The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (32 page)

By 1826, when Comte was only twenty-eight, he was presenting his “system of positive philosophy” in a series of lectures to a private audience of leading Paris intellectuals. But after only two lectures he could not continue, and was so disturbed that he was taken to an asylum. To satisfy his mother, his marriage to Caroline was solemnized in a Catholic ceremony, but he was unable to sign the register. In deep depression, he attempted suicide by jumping off the Pont des Arts into the Seine, but was rescued by a passing soldier. He gradually recovered his faculties and successfully resumed the lecture series in 1829. Over the next twelve years the lectures were published in six volumes—the
Cours de philosophie positive.

Here Comte proposed his “law of human development,” which became famous with its appealingly simple three stages. Human progress (and each branch of our knowledge), he observed, had passed through three stages—“the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.” In the first stage, explanations depended on supernatural beings, gods or spirits; in the second stage explanations were by abstract forces, essences, and final causes. “In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destiny of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their laws. . . . Reasoning and observation, duly combined, are the means of this knowledge . . . the establishment of a connection between single phenomena and some general facts, the number of which continually diminishes with the progress of science.” The second, or “abstract,” stage was necessary because “The human understanding, slow in its advance, could not step at once from the theological into the positive philosophy. . . . an intermediated system of conceptions has been necessary to render the transition possible.”

Each of the sciences in turn had also gone through these stages, and Comte arranged his “hierarchy” of the sciences—beginning with the simplest or most general, the inorganic, and proceeding to the most complex, the organic. Each science depended on the science below it in the hierarchy. “Thus we have before us Five fundamental Sciences in successive dependence—Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and finally Social Physics.” And this Social Physics—for which unifying science, the highest of the hierarchy of sciences, Comte invented the name Sociology—“is what men have now most need of; and this it is the principal aim of the present work to establish.”

Comte’s own life would dramatize the weaknesses of the rigid rationalism that he had preached. His wife, Caroline, left him and he taught erratically at the Polytechnique. He then fell in love with Clotilde de Vaux, the married sister of one of his pupils, who had been abandoned by her husband. But she died in 1846, after only a year of their passionate association, and he never recovered from his loss. He made a ritual of her memory, regularly visited her tomb, and wrote her a letter each year. His life became a ritual, in which he ended his evening dinner with a crust of dry bread, “meditating on the numerous poor who were unable to procure even that means of nourishment in return for their work.”

By the time Comte finished the final volume of his
System of Positive Philosophy
in 1854 his works had been translated and exerted a strong influence in England. Positivist societies were growing around the world. When Harriet Martineau condensed Comte’s
Cours de philosophie positive
into two volumes and translated it into English, the pious Martineau explained that “The supreme dread of every one who cares for the good of nation or race is that men should be adrift for want of an anchorage for their convictions. . . . a very large proportion of our people are now so adrift. . . . The work of M. Comte is unquestionably the greatest single effort that has been made to obviate this kind of danger.” Comte too was well aware that the progress of science and industry had created a crisis of belief.

Comte did not see science as a cure-all for the loss of moral convictions in a science-obsessed society. “Monotheism in Western Europe,” he observed in his
General View of Positivism
(1848), “is now as obsolete and as injurious as polytheism was fifteen centuries ago. The discipline in which its moral value principally consisted has long since decayed. . . . The noblest of all practical pursuits, that of social regeneration, is at the present time in direct opposition to it. For by its vague notion of Providence, it prevents men from forming a true conception of Law. . . . Sincere believers in Christianity will soon cease to interfere with the management of a world, where they profess themselves to be pilgrims and strangers.”

Comte is ready with his answer to this need for meaning. “We tire of thinking and even of acting,” he made his motto for
The General View of Positivism.
“We never tire of loving.” “The new general doctrine aims at something more than satisfying the Intellect. . . . it is in reality quite as favourable to Feeling and even to Imagination.” So Comte rounds out his system by elaborating “the Religion of Humanity.” “Love . . . is our principle; Order our basis; and Progress our end.” “Positivism becomes, in the true sense of the word, a Religion; the only religion which is real and complete; destined therefore to replace all imperfect and provisional systems resting on the primitive basis of theology.” The successor to Christianity, his religion surpasses it.

And the Religion of Humanity will have its own festivals. “In every week of the year some new aspect of Order or Progress will be held up to public veneration; and in each the link connecting public and private worship will be found in the adoration of Woman. . . . All the points in which the morality of Positive Science excels the morality of revealed religion are summed up in the substitution of Love of Humanity for Love of God.” A new kind of Worship of the Dead will be the services commemorating those eminent persons in the past who have served morality and progress. The most important object of the regenerated polity will be “the substitution of Duties for Rights; thus subordinating personal to social considerations. The word
Right
should be excluded from Political language, as the word
Cause
from the language of philosophy.”

Since Catholicism, according to Comte, is now no more than “an imposing historical ruin,” he offers us what T. H. Huxley called “Catholicism minus Christianity.” Comte’s world, governed by the iron laws of sociology, has no need for the liberty of mere opinions. Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.

Karl Marx’s Pursuit of Destiny

The most influential of the new “scientific” historians was also the prophet of worldwide revolution. “As Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature,” Friedrich Engels declared at the graveside of his hero, “so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” But while Darwin shook faith in the prevailing religion of Western Europe, Karl Marx (1818-1883) created a new religion of Revolution. His new historicism charted the destiny of Western civilization in an ideology that revealed the shaping forces of which men were part but which gave little freedom for mankind to deflect the material forces. Marx might have said, as Bertrand Russell has observed, that he did not advocate socialism but only prophesied it. The movement for which Marx supplied the sacred text would command a life-risking passion no less than the faith of the Christian saints and martyrs of the Middle Ages.

Marx’s personal background was marked by conflicting loyalties. Trier, the town where he was born, had some of the most important Roman remains of northern Europe as well as an elegant Gothic cathedral, and prospered from factories making iron and leather goods. It had been a French department under Napoleon, but passed to Prussia after his fall. Marx’s father was a lawyer, a devotee of Voltaire and the Enlightenment philosophers. Marx was one of seven children. His grandfather was a rabbi in Trier who was succeeded in the synagogue by his uncle. Marx’s mother, who came from Holland, was also descended from a line of rabbis. She spoke only broken German. About a year before Karl was born, his father, Heinrich, was baptized in the Evangelical Established Church of Prussia, and Karl himself was baptized when he was six. The conversion was convenient, and probably necessary for Heinrich’s position as a practicing lawyer. Karl happily married Jenny von Westphalen, a beautiful and spirited girl four years his senior, who came from a non-Jewish Prussian aristocratic family.

After the Trier high school, Marx attended the University of Bonn in 1835. The high school at Trier had been under police surveillance for suspected liberal teachers, and student life at Bonn was disrupted by the arrest of students for disturbing the Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Marx joined in the student life, fought a duel, and was once jailed for being drunk and disorderly. Then he went on to the University of Berlin to study law and philosophy. There he became one of the Young Hegelians. In 1841 he offered his doctoral dissertation for a degree at Jena, known to have lower academic standards. He used the Hegelian dialectic to expound the differences between the materialist philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. He idolized Prometheus, and in his foreword he already revealed his aggressive spirit. “As long as one drop of blood still pulses through the world-conquering and untrammelled heart of philosophy it will always defy its enemies with the words of Epicurus: not he is Godless who scorns the Gods of the multitude, but he who accepts the opinions of the multitude concerning the Gods.”

Another influence toward a materialist philosophy entered Marx’s life with the publications of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), who argued (1839) “that Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of mankind.” In his own philosophy Marx managed to combine Hegel’s dialectic with Feuerbach’s materialism in what became his materialist interpretation of history (“Dialectical Materialism”). When Marx left the university he became a journalist, reporting and editorializing on the miseries of the Berlin poor as well as on other issues. His liberal alarms were so effective that the paper he wrote for, the
Rheinische Zeitung,
was soon suspended by the Prussian authorities. After a jury in Cologne in 1849 acquitted him of press offenses and inciting to armed insurrection, he went to Paris to study communism. But within the year he was expelled from Paris, and emigrated to London, where he remained in exile till his death in 1883. After 1851 he was European correspondent for
The New York Tribune,
for whom he wrote some five hundred articles and editorials.

Marx lived in conflict between his two vocations—as the scholarly social scientist and as the passionate prophet of social justice. He was equally committed and equally vigorous in both. His restless exploring mind helped him assimilate and review the elusive abstractions of Hegel, Feuerbach, and others into explanations of the facts of life that he observed and reported around him. The everyday horrors of the newly flourishing industrial system that he observed in England and learned about through his close friend the Manchester industrialist Friedrich Engels documented the findings of English Royal Commissions, fueled his moral indignation, and inspired his hopes for a better society. In both roles he had the advantage of a restless pen, equally fluent of wit and vitriol.

Karl Marx proved to be the perfect transitional figure between the Age of the Religious Why, which sought to explain the world by the end (To what purpose?), and the Age of the Science Why (From what cause?). From Salvation to Evolution. He somehow preserved a sense of meaning and purpose in history while revealing the laws of social change. So for his followers Marx was able to avoid the emptiness of a valueless world ruled by impersonal forces by assuring them of the triumph of justice in the long run. His moral prophecies were all encapsulated in the security of science. The Marxian history would offer salvation without Christianity.

How did he manage to provide so persuasive and powerful an ideology? In harmony with the modern empirical spirit Marx’s ideology was not a theology, a metaphysic, or a moral philosophy, but purported to be a pure science of history. Before he was thirty he had laid out the outlines of his materialist theory—which came to be called “dialectical materialism.” He had developed his ideas in journalistic articles and polemics, including
The Holy Family
(1845),
The German Ideology
(1845-46),
The Poverty of Philosophy
(1847), and
The Communist Manifesto
(1848). Marx himself would describe the “guiding thread” of these works and the essence of his theory in a famous summary passage:

The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.

So far in history all methods of production (“the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois”) had depended on “antagonism”—between the producers and the beneficiaries of production. He forecasts that “the bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production . . . at the same time the production forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism.” This will be “the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.” So Marx’s “science” of history ends on an apocalyptic note.

According to Marx, Darwin’s great achievement was to interest us in “the history of nature’s technology.” Engels, as we have seen, eulogized Marx for having similarly “discovered the law of evolution in human history.” For Marxists, Marx had discovered the technology of human history—the forces and institutions that shaped and changed society. The dynamic role of social classes determined the course of history. Capitalism had made the workers into an alienated class. “What the bourgeoisie . . . produces, above all,” he prophesied in the
Communist Manifesto,
“are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” He concluded the
Manifesto
by appealing to the proletariat to fulfill his scientific prophecy: “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” His was not a plea to fight against menacing odds, but rather an invitation to join the bandwagon of history, to move with the current.