From the second half of the 19th century, the romanticism that characterized German idealism began to lose its validity. Positivism aims to “stick to the facts” and takes experimental science as a model of all rationality. But paradoxically, so many positivists have exalted science and humanity in their ability to produce science, which can be considered, in essence, romantic. There are those who even claim that positivism is a kind of “romanticism of science”.
It is possible that Augustus Comte best represents positivism, so much that he could be considered its founder.
Overall, positive science can be described by:
Propose a new model of scientific rationality
To remain within the realm of facts, understanding the latter not so much the immediate data of the senses but the relationships between such data, that is the scientific laws. Laws cease to be made to become generalizations about facts.
Agonosticism, metaphysics is despised as it considers unknowable everything beyond the facts.
Science is the only guide for humanity and taking the ideals of enlightenment, relies on indefinite progress.
The value of science is subordinated to the practical function of knowledge and is relativized in its historical sense.
It represents bourgeois ideology as it defends utilitarianism.
It can thus be stated that the ideals of positivism coincide partially with those of Bacon, who tried to collect the first results of the industrial revolution. But positivism was also an attempt to remedy the social conflicts of the nineteenth century.
There is, in positivism, a remarkable relationship with empiricism, as they value the information that comes from experience. But there is a clear difference, for positivism it is, without hesitation, a realism: the senses come into contact with reality and the laws of nature express with real connections and not simply subjective habits.
In this vein, the philosophy of Comte has a clear intention of social reform in the context of the consequences of the French Revolution. Comte postulates that reform cannot be carried out successfully but precedes a theoretical reform. Comte opposes order to revolution, which brings it closer to the philosophers of the Restoration, but separates from them to seek order in progress, not in the return to the past.
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The Positive State
“ It consists of this law that in each of our main conceptions, each branch of our knowledge, passes successively through three different theoretical states: the theological or fictional state; the metaphysical or abstract state; the scientific or positive state. (...) In the theological state, the human spirit, essentially directing its investigations towards the intimate nature of beings, the first and final causes of all the effects it perceives, is a word, towards absolute knowledge, phenomena are represented as produced by the direct and continuous action of supernatural agents, more or less numerous, whose arbitrary intervention explains all the apparent anomalies of the universe. In the metaphysical state, which is not in the background but a simple general modification of the former, supern natural agents are replaced by abstract forces... Finally, in the positive state, it is the human spirit, recognizing the impossibility of obtaining absolute notions, renounces to seek the origin and destiny of the universe and to know the intimate causes of phenomena, in order to devote itself solely to discovering, through the well-controlled use of reasoning and observation, its effective laws.” Augusto Comte, Course of Positive Philosophy, 1830
In short, Comte is an 'idealist' in the sense that for him it is the ideas that will determine the social order, for him, the cause of the political and moral crisis lies in intellectual anarchy. Revolutionary 'disorder' could only start the path of 'order and progress' through a new system of ideas, this system would be positive philosophy, the third state after theological and metaphysical. But it is also rationalist and enlightened in that it admits a linear pogreso of humanity with a goal that is the triumph of rationality. Positivism manifests itself in that such rationality is scientific (or 'positive'). And finally, based on the general idea of 'order', Comte's philosophy is conservative.