Positivism: summary of the philosophical conception that characterized the worldview of the educated classes in the first half of the 19th century, characteristics and exponents.The term positivism refers to a philosophical movement that was widespread in 19th-century Europe, which influenced various fields: from literature to philosophy, but also science and history.
Positivism bases knowledge on real facts and draws certainty exclusively from the observation of experimental sciences . The origins of positivism are to be found in the English and French Enlightenment : from the first it will deduce the empiricist and utilitarian matrices, from the second the principle according to which the progress of all knowledge depends on the progress of positive science.
From Comte to Spencer
Positivist thought found a favorable environment for its development starting from 1830 : progress of natural sciences, first technical applications of scientific discoveries and their reflections in social and economic fields. The greatest representative of positivism was the Frenchman A. Comte , but positivism also spread in England, especially thanks to John Stuart Mill , who was committed to removing moral science from its usual uncertainties to establish instead a firm set of rules for it. The greatest exponent in England was Charles Darwin , but Herbert Spencer also had a certain importance .
Positivism in Italy and Germany
In Germany, positivism is placed in a position more properly defined as ” materialism “: it derives from Franco-English positivism and from the strong progress made by natural sciences and biology. In Italy, followers of positivism were Carlo Cattaneo and Roberto Ardigò , who conceived philosophy as a discipline of the organization of scientific data and carried out an original reform of Spencer’s evolutionary doctrines.
Positivist thinking
Positivism is characterized as a reaction to the irrationalistic outcomes of Romanticism and the reconnection with some instances of Enlightenment reflection. Trust in reason , in science and deterministic conception of human action. Extension of the experimental method to fields that in the past were the domain of morality or metaphysics. Foundation of new disciplines , such as sociology or the methodological renewal of various disciplines having man as their object, such as medicine, physiology, biology and psychology. Notions such as evolution , struggle for survival and heredity or cultural assumptions such as determinism , the experimental method and the dependence of human behavior on environmental conditions.
Assumption of scientific rationality as the sole paradigm, criterion and model of knowledge. Scientific knowledge, say the positivists, is based on facts and not on irrational and arbitrary intuitions or on vague and confused metaphysical ideas. The new science does not want to discover the ” why ” of the existence of a behavior , but more concretely the ” how ” and what are the laws of its functioning . Positivism considers man and the spirit as phenomena to be studied with the same detachment and objectivity with which physical and chemical phenomena are observed.
Positivism and progress
The main theme of positivism is progress : the belief that the development of humanity proceeds according to a pattern implying the achievement of increasingly higher levels of scientific knowledge and socioeconomic well-being. Consequently, the aesthetics and poetics directly connected to it privileged the social aspects of the artistic phenomenon and identified social commitment as essential to the poet and the artist (with an inevitable reduction in the right to individual expression).
The use of the term “positive” reveals an ideology or a program of economic, social, political action that sees in science and technology the foundation of its ideals and the instrument to realize them (all knowledge regarding questions of fact is based, therefore, on the “positive” data of experience ). Its absolute and almost mystical faith in science makes it become, in certain cases, like metaphysics (in fact it considers science as the only valid and effective knowledge).
