Document Type : Original Article

Author

Faculty member of the Department of Social Studies, Faculty Social and Cultural Studies

Abstract

Future and ideal are something problematic now more than every day before. In this frustrating fog occupying everywhere, all attempts have been assigned to individual needs, personal successes and close future. Collective ideal and far future have become secondary goals. In such conditions “self” will cut its ties from social context, will alienated from the society, from history and from itself and will tend to reification. What role university and academic training will play here? The specific question of this article is how each of the two approaches of natural sciences and human sciences will relate in this alienation? Social faculty of Tehran university has been selected as representative of human sciences and engineering faculty of Tehran university as representative of natural sciences. 15 students of each faculty were interviewed about their ideals, wishes and futures. According to the results, linear determinative scientific causal law dominated on natural sciences in engineering faculty will permeate to the world of human relations. In the sphere of these disciplines society is not an independent totality but just sum of the singular individuals. Ideal and future have seen as not more than just personal success. In contrast in the fluid and multi-paradigm world of human sciences, relation between individual and society will be understood as complicated, multilateral and dialectical. Personal success and collective ideal will be seen as interwoven; and ideal will not know as just personal success inside the status quo, but the will of the change in the status quo itself.

Keywords

 
Honneth, Axel (2012) Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford University Press.
Jeaggi, Rahel (2014) Alienation” translated by: Alan E. SmithFrederick Neuhouser, Columbia University Press.