Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Condorcet, by appealing to the habitual assumption that history had a pre-
ordained purpose and direction. The positivist notion of progress, in other
words, remained an article of faith, the unexamined background assumption
against which Saint-Simon and Comte would plot their evolutionary visions.
If history was innately progressive, this meant that positive science
was its apocalypse, the same awakening to scientific self-consciousness that
Condorcet had projected. The difference was that Galileo, Descartes, and
Bacon were no longer the chief prophets of this new epoch. Saint-Simon
and Comte claimed this role for themselves. This was because the substance
of that revelation was no longer the formal mapping of scientific reasoning,
such as we associate with these seventeenth-century figures; the new apoca-
lypse was the discovery of a science of history that integrated and subsumed
all other endeavors of inquiry.
The mimetic bases of this science of history become especially appar-
ent, just as with Condorcet, in the necessary deviations from the historical
record that were necessary to make this account consistent with a pre-
established narrative form. Condorcet needed to force fit the past into a
structure dominated by a perennial war between reason and superstition
in order to explain why the tide of inevitable progress had been held back
for so long. Saint-Simon's evolutionary periodizations grew out of a differ-
ent thesis, but one no less likely to reinvent the past in the image of an
imagined positivist future. Since positive science was the natural end of
religious evolution, he needed to make the great age of monotheism look
much more science-like than it in fact had been. This accounts for the
different scientific role given to Socrates in Saint-Simon's
Introduction aux
travaux scientifiques
as compared with Condorcet's
Esquisse
. As we saw in
the previous chapter, Condorcet fashioned Socrates as a full-blown man of
science whose martyrdom had forestalled the revolutionary age of science.
Once having claimed that nature's great apocalypse was on the verge of
erupting through Socrates' genius, Condorcet needed to posit an opposing
priesthood possessed by such malice and genius as could frustrate it. But
Socrates' untimely death is not even mentioned in Saint-Simon's account,
let alone treated as an instance of religious persecution. In fact, Socrates is
championed much more for his theological genius than for his philosophi-
cal wisdom. Having taken his inspiration for this historical narrative from
Dupuis, Saint-Simon identified science with religion as two manifestations
of a single historical process at different stages of its evolution. No less than
the Socrates of the
Esquisse
, Saint-Simon's hero remained a scientific figure
by virtue of his discovery of the synthetic or
a priori
mode of reasoning,
