ABSTRACT
Given his view of humanity’s future, Auguste Comte might be considered the poster child for scienti…c optimism. Scienti…c (i.e. “positive”) knowledge is, for him, the only real knowledge; its application to real-world situations will make us safe and happy; and becoming fully aware of these facts about science and about technology (he would have approved of calling them, together, “technoscience”) will make safety and happiness come all the more quickly. In other words, for Comte technoscience is nothing short of a consummating occurrence or world event – that is, the practical as well as theoretical “ending” or ful…llment of the Western intellectual tradition. According to his famous “law of the three stages,” we all begin as theologians, and under the right conditions we graduate …rst to abstract or metaphysical thinking, and then …nally to science. Following after this intellectual development, given the necessary time lag, come the appropriate socio-political transformations – from primitive, militaristic, and theocratic communities, to societies re¶ecting increasingly secular and material interests organized by abstract principles, and …nally to peaceful, fully industrial societies guided by a genuine knowledge of the human condition and supported by a Religion of Humanity. The task for philosophers in the current age is therefore to become positivists – that is, to become fully and re¶ectively aware of the historically palpable, ever more pervasive character of the emerging technoscienti…c era, to explain it, justify it, and see that this is taught to others. Yet Comte’s positivist interpretation of history and its three-stage theory of development have been widely misunderstood. On the one hand, because he is famously the “founder” of sociology (he originally called it “social physics”), his account of the rise of science and its technologies is often assumed to be a causal account. It is not. Comte does not think the coming technoscienti…c age entails either the
complete suppression of other (i.e. non-technoscienti…c) possibilities or a speci…c and predictable future state produced by our antecedent socio-historical conditions. The three-stage law is a developmental law; it is no more causally necessary that everyone ends up a perfectly positive thinker than it is that everyone ends up making identical and maximally sophisticated use of their native language. On the other hand, because of the “meta-narrative” reach of his account, Comte’s law is often construed as the linchpin of an old-fashioned speculative philosophy of history. His position, however, is neither teleological nor essentialist in the requisite sense. Although he happily regards all non-scienti…c possibilities as regressive and eagerly depicts philosophy’s future in scientistic terms; he does not think that progress toward this future is the actualization of something like humanity’s technoscienti…c entelechy. Comte’s account of the rise of technoscience is, I shall argue, something much more interesting than any of these mistaken interpretations can tell us. Yet my aim is not just to encourage the idea that Comte’s account is interesting. In my view, Comte’s progressivist, technoscienti…c optimism is no mere relic of the nineteenth century. Nor should we see it as merely a theoretical stance, still held by some people, applied on some occasions, to some experiences. Comte’s account of the rise of an age of technoscience is more even than a “world view” – that is, more than a general conceptualization of the present age that we might choose or reject. It is, and Comte advertises it to be, his projection of how the good life is destined to be experienced and understood in our increasingly post-theological and post-metaphysical circumstances. As he describes it, the third stage is working itself out as the ultimate way for us to be, in its full, philosophical and practical articulation. Comte’s language sometimes makes his account seem a bit exaggerated and out of place today, yet it should also sound very familiar. It is the sort of language that many philosophers of technology (e.g. Mumford, Ellul, Adorno, Marcuse, Heidegger) complain is all too often used to de…ne what “philosophy” has come to be since the Greeks – namely, a guardian’s discipline whose main job is to analyze and defend a “scienti…c” sort of rationality because it allegedly provides the best intellectual access to and power for handling everything “real” that we encounter. Comte seems to me, then, to have contemporary rather than just historical signi…- cance. He asks what it means to “be” in an increasingly technoscienti…c world, and he offers an answer that is by no means dated. Indeed, Comte’s paean to technoscienti…c life – his portrayal of our last and most “mature” condition – still serves quite well as a description of the background understanding of most Western technocrats, as well as many Anglo-American epistemologists and philosophers of science and technology. In a way, it is entirely fair to call Comte the last honest positivist. He actually identi…es and defends a human condition many others, for various reasons, still embrace but only silently and as if its normativity were self-evident. Some thinkers, most famously Heidegger, have complained loudly that this technoscienti…c way of being and understanding everything does not deserve its current hegemony. Yet their complaints are usually met with the objection that they are overheated and romanticist – or worse, that they are complaints typical of cultures that are already technoscienti…cally “developed” and eager to retain their monopoly
on the social and political bene…ts this accords them. It is one thing to criticize this or that technoscienti…c excess, so goes the argument; it is another to condemn technoscience itself. Near the end this essay, I come back brie¶y to this controversy over technoscienti…c optimism and pessimism. Mostly, however, I talk about Comte. I argue that when Comte’s understanding of the scienti…c age is carefully recounted, it is hard to sustain the usual assumption that his conception of either the present world or philosophy’s primary tasks in this world has been surpassed. Indeed, I think Comte is the one positivist who retains his contemporary relevance after positivism as a movement has run its course (Scharff 1995). I begin from this last remark, with some comparisons between nineteenth and twentieth-century positivism.
