LITTRÉ, ÉMILE
(1801–1881)

Émile Littré, the French linguist and positivist philosopher, was born in Paris. From an early age Littré was interested in medicine and languages; and he received training in both. He is now best known for his Dictionnaire de la langue française (4 vols., Paris, 1863–1872) and his edition (with Charles Robin) of Pierre Hubert Nysten's Dictionnaire de médecine, de chirurgie, de pharmacie, de l'art vétérinaire et des sciences qui s'y rapportent (Paris, 1885). He was also prominent in radical political journalism (in Le national of Armand Carrel) and in freethinking circles. He became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions in 1838 and of the Académie Française in 1871, the latter over the violent objections of Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans. Littré was elected a deputy in 1871 and a senator for life in 1875.

These various activities and contacts enabled Littré to be unusually successful in his principal philosophical activity, the propagation of Auguste Comte's Positivism. He began to read Comte's Cours de philosophie positive in 1840, wrote a series of articles on it in Le national in 1844 and 1845 (published separately under the title De la philosophie positive in 1845 and later reprinted in his Fragments de philosophie positive et de sociologie contemporaine in Paris in 1876), and for a time became Comte's "principal disciple" and heir apparent as Director of Positivism and High Priest of the Religion of Humanity. Littré broke with Comte in 1852, however, over a combination of personal and political disagreements. Thereafter he took an increasingly independent line on Comte's doctrine as well, forming a loose group of disciples—distinct from the orthodox Comtian school—that found its principal expression in the journal La philosophie positive, started by Littré (with G. N. Vyrubov, the Russian positivist) in 1867. Littré himself contributed numerous important articles to the journal, but his position is stated most clearly in his Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive (Paris, 1863).

Littré's fundamental proposition was that during the 1840s, partly for personal reasons, Comte had abandoned the positive method for the sake of a "subjective" method that vitiated all his subsequent work. Littré proposed to cleanse Positivism of the "aberrations" of Comte's "second career" by propagating the doctrine in the pure, scientific form of the Cours. He insisted that "there is only one stable point and that is science." Positivism as a scientific philosophy is in one aspect a system, "which comprehends everything that is known about the world, man, and societies," and in another aspect a method, "including within itself all the avenues by which these things have become known." It has, however, a practical purpose as well: to provide a "demonstrable rallying point" and a "definite direction" for humankind. Littré differed from Comte in doubting whether Positivism was yet sufficiently advanced to serve as a basis for social and political action. He also, among other things, denied ethics its place at the apex of the hierarchy of the sciences, which Comte in his later years had given it; for Littré, ethics was not an autonomous science at all. On the other hand, Littré was inclined, against Comte, to admit psychology as an independent discipline. Littré remained committed to the evolution of the positivist Religion of Humanity into a "spiritual power" but rejected Comte's prescriptions for its actual institutionalization.

Littré and his group often found it difficult to elaborate a consistent doctrine, largely because Comte's system had in fact been conceived as a unity very early in his career, and it was therefore wrong and illogical to divide his life and work in half.

See also Comte, Auguste; Positivism; Psychology.

Bibliography

Littré's important works also include Conservation, révolution et positivisme (Paris, 1852; 2nd ed., 1879) and La science au point de vue philosophique (Paris, 1873).

For information on Littré, see É. Caro, M. Littré et le positivisme (Paris, 1883), which is hostile.

W. M. Simon (1967)