Abstract
Sociology has created the social and has acted as its interpreter but has introduced an untenable simplification of the human The image of society has replaced reality. To regain the dignity of science, contemporary sociology has to reintroduce the complexity of the acting subject — as both starting and ending points in any interactional relation - into the complexity of the situation The acting subject should be re-examined to take into account the complexity both of psychological attitude in social relationships and the definition of preconditions and prefigurations of action Collective imagery, individual prefigurations and experience should be considered in order to correlate pre- and back-regions of social action In doing so, sociologists should be aware that what we can really observe and the very elements of our experiencing are but fragments of a real process whose unity is not accessible to us and which we can only reconstruct through the imagination. The natural sciences reconstruct seemingly symmetric complexity. The social sciences can only investigate living processes through big asymmetrical simplifications The general simplification of the representation may only be integrated by humanistic sociology, which, within certain limits and in a context similar to the arts, should be capable of reintegrating the representation with the complexity of real experience, without losing touch with it, but rather adding to it the value of the peculiarity and historicity experienced in day-to-day life.
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