READINGS OF GUSTAVE COURBET MARK EDWIN SOUNESS A ...

conceived, not divinely created, and that the religious threat of damnation was used by the
Church and the State to perpetuate the fear of the people and maintain the privileges of
controlling social sectors. Through this investigation, which includes an exploration of the
impacts that the domains of biology and positivism had on each other, biology emerges as
an important conceptual impetus for the positivist and anti-establishment manner in which
Courbet opposed religious and mystical ideals. In his writings, the artist attacked such
ideals and their oppressive effects by giving human and animal subjects equivalent status as
physiological beings and by expressing a biological view of the natural circumstances in
which they existed. The chapter also highlights a number of philosophical principles
postulated by the artist to advance this view, principles whose positivist character has been
almost entirely ignored in the existing literature on the subject: „synthesis,‟ „concretisation,‟
the exercise of reason and the biological idea of „series.‟ According to Courbet‟s idea of
synthesis, for example, knowledge always served social unity. Synthesis opposed
„analysis,‟ the principle of specialisation characteristic of theological and metaphysical
philosophies seen to disunite and divide society. In contention with the majority of existing
scholarly opinion on the subject, this chapter also argues that Courbet‟s rejection of
religious and mystical ideals was not part of an opposition against all forms of idealism. As
the thesis reveals, this rejection was entirely consistent with the artist‟s overall positivist
position, which embraced certain idealist views articulated in Proudhon‟s positivist
philosophy.
To what extent was Courbet‟s stance against particular forms of idealism
representative of the relationship between the artist‟s work and the positivist treatment of
idealism as a whole? Paradoxically, despite the positivist condemnation of religious and
mystical idealism, other forms of idealism occupied central roles in positivism. Chapter five
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