Anthropocentrism and Human Studies
The premise that individuals act rationally, autonomously, consciously, intentionally, and in their own interest has been denounced umpteen times, especially in the relational approaches. These critiques have emphasized the following: importance of the unconscious mind and of emotion in the human psyche; the impossibility of comprehending human action without taking into consideration social structures; the illegitimacy of a subjectivity that deliberates in a monadic way. In and of themselves, these critiques should have evacuated a long time ago the rationalizing postulate. Yet, this postulate loses nothing of its force; it keeps dominating models in human studies. The question then arises of how it can perpetuate. It has to justify its existence. In a recent work, we identified seven ways through which human studies specialists legitimate this postulate, which is, at best, a half-truth (NPSS, 2015). However, neither of these justifications really constitutes an answer to the relational critique. And if these justifications can be identified and proven as inadequate, it is necessarily because there is something comforting for specialists of human studies in ignoring these demonstrations. Our intention, in this article, is to highlight that which is comforting in the rationalizing modelizations as well as that which is terrifying in others, whether they do not contain a rational actor or they do not rely on an actor per se. We intend to show that human studies are attached to an anthropocentrism which undermines their ability to produce abstractions; that this anthropocentrism is more an idealism than the result of an analysis, which exacerbates the difficulty to generate operationalizable abstractions, and even to perform an empirical relationalism in which exchanges would not only be the relationships between social actors. We furthermore intend to show that anthropocentrism represents an obstacle to relationalism when this approach wants elevate in the abstraction sphere to generate some science aiming to understand human being.