ABSTRACT
Sociology is likely to be numbered among the counterintuitive magnitudes of our life—like most names. First of all, a state of affairs, an event, must be brought to examination, together with the lives and names, the place and date pertaining to it, before it is possible to derive any sort of conclusions. Actualization involves calling things by their real names; and giving a name to something is an ineluctable precondition for thinking about the real world. Name and species, place and origin, are the elements of actualization. Reality needs constantly to be renewed in actualization. The reality that steps out of names to face us is inapproachable through abstract concepts. This chapter determines the situation of sociology from the outside—that is, its home in the midst of other realities. Sociology is born from passion, not from theoretical equanimity. There is in this circumstance the danger of losing credit as a science.
