressed issues related to society, the philosopher separated two differentiable aspects: the social static, which studied both laws and social organizations, and the social dynamic, which dealt with progress and changes.

Comte believed that the nature of society had had a speculative treatment in the studies that had approached it up to his day. Consequently, it was extremely easy for moral codes and prejudices to cloud perception in both philosophy and history.

He claimed that the static social had been widely studied and discussed by different thinkers from different times, but the dynamic social had been systematically ignored. Furthermore, his interest lay in the study of the sociological field that he considered neglected.

Classification and hierarchy of science

Comte created a scheme in which he organized the sciences both for their complexity and for their historical development. Within this scale, the first place corresponds to the most basic and the last to the most complex, until now this is the preferred classification.

The order was as follows:

1) Mathematics

2) Astronomy

3) Physics

4) Chemistry

5) Physiology (or biology)

6) Sociology

Each of these areas was part of what the French defined as the philosophy of science. All the areas that were within the field of studies were represented in the hierarchy.

It went from the general to the particular. That is why the first place was occupied by mathematics, which serves as a tool for many other sciences, and in the last seat was sociology, which made use of more assistance to develop since it was the most complex.

According to Comte, it was clear that, for example, astronomy uses mathematics, just as chemistry uses physics. Each more advanced science uses the previous one without being a product of the previous link.

Method

There are three processes that give body to the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte so that an investigation can be considered a scientific study.

In the first place, a procedure must be carried out that serves as a foundation: observation. However, this has to be delimited, that is, there must be a previously defined hypothesis or law.

It cannot be denied that there is a risk that the results will be manipulated to be in accordance with a preconceived hypothesis.

In the second process, experimentation occurs, but this is only valid in the case that it can undergo manipulations that are controlled by the researcher, as is the case in areas such as physics and chemistry.

However, more complex areas like biology do not allow that. Here nature can only be allowed to take its course and carry out its own experiments, as Comte called pathologies.

The comparisons constitute the last process of the method proposed by Comte. Comparisons dominate this third step, and this is useful in areas such as biology because it makes it easier to study, for example, anatomy.

Comte's main impact on his contemporaries was methodological. The logical analysis was one of the main requirements that should be given in science according to this philosopher.

The future of sociology

The aspects that according to Auguste Comte were the main issues to be addressed by sociology were the evolution of society (emergence, expansion and life cycles) and its characteristics (through the use of history and biology).

He thought of history as the main area of ​​collaboration with sociology, since in that way he would not need the other lower-ranking sciences. In his plan, social philosophy only had a dependent relationship with biology.

At this point, the differences between Comte's approach to studying society and what sociology is currently doing to achieve this goal become visible (with the use of tools such as social mathematics and economics).

This is not adequate to the hierarchical order of the sciences proposed by Auguste Comte. For Comte the historical method was the one that worked best, since this element was indivisible from the evolution of the sciences.

Other contributions

Positive politics

During the final years of his life, the French philosopher Auguste Comte undertook the task of modifying his theories and organizing them in what he himself baptized as positive politics.

This has two fundamental approaches: there must be a government for a society to exist and there must also be a spiritual power that is not related to the temporal to give it some cohesion.

For Comte there were natural governments, which arose spontaneously alongside society, but he also recognized artificial governments, which are modified at will by humans according to their convenience and are those that we have normally known.

Religion of mankind

Auguste Comte proposed a religious system that did not have supernatural aspects, as well as a God. The object of worship in their creed were human beings themselves and to fulfill their dogma they had to love, know and serve humanity.

This was his main objective after the death of Clotilde de Vaux, whom he idealized in such a way that he made her a saint within the newly created religion. Comte took the structure of Catholicism and positioned himself as a spiritual leader.

The philosopher also elaborated a series of rites that would have to be performed by the faithful. Later he tried to call to his new faith those who had adhered to the positivist philosophy, but he did not succeed.

Because of his interest in promoting the “religion of humanity,” Comte ended up isolated from most of the people who appreciated him for his intellectual gifts.

The three stages of science

Comte was the creator of the law of the three stages, which refers to the evolutionary moments through which the development of each science goes through.

In the first stage, also known as theological, a primary cause is sought, in the second metaphysical call the essence is sought, and in the third or positive, the parameters of a law are established.

Similarly, each of these stages is a phase in the history of the study of science, as well as a corresponding stage in the mental and structural development of society.

With this classification, it was possible to know what the primary sciences were, because they had concluded with the three stages, as was the case with astronomy.

Plays

- "General separation between opinions and desires", 1819.

- "Summary of the modern past" ("Sommaire appréciation du passé modern"), 1820.

- "Plan of the scientific works necessary to reorganize society" ("Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour reorganiser la société"), 1822.

- “Philosophical considerations on the sciences and the wise men” (“Considerations philosophiques sur la science et les savants”), 1825.

- "Considerations on spiritual power" ("Considerations sur le pouvoir spirituel"), 1826.

- Course in positive philosophy (Cours de philosophie positive), 1830-1842.

- Elemental Treatise on Analytical Geometry (Traité élementaire de géométrie algébrique), 1843.

- Discourse on the positive spirit (Discours sur l'esprit positif), 1844.

- Philosophical treatise on popular astronomy (Traité philosophique d'astronomie populaire), 1844.

- Preliminary speech on the whole of positivism (Discours sur l'ensemble du positivisme), 1848.

- System of positive politics, or sociology treatise that institutes the religion of humanity (Système de politique positive, ou traité de sociologie instituant la religion de l'Humanité), 1851-1854.

- Positivist Catechism (Catéchisme positiviste), 1852.

- Appeal to Conservatives (Appel aux conservteurs), 1855.

- Synthesis subjective (Synthèse subjective), 1856.

References

1. En.wikipedia.org. (2020). Auguste Comte. Available at: en.wikipedia.org.
2. Fletcher, R. and Barnes, H. (2020). Auguste Comte - Biography, Books, Sociology, Positivism, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: britannica.com.
3. Pérez-Tamayo, R. (1993). Does the scientific method exist? History and reality. Mexico: Fund for Economic Culture.
4. Bourdeau, M. (2020). Auguste Comte (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Plato.stanford.edu. Available at: plato.stanford.edu.
5. Laudan, L. (2020). Comte, Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier - Encyclopedia.com. Encyclopedia.com. Available at: encyclopedia.com.