Integrating Science and the Humanities: Toward a Second Wave
Attempts to bridge C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”—the natural sciences and the humanities—thus far not managed to make a great deal of progress. They have too often taken the form of hostile takeovers: humanists trying to forcibly bring the work of scientists under the umbrella of arbitrary, interpretable “inscriptions” or scientists arguing for the explanatory irrelevance of human phenomena not amenable to quantification. A potentially more helpful approach—referred to as “vertical integration” (Tooby & Cosmides 1992; Slingerland, 2008) or, increasingly commonly, “consilience” (Wilson 1998)—seeks to get beyond the sort of mind-body dualism that underlies the two culture split, arguing that the work of scientists and humanists can be coordinated in a seamless hierarchy of explanation. Such a coordination would respect the importance of emergent levels of explanation, but also seek to ground those levels in an integrated chain on causation.
Unfortunately, the vertical integration approach has, for the most part, been received with a great deal of hostility by humanists. This paper seeks to explore some of the reasons for this reception, as well to sketch the outlines of a “second wave” of consilience that would overcome humanistic resistance by responding to genuine, and valid, humanistic concerns. By taking seriously the phenomenological inescapability of human-level truth, the crucial and transformative role of culture in human embodied experience, and the limits of natural scientific inquiry, such second wave consilience could help to transform Western institutions of higher learning from “biversities” into true universities, where the various levels of the human body-mind are studied in a truly integrated manner.
