To speak of science is to speak of research, of the search for knowledge through experimentation and the validation of hypotheses and theories that can be verified on an empirical level. Regardless of how we say it, what is clear is that knowledge is only considered scientific if it can be proven objectively .

However, this idea of science has not come out of nowhere: throughout history a large number of authors have debated and defended various models of knowledge on the basis of philosophy and epistemology, some of which are opposed or exclusive to each other.

One of these models is Auguste Comte’s Positivism, one of the main philosophical currents that advocate that authentic and true knowledge can only be obtained through the verification of hypotheses through the scientific method. This movement has largely marked the intellectual evolution of an era, which is why we must know its main creator. That is why throughout this article we are going to make a short biography of Auguste Comte , with his main contributions to the intellectual development of the West.

Brief biography of Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte was born on January 19, 1798 in Montpellier, France, in the last years of the French Revolution. Born Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte, he was one of three children of the civil servant Louis Auguste Xavier Comte and Félicité Rosalie Comte. His family of origin was of modest condition, with strong Catholic beliefs and defenders of the monarchy.

During his first years of life Comte was educated in the Catholic religion, and he would attend a school in his home town. Around the age of fourteen the young man decided to declare himself an agnostic and a republican. Highly intelligent and endowed with a great capacity for memory, his grades were high but he stood out for his great rebelliousness.

Training

In 1814, when the young man was sixteen years old, he was accepted into the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. In this centre he would begin to take an interest in science and engineering , subjects promoted for the training of new technicians for the benefit of the State, and would come into contact for the first time with the ideas of Count Claude Henri Saint-Simon.

All this led him to believe in the need to generate a society governed by scientists. However, two years later the government decided to close the institution, due to its republican ideology.

The closure of that school caused Comte to return to Montpellier, where he would begin studying medicine at the faculty while surviving by teaching mathematics. However, shortly afterwards he decided to return to Paris and settle there, studying on a self-taught basis . Academically, he was an outstanding student, but nevertheless did not obtain any degree, something that would later make it difficult for him to gain access to different positions.

In Paris he met Saint-Simon in person, and managed to become his secretary in 1817. He would remain with him until 1824, a period during which he obtained from his mentor a large number of apprenticeships, even if he would end up separating from him in the face of divergences over what should be done to reshape the society.

The separation came after the publication of the Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la societé (“Plan for the scientific work necessary to reorganise society”, a work in which one would begin to observe the nature of positivism and its link with politics) by Comte, with whom his mentor did not agree, and in view of Saint-Simon’s lack of appreciation of his ideas.

Precariousness and crisis

One year later, in 1825, Auguste Comte married Anne Calorine Massin . For a few years, the couple suffered from a great economic precariousness, which forced Comte to organize courses of positive philosophy at great speed and almost without being able to sleep in order to survive.

He began to give lessons at home, in which he would have some of the most renowned scientific personalities of the time as his students. These lessons were about positive philosophy, and with the passing of time they were collected in the Cours de philosophie positive , which would culminate in six volumes in 1840.

The author’s great mental exhaustion led him to suffer nervous crises for the first time, of such gravity that he had to cancel his courses and they led him to a state of high irascibility and delusions of a messianic type. Although his mental problems were initially brought on by his wife, they became increasingly serious.

He was then admitted to Saint-Denis and diagnosed as a “megalomaniacal maniac” , which could correspond to a manic episode or even a psychotic break.

His internment lasted one year, until December 1826, when his mother’s intervention allowed him to leave the centre even though he was not considered cured. However, shortly afterwards (in 1827) the author threw himself from the Pont des Arts into the Seine River with the intention of taking his own life, which he avoided by a guard.

The beginning of positivism

In 1828, a little more recovered, Comte took up the lessons again at home, at the same time as he began to compile and elaborate the different volumes of his “Course on Positive Philosophy”, which would end, as we have already said, in 1840, and which would include the three theoretical stages through which each branch of knowledge must pass (theological, metaphysical and scientific/positive). It was this book and the courses he took that caused the beginning of the rise of positivism as a current of scientific thought.

In addition, founded and worked as a professor at the Polytechnic School of the Polytechnic Association , which allowed him to expand his ideas, but where he could not be a professor and from which he ended up being expelled.

Likewise, and based on this and his dream of generating a society led by wise scientists, Comte tried to apply the principles of mathematics and science to social phenomena , and sociology was born on the basis of this ideal. One of the works in which he would express these beliefs can be found in Système de politique positive, ou Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité (to be published in 1854).

In 1842 he separated from his wife. In 1845 he met his future great love, Clotilde de Vaux , who initially rejected him but ended up establishing a relationship with him. A relationship that would end a year later, when the woman died. All of this, together with the economic precariousness that accompanied him all his life, would once again lead him to a state of crisis in which he needed the financial support of admirers like Stuart Mill.

Last years, death and legacy

Towards the end of his life there was a shift in Comte’s thinking towards religion , producing works in which he linked positivism with religious sentiment and the elaboration of a personal god and trying to promote a new religion in which society was governed by sociologists.

He also began to write and finished one of the volumes of Synthèse subjective ou Système universel des conceptions propres à l’état normal de l’Humanité , in which he sought to link mathematics and religion.

Auguste Comte died on September 5, 1857, in the city of Paris, at the age of 59 , as a consequence of a cancer of stomach origin.

Despite the great difficulties he faced throughout his life, Comte’s work has left a legacy of great importance on a global level, since from him sociology and other currents have developed, either based on the ideals of positivism or in opposition to them.

Bibliographic references:

  • “Auguste Comte.” (2018). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  • Sutton, M. (1982). Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism. The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890 – 1914.