I share with Comte a desire for a comprehensive and empirically informed social science.   The recent work in behavioral economics and social psychology is exciting, to say the least.  However, positivist social science makes the mistake of confusing the architecture of the natural and social world, with disastrous consequences.

For the natural sciences, their object of study is given: hydrogen will have the same atomic weight in Paris and Chicago.   It is beyond our control to alter.  In  addition, these objects are arranged in a single reductive casual chain: the principles of physics explain chemical phenomena which in turn explain biological phenomena.

However, the social world is defined (in modernity) by fundamentally heterogeneous arrangements who are only casually connected.  At times, these relationships are random and fluid, and occasionally shift.  Habermas defines modernity as an a sort of Hegelian process of reason ‘unfolding’: social life is thoroughly rationalized and the diversity of opinions that exist among individuals ‘comes into being.’   We thus see in modernity a transformation from a monolithic epistemology of a singular theological truth to the many truths that are given recognition in liberal democratic structures.

This is why positivist social science should be considered exceptionally dangerous.   That anti-democratic impulse is the worse aspect of Comte’s theory and this feature is thoroughly unacknowledged.  He sets the stage for a type of technocratic single-minded governance: as ’social science’ succeeds or becomes the logical extension of moral philosophy, we thus strip away any need for a democratic ‘general will.’   To define both method and homogeneous body of knowledge is to set the stage for a singular tyrannical ‘truth’ to emerge presented under the guise of a ‘dispassionate objective natural science.’

The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937)
Etienne Gilson (Ignatius, 1999)
269 p. First reading.

In the fall of 1936 Etienne Gilson, the great historian of medieval philosophy, delivered the William James lectures at Harvard University, and this book followed shortly thereafter.  Gilson’s main purpose is to consider what the history of philosophy tells us about philosophy itself.  The history of philosophy, he says, is to the philosopher what the laboratory is to the scientist: it is where he can see a variety of experiments carried out, study the results, and from such observations draw certain conclusions.

A second, organizing theme of the book is that philosophers are frequently tempted to approach their subject as though it were another.  That is, they are tempted to adopt a certain method, or define a certain kind of rationality, as an ideal, and proceed as though it were, at last, the proper approach to philosophy.  Though the ideal varies from philosopher to philosopher, the developing philosophical projects follow a predictable pattern: inevitably the favoured approach encounters questions it is not well-suited to answering, at which point such questions are declared un-philosophical, meaningless, or otherwise inadmissible, and, when that tactic proves unacceptable (usually to the disciples of the originator), the philosophy devolves into skepticism.

Gilson illustrates this cycle — exposition, development, collapse — using three main historical examples, the “medieval experiment”, the “Cartesian experiment”, and the “modern experiment”.  In each case he traces the logical development of the philosophical projects in careful detail.  Given his expertise in medieval philosophy, one might expect the sections on later philosophical developments to be comparatively weak, but, to this untutored reader at least, he seems perfectly adept discussing Descartes, Hume, and Kant.

Though it would be a pleasure to rehearse the book’s arguments in detail, I think that I must, owing to time considerations, content myself with a high-level overview.

The Medieval Experiment. The particular stream of medieval philosophy in which he is interested was inaugurated by Peter Abelard, and his approach to philosophy Gilson calls “logicism”.  Abelard took pure logic as his ideal of rationality:

It is not easy for us to share his enthusiasm and that of his first disciples, when he discovered that human thought was submitted to necessary laws, themselves susceptible of exact definition, the knowledge of which would enable us to distinguish in all cases the true from the false. As soon as he made that wonderful discovery, Abelard decided that anything that stood in the way of the new science should be ruthlessly thrown into the scrapheap.

When Abelard, however, tried to address the favourite problem of medieval philosophers — the problem of universals — he ran into trouble. Do we have general ideas of things, or can we conceive only of individual things? What is the relationship between our ideas of things and things themselves? From pure logic, Abelard was uanble to build a bridge between his mind and the world, and consequently he ended in scepticism: concepts are empty words, unrelated to real things in the world, and what we call knowledge is merely opinion.  The cycle is complete.

A second temptation for medieval thinkers was to treat philosophy as though it were theology, an error Gilson calls “theologism”.  When defending the glory and omnipotence of God becomes the central purpose of one’s philosophy, certain unfortunate consequences seem to follow.  When it is considered impious to put limits on God’s power, and when impiety is considered worse than error, there is no way to prevent God’s power from overwhelming and crushing both the natural world and natural reason.  Muslim philosophers, for instance, argued that physical laws would place unacceptable limits on God’s capacity to act in the world, so they rejected them, arguing instead that God creates the world anew at each moment, and every aspect of each newly created world is contingent, subject to the arbitrary will of God.  The world is thereby deprived of motion, duration, and causality.  In the Christian world William of Ockham followed much the same reasoning to much the same conclusion, and finished by espousing an empiricism that bears more than a passing resemblance to Hume’s (much later) philosophy. (Ockham, incidentally, is important for understanding the transition from medieval to early modern philosophy, for he invented what Gilson calls “a new intellectual disease” that affected much of modern philosophy: psychologism, the belief that “to give a psychological analysis of human knowledge was to give a philosophical analysis of reality”.) Meanwhile St. Bonaventure, intending to place God at the centre of the inner life, argued that we know only by divine illumination of our minds, but in so doing he destroyed the very possibility of philosophy, for “If the truth of my judgements comes to me from God only, and not from my own reason, there is no natural foundation for true knowledge; the proper place for epistemology is not in philosophy, but in theology.”

The scepticism that resulted from these misconceived philosophical programs resulted in late medieval scholars turning their backs on philosophy, considering it a useless, vain enterprise.  From roughly 1400 to roughly 1600, little valuable philosophical work was done.  Instead, scholars turned to moralism and humanism, as in the work of Erasmus or Montaigne, or to mysticism, as in Thomas à Kempis or Meister Eckhart.  Scholasticism continued to be taught in the schools, but it had lost its vitality and its living interest.  It stayed that way until someone introduced a new way of doing philosophy.

The Cartesian Experiment. The purpose of Descartes’ philosophy was to provide a remedy for skepticism.  To accomplish this goal he reconceived philosophy as a branch of mathematics.  In mathematics, after all, there is none of the discord and doubt that plagues philosophers.  Cartesianism is “an experiment to see what becomes of human knowledge when molded into conformity with the pattern of mathematical evidence.”  He rejected the merely probable in favour of the strictly certain.  He attempted to develop abstract versions of the various sciences, apparently in the belief that “since the most evident of all sciences [mathematics] is also the most abstract, it would be enough to make all the other sciences as abstract as mathematics in order to make them just as evident.”  The basic abstractions had to be “clear and distinct”, so as to be evident intuitively.  He committed himself to a variant of psychologism: what can be clearly and distinctly known of a thing is the thing, and he attempted to construct the world solely on the basis of these “clear, distinct ideas”.  For instance, from the fact that his clear and distinct idea of the soul implies nothing about the body he concluded that the soul was really distinct from the body.

This way of thinking was taken up with alacrity in Europe until, in 1728, Voltaire visited London.  To his surprise, he found that Descartes was there considered “a dreamer”.  The English followed John Locke instead, a man who approached psychology not as a mathematician but as an anatomist, and confronted by this alternative approach Voltaire, and through him many others, lost faith in Cartesian philosophy.  But the damage had been done, for Descartes had succeeded in convincing his disciples that the soul and the body were distinct, and when his philosophy fell apart, so did the human person.  Some, like Le Maitre, retained the body but not the soul and proposed a materialistic philosophy, and others, like Berkeley, retained the soul but not the body, and proposed a form of idealism.  This latter was perhaps more faithful to the spirit of Cartesianism, for the concept of matter is rather unclear and indistinct, and it was a notorious problem to prove the existence of the external world from Cartesian principles.  There does seem to be such a thing as matter, but it is entirely distinct from thought.  How then is it that there seems to be a connection between the two?  Malebranche, being a disciple of Descartes, proposed the theory of occasionalism: an event, or apparent event, in the physical world does not itself cause a mental event, but is the occasion for God to cause a mental event. Thus was physical causality destroyed.  When Hume came along and removed God from the picture, the world fell apart into disconnected fragments, “a mosaic of mutually exclusive substances, that could neither act nor be acted upon, neither know, nor be known.” Metaphysics was dead, and the world either did not exist or could not be known. The cycle ended in skepticism.

The Modern Experiment. The philosophy of Kant begins with another attempt to re-imagine philosophy after the model of another science — in Kant’s case, the model was physics.  He wrote, “The true method of metaphysics is fundamentally the same as that which Newton has introduced into natural science, and which has there yielded such fruitful results.”  To which Gilson adds the wry observation: “On the very day and at the very minute in which he wrote these simple words, Kant crossed the deadline beyond which lies the waste land where no metaphysics can live.”  Kant proposed that philosophy start not with mathematical definitions, but with immediately evident perceptions and the judgements that accompany them.  His project was to identify and enumerate these judgements, which could then serve as a sure foundation for philosophy.  Gilson: “The Critique of Pure Reason is a masterly description of what the structure of the human mind should be, in order to account for the existence of a Newtonian conception of nature, and assuming that conception to be true to reality.”  A second arm of Kant’s program was moral philosophy, but Gilson contends that he never succeeded in integrating morality with the rest of his ideas, which is why Kantian philosophy presents us with the peculiar notion of the human being as both subject to the necessity of Newtonian physical law and free and morally responsible.  Gilson traces the subsequent career of Kant’s ideas through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel, but I had difficulty following this part of the argument.

Post-Kantian philosophy is something of which I am mostly ignorant, but to hear Gilson tell it, its efforts to re-found philosophy have been comparatively feeble.  Auguste Comte proposed that philosophy should be primarily concerned with the human person and the needs of society, and so proposed sociology, of all things, as the foundation upon which philosophy should be erected. To his way of thinking, mankind should be always at the center of our thinking. Thus he called astronomy a “grave scientific aberration” and argued that astronomers should study celestial bodies only in their relation to the earth!  Others, such as J.S. Mill, thought, like Kant, that scientific knowledge was an ideal, but unlike Kant they decided to reduce philosophy to science. In so doing, they subjected the human mind, and the whole human person, to nature, forsaking the vantage point from which rational criticism of science is possible.  This, says Gilson, is why his day saw certain parts of the academy promoting a kind of agnosticism with respect to science: in a philosophical tradition that has ruled out metaphysics, agnosticism remains the only means by which to protect human liberty.  It is an impasse.

Conclusion. As I said earlier, and as these examples illustrate, one of Gilson’s central claims about the history of philosophy is that attempts to do philosophy using the methods proper to another subject are doomed to eventual failure. The methods suitable for particular subjects are not adequate for the most general of all subjects.  As he puts it, “History is there to remind us that no one ever regains the whole of reality after locking himself up in one of its parts.”  Implicit in this claim is the notion that there is a properly philosophical method.  But is there?  Gilson thinks so, and in the last chapter he sketches its basic outline.  His central idea, learned at the feet of St. Thomas Aquinas, is that the most basic metaphysical reality, and therefore properly the most basic philosophical concept, is Being.  Not space, not time, not thought (which has been the strongest temptation for modern philosophers), but Being.  Only this foundation does not begin by excluding something that will be needed later.

[Virtue and knowledge]
There is an ethical problem at the root of our philosophical difficulties; for men are most anxious to find truth, but very reluctant to accept it.  We do not like to be cornered by rational evidence, and even when truth is there, in its impersonal and commanding objectivity, our greatest difficulty remains; it is for me to bow to it in spite of the fact that it is not exclusively mine, for you to accept it though it cannot be exclusively yours. In short, finding out truth is not so hard; what is hard is not to run away from truth once we have found it.

[St. Augustine anticipates Descartes]
Reason is leading the discussion with Augustine: “You, who wish to know yourself, do you know at least that you are? — I know it. — How do you know it? — I don’t know. — Are you a thing that is simple, or that is composed? — I don’t know. — Do you know whether you are moving or not? — I don’t know. — But do you know that you think? — Yes, I know that. — Consequently, that you think at least is true. — It is true. — You know therefore that you are, that you live and that you think.”  — Soliloquies, Book II, I.

[Science and philosophy]
The initial condemnation of metaphysics in the name of science, posited by such philosophies as the only type of rational knowledge, invariably culminates in the capitulation of science to some irrational element.  This is a necessary law, inferable from philosophical experience.

[The Western creed]
Its most fundamental feature is a firm belief in the eminent dignity of man.  The Greeks of classical times never wavered in their conviction, that of all the things that can be found in nature, man is by far the highest, and that of all the things important for man to know, by far the most important is man.  When Socrates, after unsuccessful attempts to deal with physical problems, made up his mind to dedicate himself to the exclusive study of man, he was making a momentous decision.  “Know thyself” is not only the key to Greek culture, but to the classical culture of the Western world as well.

[Man subject to nature]
Philosophy is the only rational knowledge by which both science and nature can be judged.  By reducing philosophy to pure science, man has not only abdicated his right to judge nature and to rule it, but he has also turned himself into a particular aspect of nature, subjected, like all the rest, to the necessary law which regulates its development.  A world where accomplished facts are unto themselves their own justification is ripe for the most reckless social adventures.  Its dictators can wantonly play havoc with human institutions and human lives, for dictatorships are facts and they also are unto themselves their own justification.

Mă refer în mod specific la conceptul strict operaţional: “ţinuţi sub observaţie”. Şi mă refer exact la felul cum este definit acest concept în cadrul filozofiei pozitiviste a lui Auguste Comte. Nu vă vine să credeţi, dar existau foarte mulţi “observatori pozitivişti”, cu spirit viu, care observau  “la rece” comportarea armatei române la anul 1907.  De fapt observau comportarea întregii Românii la anul 1907. An cumplit. Nu doar pentru faptul că tinerii ofiţeri români au comandat plutoane  de execuţie pentru 11 000 de ţărani răsculaţi. Unii dintre aceti ţărani probabil că nici nu au fost măcar răsculaţi, ci aleşi la întâmplare. După vechile reguli de decimare pentru legionarii romani din antichitate. Tot la întâmplare, pe vremea guvernării  carliste interbelice, au fost aleşi tineri nevinovaţi care au fost executaţi ca “legionari”. Acestea au fost regulile internaţionaliste ale jocului. Pe care românii le-au respectat. De ce ? Pentru ca România  să nu dispară ca stat.

Winston Churchill scrie aluziv în Memorii că armata  română a trecut “cu brio” testul la care a fost supusă la anul 1907. Cine au fost “observatorii” de la 1907 care monitorizau România ? Secretivul Winston Churchill nu mai scrie. Noi am reuşit să identificăm un “grup de observatori”. Poate că s-au mai aflat şi alţi obervatori individuali, în ordine dispersă. Grupul pe care l-am identificat noi poate fi caracterizat cu totală certitudine drept grup de “observatori pozitivişti”.  Îi priveau pe români la anul de tragedie naţională 1907 la fel ca pe nişte insecte. Rapoartele lor mergeau, în duplicat, la Amiralitatea londoneză, sediul ministerului de război britanic.  Fireşte, nu pe drum oficial, ci prin spionaj englezesc combinat cu obişnuita corupţie balcanică. “Grupul  de observatori pozitivişti ” era constituit din tineri ofiţeri turci aflaţi în misiune pe Via Egnatia, în Macedonia Vardarului. Relativ foarte aproape de noi.

Dar mai întâi să reamintim situaţia războiului pentru “normarea independentistă” de la 1877-1878.  Contrar minciunilor oficiale, acela nu a fost război de independenţă,  adică un război pentru  eliberarea naţională. Eliberarea din ce ? România  era în Romania. Acel fapt era un adevăr tacit, prezent în toate capitulaţiile. Şi fusese recunoscut în modul cel mai ceremonios şi oficial de cancelaria Imperiului Otoman la anul 1877.  

Revin iarăşi la Memoriile scrise de Winston Churchill. Spre deosebire de poezia lui George Coşbuc, –un autor pe care îl stimez foarte mult!, i-am citit opera în copilărie—, Winston Churchill aprecia că generalul Osman Pasha avea geniu militar!  Deci aprecierea armatei române de către Winston Churchill nu s-a făcut în funcţie de performanţa ei la Plevna în istoria versificată ce se recită frumos. Repet, Winston Churchill rămâne extrem de secretiv în ceea ce priveşte motivul aprecierii pozitive a disciplinei trupei române şi a determinării ofiţerilor români înainte de primul război mondial. Memoriile lui Winston Churchill sugerează foarte puternic numai faptul că motivul real pentru această apreciere nu se afla în performanţa  trupei româneşti în războiul de “normare independentistă”!  Totul ţinteşte către un raport de evaluare de  performanţă a comportamentului armatei române la 1907.  Chiar dacă nu avem documentul, putem bănui că Ionel I.C. Brătianu ştia despre existenţa şi conţinutul lui. Spre deosebire de Tache Ionescu, speriat oarecum de intransigenţa arătată de Ionel I.C. Brătianu în negocierile de după război. Intransigenţa lui  Ionel I.C. Brătianu se baza pe acel raport de evaluare făcut României la 1907.

Deci comportamentul armatei române  a fost observat de tinerii ofiţeri turci din  Macedonia Vardarului.  Şcoala de cadeţi fusese reformată după principii europene de către Osman Pasha, în mai multe rânduri ministru de război al Imperiului. Spre deosebire de tinerii ofiţeri români formaţi în ideologia naţionalistă fondată de Ioan Eliade Rădulescu, ale cărui idei europene proveneau din senzualismul lui Bonnot de Condillac şi ideologia primară a lui Destutt de Tracy, ideologia cadeţilor turci era modelată de filosofia pozitivistă a lui Comte. În care observaţia non-emoţională a faptelor juca un rol central. La fel şi cauzalitatea, de tipul determinismului laplacian, în care acţiunea umană, de orice natură, este inevitabilă  precum mişcările astrale  ori căderea asteroizilor.  Cert este că determinarea observată la ofiţerii români pentru reprimarea implacabilă a răscoalei de  la 1907 a servit ca model şi pentru atitudinea tinerilor ofiţeri turci din  Macedonia. Ei  se organizează în gruparea politică Junii Turci, care la anul 1908 începe un ciclu de acţiuni extrem de hotărâte. Unele au fost realmente pozitive. Altele au consecinţe tragice chiar şi la timpul prezent.

Titus Filipas

Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908-), according to the well-known anthropologist, the “functionalist” and  student of Bronislaw Malinowski, Edmund Ronald Leach, is the most famous representative of the first of dual traditions of social anthropology.  The founder of the first tradition was the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941).  According to Leach, Frazer was a man “of monumental learning who had no first-hand acquaintance with the lives of primitive people about whom he wrote.”  (Claude-Levi Strauss, 1)  Rather than study a culture in minute detail, Frazer wished to understand the primitive consciousness on a world-historical scale.  The progenitor of the second tradition was Bronislaw Malinowski who “spent most of his academic life analyzing the results of research which he had himself had personally conducted over a period of four years in a single small village in far off Melanesia.”  Malinowski was far more interested in how an individual communities social systems “functioned” than in developing a grand narrative of the primitive consciousness.  Although not in the “style” of Frazer, Levi-Strauss is more concerned with the discovery of true “facts” about a general “human mind.”  He is less concerned, according to Leach, with the “organization of any particular society or class of societies.”  For Leach, this difference is “fundamental.”

Leach, while disagreeing with much of Levi-Strauss’ work, nonetheless had a sound understanding of Levi-Strauss’ argument.  According to Leach, structuralism begins with the biological faculties, quite similar to the philosophical anthropology of Hans Jonas and Arnold Gehlen in Germany, articulated around the same time.   The phenomenon perceived by the human mind, “have the characteristics which we attribute to them because of the way our senses operate and the way the human brain is designed to order and interpret the stimuli which are fed into it.”  As man is consistently bombarded with vast numbers of particulars, given our situatedness in space and time, he separates particulars into classes of objects and apprehends particulars in a sequence of events.  When man writes a history or preforms a ritual action “we imitate our apprehension of Nature: the products of our Culture are segmented in the same way as we suppose the products of Nature to be segmented and ordered.”  These principles of order or structures by which man orders his reality, reflect the fundamental sameness of the  human mind, a universal rationality that binds all acting, communicating agents (In Jerry D. Moore, Visions of Culture, 236-7.)

Levi-Strauss, according to another well-known anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, is unique in two respects: in his understanding of anthropology as a deeply personal quest and in his understanding of anthropology as a “positive science.”  Geertz notes that Levi-Strauss work uncovers the dual quality of anthropological epistemology and methodology- “as a way of going about the world and as a method for uncovering lawful relations among empirical facts”- (The Interpretation of Cultures, 346) and forces them in conflict with one another.  This conflict, for Geertz, explains Levi-Strauss’ widespread popularity among non-specialists but has also led to some discussions in professional circles that “what is presented as High Science may really be an ingenious and somewhat roundabout attempt to defend a metaphysical position” (347.) Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques (1955) furthermore exemplifies the melange of perspectives as it is simultaneously a “standard legend of a Heroic Quest” and a “combination autobiography, traveler’s tale, philosophical treatise, ethnographic report, colonial history, and prophetic myth”  (347.)

The end of Tristes Tropiques brings a riddle rather than a solution as “the anthropologist is condemned either to journey among men whom he can understand precisely because his own culture has already contaminated them” or is among those who, though not contaminated by the culture of the anthropologist, are “unintelligible” to the anthropologist for that very reason.  Is it possible then to know the savage at all? Levi-Strauss answers this question in the affirmative since it is possible to gain knowledge of the anthropological subject through a method other than the anthropologist’s “personal involvement” in the world of the savage.  Knowledge of the savage is possible in spite of the strangeness of savage culture due to the psychological similitude of all human beings.  Levi-Strauss believed that “the mind of man is, at bottom, everywhere the same .”  While it was formerly believed that anthropology was the study of customs or beliefs, in reality, it is the study of thought (350-52.)

Thus, in Le Pensee Sauvage (1962), Levi-Strauss argued that the primitive mind and the savage’s actions in the world was determined by “the science of the concrete”, by which Levi-Strauss understood the savage mind to be “closed” in the sense of approaching reality not in terms of an abstract formal system (as a modern scientist would) but in terms of particulars ordered into immediately recognizable and intelligible wholes.  Thus, what the savage is most concerned with are the immediately discernible differences between, say, animals or the phases of the moon.

Levi-Strauss’ assumption of the fundamental similitude of rationality, the existence of ‘a mind’ hearkens back, according to Geertz,  to the “universal rationalism of the French Enlightenment ” (356.)  In this narrow sense, Geertz argues, very little separates Levi-Strauss from Rousseau, one of Levi-Strauss’ favorite thinkers. As importantly, “structuralism” was an attempt on the part of Levi-Strauss to have anthropology approach the systematicity and theoretical rigor of the natural sciences.   In this sense, according to François Dosse, “structuralism followed on the positivistic tradition of Auguste Comte and his scientism.”  While Levi-Strauss did not subscribe to Comte’s theory of progress, he nonetheless borrowed Comte’s notion that “knowledge is only interesting if it borrows from a scientific model or manages to transform itself into a science…”  Levi-Strauss was as indebted to  Comte’s emphasis on “holism” (History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 13.)

According to Christopher Johnson, for Levi-Strauss, the first goal of anthropology is “objectivity”  or the “discovery of structural constants that would be independent of the contingent observer and his or her particular categories, values, and beliefs.”  However, as essential to the anthropologist’s task is his sense of “mission,” “how anthropology as a human science speaks to the moral consciousness of modern humanity” (Claude Levi-Strauss, 6.)  It was Levi-Strauss’ intention, finally, that the conceptual and methodological innovations which he discovered to become separated from his own person, thereby, much in the same manner as the natural sciences,  acquiring “a truth and self-evidence independent of its instance of enunciation” (7.)  The reality, however, is that the program of structuralism is inseparable from that of its founder.

Kabul etmek gerekir ki kolay bir başlangıç olmayacak. Bunu derken bazı başlangıçların kolay olduğu izlenimi yaratılıyorsa çok doğru bir izlenim evet öyle. Cem bey ile konuşurken muhabbeti açılan konuyu zihnimi ferahlatmak ve isminin daha fazla kişi tarafından sahiplenmesini beklememek adına 20 Temmuz 2009 tarihi itibariyle Parasosyoloji isimli disiplini kurmuş bulunuyorum.
Peki nedir ve ne olarak tanımlanabilir denilirse ?

Nasıl ki insan ve doğa üzerine açıklanmayan olguları bir sınıflandırma ihtiyacı hissedildiğinde “parapsikoloji” devreye giriyor, sınıflandırma konusunda hala yetersiz ve sığ olduğunu düşündüğüm sosyolojide de durum nispeten aynı. Auguste Comte, sosyolojiyi kurup bilimsel gerçeklikleri bulmaya çabalarken elde ettiği hiçlik Parasosyoloji’nin gerçekliğini ve tamamen bilimin kanıtları eşliğinde bir cevabın imkansızlığını kanıtladı fikrimce. Bu anlamda denilebilir ki Parasosyoloji, sosyoloji biliminin toplum ve insan hayatında açıklayamadığı, açıklanamaz bulduğu ve incelemekten, sınıflandırmaktan, tartışmaktan kaçındığı olayları geniş bir ufuktan inceleyen, incelemesinde deneylerin yanında gerçeğe varmasını sağlayacak her türlü bilgiyi de kullanmaktan kaçınmayan bir disiplindir.

Parasosyoloji’nin tarihçesi var mı ?

Olaylar ve örnekler çerçevesinde bakıldığında her uygarlığa dair söyleyecek birşeyi olan parasosyoloji’nin ortaya çıkmaya en müsait olduğu an 2.Dünya savaşı sonunda başlayan araştırmalar ve “Topluluğun Ruhu” kuramıdır. Ancak henüz parasosyolojiye dönüşme evresini yakalayamadan bastırılmış olan bu düşünce 1980′lerde kendisini hizaya sokanlar tarafından engellendi ve sosyolojinin bilimsel olma tribinin ardından yok oldu. Bir konuşmada ismin ilk defa kullanılışı ise Cem Serkan Atlı tarafından 14 Temmuz 2009′da yapıldı, ardından incelemelerini, temellendirmelerini ve bu gizemli cümleyi gerçeğe taşıyış aşaması ise Tuna Çağlar Topgül tarafından 20 Temmuz 2009′da bir kısa makale biçiminde yapıldı.

Parasosyoloji bir bilim midir ?

Açıklamamın başından beri ele aldığım şekliyle Parasosyoloji en başta bir disiplindir. Bir bilim olmayışı onun önünü kapatan bir durummuş gibi gözüksede zaten kurulumunda ki amaç genişlemiş gözlem ufkuyla olaylara bakabilmektir. Bilim olması onu deneylere, kuramlara ve genel-geçer kurallara zorlayacakken, parasosyoloji istisnaya,olağan dışılığıa, bilinmeyenin gerçekliğine (yani bilime dair yeri olmayan bir çok şeye) açık bir konumda gerçeğe ulaşmayı amaçlar.

Parasosyoloji’nin parapsikolojiden ve bilimlerden farkı nedir ?

Felsefe’nin lider olduğu zamanlardan bugüne devam eden kopmalardan birisi olarak parasosyoloji’yi de bu durumun için de görmenin mümkün olduğunu düşünüyorum. Keza toplumsal durumlardan telekineziye kadar en küçük ayrıntıya kadar parapsikolojinin üstüne binen yük onu işlevli ve saygı değer bir disiplin olmaktan çıkarıyor. Bunun ötesinde işleri kültürler, toplumlar ve en genel anlamda “doğaya galip gelen insanın hikayesi”ni inceleyen sosyolojinin bunların açıklanmadığı konumda onları yine anlaşılabilir olması için teslim edeceği yer “parasosyoloji” olmalıdır. Büyük uygarlıkların toplu intiharından, dünya-dışı akıllı varlıklarının yaşayış, kültürleme hatta köleleştirme yapılarının incelenmesine kadar binlerce yaşantı parasosyolojinin geniş konu ölçeğini bize gösterebilir. Bu anlamda inceleme alanında örnek verdiğimiz parasosyolojinin bilimlerden farkı, insan merkezli doğaya ve dünya merkezli evrene karşı çıkmasıdır, parapsikolojiden farkı ise zihinsel güçlerden çok topluluğun ruhuna inanması ve incelemelerinde daha çok bireyden öte biraraya gelişleri konu edinmesidir.

Parasosyoloji dünyayı ve dünyasal toplumu evrenin merkezinden çıkartan ve daha açık bir görüşe götüren ve dünyanın evren ve toplumun kuramlarının dışında da bileşimlerin muhtemelliğini savunur.

Facebook’ta Parasosyoloji.

Domnul Ion Ianosi retrasa în una din cărţile sale istoria “genocidului armean” din Imperiul Otoman la începutul secolului XX. Domnia sa acuză organizaţia foarte progresistă şi reformatoare a Junilor Turci. Deşi profesorul  Ion Ianosi  conduce doctorate în filozofie la Universitatea din Bucureşti, domnia sa nu lămureşte care era filosofia ce îi ghida pe Junii Turci la acţiune. Ei bine, filosofia era Pozitivismul lui Auguste Comte. Acesta (iar după el şi Junii Turci) considera că Filozofia Pozitivă “constituie singura bază solidă pentru … reorganizarea socială”. Aşa cum sugerează specialistul american în Teoria Culturală Robert B. Ray, în această clamare Auguste Comte s-ar fi inspirat din Voltaire, anume din textul Lettres philosophiques, XXV. În remarcile lui “Sur les Pensées de Monsieur Pascal”, Voltaire insistă asupra necesităţii separării problemelor practice şi solvabile, de chestiunile metafizice impenetrabile.

Titus Filipas

Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874)

Throughout the 19th century, the nature of social changes and regularities in social activity remained an intense concern as population growth, urbanization, industrialization, and political upheaval captured the attention of scientific and political thinkers throughout Europe and America.  As today, this thought necessarily spanned political, popular, philosophical, and scientific realms of thought as debates ensued concerning what could be said about societies and what could and should be done to affect how they function.

In the early 19th century, keeping and deploying statistics was already widespread, but their use as a tool of political discourse remained novel, and thus a subject of general and heated discussion.  The astronomer and essayist Adolphe Quetelet proved to be one of the century’s most singular and influential thinkers concerning the use of social statistics.  Born in Belgium in 1796 shortly after French annexed Austria’s Belgian provinces in the wars following the Revolution, Quetelet was educated in a French lycée, and as a youth took notice of the place accorded to the sciences in the Napoleonic empire.  After Napoleon’s fall in 1815, Quetelet taught mathematics in Ghent, earned a doctorate in the subject, and, after convincing the government to build an observatory in Brussels, he departed to Paris—still the intellectual center of the world—to learn astronomy.  Quetelet took up his post as director of the new Brussels Observatory in 1828, and the observatory began operation in 1832.

By no coincidence, it was in this same period that Quetelet first began writing about statistics and “social physics” (a phrase taken from contemporary “positivist” philosopher and social theorist Auguste Comte).  Principles of statistics and probability had been worked out by key figures in the development of the technical methods of astronomy in France who were also interested in social statistics, particularly Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827).  And, like many others writing on social phenomena in the 18th and 19th centuries, Quetelet was struck by the constancy of certain statistics from year to year, such as births, deaths, crimes, and suicides.  Even though the fates of individual humans seemed to be governed by their free will and happenstance, taken en masse they seemed to be governed by social laws, which individual people appeared to be largely helpless to alter.  It therefore made sense to speak of society as an entity possessed of its own independent nature.  In 1848—a year of major political upheaval in Europe—Quetelet observed approvingly in his work On the Social System and the Laws that Govern It that not even revolutionary political change could alter basic social realities such as the frequency of crime.

Quetelet’s approval of the constancy of social relations related to his belief in political and moral moderation as a means of governing them.  Where some thinkers in this period understood history as requiring, doomed to, or inevitably headed toward radical change (as in the thinking of Charles Fourier, Arthur de Gobineau, or the dialectical philosopher Karl Marx), and where some elements of political economy suggested that social conditions were fatalistically inalterable, Quetelet believed that the study of statistical phenomena could reveal a high road toward a society governed by the intellect rather than by gross physical principles.  Essential social change, he believed, had been—and would continue to be—gradual, as society strove progressively toward an increasingly conscious understanding of how to govern its own natural development.  As he wrote in his touchstone 1835 work, On Man and the Development of His Faculties, or an Essay on Social Physics:

The perfectability of the human species is derived as a necessary consequence of all our investigations.  Defects and monstrosities disappear more and more from the body; the frequency and the gravity of maladies are combatted with greater effectiveness through the progress of medical science; the moral qualities of man will meet with improvements no less tangible; and the more we advance, the less need we fear the effects and the consequences of great political upheavals and wars, the plagues of humanity.

Thus, while Quetelet ought to be grouped with those 19th-century thinkers who understood history as proceeding through a general arc, the principles governing the path of this arc exerted their influence piecemeal rather than according to a grand historical logic governing the succession of epochs.  Here Quetelet was deeply influenced by his technical understanding of probability and error theory from his astronomical training, though he rarely used any advanced methods in his statistical analyses of social data.

While astronomers understood objects to move through the universe according to Newton’s laws, these paths were constantly perturbed by the minute gravitational pull of all objects, and observations of paths were imperfect.  To face these challenges, mathematicians had developed advanced means of resolving conflicting observations and of approximating the mathematical functions describing trajectories of celestial objects.  Mathematically, these methods were closely linked to the calculus of probability, which, of course, governed the behavior of large numbers of individually unpredictable phenomena.  The deviation from expected behavior was governed by an omnipresent function that we now know as the Gaussian distribution after Quetelet’s contemporary, German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).

Quetelet understood the applicability of astronomy’s error theory to statistical variation from a determined mean—Quetelet’s main legacy to mathematical statistics—to represent a profound truth of nature.  If one measured human and social attributes according to a distribution surrounding an average, one would begin to gain an appreciation of the qualities of l’homme moyen, or “the average man”.  In an Aristotelian move, Quetelet felt that the average man represented an ideal of nature, from which perturbing factors would cause reality to deviate.  For example, a human of average height could be taller or shorter according to specific conditions such as diet or climate.  While some progressive thinkers in this era celebrated individuality and variation, for Quetelet using statistics to inquire into the physical and moral qualities of the average man represented a path to understanding social laws, which was the path of further enlightenment, good morals and governance, and, ultimately, the harmonious society.

As near as I can tell there is no extensive treatment of Quetelet’s life written in the last hundred years, but his work and thinking are discussed in overviews of the history of statistics and probability and their politics.  See especially Ted Porter’s The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (1986), from which this post draws heavily

Auguste Comte lahir di Montpelier, prancis, pada tanggal 19 januari 1798. Orang tuanya berasal dari kelas menengah dan akhirnya ayahnya sang ayah meraih posisi sebagai petugas resmi pengumpul pajak lokal. Meskipun seorang mahasiswa yang cerdas, Comte tidak pernah mendapatkan ijazah sarjana. Ia dan seluruh mahasiswa s-angkatan-nya dikeluarkan dari Ecole Polytechnique karena gagasan politik dan pembangkangan mereka. pemberhentian ini berdampak buruk pada karier akademis Comte. Pada tahun 1817 ia menjadi sekretaris (dan “anak angkat” [Manuel, 1962:251]) Claude Henri Saint-Simon, seorang filsuf yang empat puluh tahun lebih tua dari Comte. Mereka bekerja sama selama beberapa tahun dan Comte mengetahui besarnya utang pada Saint-Simon: “Aku benar-benar berutang secara intelektual pada Saint-Simon…ia banyak berperan dalam mengenalkan aku ke wilayah filsafat yang kini aku ciptakan untuk diriku sendiri dan tanpa ragu aku jalani seumur hidupku(Durkheim, 1928/1962:144). Namun pada tahun 1824 mereka bertengkar karena Comte yakin bahwa Sint-Simon ingin menghapuskan nama Comte dari daftar ucapan terima kasihnya. Kemudian Comte menulis bahwa hubungannya dengan Saint-Simon “mengerikan”(Pickering, 1993:238) dan menggambarkannya sebagai “penipu hina” (Durkheim, 1928/1962:144). Pada tahun 1852, Comte berkata tentang Saint-Simon,”Aku tidak berutang apapun pada orang ini”(pickering, 1993:240).

Heilbron (1995) menggambarkan Comte bertubuh pendek (mungkin 5 kaki,2 inchi), dengan mata juling, dan sangat merasa gelisah dengan situasi sosial di sekitarnya, khususnya ketika menyangkut perempuan. Ia juga terasing dari masyarakat secara keseluruhan. Ini dapat membantu menjelaskan fakta bahwa Comte menikah dengan Caroline Massin (perkawinan yang berlangsung dari tahun 1825 sampai dengan 1842). Ia adalah seorang anak haram yang berbekalan disebud “pelacur” oleh comte, meskipun tuduhan itu akhir-akhir ini dipertanyakan (Pickering, 1997:37). Kegelisahan pribadi yang dialami Comte berlawanan dengan rasa aman yang begitu besar terhadap kapasitas intelektualnya, dan tampak bahwa rasa percaya begitu kuat:

Ingatan Comte yang luar biasa begitu tersohor. Didukung dengan ingatan fotografis ia dapat mengucapkan kembali setiap kata yang telah ia baca meski hanya sekali. Kekuatan konsentrasinya begitu hebat sehingga ia dapat menggambarkan seluruh buku tanpa menuliskan catatan sedikitpun. Seluruh kuliah disampaikannya tanpa catatan. Ketika ia duduk menulis buku-bukunya, ia menulis semua yang ada dalm ingatannya.(Schweber, 1991:134)

Pada tahun 1862, Comte mengolah satu skema yang akan digunakannya untuk menyampaikan serangkaian 72 kuliah umum (diselenggarakan di apartemennya) tentang filsafatnya, namun dihentikan pada kuliah ke tiga saat Comte menderita gangguan jiwa. Ia terus mengalami masalh mental, dan pada tahun 1827 ia pernah mencoba bunuh diri (meski gagal) dengan melemparkan dirinya ke sungai Seine.

Meskipun ia tidak dapat memperoleh posisi reguler di Ecole Polytechnique, Comte mendapatkan posisi minor sebagai asisten pengajar pada tahun 1837, Comte mendapat-kan posisi tambahan sebagai penguji ujian masuk, dan untuk pertam kalinya, ini memberikan pendapatan yang memadai (ia sering kali tergantung secara ekonomis pada keluarganya sampai saat itu). Selama kurun waktu tersebut, comte mengerjakan enam jilid karya yang melambungkan namanya, Cours de Pkilosophie Positive, yang secara keseluruhan terbit pada tahun 1842 (jilid pertama terbit pada tahun 1830). Dalam karya ini Comte memaparkan pandangannya bahwa sosiologi adalah ilmu tertinggi. Ia juga menyerang Ecole polytechnique, dan hasilnya adalah pada tahun 1844 pekerjaannya sebagai asisten tidak diperpanjang. Pada tahun 1851 ia menyelesikan empat jilid buku Systeme de Politique positive, yang lebih bertujuan praktis, dan menawarkan rencana reorganisasi masyarakat.

Heilbron menandaskan bahwa kehancuran terbesar terjadi dalam kehidupan Comte pada tahun 1838 dan sejak saat itu ia kehilangan harapan bahwa setiap orang akan me-mikirkan secara serius karyanya tentang ilmu pengetahuan secara umum, dan khususnya sosiologi. Pada saat yang bersamaan ia mengalami hidup “yang menyehatkan otak”; yaitu Comte mulai tidak mau membaca karya orang lain, yang akibatnya adalah ia menjadi kehilangan harapan untuk dapat berhubungan dengan perkembangan intelektual terkini. Setelah tahun 1838 ia mulai mengembangkan gagasan anehnya tentang reformasi masyaratkan yang dipaparkan dalam buku systeme de politique positive. Comte mulai mengkhayalkan dirinya sebagai pendeta tinggi agama baru kemanusiaan; ia percaya pada dunia yang pada akhirnya akan dipimpin seorang sosiolog-pendeta. (Comte banyak dipengaruhi oleh lata belakang khatoliknya). Menarik untuk disimak, di tengah-tengah gagasan berani itu, pada akhirnya comte memang mendapatkan banyak pengikut di prancis, maupun di sejumlah negara lain.

Auguste Comte wafat pada 5 september 1857.

You study the history of ideas with any number of objects in mind, I suppose, but for some of us, the fact that you meet every day of the year some of the oddest characters this side of the Addams and Osbourne families might prove primus inter pares. You button up your waistcoat, wipe the morning dew off your spectacles, and stroll into the Athenæum after your last swallow of tea and kippers, just knowing that at any moment any one of the marble busts is about to shriek, “I was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs (and/or Communism, phrenology, the Phlogiston theory, Marxism-Leninism, monomaniac mastication , &c.)!” in the language living or dead of your choice.

Oh, dear. I did just speak of waistcoats. Here’s this week’s treat from the Annals of Addled Abstraction, as noted by novelist  John Banville , reviewing in Saturday’s Guardian the sceptical contemporary English political philosopher John Gray , who I met a quarter-century ago during his Hayekian/Thatcherite phase, when he entered Laissez-Faire Books, the libertarians’ flagship bookshop whose storefront in lower Manhattan was just outside NYU, as was I, too, then, as a recent undergrad:

Gray has been having fun for years with that poor old crazy coot Comte  – one of whose initiatives for a new world order of brotherly love was a waistcoat with the buttons down the back so that it could be put on and taken off only with the help of others…

Inicio por uma descrição partitiva da tarefa solicitada, ou seja, a leitura do livro Ciência e Jornalismo, da herança positivista ao diálogo dos afetos, em especial a primeira parte “Positivo não operante, ou Auguste Comte Revisto”. Ali é tratada a crítica ao positivismo como regente da produção científica e mesmo do jornalismo, sendo a teoria positivista regida pela razão como o princípio e o fim de toda a nossa existência, enquanto que a professora, com contribuições de vários autores, propõe uma leveza de olhar em nosso cotidiano e mesmo na academia, afastando a rigidez matemática de René Descartes e a objetividade absoluta de Auguste Comte.

O relato objetivo termina aqui.

Fui educado, como todos, acho, dentro do positivismo. No entanto, fora do meu trabalho enquanto jornalista ou enquanto pesquisador, abro espaço para percepções mais poéticas da vida, principalmente, na observação cotidiana da vida, vivendo, e eu, sentindo, cada um desses momentos. Dentro disso, acredito que a música também proporcione essa transcendência do cenário objetivo, pois costuma ser uma síntese de nossas angústias e alegrias. A música tem na minha vida um espaço cativo de respiro, reflexão, bem-estar e novas experiências, sentimentais e sensoriais. E ela está presente o tempo todo – nesse momento mesmo escuto Los Hermanos, uma banda pop brasileira que fala de amor, do tempo, do cotidiano, de sensações e sentimentos, da vida, enfim.

Outro dia, em um encontro com meu orientador, o professor Renato Seixas, ele comentara sobre a relação que a música tem com muitas coisas da Filosofia que não os alunos nunca imaginam e citou um exemplo de uma canção que levara a seus alunos de graduação. Ou seja, o conhecimento, o saber, não está apenas nos livros, na rigidez normativa, na academia, em um telejornal, mas em qualquer lugar: em uma canção, na rua, em um parque, em um bate-papo, etc.

Gostaria de relatar um episódio ocorrido durante a leitura. Ao ler sobre as “marcas epistemológicas herdadas do Discurso sobre o espírito positivo”, mais especificamente o item “ênfase na utilidade pública dos serviços informativos”, me senti profundamente atingido. Sempre nos lugares que trabalhei e nos projetos que colaborei, defendi a tese de que a informação tinha que ser útil, pois o papel do jornalista era justamente esse, de levar uma informação de utilidade pública, com a utopia de ajudar o consumidor daquela notícia. E, ao ver esse ponto dentro da crítica do texto, me senti confuso: “então, isso não é bom? O que tem de errado nisso? O que fazer então pra que ajude o leitor?”. Minhas dúvidas saltadas assim que percorri os olhos pela fatídica linha talvez estejam focadas, erroneamente, no como fazer, sendo que o problema está no que fazer. Continuo sem resposta.

A minha inquietação – existente desde antes da leitura do texto, mas já no princípio dos encontros das quartas-feiras –, no sentido acadêmico, reside no fato de que, ao concordar com a pobreza da visão positivista encalacrada no nosso âmago intelectual (agravado pela minha formação de jornalista, que não bebe, mergulha na fonte comteana), me vejo em um beco sem saída do que fazer a partir dessa constatação: como produzir conhecimento sem os rigores acadêmicos? O abandono do positivismo como metodologia não impede esse rigor acadêmico pautada em hipóteses, justificativas, objetivos? Como diferenciar as armadilhas cartesianas-positivistas de uma produção condizente com uma preocupação com a realidade, só que, com uma realidade aberta, subjetiva? Como produzir conhecimento, debater teorias, formular e testar hipóteses, sem fugir da discussão reducionista do certo e o errado?

A minha dificuldade maior ainda é transportar essa quebra de paradigma para a produção teórica, em especifico, para o meu projeto de pesquisa, que não busca um mergulho em uma comunidade, não pretende ir às ruas (creio, nesses casos, menos complicado para a “arte de tecer o presente”), mas sim estudar documentos, declarações, discursos, de diplomatas e presidentes de Brasil e Venezuela, sobre a política externa para a América Latina, sob o recorte dos projetos de integração em andamento no subcontinente. Há a possibilidade de trazer a intuição-poética para um trabalho como esse? Ou, pelo menos, não incorrer no risco de uma sentença afirmativa, absoluta, de uma verdade a respeito do objeto estudado?

Confesso que participar desse curso e do mestrado em geral está sendo mais duro do que imaginava. Eu acreditava que teria todas as respostas, mas as dúvidas se assomam assustadoramente, me deixando, por vezes, perdido. Essa crise de paradigmas, ou o simples fato de haver esse tipo de discussão, essa “pulga atrás da orelha”, para mim, revela uma crise existencial, pois, se tudo em que acreditamos até hoje está equivocado, no que acreditar hoje?

Nós temos essa obrigatoriedade de ter algo em que crer, seja uma fé, uma teoria, um teórico, um time de futebol, um partido político, um parente. Precisamos nos apegar a algo como se fosse a última coisa existente, como uma verdade que nos proteja desse mundo confuso. Mas talvez seja o momento de perceber que as incertezas, as assimetrias e as instabilidades, tanto na vida quanto na academia (parte desta), devam ser aceitas como elementos vitais de nosso crescimento, tanto interior quanto em sociedade.

* Texto feito para discussão em sala de aula do dia 15/04/09, da disciplina “Signo da Relação: Revisão Epistemológica e Fundamentos Metodológicos da Dialogia na Comunicação Social”.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) fue un filósofo francés creador del positivismo y se le considera uno de los iniciadores de la sociología. Su teoría fundamental es la teoría de los tres estados por los que pasa la humanidad para encontrar explicación a los fenómenos que se dan, la cual se recoge en su obra Curso de filosofía positiva. Estos tres estados son el estado teológico o ficticio, el metafísico o abstracto y el científico o positivo.

En el estado teológico o ficticio la explicación de los hechos se concibe desde el punto de vista divino, como su propio nombre indica este estado se basa en explicaciones teológicas de la realidad. El estado metafísico o abstracto es la naturaleza el factor en torno al cual se encuentran las explicaciones necesarias, en este stado no se contempla la existencia de fenómenos paranormales, sino que se considera que en el caso de que éstos se den, tienen una explicación natural desconocida hasta el momento. Por último, el estado científico o positivo contempla  que los hechos solo pueden ser conocidos empíricamente y a partir de su observación se descubrirán las leyes naturales que realmente rigen el mundo.

Fuente: Wikipedia

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (Montpellier, 19 de janeiro de 1798 — Paris, 5 de setembro de 1857) foi um filósofo francês, propositor da Sociologia e o fundador do Positivismo.

Nascido em Montpellier, no Sul da França, Augusto Comte desde cedo revelou uma grande capacidade intelectual e uma prodigiosa memória. Seu interesse pelas ciências naturais era conjugado pelas questões históricas e sociais e, com 16 anos, em 1814, ingressou na Escola Politécnica de Paris. No período de 1817-1824 foi secretário do conde Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), expoente do socialismo utópico; todavia, como Saint-Simon apropriava-se dos escritos de seus discípulos para si e como dava ênfase apenas à economia na interpretação dos problemas sociais, Comte rompeu com ele, passando a desenvolver autonomamente suas reflexões. São dessa época algumas fórmulas fundamentais: “Tudo é relativo, eis o único princípio absoluto” (1819) e “Todas as concepções humanas passam por três estádios sucessivos – teológico, metafísico e positivo -, com uma velocidade proporcional à velocidade dos fenômenos correspondentes” (1822) (a famosa “lei dos três estados”).

Comte trabalhava intensamente na criação de uma filosofia positiva quando, em virtude de problemas conjugais, sofreu um colapso nervoso, em 1826. Recuperado, mergulhou na redação do Curso de filosofia positiva (posteriormente, em 1848, renomeado para Sistema de filosofia positiva), que lhe tomou doze anos. Em 1842, por criticar a corporação universitária francesa, perdeu o emprego de examinador de admissão à Escola Politécnica e começou a ser ajudado por admiradores, como o pensador inglês John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). No mesmo ano, Comte separou-se de Caroline Massin, após 17 anos de casamento. Em 1845, apaixonou-se por Clotilde de Vaux, que morreria no ano seguinte. Entre 1851 e 1854 Comte redigiu o Sistema de política positiva, em que extraiu algumas das principais conseqüências de sua concepção de mundo não-teológica e não-metafisica, propondo uma interpretação pura e plenamente humana para a sociedade e sugerindo soluções para os problemas sociais; no volume final dessa obra, apresentou as instituições principais de sua Religião da Humanidade. Em 1856, publicou o livro Síntese subjetiva, primeiro e único volume de uma série de quatro dedicados a tratar de questões específicas das sociedades humanas: lógica, indústria, pedagogia, psicologia, mas faleceu, possivelmente de câncer, em 5 de setembro de 1857, em Paris. Sua última casa, na rua Monsieur-le-Prince, 10, foi posteriormente adquirido por positivistas e transformado no Museu Casa de Augusto Comte.

“Wichtig is uffm Platz!” – diese Fußballerweisheit hat sich mittlerweile herumgesprochen. Wie jedoch machen sich Soziologen “uffm Platz”? Welche Fähigkeiten verkörpern sie, welche Stärken und Schwächen offenbaren sich? An dieser Stelle werden 11 ausgewählte Klassiker der Soziologie vorgestellt und ihre Eigenschaften auf das Fußballfeld übertragen. In der ersten Folge: Auguste Comte im Tor.

von Martin Booker

Sepp Maier hat einst die Charaktereigenschaften eines Torhüters beschrieben:”Ein genialer Torhüter [...] braucht angeborene Fähigkeiten, so was kann man nicht erlernen. Verrückt muss er sein. Ein Besessener, ein Außenseiter, sogar im eigenen Team.” Was die “Katze von Anzing” über seinen einstigen Protegé Oliver Kahn sagte, trifft ebenso gut auf die Nummer 1 unserer Soziologen-Elf, Auguste Comte, zu. Auch er gilt als schwierig, selbstverliebt, bisweilen eingebildet.

Comte eckte vor allem in der Vergangenheit desöftern an. Insbesondere seine rethorischen Spitzen gegen die Metaphysik, die er als “jungenhaft” verspottete und nie so recht ernst nehmen wollte, brachte ihm nicht nur Freunde ein. Von seinem einstigen Mentor und Lehrer Graf Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon trennte sich Comte in Streit. Aufgrund seiner “Philosophie des Positivismus”, seines blinden Fortschrittsglaubens und seiner darin zum Ausdruck kommenden Rechthaberei wollten ihn auf Dauer nur wenige im Team haben. Brennend vor Ehrgeiz und ohne Rücksicht auf seine Mitspieler wollte Comte eine “soziale Physik” etablieren, mit der man den Fortschritt von Gesellschaften zuverlässig messen und steuern konnte. Im Jahre 1838 gab er diesem Ansinnen den seltsamen griechisch-lateinischen Hybridnamen “Soziologie”. Die Ecole Polytechnique etwa lehnte ihn “wegen der unmoralischen Falschheit seines mathematisierenden Materialismus” ab.  

Auguste Comte / Wikipedia creative commons

Doch wie so oft und wie bei so vielen anderen Torhütern liegen auch bei Comte Genie und Wahnsinn nicht weit auseinander. Tatsächlich rettete er mit seinen Glanzleistungen der Soziologie den ein oder anderen Punkt gegen die ihrerzeit so dominante religiöse Weltanschaunug wie auch gegen die Empirielosigkeit der Philosophie. 

Auch seine Idee einer neuen, aufgeklärten ”Religion der Menschlichkeit”, die an die Stelle der herkömmlichen Religionen treten sollte, fand durchaus ihre Anhänger. Das Land Brasilien integrierte Comtes berühmtes Credo “Ordung und Forschritt” (Ordem e Progresso) in seine Nationalflagge. Auch in Frankreich, Polen und Italien fand Comtes Konzept der positiven Philosophie seine Anhänger.

In den letzten Jahren ist es stiller geworden um den Mann, dem die Soziologie ihren Namen verdankt. Insbesondere seine Eheschließung mit der ehemaligen Prostuierten Caroline Massin scheint eine stabilisierende Wirkung auf den Exzentriker gehabt zu haben. Wie so mancher Torhüter hält er sich weiterhin für den Größten. Über den Einwand seines Teamkollegen Merton, er stehe selbst nur auf den Schultern von Riesen, lächelt er, der sich selbst für den Titan der Soziologie hält, nur müde.

Comte ist ins Alter gekommen. Die Reflexe sind nicht mehr die frischesten und seine Herangehensweise an das Spiel ist mit Sicherheit nicht mehr ganz zeitgemäß. Doch der Veteran gleicht dies durch seine Erfahrung und seinen nach wie vor brennenden Ehrgeiz aus, und so verwundert es nicht, dass er für den Posten zwischen den Pfosten, für die Nummer Eins der Soziologenelf, ranghafte Konkurrenten wie de Saint Simon [wiki], Adam Ferguson [wiki] und Ibn Chaldun [wiki] ausstechen konnte.

“Sehen um vorauszusehen, so lautet der Spruch der wahrhaften Wissenschaft.” Mit diesem Motto auf stolzgeschwellter Brust hütet Auguste Comte das Tor der Soziologen-Elf.

Auguste Comte [wiki] wurde am 19. Januar 1798 in Montpellier geboren und starb am 5. September 1857 in Paris. Seine letzten Worte sind überliefert und können an Wahrheitsgehalt kaum überboten werden: “Welch ein unvergleichlicher Verlust.”

Alle Soziologie-Fanshirts gibt es unter Soziologie-Fanshop.de. 

Bildquelle A.Comte: Wikipedia CC