Science and the humanities in the understanding of Human Nature

Edwin Arthur Burtt reflected on the consequences of this world view for any attempt at understanding human nature.

"...it does seem like strange perversity in these Newtonian scientists to further their own conquests of external nature by loading on mind everything refractory to exact mathematical handling and thus rendering the latter still more difficult to study scientifically than it had been before. Did it never cross their minds that sooner or later people would appear who craved verifiable knowledge about mind in the same way they craved it about physical events, and who might reasonably curse their elder scientific brethren for buying easier success in their own enter enterprise by throwing extra handicaps in the way of their successors in social science? Apparently not; mind was to them a convenient receptacle for the refuse, the chips and whittlings of science, rather than a possible object of scientific knowledge" (Burtt, 1932, pp. 318-19).

I have quoted the profound and searching critiques of Whitehead and Burtt to indicate where we need to look for the metaphysical foundations of the science-humanities split and the philosophical defensiveness of the human sciences. This is particularly pertinent to the restricted range of approaches to human nature adopted in most psychology departments, a feature which disappoints and bewilders many students. In a better world, for example, biography would be a discipline taught in psychology curricula, not to mention psychoanalysis.

Now we can begin to see why my research has had the trajectory it has. I set out to find a scientific basis for the moral and psychological issues which worried me as a young man. I thought I could do so by understanding the theoretical basis for the sciences underlying mental functions, i.e., brain physiology. That's why I studied the history of cerebral localization. The natural classification of the aspects of human nature would, I thought, be the natural classification of the functions of the brain. But the brain turned out not to speak its own classification. There are many overlays of mental functioning -- primary sensory modalities, balance, proprioception, higher mental functions, associations, emotional functions, etc. The more you think about it, the more you realize that you can ask the brain how it does anything; you can bring any overlay to it. There are as many psychologies as there are -- what? -- as there are views of human nature, as there are value systems, as there are ideologies or world views.

I did not see that far at first. I asked myself where classifications of mental functions came from. In research on cerebral function in the early and mid-19^th century they came from physiognomy then phrenology, especially the work of Franz Joseph Gall, whom I studied for a time. The next generation created an evolutionary psychology inspired by Herbert Spencer, to whom Darwin deferred in matters of psychology, then aphasia research, then John Hughlings Jackson's clinical neurological studies of evolution and dissolution of functions. Then Freud used them as a basis for his early work on aphasia and then on hysteria and then the magnificent model of the mind in Chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams, which brings us up to 1900. What I am trying to convey is that the context of brain research turned out to be associationist psychology, clinical neurology and evolutionary theory. The context of evolutionary theory was, in turn, natural theology, uniformitarian geology and Malthusian population theory. The context for these was debates about science, theology, positivism and the theory of ideology in the nineteenth century. I contend that to understand these matters we have to work with little or no recognition of boundaries between science and the humanities. We must go wherever the multidisciplinary history of ideas leads us.

I looked into all of these matters and wrote a history of ideas about the functions of the brain, followed by a series of studies on the 19th century debate on 'man's place in nature' (as it was then called), which I published as Darwin"s Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. This research led in another direction in the context of the ferment of the 1960s -- into the historiographic traditions in thinking about Darwinism and the relationship between science and ideology, a topic which had been debated since the school of Idéologie of Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy in Napoleonic France. Idéologie was a discipline first embraced than reviled by Napoleon. It began life as the meta-discipline to which science was accountable. The idéologues' intellectual programme was 'to subject the ideas of science to the science of ideas', something rather like metaphysics, Aristotle's discipline which came after and was 'meta' to physics. But when he fell out with this group, Napoleon gave the term a pejorative connotation of polluted knowledge, one which it has largely retained. It was that sense Marx and Engels invoked in their study of The German Ideology, where, as in other places, they argued that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class, a proposition being revived in the 1960s during the Vietnam War in the critique of the role of the academy made by radical scholars. Along with other academic disciplines, science was not being allowed to claim that it was above the battle of contending ideologies. Scientific and technological and medical rationality were seen as much as part of the problem as part of the solution. This critique was led by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, for example, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas, and it was during this period that there was a movement for social responsibility in science which attracted, among others, the Nobel laureate, Maurice Wilkins. It also evoked a number of radical science periodicals, one of which I edit. You may think I have strayed from my theme, but I believe that I have been exemplifying ways in which the strict dichotomies I listed above are problematic. I am suggesting that science is part of culture, that how we see nature is, too, which is why the journal I just mentioned is called Science as Culture and is based on the assumption that research traditions cannot be reasonably claimed to be set above the prevailing world view of the epoch. This is a radical version of the research programme of the sociology of knowledge and is known as social constructivism in science.

One particular manifestation of this point, an experimentum crucis, has been a recurrent theme in my research. Darwin tells us in his notebooks, his pencil sketch of 1842, his longer sketch of 1844, in On the Origin of Species and other writings, in his letters and in his autobiography that Malthus' population theory -- that populations increase geometrically while food supply only grows arithmetically -- provided the key insight that led to his formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. The gap between population growth and resources created the pressure in the struggle for existence. I traced this link with some care and gave a paper in Oxford entitled 'Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory' (1968). You would not believe the howls which came from orthodox biologists. What I'd found meant that putatively pure biology, the holy of holies of Darwin's mechanism for evolutionary change, the foundation stone of modern biology, was in debt to, in bed with, tainted social theory of an avowedly conservative kind. There has been a running battle about this since I first wrote about it over thirty years ago. I think it is now the consensus that my account has prevailed. The scientific ideologues continue to hate it, though. I take great pleasure in the integration of Malthusianism with Darwinism, because I think history happens in that way. Assumptions about human nature and society contribute fundamentally to approaches taken to nature and living nature which are then extrapolated to account for human nature and society. It was always so. Indeed, a number of studies influenced by mine have made this point over a wide variety of scientific disciplines. I think the best of all of them is the magnificently detailed and meticulously written research of Donna Haraway, whose magisterial volume Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989) traces the wide range of determinations which gave us the biological science of primatology, the study of the animals closest to us in the evolutionary tree.

I cannot sufficiently stress how furious it makes many scientists when scholars in the history, philosophy and social studies of science, technology and medicine draw attention to the social forces at work in the origination, funding and deployment of scientific research, in the foundations of scientific disciplines and even in the scientific world view. There have been scholarly writings on these issues for as long as people have reflected on nature and human nature. Yet the education of scientists in recent times has left out any study of the history and philosophical bases of ideas about science and scientific rationality, with the result that they think people who do think critically about the philosophical and other dimensions of science are mad, bad, polluting -- threatening the very fabric of rationality and society. They hate it. They declare war. I am not exaggerating; the phrase 'the Science Wars' is current in America and elsewhere. Lobbies for science have largely succeeded in eliminating governmental funding for history, philosophy and social studies of science. I have seen this problem at first hand. Directors of studies in science and medicine in Cambridge were hostile to and satirical about the HPS Tripos, never mind that the RAE gave a 5* to the department, more than the university's distinguished philosophy department got. I find that students who did their undergraduate degrees in science, engineering or medicine tend to have such reactions. They take it that studying social determinations means that it is claimed that there is no rationality, no fabric of reality. They tend to become witch-hunting and aggressive. I have been unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of this sort of stuff at every stage of my academic career. Having been the object of it in my time as a historian and philosopher of science, I was less than delighted to get it again (sometimes from the same ideologues) as I debated them in my role as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and as a scholar in psychoanalytic studies.

Come to that, a new colleague said in his very first intervention at our weekly the Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies seminars that he had been discussing things with the vice-chancellor at his last university, who had said that humanities research was a luxury universities could no longer afford and would have to become a private hobby. At least one member of staff took that intervention to be a defining moment in the history of the centre. What it conveyed to him was that a group of accomplished humanities scholars could not find a congenial home inside a medical faculty, because that faculty would be so hostile to and uncomprehending of qualitative, scholarly book research and would insist on experimental or at least quantitative research, something for which one can get grants. I thought he was being alarmist, but I think that in the long run he his likely to be proved prescient

I now want to turn to a strong sense I have of what underlies this view -- the pecking order of disciplines based on the pre-eminence of natural science. What characterises science? A method. As I've said, since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many have also argued that science strives to produce explanations in terms of matter, motion and number, the framework of ideas associated with Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Locke, etc. An explanation in these terms is said to be better and more basic than one couched in other terms. This is the reductionist/materialist programme of modern science and is explicit in many of the dismissive remarks natural scientists make about the humanities. It is also implicit in the ranking of disciplines which places mathematical and material sciences, e.g., physics and chemistry, above biological ones. Among the biological ones molecular biology and biochemistry rank above physiology, morphology, taxonomy, ethology and evolutionary psychology. Biological scientists, in turn, peck behavioural and social scientists. The medical sciences are all over this map, since some are exquisitely experimental and quantitative, e.g., neurochemistry and endocrinology, while others are far from being so, e.g., psychiatry. Psychotherapy and especially psychoanalysis, are hardly on the map, according to some, and hardly funded, even though psychological difficulties constitute a large part of the reason people go to doctors. Outside all this -- beyond the pale -- are the humanities

One discipline which strikes me as helping us to see that natural science does not shed enough light on human nature for us to rely solely on science is the burgeoning field of evolutionary psychology (which I shall mention again later). I recently went to a millennial celebration of Darwin at his old school in Shrewsbury at which Matt Ridley defended Darwinian reductionism, though he granted that there was such a thing as greedy reductionism, which he deplored. By Darwinian reductionism I mean the appeal to evolutionary selectionism to explain aspects of human character and personality without allowing due consideration of more proximal explanations drawn, for example, from psychodynamic psychology, philosophy and literature. I expect to learn more from 'Othello' about jealousy than from explanations appealing to natural selection and competition for mates drawn from Darwinian psychology. I suppose I mean that I don't want to be placed in the position of having to choose between them. Why should I, unless evolutionary explanations are somehow thought to be better than the insights of Sophocles or Shakespeare or Freud? There is a militancy in the representations of Darwinian psychologists, for example, the people who mount the programme called Darwin@LSE, which frightens and affronts me in the same way the assertive anti-humanities ways of Richard Dawkins and Louis Wolpert affront me. I would gladly say 'Go in peace' to them, but their explanatory imperialism strikes me as not allowing due space for explanations drawn from the humanities. It is as if only reductionist sciences can provide real explanations.

You could say that Darwinism provides the bridge between human nature and the sciences. Let's place Darwin in the great scheme of the history of ideas. There have been a number of blows to human arrogance. The concept of the solar system dethroned the Earth from being regarded as the centre of the universe. Darwinism showed that humanity is not the specially created pinnacle of all living beings. Marxism showed that economic and ideological forces fundamentally condition what humans do. Freud showed that we do not even have access to the greater part of our motivations, which are unconscious. These explanations mitigate our conception of the human species and our planet as central in the firmament and our humanity as adequately characterised by rational intentionality and conscious control over our actions.