Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy is represented as the final stage in a society’s pursuit for knowledge, and an individual’s understanding of experience. The final stage in a tripartite methodology of diffusing one’s unified experience; from an internal absolute belief, to an elucidated metaphysical form, and into the observable realm of quantifiable laws. The first stage is a theological point of departure that is concerned with the epistemic pursuit of absolutes, the “origin and purpose” (Comte 1) of phenomena. We first attribute these phenomena to a supernatural instigator, a prime mover. In the metaphysical stage, we attempt to transition from a subjective story of experience into a verifiable story where the supernatural is assigned a causal yet still elusive role. The final and, according to Comte, definite state of positive philosophy tracks the causal mechanisms of these movers and studies their laws. I find Comte’s account on the stages of personal and collective knowledge to be poetic and strange. Poetic in that the transition from being a theologian in childhood and a “metaphysician in his [one’s] youth” (2) assumes epistemic humility as a necessary condition to preserving the consistency between our personal accounts of reality and our objective ones. Strange in that Comte views the path that knowledge follows before reaching the positive domain of fact, as a ladder with three steps rather than a cycle. 

 

Epistemic humility is a philosophical notion that places knowledge originating from a humble intellect at higher epistemic order (Bonmarito). A person clinging onto their infallible beliefs will be incapable of considering the improbable truth. The theological state, as an exclusive mode of understanding is immovable and as a stage in human history, beguiles people with “a charm of unlimited empire over the external world” (Comte 4). Comte argues that this necessary state of human development offered people an “exaggerated estimate” of our potential before being moved to overcome the obstacles faced in actualizing it. The transition from the theological state to the metaphysical stage requires us to forgo our attachment to an imprint of our unified experience in order to understand the real phenomena. We acknowledge that our preliminary report on experience and its supernatural perpetrators might be missing a few points. In order to fill the gaps in our understanding people “substitute for supernatural direction a corresponding entity” (5).  This awareness of what we do not know is a feat of epistemic humility. Recognizing that what is verifiably true lies outside our limited abstraction of experience requires a motivation to preserve the congruence of our personal and socially situated realities. A human can very well live their lives rejecting the classic denotation of colors and live by their own code of color recognition. This, however, would make them incompatible with the body of color knowledge. If colors become moral codes, or a scientific account of blackholes, they would be alienated from the general or scientific community. 

 

In cases where the moral or scientific iconoclast turns out to be correct, Comte’s account of the linearity of the trajectory of knowledge is flawed. Comte represents knowledge as undergoing three stages of development in our personal and civilizational intellectual pursuits. The final stage being the positive state. That knowledge in its highest form grows from but does not return through the theological and metaphysical states. However, knowledge is dynamic and individuals undergoe different periods of necessary theological abstractions of reality, metaphysical diffusion, and positive exploration. While Comte considers this at the individual level, he neglects this reality of fallible systems of knowledge and regular paradigmatic shifts in our Anthropocene. When Einstein was developing his theory of general relativity he offered a paradigm shift that rested on the suspension of belief in the Newtonian models of motion, and curiously suspended his disbelief in divinity in order to consider what order the universe would have constituted itself through if it were conscious of itself. In detaching himself from the intellectual tradition of a positive science, Einstein reedified the theological state of understanding in Physics before returning to the positive state. I propose that Comte’s stages of knowledge ought to be regarded as a cycle of discovery and rediscovery in order to account for the dynamics between transient personal bubbles of understanding and civilizational reserve of knowledge as it progresses through time. 

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Citations:

Bommarito, Nicolas. “Modesty and Humility.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 31 Oct. 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/modesty-humility/#InteHumi.

 

Comte, Auguste, and Harriet Martineau. “Estimate Of The Final Action Of The Positive Philosophy.” The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, pp. 1–17., https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511701467.015.