19th Century Philosophers:
August Comte (1798-1857)
I. Life
Comte came from a reasonably well-to-do family, his father being a regional tax collector. He rejected fairly early his family’s fervent Catholicism and Royalism, announcing his atheism at the age of 14. He seems to have maintained a “love-hate” relationship with his family throughout his entire life. He was an excellent student who studied for two years at the Ecole Polytechnique, a premier school devoted to the study of the sciences. In 1818 he because a secretary to and a disciple of the French social philosopher Saint-Simon (1760-1825), although they had a falling-out shortly before Saint-Simon’s death. Saint-Simon was an inventive but not a systematic thinker. Comte took over several ideas from him and developed them. For example (a) the idea of founding and directing society on a scientific basis and (b) developing a science of human behavior.
He entered into an unhappy marriage at his family’s insistence in 1825. He separated from his wife in 1842 and then established a brief relationship with a Madame Clotilde de Vaux, whose husband had been sentenced to the galleys for life. She apparently had influence upon Comte’s later philosophy. IN 1826 he began to offer a course of lectures on his Positive Philosophy and attracted some noteworthy thinkers, such as the scientist Humboldt, but he soon suffered a mental breakdown. His recovery took a year and at some point he threw himself into the Seine River in Paris but was rescued. He resumed his lectures in 1828. Between 1839 and 1842 he published the Course of Positive Philosophy in six volumes.
In 1833 he became an examiner for students applying to the Ecole Polytechnique, a position that doubled his modest income, although he lost the position because of some comments in the Preface to the sixth volume of the Course of Positive Philosophy. During the years 1852-54 he published his System of Positive Polity. As a person, Comte was a rather egotistical and arrogant individual although he was also supremely and sincerely devoted to what he took to be his role in bringing about human progress. John Stuart Mill solicited three English friends to give Comte some money for a temporary time after the loss of the examiner’s position. When they stopped sending the money after a year, Comte accused them of falling away from righteousness and high-mindedness.
