Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Preface xvu
understanding, respect and a feeling of solidarity between men are established
on a firmer foundation. This is a twofold function, for which no discipline taken
in isolation can suffice but which calls for the widest co-operation between them
all. It is a twofold ambition, by which they take it upon themselves io be the
diverse but interrelated forms and processes of the same striving for knowledge,
the same thinking and the same endeavour.
To my way of thinking, this does not mean that the social and human sciences
should renounce their primary mission: to pursue a truth - the truth of man-
without ever having to subordinate this quest for knowledge, this effort towards
understanding, to concern for immediate utiIity and still less to ideoIogical
considerations. It need hardly be recalled that the usefulness of a theoretical
proposition often becomes apparent only at a later stage, in face of problems
that were not previously forseeable, and that speculative truth can prove to be
an inexhaustible source of ethical inspirations which it is not incumbent upon
science to identify, to determine or to anticipate itself. The fact remains that the
sciences which contribute to a knowledge of man give rise to applications and al-
low in particular of a better adjustment of the techniques of action to existing
situations; also that they can provide lessons, that their findings and even more
their processes have a quality that might be called instructional. They recall man
to himself, they invite him to consider, in concrete terms and without compla-
cency, himself, his destiny, ways of achieving self-fulfilment in the conditions of
his actual life, equally removed from passive resignation in the face of inscrutable
fate and evasion in the dream of a freedom unrooted in reality.
These two natural functions of knowledge are complementary to each other
and counterbalance each other; their complementarity, even in the oppositions
that constitute the life of the social and human sciences, provides the firm basis
for solving the old and ever-recurrent conflict between their disinterested theo-
retical vocation and the constant calls of action. For action involves more than
a set of procedures or recipes; it also means broadening of the range of what is
possible and determination of the objectives behind choices and, hence, both ac-
ceptance of change and differences, and emancipation through the process
of setting the goals - in short, the affirmation and recognition of man in him-
szlf and in others which, together, postulate and promote universality. And
for science, action is the prerequisite for a fruitful dialogue between the mind
and human reality. Modern man, who has been made, in fact as well as in law,
master of his destiny by the instruments of an unprecedented power over nature,
and yet who, at the same time, is strangely bereft of the means of governing his
inner life according to truly human values in face of this new, teeming, unfore-
seeable, and all too often alienating world which is increasingly his work, needs
something more than a spurious humanism that is merely an empty and inef-
fectual verbal formula. He needs the effective means, grounded in true scientific
knowledge, of a genuine humanization of the relations between individuals within
societies, between peoples within a hiiman order.
Such is the humanism of which the social and human sciences are, at least poten-
tially, the guarantee and even the essential source. But they can only be so all
together, and interdependently, for once again, no single one of them could suf-