Science and the humanities in the understanding of Human Nature

If we look at Darwin’s theory as one of the great ideas in the history of science, we can characterise it in two ways. Evolution ranks with gravity, the central concept in physics, and affinity, the key idea in chemistry, as one of the most basic concepts in the natural sciences. Beyond that, however, evolution by natural selection is a widely-applicable theory in two senses. It is the law which binds all of life together and defines its relations with the physical environment — how the history of living nature relates to the history of nature. And, of course, it binds humanity by causal laws to the rest of life and nature. Evolution by natural selection is the process which accounts for the history of living nature, including human nature. It is arguably the most important idea in the history of the natural and the human sciences

All of the above is fairly common knowledge, though the breadth and depth of the scope of Darwinism is rarely adequately presented. However, there is a huge problem which is left unresolved -- or perhaps I should say it is in some hands too easily resolved -- by evolution. If we take evolution to be an all-embracing explanation of living, including human, phenomena, then it includes human psychology, society and culture within the causal nexus of deterministic scientific laws. If this is so, what is the basis for morality? Put another way, how should we think of the role of values and morality in human nature? At its most stark, evolution by natural selection proceeds by competition for resources and/or mates to achieve viable offspring which live to reproduce. How can this conception of the interrelations between creatures be subtle enough to include processes which transcend competition — altruism, charity, generosity, self-critical reflection. How can it explain the diversity of customs and mores in different cultures? Providing such explanations is, I take it, part of the project of the new Darwinian sciences, in particular Darwinian (sometimes called Evolutionary) Psychology. As I've said, the answers they tend to provide often strike me as less useful than the ones we can gain from more traditional ones employing human purposes, consciously conceived and/or discerned in unconscious motivations, which do not rely on selfish genes and competition for resources and/or mates.

It seems to me to be approaching things the wrong way up to claim that Darwinian explanations provide the most basic accounts for the subtleties and complexities of human relations when literature, philosophy, theology, analytical psychology and other cultural approaches evoke and explore them so well. Perhaps I should say, rather, that it seems wrong-headed to me to offer Darwinian explanations as superior to or as replacements for traditional explorations of such matters derived from the arts. It may be, of course, that evolution explains humanity and all its works, but we must still find a way of paying due respect to established forms of reflection on human nature and not run headlong into a single explanatory paradigm -- and a reductionist one, at that. The general applicability of evolutionary explanation is not the same as its replacing other explanations or as being seen as more appropriate or basic than them. Hence we need science and the humanities; neither will do alone now or, in my opinion, ever.

For example, I expect the discipline of biography to have an enduring role in understanding human nature. It can weave together the strands which make up a person's inner and outer lives. It can illuminate character, the moral dimension of who we are. Writings in literature and history can also shed light on civility, on generosity, on compassion, on sectarian and nationalist conflicts and on the rise and fall of societies and civilizations that I simply do not expect to get to anything like the same degree from evolutionary explanations. They are too crude and general, while biography, history and literature are exquisitely particulate in their piecing together the vicissitudes of lives of individuals, families, groups, societies and cultures.

You will not be surprised to hear that one reason I mind about this stuff is that, along with other anti-humanities zealots, its advocates relentlessly attack psychoanalysis -- as a theory of human nature, as a method of investigation and as a therapy. It was not always so. Freud was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society when he emigrated to England in 1939. Indeed, the British Medical Association undertook a careful assessment of psychoanalysis in the late 1920s and (not without making some criticisms) gave it its imprimatur. I think the flak that has come the way of psychoanalysis is in some ways very obvious and in some ways very odd, unmerited and even perverse. I'll start with the unmerited bit. There is an increasing number of writings coming from inside the psychological and psychoanalytic community which assess it as a therapy by high standards of clinical assessment and give it good marks. (Our own Professor Glenys Parry contributed to one of the best of these.). They demonstrate with great care that psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis work. Indeed, one shows that people in therapy benefit as much as people in full analysis, but three years later the people who had full analysis have gone on improving, while those who had less sessions per week are no worse than at the end of treatment but are also no better. Other studies, including a huge one overseen by the President of the American Psychological Association, have shown that various sorts of psychotherapy work. More therapy yields more benefit, and more training means more likelihood of benefit. There is also a thriving and growing body of research going on, including an international society and a journal entitled Psychotherapy Research.

The vehement critiques of Freud and psychoanalysis do not take account of these careful findings, ones which are growing apace. Those who mount the critiques, on one side, and those who defend it, on the other, make up what is known as 'The Freud Wars' and engage is polemics strikingly reminiscent of the attacks on the history, philosophy and social studies of science, technology and medicine in 'The Science Wars' which I mentioned earlier. Another parallel is that their ranks, along with other forces in medicine and its funding, have succeeded in all but pushing psychotherapy out of psychiatry. There is a new and important book deeply lamenting this trend, Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry by T. M. Luhrmann (2000). She traces the growing polarization of treatment regimes, almost exclusively at the expense of talking cures. What they have put in place of psychotherapy, as is well known, is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

I think there is a deeper reason for the ideological attacks on psychoanalysis: dumbing down. It is a widespread movement, widely commented upon. I am sorry to say that think that the same deeply superficial forces are at work in attacks on humanities and the disciplines which reflect on science as are aimed at psychoanalysis -- a mistaken belief that all truths are truths of the surface, that our inner natures, what Kleinans call our inner world, is not to be taken account of, looked into, that we should not seek to take responsibility for our unconsciouses and change. Moral struggle, which is at the heart of psychoanalytic work, is just too tough for these times.

There is an appropriate movement, to which I have alluded, for testing the efficacy of psychoanalysis and other psychotherapies. In this sense it is rightly accountable to science. However, to tell the truth, I am not personally much in sympathy with those who seek to prove it is a science, though I am quick to grant the importance of outcome studies. You could say that I am happy to have a science of outcomes but believe that what the outcomes are outcomes of is a humanistic relationship, a disciplined, empathic dialogue. I am speaking up for a humanities 'take' on psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. As I have said, I am quite happy to grant -- even celebrate -- that the understanding if human nature is well-served by the insights gleaned from the humanities. I am content, nay pleased, when people write about Freud and Judaism, Freud the moralist, or the religious and romantic roots of psychoanalysis. I am not a theist, though I sometimes nostalgically wish I could be. I am, however, a believer in the collective wisdom contained in religious traditions, just as I appreciate the insights gleaned from literary traditions. I appreciate the story of Job as I do the religious philosophical writings of Kierkegaard, as I do those of Kafka, all much in the same vein. Come to that, I celebrate Freud's lifelong exploration of the depths of the meaning of the Oedipus myth for the human family, just as others find in 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear' keys to intergenerational dynamics.

Psychoanalysis, in turn, has had an important influence on literature, and on literary studies, especially biography, the novel and film, but it has also importantly influenced history and was at least once (1957) the subject of the Presidential address of the American Historical Association. The same can be said for social theory and for the study of groups and institutions, where its influence is growing. Indeed, psychoanalytic studies has been established as an academic discipline in the midst of the Freud Wars, and innumerable new books and journals have also come on stream.

I want also to make a claim for the role of the humanities in illuminating science. Here we have literary and philosophical methods employed in studying the writings at the heart of the natural sciences. The current senior professor of English Literature at Cambridge, Gillian Beer, founded her reputation on a close study of Darwin's Plots, and she and others continue to contribute to the study of science and literature under a single umbrella. Our own Professor Sally Shuttleworth has made a number of studies of the relationship between Victorian psychology, on the one hand, and literature and the broader culture, on the other. I have made detailed historical and philosophical studies of the basic concept in Darwin's explanation of evolution, the metaphor of 'natural selection', and have demonstrated the central role of teleology and anthropomorphism in the theory which lies at the foundations of biological science. Margot Waddell has studied both the influence of scientific ideas on George Eliot's novels and (with Meg Harris Williams) the literary origins of the psychoanalytic theory of the mind (1991). There are studies of how Newton influenced poetry, how Darwin influenced literature, how hermetical and alchemical traditions were at the heart of renaissance and Elizabethan letters and in Newton's philosophy of nature. Scholars study the philosophical assumptions and the forces in the society and values of particular times which led scientists and whole movements in science to ask the questions they did and to settle for the kinds of answers they did. I have no time even to list the ways in which fiction and science fiction explore science, technology and medicine from Marlowe's 'Dr Faustus' to 'Jurassic Park'. Nor can I do more than mention how science itself is illuminated by traditional humanities genres employed by scientists, e.g., James Watson's The Double Helix. There is, I am glad to say, no end to it.

Yet, for reasons I have tried to begin to illuminate, at the level of the rhetoric of the press and the literary press, in the halls of learned scientific societies, in granting agencies and charities, scientific rationality is waxing at the expense of studies in the humanities. I call this philistine and seriously dangerous. I think it is at work in this university, among others. When I proposed the expansion of the CPS into an institute of human relations on the model of the ones established in the last century at Yale, at Harvard, at the Tavistock Centre and at the New Bulgarian University, the proposal got nowhere with the powers that be in SCHARR. The reason, I was told, that it was a non-starter was that no one could see how it would generate research funds and quantitative research relevant to our RAE rating. I disagree profoundly. I put it to you that bringing together various approaches to human nature from the humanities including literature and philosophy, the human sciences and the helping professions could be a distinguished and illuminating project to which eminent scholars and researchers would, I promise you, flock. In the immortal worlds of Kevin Cosner in 'Field of Dreams', 'If you build it they will come'.

You may have noticed that I have not explicitly discoursed much on the third term in my title, human nature. It is at least as problematic as science and the humanities. Indeed, some Marxists have claimed that it is only an ensemble of human relations, while others have written excellent books rebutting this reading. Althusserians, deconstructionists, Lacanians and postmodernists have reduced human nature to a hook onto which inscriptions and on which constitutive forces act. I defy you to make it go away. It is, of course, a subject of debate in every newspaper and periodical, and I once collected titles of a large number of books on my own bookshelves with the phrase in their title. It is what we wish to fathom in deciding what we are up against in ourselves and others, what we can hope for, what we may even achieve: part biology, part socialization, part striving. For me it is (you may find this limp) a mixture of good and bad, loving and aggression, but all my studies and clinical work and family life have taught me that it can to a degree be shifted for the better, as Freud once put it, from unbearable misery to ordinary human unhappiness. My own views are close to Freud's tempered pessimism, a sort of stoicism, but let's keep on trying. In the last of his New Introductory Lectures he claimed to have no weltangschauung or world view, while vehemently attacking leftist views on human nature. I -- and I trust you -- do not suffer under the delusion that I am free of ideology, but discerning its role and picking and choosing among the philosophies of human nature available to us is a task which is never-ending.