28 POSITIVISM

Positivism (from the Latin. Positivus - "positive") is a paradigmatic gnoseo-methodological setting, according to which positive knowledge can be acquired as a result of purely scientific (non-philosophical) knowledge; The program-scientist pathos of positivism consists in the renunciation of philosophy as a cognitive activity, which has integrating and prognostic possibilities in the context of the formation of concrete scientific knowledge.

In the first half of the XIX century. systems are being born to neutralize the stubborn tendency of natural scientists to materially comprehend the discoveries of natural science. The most significant among them was the philosophy of positivism, which declared the fundamental unknowability of the essence and causes of phenomena, called upon scientific thinking to limit itself from only the observed facts and their stable dependencies.

The first program of positivism was formulated by O. Comte (1718–1857) in the Course of Positive Philosophy in six volumes.

O. Comte created a new classification of sciences in which there was no psychology at all. Mental phenomena as a subject of positive study were divided into two disciplines - physiology and sociology. O. Comte criticized the individual, introspective method.

The idea of ​​O. Comte about the spiritual world will be the object of scientific analysis only when the ineffective ground of introspective study is forgotten. Formulating the true need of psychology in overcoming subjectivism, he saw the concrete implementation of his idea in observing the operations of consciousness on the realities of public life that are accessible to an objective image. In this intercommunication consciousness appears. The social organism forms the objective core of the facts of consciousness.

Depicting society as an organism, and his family as the smallest cell, O. Comte transferred to the field of social science a model borrowed from biology. In the 1830s, when its “positive philosophy” was being formed, biology had not yet become evolutionary. Therefore, in order to interpret the evolution of society, he was forced, in search of the driving force of this formation, to go beyond the bounds of biological correspondences and head towards the explanatory category of idealism — reason. Reason goes through three stages of development: theological, metaphysical and positive. These stages are logical both for each individual and for humanity as a whole.

Taking the process of communication as a starting point, he analyzed the dynamics of the personality consciousness as a derivative of the objective forms of its interaction with other people. O. Comte did not see that human relations were formed during the labor process, but in itself the separation of communication into the characteristic determinant of the psychic was its essential merit.

Later, under the influence of O. Comte, social psychology was created.