4 - Comte's Ambiguous Legacy: Science Defended or Already Justified?

Summary

In light of Part I, the unusual character of Comte's positivism should now be clear. Whereas later positivists tend to simply begin – without further ado, ahistorically, as if in complete intellectual self-possession – by inquiring how a good scientist thinks, Comte stops to give historico-critical consideration to the current philosophical appropriateness of conducting such an inquiry in the first place. In other words, in contrast with advocates of the positivism we more directly – and now, unhappily – inherit, Comte tries to (as we say now) “contextualize” current inquiry. More specifically and quite unlike a sociologist speaking of the current thought of others, however, Comte is above all concerned with understanding that contextualization in the case of his own philosophizing.

Yet it is time to acknowledge that Comte does not always – in fact, does not mostly – display such historico-critical sensitivity. Indeed, it is no accident that the side of Comte I am trying to retrieve has gone relatively unappreciated. There are plenty of passages in which he appears to speak from a vantage point just as far beyond the need for further reflection as that of any later positivist. Hence, in Part II, my focus is on the fundamental tension in Comte's writings between two conceptions of third-stage philosophizing – namely, the one I have so far emphasized, which pictures its orientation as historically contextualized and defensible, and another, more akin to that of later positivism, which represents this orientation as context-free and somehow already justified.