Auguste Comte
Know only facts: the positive age of science.
Auguste Comte (1798 – 1857, France) : positivism. The human mind has passed through three ages. In the first, it explains the world by gods and supernatural wills. On AskPhilosophy: 3 reconstructed arguments, 6 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 4 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
He gave his name to a way of thinking: positivism, for which only what observation and science can establish counts. He also coined two words we use every day, sociology and altruism. His formula "order and progress" became the motto on the flag of Brazil. He is one of the great thinkers of the 19th century that people quote, criticise and read too little: his ideas on science are often separated from his religion, whereas he insisted on keeping them together.
His times
Born in Montpellier, he entered the École polytechnique at 16. He was secretary to the thinker Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824, then gave his Course of Positive Philosophy (60 lessons, published 1830 to 1842). He lived on private lessons and modest posts, went through a serious health crisis in 1826-1827, and lost his posts at the École polytechnique (in 1844, then in 1851). In 1844 he met Clotilde de Vaux: a love without marriage, ended by her death in 1846, that changed his thought: the heart comes before the mind. He then wrote the System of Positive Polity (1851-1854) and the Positivist Catechism (1852). Many of his readers, Mill among them, love the Course and reject this second part.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe sets God aside, but in a particular way: looking for the origin of the world and its first causes is for him "absolutely inaccessible and unmeaning", and theological opinions are "indemonstrable". He does not first say "God does not exist": he says science has no business with it and cannot agree with theologies. Atheist or agnostic? Readers hesitate. He ended by putting Humanity in the place of God.
There is no real knowledge except what rests on observed facts. But he rejects pure empiricism: to observe, the mind needs a theory, and a mere heap of facts is not science.
Positive knowledge is solid, but relative: the mind gives up absolute notions, first causes and the origin of the universe. He holds laws established by observation to be reliable, without claiming final knowledge of the essence of things.
He rejects psychology by introspection, "the last transformation of theology": the mind cannot observe itself. It must be studied through its organs (physiology) and through its works (the sciences). So he ties thought to the brain, without writing a full theory of matter and mind.
For mature positive science, the will itself is subject to true laws. Yet he writes that natural fatality is "modifiable": humanity acts by knowing the laws. He hardly speaks of free will in the metaphysical sense.
His morality fits in one sentence: "live for others". It rests on human social nature and on what we owe those who came before us, not on a divine command. So it is neither purely subjective nor an order from beyond the world. Readers classify it differently.
In the Course, reason and science judge everything. In the Catechism he puts the heart above the mind ("the continual preponderance of the heart over the mind"), but wants a religion based on "demonstrable" doctrines, not on the supernatural. Many see two Comtes; he held there was only one.
Life has a meaning, which does not come from God but from our place in Humanity: living for it, with its dead and its descendants. It is a meaning "given" by what we owe to others, not invented by each person. Nietzsche, among others, would see in it a shadow of the old religion.
He thinks man is at first rather selfish, but perfectible: all human progress consists in making altruism gradually prevail over selfishness. For him education and religion exist for this.
Society comes before the individual. Positivism "recognises in no one any other right than that of always doing his duty": in his eyes individual rights are a metaphysical notion, and everyone is born loaded with obligations toward Humanity. His liberal readers, Mill first among them, judge this programme authoritarian.
A morality of altruism: "living for others" is a "continuous duty" that follows from a fact, we all live "by others". It could also be placed near duty ethics; that is why we file it under "other".