The Symbiosis of Science and Humanities
Shadi Bartsch, Ph.D., FBA
Helen A Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor,
The University of Chicago
My project is to show that the humanities and sciences are interlaced, and that recognition of this fact is necessary if we are to better determine what is good for us as a society—and even as a species. This claim is one that is already winning acceptance in the field of medicine, with its growing concern for the medically beneficial effect of better communication and greater empathy. Elsewhere in Western research, practice, and education, however, our contemporary separation of humanities and science saws in half a complex whole that we should be studying—let alone being aware of its existence—if we want to improve the status of what we know, and how we know it.
“The presence all around us of multiple examples of how humanities and science lean on each other goes unremarked even as the debate over the value of the humanities continues well into our current century”
Science needs humanities as a second half, not as a handmaiden, and certainly not as something theoretically de-fundable in our institutions of higher education as well as our national labs. Without understanding how the two influence each other as we create what we call “knowledge,” we impoverish our capacity to understand the current problems we seek to address, some of them caused by ourselves. We will be better custodians of the future if we understand that “humanities” is not a choice of education that means giving up on STEM options, not “the widespread yet markedly wrong perception that the humanities are an anachronism in a world driven by technology” but a way of processing the world with greater accuracy than in its absence—and after all, isn’t science about that too?
The building blocks of the view I am suggesting here are not particularly unusual; I do not point to rare case studies or esoteric research done by experts. And yet, the presence all around us of multiple examples of how humanities and science lean on each other goes unremarked even as the debate over the value of the humanities continues well into our current century. There exists only a scattered body of work on the topic, and while there have been several institutional attempts to create radically interdisciplinary spaces for thought on our campuses, the notion that science needs and uses the humanities has not been widely acknowledged. Au contraire, public discourse suggests it’s possible to detach the humanistic fields of knowledge from others—a wishful and dangerous dream. Nor does any of the terminology currently in popular use really serve this concept of the yin-yang of the two areas of knowledge. In this study, I adopt the metaphor of symbiosis, used in Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg’s 1964 article, “Science and the Humanities: A New Level of Symbiosis.” Needless to say, his optimism has not yet found corroboration, nor has his metaphor been retrieved in our times.
The symbiosis of science and humanities describes an interlocked and often inextricable relationship that mutually affects both parties involved. This is, after all, the definition of symbiosis as used of cooperation between animal and plant species in biology: for example, bees feed on the pollen of a flower and in doing so help the flower scatter and reproduce. Or, on a different scale, the symbiotic relationship between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and leguminous plants help the plants thrive by supplying nitrogen. A symbiotic relationship that harms one of the participants is parasitic; a symbiotic relationship that benefits one but not both partners is “commensal;” a symbiotic relationship proper is mutualist. Barnacles like to ride on gray whales, and as far as we know the whales neither benefit nor suffer (of course, we know little about whale aesthetics): this relationship is commensal.
Neither humanities nor science is a species, of course, so symbiosis here stands as a metaphor for different fields of knowledge that benefit each other—a sense that is consonant with the word’s Greek roots, with and living: the co-existence, the mutual influence, of two different spheres of life, or ways of knowing, or categories of things. And what is it that is living together? Humanities—as a shorthand for the humanistic fields, including the social sciences, the arts, and law—and the sciences, from their inception in antiquity to the present. It is all too true that the categories “humanities and sciences” or STEM-HASS make for messy binaries, as shown by current areas of inquiry that are hard to pin down using these divisions (climate studies, for example); and it is possible that there are other, better divisions that could be imposed upon the categories that divide up what we call knowledge. But since our interest is in releasing this knowledge from the boundaries imposed by division, we will not trouble ourselves unduly with a terminology that, though judged true in the court of public opinion, turns out to be much less representative of how the world works.
Further reading
- Bono, James J. (1990) “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role / Rule of Metaphor in Science,” in ed. Stuart Peterfreund, Literature and Science: Theory and Practice, 59-89. Boston, MA.
- Bouterse, Jeroen and Bart Karstens. 2015. “A Diversity of Divisions: Tracing the History of the Demarcation between the Sciences and the Humanities.” Isis 106: 341-352. ¥
- Gleiser, Marcelo, ed. 2022. Great Minds Don’t Think Alike. Debates on Consciousness, Reality, Intelligence, Faith, Time, AI, Immortality, and the Human. New York, NY.
- Graff, H.J. 2017. Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press
- Hammond, R. 1986. The modern Frankenstein: Fiction becomes fact. Poole, England: Blandford Press.
- Kroeze, J.H. 2009. “Information Systems and the humanities: a symbiotic relationship?” Vanderbijlpark: North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus. (Vaal Triangle Occasional Papers: Inaugural lecture 5/2009.
- Hunter, Kathryn Montgomery (1991) Doctors’ Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge. Princeton, NJ.
- James, Frank. 2016. “Introduction: Some Significances of the Two Cultures Debate.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 41: 107–117.
- Joad CEM. 1993. “Plato’s Theory of Forms and Modern Physics.” Philosophy 8 :142-154.
- Kalusivalingam, Aravind Kumar. “The Turing Test: Critiques, Developments, and Implications for AI.” 2018. Innovative Computer Sciences Journal 41, 1−8
- Lloyd, G. E. R. 2009. Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning, and Innovation. Oxford.
- Seaborg, Glenn T. 1964. “Science and the Humanities: A New Level of Symbiosis.” Science. Jun 5; 144(3623):1199-203.