Now in these passages, however obvious their limited and reactionary character may be to you, you can actually detect a dialectical element which is certainly quite alien to Comte the arch-nominalist, and it is this: the same rational principles which once represented truth, insofar as they hastened the dissolution of an old social order that had become an unacceptable fetter on human development, may drive society towards destruction when we cling to them in a completely unreflective way, at the point, in other words, when society has become nothing but an unfettered exchange society.
I lay such importance on pointing out all this here because it helps you to see how some of the conceptions that are commonly ascribed only to speculative philosophy – such as the dialectical idea that the same things, here the same theoretical approaches, can assume entirely different and mutually contradictory functions – can sometimes be detected in a position which, in terms of its own self-understanding or its own apparent intentions, is utterly opposed to all dialectical speculation. I point this out precisely so you can see what I am trying to do here. I want to show you, in a whole variety of contexts, that the sources of dialectical thought do not lie in the speculative inclinations of the individual thinker, or in any merely intellectual processes as such; I want to show you how thinkers such as dear old Comte, who would never be suspected of harbouring such inclinations, nonetheless find themselves driven to dialectical conceptions simply by the force of the subject matter they engage with. Thus we find that Comte – and this is really a point where this positivist philosophy crucially differs from philosophy in the emphatic sense – sets social organization in dogmatic opposition to the idea of freedom of conscience on account of a hidden premise that is not really examined at all. This is the premise that it is better that something such as organized society should exist than that it should not exist. But this effectively ignores the fundamental question which preoccupied many schools of thought in the ancient Greek Enlightenment, such as the Cynics, that wondered whether organized society was not deeply problematic, and hardly something to be endorsed, in comparison with the state of nature. This philosophical question has already been decided in Comte, and the profound hostility to philosophy in this kind of sociology is ultimately sustained by the way in which a whole series of premises, which philosophy would reflect upon and specifically examine, are here simply assumed as something positive.
Now the term ‘positivism’ is actually ambiguous in a very deep sense, as you can see in an exemplary way if you study the work of Auguste Comte. Thus, on the one hand, the epithet ‘positive’ implies that the scientist, for example, should stick to the facts, to what is positively given, to what is really there, rather than getting lost in useless fictions or illusions. But at the same time ‘positive’ also always implies a certain theory of value, one that claims we should ascribe higher value to what is the case, to what one clutches as it were, than to what is merely possible rather than actual. Thus positivism always harbours the idea – rather like a moral maxim – that the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. These two concepts of positivity play into each other. If Comte believed – although at first this appears highly paradoxical and barely credible in view of his ‘scientistic’ self-understanding – that he might ultimately be able to found a positivistic religion,19 this is intimately connected with the way he literally makes a cult of the facts; looked at more closely, this essentially involves the idea that those who administer the facts as facts, namely the representatives of organized science, also claim to be able to direct and control social reality completely. To put this another way: the decisive turn which this sociology adopts in contrast to the concept of critical philosophy, a concept which Comte expressly opposes, is that his own thought is one that moves in advance within the parameters of the rules, of the facts of society as it actually exists. Thus the laws and principles in accordance with which civil society is organized, such as the principle of exchange, are not themselves grasped as things that have a history, that have come to be, that are problematic in any way; on the contrary, all this is taken positively in the sense that we must hold to what is actually there – or, as I prefer to put it, that we must proceed in a purely system-immanent fashion. Instead of critically exploring the contradictions and internal problems of the system in which we move and find ourselves, instead of ultimately grasping the system itself as something historical and conditioned, as something that possibly may not be simply binding for all time. The decisive theoretical flaw we find here is that, since the exercise of self-possessed and autonomous thought is incapable of corroding institutions or undermining society, we must really call a halt to such thinking. Thus we demand that thought should not only orient itself to facts and respect facts in the general scientific sense, but that it should essentially accommodate itself to the facts – in other words, basically content itself with what can positively be observed here and now; it may be able to improve on this in some sense, but it should still accept or receive it as a datum rather than attempting to show how it has come to be something problematic, and possibly something riven by internal antagonism. You might say, if you like, that in Comte we may already make out that element which later became decisive for the positivist conception of social science, namely the doctrine of accommodation for which the task of social thought and its scientifically based claims is to encourage human beings to adapt to given social realities, and thus tacitly dispense with the question whether the given social realities are truly adapted to them, i.e. whether these social realities could really survive the judgement of a truly independent and self-possessed reason. Now there is another passage where this aspect, which I have just emphasized, is expressed even more clearly. You can find it on page 79 of the little Kröner edition, and perhaps I can read some of it out for you here. Once again Comte is basically trying to identify metaphysical ideas with theology, with the ultimate intention of eliminating both at a single stroke. He says: ‘Whether the processes in question are traced back to supernatural intervention, or are explained by the recourse to the existence of the corresponding essences’ – and this of course is the criticism he makes of philosophy, and especially the older medieval realist tradition of philosophy, although he throws early modern metaphysics in here too – ‘is certainly a distinction within approaches that are ultimately identical. It does not prevent the one from repeating the features of the other.’ In other words, theology and speculative metaphysics are essentially the same. They both spring from an excess of imagination over observation, and their content derives from a desire to discover absolute concepts.
For social science this simply permits arbitrary and indeterminate judgements with regard to these processes, since the latter are not regarded as something that is subject to natural laws. The spirit of all theological and metaphysical speculation is ultimately delusory, and, while it sees itself as unconditioned, its application to experience is arbitrary; and the entirety of social science today is basically the same. The distinctive method of positive philosophy, by contrast, consists in the subordination of imagination to observation.
And this is what he is after: the subjection of fantasy to observation. ‘The method provides a broad and fertile field for the imagination, but the latter’ – and this ‘but’ is the very dogma of positivist social science in our own day20 – ‘is restricted here to discovering and perfecting the collation of observed facts, or to its role in facilitating new investigations in a fruitful manner. It is this approach, which subordinates our understanding to the facts, that must be introduced into social science.’
Nobody can fail to recognize the legitimate aspect of this critique of a purely speculative form of thought which has simply run wild or has evaded any serious engagement with the facts, but when you examine these Comtean formulations more closely they actually imply that the conceptual elements employed in the social sciences must be exempted from any kind of independent scrutiny if they are to represent truth, or, in other words, that the relevant concepts must accommodate themselves to the realm of empirical observations in advance. We ought to think just as the reality that we observe before us requires us to think. As for the element that Comte here calls fantasy, the features of spontaneity and independence – in other words, the element that allows us to envisage something that ought to be, something beyond the mere enactment of what already is – we find that this whole sphere of possible conceptualization must be relegated, in the best case, to the realm of auxiliary hypotheses formation.21 But Comte’s ideal is precisely this: as
