The Worlds of Positivism by Johannes Feichtinger

Author:Johannes Feichtinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

For Renan , the sciences and the universe were part of one large-scale cosmological development which he portrayed in “Les sciences de la nature et les sciences historiques”. A primitive “atomic period” was succeeded by a molecular era when atoms combined, then a solar period when stars were formed, a planetary era when systems were created around the stars, a period of individual development for each planet when the earth took its current form. It was followed by a period of unconscious, biological humanity , which saw the progressive emergence of consciousness and whose appearance marked the beginning of the final period, that of historical time. 132 A specific type of science corresponded to each period: astronomy and, more recently, geology thus explained the history of the cosmos and the earth; the biological sciences shed light upon the physical appearance of man. All that was left was to discover the laws of the historical period. Their discovery would constitute, Renan asserted, “the highest degree of intellectual culture”; this would make it possible to fully “understand humanity .” 133

Scrutinizing the regularities in human evolution, Renan built a philosophy of history . Like Comte, he described states characterized by forms of knowledge. But he developed his own formulation of human becoming, substituting the succession of syncretism, analysis, and synthesis for the Comtean sequence of theological, metaphysical, and positive ages. Renan’s states did not correspond to Comte’s three stages. He did not discern a metaphysical age; neither did he claim that the current era would achieve the ultimate step in the development of knowledge and human progress. The current time, that of analysis, certainly shared common traits with the positive age, but it, too, was to be surpassed. Finally, Renan criticized the overly chronological character of Comte’s law of three stages . Syncretism , analysis, and synthesis were not exactly eras of human history, but overlapping, superimposed ways of thinking, which always contained the possibility of reversal.

Other fundamental differences, concerning the place given to reason and the classification of the sciences, were clarified in articles written between 1858 and 1863. The author of Vie de Jésus did not subscribe to what he regarded as Comte’s radical rationalism: “this analytical, dry, negative arrogance, incapable of understanding things of the heart and the imagination.” 134 Indeed, for Renan science did not hold a monopoly on knowledge: next to what could be studied experimentally, there existed “everything which is beyond and can be felt, noticed, and revealed but is not demonstrated.” 135 This distinction between reason and sentiment coincided with the juxtaposition of physical and moral phenomena, creating a fundamental rift between two separate orders of sciences, “the natural sciences and the human sciences.” 136 And, according to Renan , that was precisely what Auguste Comte had not understood in his linear classification: “Preoccupied especially with the method of physical sciences and aspiring to transport this method into other branches of human knowledge,” he had defined the science of man in a rudimentary, restricted manner, as a simple prolongation of the natural sciences.

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