Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was born in Montpellier on January 19, 1798. He attended the École Polytechnique in Paris, which profoundly influenced his philosophical education. At the heart of his philosophy is mathematics and the belief that the only true form of knowledge is science. Auguste Comte is credited with the birth of modern social science: it was he who coined the term " sociology ," hoping with this definition to unify all studies of man, including history, psychology, and economics. He initially called this new science "Social Physics," but this term was unwittingly used by Adolphe Quetelet in 1835 to indicate the importance of the average man as the driving force of society and the uniformity of the social system. Comte thus decided to coin the term "sociology" to differentiate himself from the Belgian thinker. This discipline is divided into two branches, which are inseparable in reality: static , which deals with the permanent structures of society and is therefore based on the concept of order; dynamic , which deals with transformations over time and is therefore based on the concept of progress. These two concepts expressed by Comte appear on the Brazilian flag ( Ordem e progresso ).
The thought of Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte is generally considered the father of Positivism . He dedicated his Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1844) to the term “positive” . Comte identifies five different meanings of the term positive, all of which contribute to defining the character of the new philosophical conception. Positive is first of all that which is real , effective, experimental, as opposed to that which is abstract, chimerical, metaphysical. Positive is also that which appears fruitful, useful , effective, as opposed to that which is useless and idle. Positive is that which is precise , that is, determining its own object, as opposed to the vagueness of theological-metaphysical thought and language. Positive is that which is certain and based on fact, as opposed to indecision and existential doubts. A knowledge, therefore, firmly established within its own limits. Finally, positive is constructive , unlike the destructive negativity of the Enlightenment which limited itself to criticism. But his ideas, during his lifetime, did not meet with much success, and all his attempts to enter fully into academic life failed miserably; these constant failures, combined with his failure in love, probably lay at the root of the mental imbalance that tormented him for the rest of his life.
The three-state law
In his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830), Auguste Comte developed the famous “ law of the three states ”. Comte considered sociology as the ultimate result of the development of sciences such as biology, chemistry and physics. He believed that the study of this discipline would lead humanity to a state of well-being, given by the understanding and consequent ability to control human behaviour. With the law of the three stages, Comte prefigured the advent of the positive era in which science would have a central place in human life. The law is divided into three phases (inspired by the three ages of gods, heroes and men) which concern both the development of the individual and that of humanity as a whole. The first state is the theological one , which corresponds to the period of humanity's infancy; the search for the causes of phenomena is attributed to supernatural beings, first to the fetishes of animistic religions, then to a plurality of divinities (polytheistic) and finally to the one God (monotheistic). The second state is metaphysical and corresponds to the period of adolescence or youth of thought: man asks himself the same questions he did in the theological state, but formulates a different answer, no longer resorting to causes that transcend the natural dimension, but rather to immanent causes. This is the age in which the cause of phenomena is sought in essence and form: to the question "how does a tree grow?", the answer is no longer that there is a God who provides for it, but, conversely, it is said that there is the form of the tree that contains within itself all the structures that allow it to develop. The third and final state is the positive-scientific one , described as "the virile state of our intelligence"; it involves the development of positive philosophy. In this phase, man ceases to dream: reason no longer wanders, but is instead directed toward praxis. Humanity reached this stage thanks to the work of men like Galileo Galilei, Descartes, and Bacon, passing through the Enlightenment and arriving at positivism in the 19th century, the beginning of this new era. The law of the three states thus corresponds to what actually happened in history: in the time of the ancient Greeks, religion reigned supreme, then with Christianity, metaphysics took hold, and finally, with Auguste Comte, it was overthrown by positivistic science. However, beyond being a process that occurred in human history, the law of the three states is also a journey that each of us travels within ourselves: as children, when we are most gullible, we tend to explain every phenomenon by resorting to a God; as we grow, religion is replaced by metaphysics, and finally, as we become adults, science prevails.
Comte's classification of sciences
All existing sciences, Comte argues, have passed through the three stages outlined above, but not all arrived at the same speed: some sciences arrived first and others later, and by virtue of this difference in timing, Comte classifies them according to an order of both increasing complexity and decreasing generality . Indeed, logically, the fewer factors one considers when outlining a concept, the broader the concept, so to speak, becomes: the concept of man, for example, is more complex than the concept of animal, precisely because it implies the concept of animal plus something else; but the fact that it is more complex also means that it is more narrow (that is, it encompasses a smaller number of cases), since all men are animals but not all animals are men. The concepts studied by mathematics are, as a whole, very simple, says Comte, since this science limits itself to analyzing quantity in its pure state, without posing more specific problems. Thus emerges Comte's conviction that mathematics is a simple science, since it works on a single concept (quantity) and is therefore applicable to all reality; and because of its applicability to all reality, Comte is more inclined to consider it a sort of logic of scientific knowledge rather than a science. As one ascends the ladder, the sciences become increasingly complex (because they study more and more characteristics) and therefore less general. At the top of the ladder, we find the science that is the most complex of all, but also the least general: sociology . Contrary to what one might expect, Auguste Comte is not a reductionist; that is, he does not reduce all the others to a single science, as Hobbes had done two centuries earlier . In his opinion, knowing the laws of matter allows us to explain the entire living, human, and political world with them. For Comte, it is certainly true that a more complex science cannot be constructed without understanding the simpler one that underlies it, but it would nevertheless be incorrect to reduce it entirely to it: to identify the laws of biology, for example, I cannot ignore the laws of physics, Comte says, but this does not mean that they can be deduced from each other. In other words, each science relies on the one before it (simpler and more general), but cannot be entirely reduced to it: this attitude is particularly relevant because it allows Comte to guarantee the autonomy of the sciences, so that a physicist, for example, will never be able to explain the sociological world.
The birth of a positive religion
In the last phase of his thought, there will be several elements that will reveal his unstable mental condition: first of all, the attempt to elaborate a true " positive religion ", a sort of institutionalization of scientific knowledge as religious knowledge; science will not only replace religion as faith, but, indeed, there will be a Church of science, with its host of officials and saints. In the Positivist Calendar (1849) and the Positivist Catechism (1852), the French philosopher transposes the doctrinal, liturgical and ethical elements of the Church into his new religion of humanity of which the sociologist, the positivist intellectual and the scientist are the new priests. He has always admired the Catholic Church not for its contents (which he rejects, in the name of scientific knowledge), but for the organization it gives to society: it is therefore a question, says the last Comte, of replacing the dogmas of Christianity with scientific ones, while maintaining the institutions typical of the Catholic Church. Auguste Comte died on September 5, 1857 in Paris, at the age of 59.
Sociologically
