[Keywords:] Comte; Cultural sociology perspective; Positive spirit; humanitarianism
Comte is a controversial founder of sociology. On the one hand, he advocates using empirical science to study society and solving the problem of social disorder by expanding empirical knowledge. On the other hand, he introduced a moral scheme to solve social problems and established a "human Taoism" related to faith. As a result, he was criticized from different aspects: from the perspective of ontological philosophy, Comte's pursuit of the decisive force of social development from the perspective of human spiritual development rather than material economic development belongs to idealism, which eventually slipped into the wrong path of humanism; From the perspective of positivism, Comte's establishment of humanism deviates from the positivism principle he advocated earlier, which is a morbid product and a "sad degradation of great wisdom".
The author thinks that it is difficult for Comte, a great thinker who was born in sorrow and died in sorrow, to observe his heart of boxing with such criticism; It is superficial and rude to simply separate his positive philosophy from positive politics, which greatly devalues Comte's thought. This paper intends to observe Comte's ideological trajectory from a more inclusive perspective of cultural sociology, with a view to making a more open understanding and fair evaluation of the value of Comte's thought.
First, the perspective of cultural sociology
The visual threshold of cultural sociology is different in the eyes of different researchers. From the standpoint of dual understanding of dynamic and static culture, process and achievement, and referring to Zimmer's classification, the nature of culture can be divided into "objective culture" and "subjective culture" according to the different fields where cultural phenomena occur and exist. He said: "the culture of all kinds of things is also a cultural process of human beings ... the style of life in the same body depends on the relationship between objective culture and subjective culture." That is to say, culture occurs in the object of human action, the object of creation and the human itself, that is, in the subjective and objective world at the same time, so the specific presentation and change of social life or society should be understood in this classification relationship of culture. The basic visual threshold of cultural sociology lies in the distinction between cultural subject and object and their relationship.
When talking about the relationship between subject and object of culture, Zimmer said: "We educate things (things), that is, we raise their value standards beyond what their natural mechanisms can provide us, so we also educate ourselves: this is the same process of raising value from ourselves and returning to ourselves, which touches our external nature or our internal nature." This passage of Zimmer stated a basic fact: as the subject of social life, man is the source of cultural creation. People start the process of cultural generation and development through their own practical activities, realize their own essence, externalize their own essence, transform the objective world, and bring it into a certain value system and meaning system, thus contributing to the emergence of objective culture and forming the relationship between subject and object of culture and its contradictory movement. In this dynamic process—
On the one hand, culture, as a product of human beings transcending their original existence and changing the original state of things, its objectification, that is, objective culture, constitutes the spiritual and material concrete content of developing human society. A society that belongs to people must be a cultural society, and social development is the promotion of culture. Therefore, the overall improvement and development of human beings, that is, subjectivity.