READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

data to forms of order and coherence. Whilst LaCapra has recognised that some concept of
order is indispensable in historical writing, he has argued that „it must be actively
recognised that the past has its own “voices” that must be respected, especially when they
resist or qualify the interpretations we would like to place on them.‟ 21 Consistent with this
approach, this thesis undertakes a critical reappraisal of positivism that is attentive to
precisely those hidden voices referred to by LaCapra. Whilst this reappraisal reconstitutes
aspects of positivism in an ordered way and according to certain relationships evident
through textual analysis, it nevertheless acknowledges the philosophy‟s complex genealogy
and formulation through intersecting domains of knowledge. This thesis rejects the
tendency evident in many previous studies to radically reduce positivism to separate and
ordered categories of philosophy, sociology and religion. 22
This sensitive approach to the historical record reveals key ways in which
Courbet‟s work was connected to positivism and much can be learned by focusing upon
ideas developed within the intersecting domains of positivism and medical science. 23 These
ideas were formulated into social studies from the perspective of human health and greatly
informed the theoretical basis from which many positivists sought to understand human
behaviour and its development. The human body was a primary object of study for the
practitioners of such theory, who considered that the body was geared towards behaviour,
embodied the constitution and adapted to the changing conditions of its social existence. It
was argued that the condition of the body revealed what people did, the circumstances in
21 Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, Cornell University Press, London, 1983, p64.
22 D. G. Charlton‟s Positivist Thought in France, 1852-1870, published in 1959, is a good example
of such radical ordering of positivism.
23 Most of the pioneering positivist philosophers, including Saint-Simon, Comte and Littré were
trained in medical science and developed their theories of society in terms of the relationship
between social conditions and human health.
23