Summary of the Thesis
Shahrur distinguishes between the study of nature and the study of human beings and society. Human beings do not serve as laboratory test material as in the natural sciences, because their action is mediated by thought, psyche, language, and social relations. The human sciences therefore require a more complex objective method, not a literal transfer of direct experimentation from the laboratory to politics and society.
Within this distinction appears a dual relation between the general and the particular: society is governed by general social, economic, and political laws, whereas individuals cannot be reduced to a single herd, but rather their actions move within individual possibilities and specificities that do not cancel the general law nor dissolve into it.
Foundational Atoms
- Reason and knowledge turn speech into action
- Human society develops historically
- Economy arises from the development of instincts
- Democracy mediates between the individual and society
- Changing the collective mind is the hardest task
Place of Reference within the Book
This appears at the beginning of the book, within the methodological preface on reason, knowledge, and the human sciences, where Shahrur asks about the alternative to the laboratory and telescope in studying human beings, then connects this to the general laws of society and the possibilities of individual action.
Limits of the Reading
This page does not deny the possibility of objectivity in the human sciences; rather, it defines its kind. What Shahrur calls for is not the abandonment of method, but the recognition that the object of human beings and society is more complex than the object of matter, and that the relation between the individual and society is probabilistic and dialectical, not a direct mechanism.