Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
clarity of this scientific performance.
52
But Durkheim's failure to look this
in the face seems to violate the very sociological principle he had absorbed
from positivism, the recognition that religion could not sustain social order
if it was truly reduced to something else. It is for this reason that Voegelin
parts ways with other interpreters and regards the “intramundane eschatol-
ogy” of positivism, rather than its scientific claims, as its key feature.
53
The
very motive force of this religiosity would have been rendered impotent if
Comte and Saint-Simon had genuinely enforced the reductive interpreta-
tions they posited. Thus it was Comte's “pseudo-prophetic charisma” that
enlarged positivism's fortunes in Europe. In spite of the “dubious scien-
tific value” of his ideas, they were endowed “with the glow of revelation on
whose acceptance depends the salvation of mankind.”
54
These different interpretations are made possible by the notable fact
that neither Saint-Simon nor Comte makes any concerted effort to qualify
his use of religious references so as to ensure that readers will consistently
understand these utterances within the framework of positivist epistemol-
ogy. This is to say that the scientific, or metonymic, meanings of religious
language are never carefully distinguished from pantheistic, or synecdochic,
ones. Instead, we find these writers continuously shifting back and forth
across an invisible but vital line that segregates these two realms of meaning.
We see this, for instance, in the analogies that Comte forges in his
Sys-
téme de politique positive
between the Catholicism of the previous age and the
positivist world to come. On the reductive side of our imaginary line, this
manifests in the theory developed in his earlier
Cours
which proposed that
sociology was the full realization of a scientific consciousness that formerly
resided in the theological worldview. Formally, the “Catholic” thought that
was evolving into scientific knowledge was destined to shed all of its origi-
nal religious meaning, but Comte makes no real effort to discourage read-
ers from thinking otherwise. His active appropriation of the language of
Christianity gives readers the liberty to cross back and forth between the
reductive scientific and religious sides of this invisible divide. He in fact
encourages this by continuously insisting that his positivist doctrines have
“spiritual” import.
55
Readers are free to suppose that this term is a mere
metonym acknowledging the naturalistic content presumed to lie inside the
mere container of theology, but they also remain free to spiritualize nature
by identifying content with container. Comte's formal stance absolves him
of any obligation to resolve this ambivalence, since it technically endorses
a reductive interpretation, but this does not silence the suggestive power of
his religious references.
