RESUMO 39 | COMUNICAÇÕES

Dilthey and Comte: their approaches, their divergences

SANTINI, Guilherme J. | PUC-SP, Brasil

In his Cours de Philosophie Positive, Comte seeks to elucidate the proper method for establishing a building for the sciences in general, organized from the most elementary to the highest. Above all there would be Social Physics. For Comte, it must be recognized that if all science is based on empirical data, a condition of properly scientific knowledge is to discover relationships between facts. More than that, discover the necessary and causal relationships that exist between them, growing to the realm of the most complex facts, which are the social facts. In Comte, it is presupposed that the impossibility of facts of consciousness becomes object of science, that is, the assumption of just one kind of “Psychology” in the systematic building of the sciences: the Phisiologie Cérébrale. In this way, Comte’s project equates to the foundation of a building of sciences and the elucidation of its universal method, with the mechanistic desideratum of a Social Physics based upon a kind of Explanatory Psychology, presupposing that psychological or “spiritual” contents of social and historical phenomena must be abstracted by the social scientist, since they are not and cannot be interesting to the scientific research. Now, having explained these general notions about Comte’s project, our aim will be to compare it with Dilthey’s project, that is, with his Critique of Historical Reason. Our hypothesis is that, from the point of view of the project itself, Dilthey is closer to Comte’s project than we are led to believe when we learn that Dilthey was the one who first pointed out the division between two types of Science. His distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaftenis not as radical as we are led to believe by superficial statements, and the point to understand where is the step from which Dilthey supports that distinction – and their divergences to Comte – is the kind of Psychology which he will introduce. Our aim will be to clarify, finally, what is common and what is different between the projects and assumptions of each philosopher. Indeed, although it departed for a similar purpose, the strategy proposed by Dilthey, announced in the Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, will be radically reversed, henceforth affirming the possibility and the requirement of a scientific description and analysis of the facts of consciousness as a condition and the first stage for the success of the project to establish a building of the sciences of social and historical phenomena, that is, for the success of the task of offering a scientific foundation for the disciplines of understanding. From the comparison with Comte we can conclude that Dilthey’s return to Kant is a reform of Kantianism, since, according to Dilthey, his foundational project will succeed only if the hypothesis of Comte, who is also of Kant, regarding Psychology, is proven to be false, and that is what he will try to do with his Descriptive and Analytic Psychology.