The second death of God

In retracing the steps which led Comte from positive philosophy to positive politics, and thence to the primacy of the sentiments, subjective synthesis and the ‘direct institution’ of Positive Religion, we have seen that Comte's attempt to reconcile (humanist) faith and (positivised) reason not only rested on false closures, but it failed, even in its own terms, to establish either the coherence or the positivity of its posited transcendental signified. Whether considered in terms of continuity, memory and l'Humanité's diachronic dimension, or of solidarity and the synchronic dimension of its ‘vital consensus’, Comte's fashioning of the Positivist intellectum led him to adopt a contradictory social ontology such that the transcendent and integral being with which he wanted to couple the actuality of the social not only did not, but could not, exist in the sense desired. Indeed, as programmatically envisaged, it could only realise itself as a simulation of what it claimed to be.

Thus Comte's foi démontrable undermines itself. His endless system-building, together with the rhetoric of certitude in which it is clothed, protected him against that realisation. However, suppose it had not. Or rather: suppose that we let the foreknowledge of the project's impossibility enter into a consciousness grappling with the same overall problem. Then the absence of a focalising centre for thought, feeling and action would present itself (at least for a mind ‘seeking God’) more sharply than ever.