Auguste Comte proposed the Law of Social Dynamics where humanity passes necessarily through the three states of theological affirmation, metaphysical critique, and positive science or religion. In point of fact, from a historical perspective, not every society has passed through those three stages; furthermore, Comte has not demonstrated that every society is even capable of doing so. Nevertheless, it is helpful in organizing three different ways of understanding the world and ties in with the discussion of Instinct, Consciousness, and Science.

Theological Stage

At this stage, society attributes everything to the Will of personified deities. At the level of Instinct this is perfectly rational. We moderns, who are accustomed to the motions of mechanical objects and to the attribution of motion to the hidden forces of gravitation and electro-magnetism, may not appreciate that for pre-modern peoples, motion is the result of conscious agents. In many respects, this is more rational than those moderns who tend to see things as always the result of impersonal forces, such as evolution, either biological or sociological.

Nowadays, we still see this attitude in the proliferation of conspiracy theories, which want to understand events in terms of deliberately planned actions. Again, the thrust behind such theories is understandable, since what transpires indeed is the result of the motives of conscious actors; it is just not as monolithic and perfectly planned as the conspiracy theorists would hold. Nevertheless, it suits the purposes of the agents of change to proscribe any discussion as to their identities and motives.

This stage may be divided into three sub-stages:

Animism

Animism or fetishism, attributes a will to everyday objects. This must be a transitional stage, since its explanatory power is meager and it leads to superstitions.

Polytheism

Polytheism attributes a will to many gods. Instinctually, this arises from the recognition and experience of transcendental or spiritual powers. For example, wind is understood as the cause of the motion of plants or inanimate objects, so fetishism can be dispensed with; instead, there is a god of the wind that supplies the explanation for movement. Similarly, the various powers that move the world or the mind of man, can be traced to transcendental experiences that are attributed to the gods.

Monotheism

Monotheism attributes a will to one god. Instinctually, this is the recognition of the ultimate unity of the world, despite its apparent multifariousness. There is trend in our day, mistakenly claiming to be based on Tradition, particularly Evola, to prefer polytheism to monotheism. Unfortunately, too, it justifies itself on utilitarian grounds rather than on the search for truth. This exposes the modernist roots of the idea, and Evola himself opposed such neo-paganism.

In point of fact, polytheism and monotheism, properly understood, go together. Even from a primitive point of view, there was always a “chief” god, who provided the ultimate unity. “Zeus”, or Deus, simple means God. Jupiter, or ju-pater (zeus-pater), means Father-God. The reflective elements of pagan times, such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Neo-Platonists, all accepted the ultimate unity of the cosmos under one God. The same can be said for the polytheism of the Hindus, with the Vedanta playing the other role.

Even Catholicism can be said to combine both; Comte called it the “polytheism of the Middle Ages”. Keep in mind that, for the Ancients, a god was synonymous with immortal. Thus the Theotokos and the celestial hierarchy of medieval Catholicism would be considered gods by the Ancients.

Ideological Stage

Comte calls this the metaphysical stage; however, since, in Tradition, metaphysics has a meaning distinct from that given it by secular philosophers, we prefer to call it the ideological stage, which is a more exact designation. This stage has the nature of critique and abstractions rather than offering a positive content. The beings that account for the world at the first stage are replaced with abstract principles, such a matter, progress, determinism, and so on. The theories or world views based upon such principles are characterized by their unfalsifiability, that is, no empirical fact can disprove them. This, along with their comprehensiveness that allegedly explains everything, make them very attractive. Someone in the grip of an ideological theory is very hard to dissuade, short of a “conversion” experience. Unfortunately, they often jump from one ideology to another.

Positive stage

At this point, ideological explanations are dropped in favour of scientific explanations, based on observations of facts, experimentation, and the discovery of laws based on them. Comte sought to organize scientific knowledge in a hierarchy, based on their objects and a methodology appropriate to them. In particular, he developed the science of sociology and he is often called its “Father”. Unfortunately, Comte is not read in any contemporary sociology department, but the “other” sociologist, Karl Marx, dominates. Marx and his legion of followers are reverts to the ideological stage and their revolutionary critique exerts a constant pressure to overthrow the natural order as intuitively understood at the theological stage.

Comte, on the other hand, eschews ideology as beyond the purview of positive or scientific laws. Instead, he seeks to ground the natural order on a firmer basis, so positivism does not undermine social stability. He writes:

The best evidence of having attainted complete emancipation will be the rendering full justice to the past in all its phases. … The surest sign of superiority, whether in persons or systems, is fair appreciation of opponents. And this must always be the tendency of social sciences when rightly understood, since the provision of the future is avowedly based upon systematic examination of the past. It is the only way in which the free and yet universal adoption of general principles of social reconstruction can ever be possible.

This makes positivism a reactionary system. In contrast, the revolutionary always looks to an imaginary future, when the laws of human nature will be somehow abrogated. For the revolutionary, Progress always means the overthrow of order. Yet, the fundamental motto of Positivism is Order and Progress, but, for Comte, progress is simply the development of Order. “The natural order necessarily contains within itself the germ of all possible progress.”
After Comte, positivism became ideological and adopted atheism, materialism, and determinism as unwarranted additions. Comte, however, moved in a different direction. He recognized that ethics, too, needs to be scientific, if sociology is to lead to progress. Furthermore, he created a religious system, strongly reminiscent of Catholicism, but without the supernaturalism, instead encompassing more of the greatest thinkers of history. For this, he was greatly criticized; however, it seems a reasonable development based on history.

A Further Post-Positive Stage

Comte took the observation of outer phenomena as far as he could. However, it is an arbitrary decision to leave out inner experiences. Thus, Julius Evola could call for a “positivism of metaphysics” based on the study of inner experiences of a higher nature.

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We all know about the Twilight of the Gods and how they have abondoned us, but few dare to ask where they came from in the first place.

Auguste Comte proposed that humanity has progressed from belief in polytheism to monotheism, then to an all embracing metaphysical or ideological principle, and finally to positivism. While the sequence may be somewhat correct, it represents not progress, but rather a fall. There is a primordial consciousness of unity, inwardly united with the divine Logos. The role of the human being is to bring this unity into factual realization in nature, or manifestation. As such, the human being is divided, with the consciousness of unity that unites him with God, and a material existence that unites him with the natural world.

By rebelling against the divine principle, human beings fall under the power of the material principle. The Logos was once the center of consciousness, but afterwards is experienced as an external law and hence a burden. Enthralled by the material world, he loses his center and becomes just another entity in nature. Initially, he experiences this disunity in consciousness and the idea of multiple gods, or polytheism arises. Rather than seeking unity back at the source, he looks outside himself and creates various philosophical and ideological systems based on an external principle, be it matter, thought, evolution, genetics, race, and so on. Still dissatisfied, he thinks that the facts and the laws explaining these facts will suffice. But not accumulation of facts of or theories about nature can recover the lost unity.

In this passage, Vladimir Solovyov describes how the gods arise in the cosmogonic process:

For consciousness that has lost the inner unity of the all in the divine Spirit, the only external unity that becomes accessible is that produced by the cosmic action of the divine Logos upon the world soul, which is the matter of the cosmic process. The consciousness of humanity seeks to reproduce in itself those determinate forms of unity that had already been generated by the cosmogonic process in material nature. The unifying forces of material nature (the offspring of the Demiurge and the world soul) appear now in consciousness as principles that determine it and give it content. These forces gradually manifest themselves and reign in consciousness as lords not only of the external world but even of consciousness itself, as genuine gods. Thus, this new process is, first of all, a theogonic process. This does not mean, of course, that these dominant principles were created in this very process, nor does it mean that humanity invented its own gods. We know that these principles existed prior to humanity as cosmic forces.
In that capacity, however they were not gods, for there are no gods without worshippers. They become gods only for the human consciousness that recognizes them to be such, after it has fallen under their dominion as the result of its separation from the one divine center.

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Ce que nos pères ont fait par coutume et par sentiment, le poursuivre nous-mêmes avec l’assurance et la netteté scientifiques par raison et par volonté.

What our fathers did through custom and feeling, we ourselves pursue it through reason and will, with the assurance and clarity of science.

~ Charles Maurras

With this quote, we see the dominating influence of Auguste Comte’s system of positivism on Maurras’ entire political program. The other dominant influence was Joseph de Maistre, with his love of Tradition structured by the Church and the Monarchy. However, unlike Maistre, Maurras did not have Maistre’s indomitable Catholic faith to justify his worldview. Nevertheless, Maurras accepted Comte’s claim to have discovered the true scientific basis for de Maistre’s views.

Of the two great “fathers” of a scientific sociology in the 19th century — Marx and Comte — Marx has won out handily and Comte is nearly forgotten. So we are left with a view of science that allegedly supports the forces of revolution. That this “science” is ideological, is all too obvious. Comte, on the other hand, rejected both religion and ideology, in favour of a purer science, which was simiply the exposition of laws concering what can be seen or touched. As cush, it avoided both metaphyscal pre-suppositions (e.g., materialism) and reductionism. In place of the latter, Comte proposed a hierarchy of sciences, even leaving room for a scientific ethics.

Nevertheless, Comte gets little support primarily because self-described religious conservatives have no interest in supporting Comte’s atheism or Maurras’ paganism. On the other side, secular rightists believe they can corral Darwin to their own ends, and accept its materialism and reduction as “rational”, often adopting a form of zoological racism. These secularists also oppose the role of religion in society, which they regard as mere superstition, whereas Comte and Maurras accept religion as a natural conservative and stabilizing force. What religion accomplished through “custom and sentiment”, the positivists seek the same ends through “reason and will”.

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Charles Maurras’ essay on Auguste Comte from L’Avenir de L’Intelligence (The Future of Intelligence) is now available in English in the library here: Auguste Comte.

The translator will be providing commentary in the upcoming weeks.

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No readers of these lectures should I ever think it necessary to prove that ideas govern and upset the world, or, in other terms, that the whole social mechanism rests, at bottom, on opinions. They are acutely aware that the great political and moral crisis in present-day society is due, in the last analysis, to our intellectual anarchy. Our most serious distress is caused by the profound differences of opinion that at present exist among all minds as to all those fundamental maxims the stability of which is the prime requisite for a real social order. So long as individual minds fail to give unanimous assent to a certain number of general ideas capable of constituting a common social doctrine, we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that the nations will necessarily remain in an essentially revolutionary atmosphere … It is just as certain that if this gathering of minds to one communion of principles can once be attained, the appropriate institutions will necessarily take shape from it.

Cours de philosophie positive, Auguste Comte

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If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. ~ 1 Timothy 5:8

The method of Positivism is to derive sociological laws from observing man as he is, not as how one would wish him to be in accordance with some ideological scheme. One such observation is that man is a social being with natural and organic relationships, not an isolated entity engaging solely in contractual relationships, as the liberal would have it.
In accounting for this social feeling, Comte writes:

There are three successive states of morality answering to the three principal stages of human life; the personal, the domestic, and the social stage.

Between self-love and social feeling, Comte places domestic attachments on which “the solution of the great moral problem depends.” Comte elaborates:

The love of his family leads Man out of his original state of Self-love and enables him to attain finally a sufficient measure of Social love. Every attempt on the part of the moral educator to call this last into immediate action, regardless of the intermediate stage, is to be condemned as utterly chimerical and profoundly injurious. Such attempts are regarded in the present day with far too favourable an eye. Far from being a sign of social progress, this would, if successful, be an immense step backwards …

On the one hand, then, we see today – even more so than in Comte’s – the attempt to induce an indiscriminate universal love in disregard for natural and organic familial relationships. These latter, instead, are under attack and “family” becomes no more than a definition, fluidly and tendentiously redefined. On the other hand, the “defenders” of family values limit themselves to an idealized image of the nuclear family and are unable to relate it to the larger social whole and probably would even reject the conclusion were they able to even see it clearly. Thus, true social feeling is forcibly separated from its natural and organic roots; in its place, there is only a legal fiction which can only be enforced by increasingly onerous laws and other social controls.

Comte identifies four familial relations that aid the transition from the individual to social feeling:

• Filial love
• Fraternal love
• Conjugal love
• Paternal love

Filial Love

Filial love is the affection of the child toward its parents. It is the starting point of moral education and the instinct of Continuity springs from it. The social consequence, then, is reverence for our ancestors which binds us to the whole past history of our people.

Fraternal Love

Fraternal, or brotherly, love is the affection of child toward its brothers and sisters. From it, the instinct of Solidarity arises. Hence, we learn unity with contemporaries. Relationships become voluntary rather than involuntary.

Conjugal Love

The second stage of moral education begins with conjugal love—“the highest type of all sympathetic instincts“— in which the “perfect fullness of devotion is secured by the reciprocity and indissolubility of the bond.”

Paternal Love

From the conjugal relationship, paternal love comes next.

It completes the training by which Nature prepares us for universal sympathy: for it teaches care for our successors; and thus it bind sus to the Future, as filial love had bound us to the Past.

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• Order and Progress
• Family, Country, Humanity
• Love as the principle and order as the basis, progress as the goal
• Everything is relative, that is the absolute principle
• Infer in order to deduce, so as to construct
• To know in order to foresee, to foresee in order to make possible
• The spirit must always be the master of the heart, never its slave
• Progress is the development of order
• Subordination is the basis of improvement
• The most noble phenomena are everywhere subordinated to the coarsest
• The living will always, and more and more, be governed by the dead
• Man must more and more subordinate himself to humanity

From Auguste Comte by Charles Maurras

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