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

5 I 8 Jean Piaget
symbolic nature since it comprises essential and constant affective meanings
beneath a variable and secondary conceptual mechanism.
In this chapter, whose purpose is to seek out the common mechanisms and
to stress the interdisciplinary problems from a methodological and, particular-
ly, from a prospective point of view, mention must be made, because of its
highly significant implications, of the research bearing upon the symbolic mean-
ing of doctrines of intellectual form and affective content, since such research
constitutes a striking meeting-point between the possible extensions of a general
semeiology bearing upon higher-level symbolic systems and the sociological and
even economic analysis of Marxian inspiration. One remarkable example of
such meeting-points has been supplied by L. Goldmann in his studies on Jan-
senism, and our reason for choosing this example is that it forms one of those
somewhat rare cases in sociology where through theoretical research the
existence of a hitherto unknown fact - in this particular case the discovery of
an historicaI person but one overlooked by history -has been predicated. Gold-
mann explained Jansenism by the social and economic difficulties of the noblesse
de robe under Louis XIV: the complete withdrawal from the world preached
by the doctrine was thus the symbolic manifestation of an affective and col-
lective situation. But pure Jansenism, as reconstituted through this analysis
in terms of social symbolism, was not fully realised in any of the individuals
known to history (Arnauld, etc.), and it was therefore necessary to build up
the complete hypothetical Jansenist - unknown precisely because completely
consistent - who had directed the movement without being seen outside.
Having thus ‘calculated‘, so to speak, the existence of such a leader, Gold-
mann went on to find him in the person of the Abbd Barcos and proceeded
to demonstrate his effective and until then unsuspected r61e in history.
One can thus see the number of literary, artistic and metaphysical productions
which could emerge from such analyses, the syntactic and semantic aspects of
which remain essential even though the most difficult to distinguish, and whose
sociological and even economic aspects are obvious.
18. Diachronic and synchronic problems in relation to meanings
Comte’s sociology drew a distinction between static problems (‘order’) and
dynamic ones (‘progress’), but the Saussurian linguistic system was probably the
first to give a positive status to the relative opposition of synchronic and dia-
chronic considerations in the human sciences. The history of language and the
etymology of words do not explain everything, since the meanings of words
change, just as the function of biological organs may change, to meet the needs
created by the balance of the language as it is at a particular point of time.
Now, systems of meanings as relations between the signifant and the
signifie’ occupy a special position in regard to the connexion between syn-
chronic balance and diachronic transformations. As we have seen (paragraph
g), the maximum dependence between these two aspects is to be found in the
sphere of normative structures, because the evolution of norms - the operational