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The place of the sciences of man in the system of sciences 9
real example of the decentering essential to a scientific approach, and we can
readily understand why it came so late.
A very similar phenomenon is evident in sociology, where the first speculations
on society were dominated both by an obsession with the social cell,
derived from a very long tradition, and by legalistic preoccupations which
failed to distinguish between sociology and politics - and this does not mean that
greater objectivity in sociology cannot have political implications. The comparative
and decentered approach is so difficult in this case that Rousseau, seeking
examples for his speculation on the social phenomenon in primitive rather than
civilized behaviour (which represents a considerable advance over the ideas of
his time), thought up the ‘noble savage’ - an individual existing before society,
but upon whom he conferred, without realizing it, all the characteristics of
morality, rationality and even legalistic deduction which sociology has since
taught us to be the products of community life. This noble savage is the product
of an imagination which is so barely decentered that it bears an astonishingly
close likeness to Rousseau himself composing the Social Contract. The same
phenomenon reappeared in the middle of the 19th century when one of the
founders of cultural anthropology, Tylor, in order to explain the animism
peculiar to ‘primitive’ civilization, invented a ‘philosophical savage’ who reasons
about dreams, sickness and death very much after the fashion of an Anglo-
Saxon empiricist placed in the state of ignorance of a non-civilized man but
speculating in the manner of Hume and his peers. Nevertheless, Tylor took
a great step forward when, through his efforts to collect not just ideas but facts,
he hit upon the comparative approach.
This was the direction, i.e. decentration in relation to immediate social
experience, which was followed by the founders of modern sociology in the
19th century. There is no need for us here to assess the success or inadequacy
of their efforts, which were followed by many others. Thus the purpose of
Comte’s Law of the Three States is to detach scientific thought from the level
of collective representation and to situate it in relation to other intellectual
attitudes.
The Marxist system consists in a vast effort to situate ideologies in relation
to social classes, Durkheim’s aim is to situate our collective representations
in relation to the elementary stages of socio-genesis, etc. In each of these
instances, the chief decentering action consists in ceasing to take individual
thought as the source of collective reality, and in considering the individual as
the product of a social process.
The decentering process which psychology had to undergo before it
could become a science was of a different kind, but also led to comparative
approaches. Under the influence of law-seeking tendencies, philosophical
psychology was centred on the ego as the immediate expression of the soul and
the method, which seemed adequate at that stage was that of introspection.
After a long process involving systematic comparisons between the normal and
the pathological, between adult and child, man and animal, etc., the genera1
position which eventually came to prevail in scientific psychology was that
conscience can only be understood when placed within the context of ‘conduct’,