Contribution of Auguste Comte.

Nisha Nagwanshi,

Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur

ABSTRACT:

Auguste Comte (1798 - 1857) is regarded as a founder of the discipline of sociology.

A strange destiny! The whole of Comte’s life is a romance. His successors are divided between two attitudes—the incomprehension of disciples of limited outlook, and the indifference, or even hostility, of thinkers who could have learned a great deal, if only they had read him. Comte wanted to reform the moral order. He wasn't interested in creating an affluent society, but one where everyone would "live for others". He wanted to overcome class rivalry, but not by the destruction of one class (as with Karl Marx).

INTRODUCTION:

History was the great educator of humanity. History was education, as so well shown by the theory of language11 and that of art.12 Humanity educated itself over time by a kind of ‘self creation’, which, far from expressing an arbitrary freedom to surpass itself, was made possible only by the support it found in human nature, developed by the immensity of its past. It was history which, by its progression, made the basic relation between mind and nature intelligible. The knowledge of childhood was not psychological, but historical. So a positivist education was an education based not on the bogus sciences, the latest superstitions of modernity, but on the experience and memory of humanity. When Comte deprecates ‘the deplorable obsession with psychology’,13 he therefore we know, a mere caricature of science. Human beings evolved directly from the biological to the social, from animality to humanity, their true individuality being situated beyond draws attention to the fact that our knowledge is not psychological, but historical. He means in particular that, as the purpose of education is to enable human beings to attain humanity, it is not a question of coming down to the child’s level, but of raising the child to the dignity of a person. Subjectivity should not be abandoned to its anarchical drives; the first concern must be to ‘model the inside on the outside’. Education should liberate aspirations hitherto repressed by the imperious urges of a vitality which, from the standpoint of humanity, was not an end in itself. To educate was first of all to protect the weakest inclinations, for they were already on a level with those of a mature person. So education was not made to perpetuate the state of childhood, either in the individual, or in the species. Comte would undoubtedly have found it absurd if he had heard it said that the school was made for the children. If education had a meaning, it was in that it enabled the child, not only to become an adult in mind and feelings, but above all to meditate on the childhood of humanity and its development, which, in fact, was the history of liberation.

EDUCATION WAS NOT A MATTER FOR A SPECIAL SCIENCE, BUT FOR PHILOSOPHY:

A feature of specialized instruction, theoretical or practical, was the ignoring or neglecting of the general principles that might have given it a meaning. Addressing the workers at a people’s university, Comte did not offer them further vocational training. He did not talk to them about their trades, their district or their daily routine.

This approach is obviously the reverse of the ‘training courses’ people go on today. A genuine school is not designed to provide occupational and further training: it is above all liberating, and the influence Comte’s thought was to have on the establishment of the republican school is well known. There are diametrically opposite ways of understanding what is called ‘preparation for life’, for we might ask ‘what is life?’. The purpose Comte proposes for education concerns people who, on emerging from a revolutionary crisis and protracted anarchy, were to inaugurate the positive era which alone could combine order and progress.

EDUCATION SHOULD BE ENCYCLOPAEDIC:

Cours de philosophies positive, which he was to regard later as a mere introduction, takes on its full significance. What matters above all is to rule out the restrictive interpretations suggested nowadays by the word positivism. A person had first to learn to adjust to the invariable order of things, but this was so as better to adjust later to human order. Science teaching was therefore just a part of education, and its utility was conditional on its real purpose being kept in sight. If one had first to learn to submit to external order, it was so as to prepare oneself better for the correct appreciation of human order. Science teaching thus served only as a kind of introductory course; it was not an end in itself. That is why Comte’s positivism is quite the opposite of a school of scientism which, as we know, would sometimes see fit to cite him as its authority.

However, popular science was not to be understood, as it so often is in our time, as the dissemination of contents which degenerate as they are dispersed. An encyclopedia, for example, was not an alphabetical directory from which one could extract a variety of facts and figures at need—still less a data bank. It was the order of thought patterned on the external order, and thus established. It was not with the idea of changing the world or making money that one studied the sciences, but to set one’s own thoughts in order. This polytechnic knew that science can be lethal when it is acquired as a means to achieve power or wealth. In short, not only was science teaching far from being the whole of education, as we shall see, but it was not to be conducted with a view to mercenary applications. One of the perversions of our time—Comte forewarned us—is to subordinate intelligibility to technical efficiency.22 He was already aware that modernity was tempted by a perverse use of the sciences. He had reason to fear, as was to be the case with Jules Verne, which the craze for technologies would drive out the humanities. He went still farther, however: he knew that the fanaticism of the technocrats would finally destroy scientific thought itself.

EDUCATION SHOULD BE GENERAL:

Comte gave his philosophy of education its full meaning when he inveighed against ‘lustration algébrique’24 [the despotism of mathematics], or again ‘the preponderance of signs over ideas’, which tended to give the scientific accolade to those who could skillfully negotiate the secret corridors of what Leibniz in his time had called ‘blind thought’. Skill at manipulation led to loss of intellect. The development of science teaching in our own time only goes to justify Comte’s apprehension. The confusion of ideas which he condemned is now affecting both the school and society as a whole. Comte especially stresses the catastrophic effects of specialization, which was mainly of use for practical tasks, but which in the field of theory overburdened the mind. Hence his critical exploration of the relations between research and teaching. On the one hand, scientists were appreciated only if they produced practical inventions; 25 on the other hand, the specialization necessary in the world of industry was tending to gain ground in both research and teaching. Thus scientific tasks fell more and more to ‘thinkers of little repute’,26 who, for lack of a vocation, were not motivated by anything much except their career prospects. With research thus deprived of strictly scientific thought, the sources of real education were tending to dry up.

EDUCATION AND SPIRITUAL POWER:

Commemoration, which was to be the keystone of the Religion of Humanity, made it clear that the first human duty was to combat oblivion. So, at the root of education there was history— not psychology, which concealed a principle of confinement. In the first place, the purpose of education was not to perpetuate childhood, except the poetry of infancy, which preserved the better part of the initial fetishism. Education could not, of course, ignore the reality of living organisms, which, situated between the realm of the inert and the realm of the human, underlay the human species without ever constituting it.

AESTHETIC EDUCATION:

We know how the finding that science had become a thing of the past was to be understood. Science marked a great turning-point. It remained a mainspring of education. However, only the great beginnings which contributed to the founding of the positive spirit should be called upon. Similarly, if it was considered that the future belonged to art, then art had to be related to its history. Comte spoke of art as he did of science. Both succumbed to the seduction of techniques and narrow specialization. The distinction established between the heart and the mind applied equally to science and to art: there was no genius without inspiration; there was no education without the participation of the feelings. Nothing brings out more clearly the unity of Comte’s thought than his analysis of aesthetic education. Just as science was of value essentially by reason of its approach, and hence the methodical discovery of an external order that liberated the mind, so genuine art was that which in various forms expressed feelings common to humanity, and even revealed those feelings. The whole purpose of education was to enable everyone to discover humanity through its works. However, those works would become a dead letter without initial conviction. Nor was there any education without inspiration. Discovering the genius of Archimedes could move a person to tears.29 Comte treated art as he treated science, clearly distinguishing its primary purpose, which was to instruct or to charm, from its academic use, even reputedly innovative, which tended to become exclusive in the crisis into which people were plunged by habitually negative criticism. Just as formalism and specialization made us forget that science was thought, so they drove the beauty out of art to produce mere sophisticated curiosities. Music without melody, painting, sculpture or architecture without drawing, were perversions of art, which thus departed from humanity.

WORKS BY AUGUSTE COMTE:

The most recent publications are mentioned below:

Cours de philosophie positive. 2 vols. Paris, Hermann, 1975.

Leçons de sociologie. From the 47th to the 51st lesson, with an introduction by Juliette Grange. Paris, GFFlammarion,

1995.

Système de Politique positive. 4 vols. Paris, Anthropos, 1969.

Du pouvoir spirituel. 1 vol. including the early opuscules. Paris, Le livre de poche, Pluriel, 1978.

Le catéchisme positiviste. Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1966.

Discours sur L’Esprit positif. Paris, Société positiviste Internationale, 1923. Republished: Paris, Vrin, 1987.

Traité philosophique d’astronomie populaire. Paris, Fayard, 1985.

La synthèse subjective. Paris printed privately, 1856.

OEuvres choisies. Ed. by Henri Gouhier. Paris, Aubier, 1946.

Correspondance générale, 8 vols. Archives positivistes, Mouton, 1973; Paris, Vrin, 1984.

REFERENCES:

1. Jacques Muglioni (France) Agrégé de philosophie, taught philosophy in the final year of the secondary level in Paris and elsewhere in France, then at the upper preparatory level at the Lycée Henri IV, Paris, before assuming the duties of dean of the general inspectorate of philosophy. Author of a number of articles, some of which were recently collected in two volumes: L’école ou le loisir de pensée (1993) and Auguste Comte, un philosophe pour notre temps (1995).

2. Système de politique positive, preliminary discourse, vol. I, part V, in particular p. 299.

3. Correspondance générale, vol. III.

4. ‘Considerations sur la science et les savants’, in: Du pouvoir spirituel, Paris, Le livre de poche, Pluriel,1978, p. 249.

5. Cours de philosophie positive, 1st lesson

Received on 19.11.2011

Revised on 26.12.2011

Accepted on 28.02.2012