Science and the humanities in the understanding of Human Nature

In my opinion psychoanalysis, seen as a discipline in the humanities, is centrally complementary to biological approaches. As Jonathan Lear has put it,

"The point of psychoanalysis is to help us develop a clearer, yet more flexible and creative, sense of what our ends might be. "How shall we live?" is, for Socrates, the fundamental question of human existence — and the attempt to answer that question is, for him, what makes human life worthwhile. And it is Plato and Shakespeare, Proust, Nietzsche and, most recently, Freud who complicated the issue by insisting that there are deep currents of meaning, often crosscurrents, running through the human soul which can at best be glimpsed through a glass darkly. This, if anything, is the Western tradition: not a specific set of values, but a belief that the human soul is too deep for there to be any easy answer to the question of how to live" (Lear, 1998, p. 28).

Among the most Socratic books I have read are two which I have recently had occasion to re-read and give to my children. Both are about many things, but the first looks centrally at what's gone wrong with our conceptions of the relations between the technical and the world of values -- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). The other is not as celebrated. Seventeen years after Robert Pirsig wrote Zen… he wrote Lila: An Enquiry into Morals. The central question in the book is whether a derelict, feckless, mendacious wreck of a woman had value. Throughout the book the issue hangs in the balance. I want to live in an academic world in which it is thought important and even natural that students in science, technology and medicine should read and reflect upon those books.

In conclusion, I stand before you a venerable and bloody but unbowed survivor of the Science Wars and the Freud Wars, both of which are ongoing. I am suggesting, even pleading, that if we do not make peace between the sciences and the humanities and seek to reintegrate the metaphysical foundations of science with values, we will sink into an ever-deepening pit of philistinism, false consciousness, reification and moral decay. If we do, as a result of great struggle, manage to reintegrate them, we can seriously hope to achieve and to bear ordinary human unhappiness.

Copyright: The Author

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