Better Together: Integrating the Sciences and Humanities

Why knowledge should be viewed as an integrated whole.

Reviewed by Tyler Woods

The two-fold aim of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University is (i) to study and promote human flourishing, and (ii) to develop and implement systematic approaches to the synthesis of knowledge across disciplines. Our second aim of synthesizing knowledge across disciplines has been important to our work. However, working out how knowledge and methodologies in each of these disciplines are related to each other is not straightforward. Developing systematic approaches to synthesizing such knowledge is challenging. Earlier this year, we published a paper summarizing some of our reflections that have emerged from our work together on how the humanities can inform and enrich the social and biomedical sciences, and likewise on how the sciences can inform and enrich the humanities.

Humanities Contributing to the Social and Biomedical Sciences

Our paper is shaped around six “modes,” which have emerged from our work, as to how these various disciplines can contribute to each other. There is no claim in the paper that these six modes are exhaustive. The paper is thus principally a documentation of the contributions of one set of disciplines to the other that we’ve seen over and over again. Each of the modes themselves could benefit from further development and systematization. However, it seemed good also to summarize, and illustrate, our current thinking on this task of integration.

One clear contribution that the humanities can make to the social sciences is bringing conceptual clarity and drawing of relevant distinctions. Indeed, some take drawing of distinctions to be one of, if not the, central task of philosophy. This can be relevant both in ensuring that there are precise definitions being used in the social sciences, but also in clarifying distinctions between concepts and constructs. This is important in general but also arguably crucial in work on measure development, including drawing relevant distinctions between hope and optimism, developing more grounded measures of suffering, and in more comprehensively measuring meaning.

A second potential contribution of the humanities to the social sciences is to motivate research and formulate hypotheses that arise from various philosophical and theological traditions. Work on love and human flourishing can be motivated by the insistence of so many of the world’s religions on the centrality of love to human life, human society, spirituality, and human well-being. Likewise the central role of character in philosophical understanding of well-being provides motivation for empirical work on this topic, and the same is arguably true for empirical research on suffering as well.

A third potential contribution of the humanities to the social sciences is enriching, and refining, the interpretation of empirical results. Deeper philosophical or theological interpretation of empirical results can be carried on a number of topics ranging from social connectedness, to deaths of despair, to health itself, and its relation to religion.

The Sciences’ Contribution to the Humanities

While empirical research can benefit from making use of philosophy and theology, the social and biomedical sciences can also regularly contribute to humanistic scholarship in a number of ways.

First, empirical research can sometimes help confirm or refute claims made in philosophical or theological literatures. Empirical work, for example, has confirmed theological claims that spiritual practice is generally conducive to well-being. Conversely, philosophical claims have sometimes been made that pondering the vastness of the universe or the unlikelihood of one’s own birth may lead to feelings of meaningless, whereas empirical work on this topic may suggest the opposite.

Second, empirical research can sometimes supply new data for philosophical and theological reflection. There are long-standing philosophical and theological traditions that suffering can sometimes be a pathway for growth, development, character transformation, and future flourishing. While this growth may take place for some, empirical research has suggested that this is certainly not the average experience. This can in turn prompt both further philosophical and theological reflection on the kinds of responses to suffering that in fact do enable growth and future flourishing (and this can then motivate yet further empirical research as well).

Third, the empirical sciences can sometimes help develop and evaluate the effects of practices which philosophical or theological traditions suggest may be conducive to well-being. Indeed, this is essentially the work we carried out in the randomized trial of a forgiveness workbook intervention which showed effects also on decreasing depression and anxiety, and increasing hope and flourishing. Clearly, the sciences can build upon, develop further, and implement the rich insights of the humanities.

As noted above, these various modes concerning how the sciences and humanities can inform and enrich one another are in no way intended to be exhaustive, but these are modes we’ve seen arise, again and again, in our and others’ work, and further illustrations are given in our paper.

Integration and Incarnation

The relation of the disciplines to one another is an important topic. As noted above, one of the humanistic disciplines that can arguably enrich interpretation of empirical results is theology. Our work has often drawn upon ideas across the world religious traditions, but a number, though certainly not all, of our staff approach this from a Christian perspective, reflecting on the nature of and the relation between God and creation, and also on what this means for flourishing here on earth, as illustrated also in my own recent book on a Theology of Health.

One of the deepest mysteries pondered in the Christian faith and in Christian theology is what Christians all over the world remember and celebrate at Christmas - the incarnation: the joining of God’s nature with human nature in the person of Jesus Christ. Many Christian confessions affirm that Christ’s divine and human natures are united “without division or confusion.” We seek a similar union of apparent opposites in our work of integrating the humanities and social sciences, allowing each to inform and enrich the other, while retaining its own integrity of method and subject. Christmas celebrates Jesus’ birth as a sign and act of God’s love, and one that allows us to better understand the nature of love, and the nature of God, and which provides the potential for a fuller restoration of human nature, and further, in the life of Jesus, provides an example of love for us to follow. As we continue to ponder insights arising from a range of disciplines and our knowledge of flourishing, let us also, in this season, seek that knowledge, and that flourishing, that comes from seeking to love one another, and seeking together the source of that love.