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Behind most of the criticism advanced against those who support a rigorous science of man, one finds the objection concerning quality. There is always the fear that a scientific understanding will overlook what seems to be most significant in the human being and his works, what is most unique and most irreducible to schematizations of any sort. Obviously one must admit that, in the four centuries since Galileo, Lavoisier and Claude Bernard showed us the way to the conquest of non-human objectivity, the physicist, the chemist, even the biologist have been able to detach themselves from warmth and wetness, from the sweet and the bitter. But psychological or social reality is still supposed to be grasped by the scientist as immediate experience gives it to us, that is, as a tissue of qualities. If in the domain of natural entities it seems easy today to think of quality as appearance — or more exactly, to admit another phenomenology, according to which the object is determined by abstract schemata which enable us to grasp it effectively, in the domain of man such an approach apparently meets with much difficulty. The view is eagerly embraced that the very essence of the phenomenon here is qualitative. Bergson founded his metaphysics and his dualistic theory of knowledge on this lemma. But many of the very people who are trying to build science openly share this perspective. Some sociologists have challenged the use of mathematics because it is founded on the indifferent relations of a whole and its parts, while the human totality, the total social fact is an organically and qualitatively differentiated ensemble, whose dynamism cannot be conveniently described except by the mediation of images, and in particular by that of "perpetually boiling igneous material" (G. Gurvitch 1955, p. 40).

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-7037-3_5

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