ABSTRACT
In this final chapter I attempt to bring the ideas in this book together, to form a reasonably coherent whole. First, I review and summarize the recommendations for optimal human being already suggested in earlier chapters. As I hope this book has demonstrated, there are a wide variety of potential prescriptions that can be derived simply by examining current scientific knowledge within each succeeding level of analysis. Next, I return to the more abstract perspective on optimal human being suggested in chapter 1, that it involves achieving harmony or integration between all of the different levels of one’s life. I conclude that there are important limitations to the idea, such that interlevel integration is not enough-content (i.e., “that which is to be integrated”) must also be considered. Based on this discussion, I suggest that obtaining organismic need satisfaction may provide the most general and invariant prescription for optimal human being, because the evolved psychological needs have already been tailored to solve problems of both within-level content and betweenlevel integration. Finally, I attempt to apply some of the foregoing ideas to the case of the human sciences, as a group. Can the question of how to achieve harmony and integration within an individual life be extended to the question of how to achieve harmony and integration between the human sciences? In what ways might the recommendations regarding these two questions converge?
