We will keep skating in place as long as research is exclusively positivist

In high school sociology classes from the 2000s on, you have probably heard of the “positivism” of Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Quite basically, he argued that we — you and I — had reached a rational level that works exclusively in the “now.”

For him, imaginations, fantasies, would have given way to scientific “facts.” That is where he stands on one side, and Sigmund Freud (and I) on the other.

In the Freudian understanding, although we have reached the “scientific” layer of development, the things of yesterday (in terms of the species’ evolution) do indeed take part in life. It is what we call the “animic phase.” What we learned hunting lunch or gathering fruit, there in the “Garden of Eden,” is inside us and active.

You know when you explain something “rationally” to someone, and it seems like you are talking to a door? Sometimes, I seriously suspect it has to do with the interlocutor’s “animic” life. That is when we “feel” things instead of thinking about them. I do it daily, perhaps right now in this post.