LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

here things become considerably more complicated: the thinker of these thoughts is Auguste Comte. The Future of Intelligence is Maurras and French reactionary politics at its most theoretically ambitious, and in its pages Maurras bestows praise upon Comte at almost every opportunity, as liberally as many of his contemporary “progressive” antagonists in universities and letters alike. At the outset of the book, Maurras declares that it is “the genius of Auguste Comte” that “instituted the magnificent rule” known by “the name of Positivism.”¹¹⁰ There is “no name that one must pronounce with a more lively gratitude.”¹¹¹ For Comte sought a “science of societies”¹¹² and saw that the future must include the integrative, even supreme role of this science—sociology. He also understood that, in Comte’s own words, glowingly quoted by Maurras, “man must be more and more subordinated to humanity” (which Maurras interprets as individual submission to particular collectives). There is indeed progress, but as Comte said, “Progress is the development of order.”¹¹³

      In a limited but surprising way, Maurras agrees with many of his adversaries in the preponderant intellectual coalition. For him as much as for Renan and Durkheim, the future is scientific, and social science is the key to realizing the possibilities of that future. Time, and with it history, is inexorably and progressively linear. Maurras quotes Comte in a manner that, absent the identifying source, would not have incurred the opposition of a sociologist like Simiand. There is no “freedom of conscience” in astronomy or physics, because there we have scientific principles established by “competent men.” It is different in politics because the old principles are gone, and new ones have not yet been secured.¹¹⁴ But Maurras, still quoting Comte, agrees that it is science that will find the principles of a new order and “reorganize society.”¹¹⁵

      Of course, the Maurrassian vision is distinct: Maurras seeks a polity without elections, in which those who rule designate their own successors.¹¹⁶ Religion plays a prominent role, even without faith in God, in which humanity itself, in Comtean fashion, becomes an object of divine reverence.¹¹⁷ The past is indeed a yoke upon the present, but a “noble” one,¹¹⁸ integrated into the science of the future. Maurras, unlike someone like Littré, thinks that the late Comte was quite right to move in the direction of an allegedly scientific religion.

      Maurras offers a reading of Comte in order to propose a future broadly “authorized” by Comte; many in the intellectual coalition warmed to the same task but emphasized a certain series of questions and methods extrapolated from Comte, rather than his discrete ambitions for an applied sociology instantiated in cultural and spiritual life. Their differences move amid many more affinities and homologies than one would assume. It is a disagreement about what precisely a truly scientific, truly modern future—drawn from and inspired by an inexorable sociological positivism—demands.

      This should in no way be mistaken for the historically facile and morally irresponsible claim that in response to the immediate moral questions of their own time, right-wing reaction and the advocates of immanent becoming at the turn of the last century were the same. Among other things, the unifying importance of anti-Semitism among the acolytes of reaction is an enormous moral difference between the two groups, as is the clearly stronger commitment to due process among reaction’s opponents. Upon questions of method and argument, there are other distinctions: Maurras wrote belles-lettres, a genre of inquiry and reflection that Durkheim, for example, had detested from his student days. But for all that, it is essential to understand that on questions of science, sociology, and time, the work of Maurras and, say, Renan, Durkheim, and Simiand participated in shared, profound, and eminently debatable philosophical and historical assumptions.

      What is still more remarkable is that this Comtean, sociological fascination, spreading its wings to cast its shadow across the political and cultural spectrum, became in that very moment the target of penetrating criticism. Furthermore, this critique of the “received” positivist account of science—of flat, linear time, of cumulative scientific progress in the formulation of demonstrable laws, of science as methodically secure and perpetually, progressively liberating itself from contamination by the archaic, the subjective, the uncertain and the imprecise, intended to make a science of society and an ethics for modernity to replace what had been definitively superseded—did not arrive only in the form of artistic protests by Montmartre bohemians, prompted by absinthe-infused dreams, laboring épater le bourgeois. It came from within the labor and reflection of science itself—and at the very highest levels.

      Science Questioning Science; Philosophy Unbowed

      In 1898, the mathematician and philosopher Gaston Milhaud published an article in the Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, entitled “La Science rationelle.” It expresses the unmistakable brio of a confident contrarian. Milhaud repeatedly emphasizes how science depends upon the given, including temporal givens. For example, we assume the notion of “succession in time” as when thunder follows lightning; we do not establish them in each instance.¹¹⁹ We cannot make a precise comparison of “consecutive duration,” nor can we know what “series of circumstances” would be required for perfect identities of temporal measurement.¹²⁰ (This is equally true in the twenty-first century: even with satellites and the Global Positioning System, time is a consensus among different time measurements, for “not all labs calculate their clock data exactly the same way.” In truth, “the algorithm” now used to calculate exact time requires “individual mathematical artistry” that gives an “exact” Universal Coordinated Time, about a month later, in the form of a newsletter.)¹²¹

      Then there are those nontemporal elements that, “constructed,” are often “quite close to the given.”¹²² Nonspecialists assume that the planets move in a smooth ellipse around the sun, for example, but that depends upon the points used to chart a planet’s trajectory. We must acknowledge “with astronomers that the immobility of the sun is still only a fiction, and that, in sum, the movement of the planets as we represent it today is always a relative movement.”¹²³ Similar ambiguities surround the use of central concepts in physics, like “the proportionality of force to acceleration.”¹²⁴

      Scientific instruments are assumed to endow measurement with perfect exactitude, but in actual experiments, instruments must be accompanied by “a host of corrections,” for “temperature, atmospheric pressure, air density, etc.”¹²⁵ There are theories devoted to standard formulae for correction, but absolute precision exists neither in the instruments themselves nor in the rules for their adjustment. Even the most rigorous experiments rely upon a mass of assumptions, postulates, and instruments that are all being tested in the experiment, rather than the test being confined to a single isolated variable or series of variables. Many different accounts of the same scientific observations can be given.¹²⁶ Given all these realities, the “postulates, concepts, [and] the constructions that we have indicated are indispensable to the understanding of these [scientific] laws” would “also well deserve the name of chimeras, if this word was reserved for all that is not directly verifiable.”¹²⁷

      Milhaud awakens his readers from a Cartesian dream of demonstrable certitude, reconfigured by Comtean positivism and its descendants. Yet he calls upon a phrase in Comte’s own writing to undo what Milhaud called “the exaggerated promises of positivism,” since Comte once acknowledged that hypotheses are not necessarily a faithful, neutral representation of the real, and are chosen for their “advantages.”¹²⁸ Hence Milhaud does not argue for thoroughgoing skepticism about all knowledge, but he insists that science must recognize the “active intervention” and “creative intervention of the mind” in scientific research and experiment.¹²⁹ Scientists must accept imprecision and uncertainty as they work—and that as part of that work, their own creative powers are indispensable and cannot be relegated to some earlier stage of scientific inquiry. In this account of scientific rationality, science can legitimately approach “other forms of thought”—in particular, those with an “aesthetic character.”¹³⁰ In this way, Milhaud claims for physics an aesthetic attunement that Lanson, Seignobos, and others had sought to banish from the humanities themselves.

      Milhaud’s account of science finding inspiration

Скачать книгу