Jacob Bronowski – författare

Bronowski was fascinated by William Blake for much of his life. His first book about him, A Man Without a Mask, was published in 1944. In 1958 his famous Penguin selection of Blake's poems and letters was published. As further testimony to Bronowski's enthusiasm it should be noted that the final plate in the book of his great TV series The Ascent of Man is Blake's frontispiece to Songs of Experience.William Blake and the Age of Revolution, first published in 1965, is, in some ways, a revised edition of A Man Without a Mask, in others, a new book. In it Bronowski gives a stimulating interpretation of Blake's art and poetry in the context of the revolutionary period in which he was working. Like all of Bronowski's writings it dazzles with wide-ranging erudition, making this work far removed from conventional literary criticism.

Jacob Bronowski was, with Kenneth Clarke, the greatest popularizer of serious ideas in Britain between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. Trained as a mathematician, he was equally at home with painting and physics, and wrote a series of brilliant books that tried to break down the barriers between 'the two cultures'. He denounced 'the destructive modern prejudice that art and science are different and somehow incompatible interests'. He wrote a fine book on William Blake while running the National Coal Board's research establishment. The Common Sense of Science, first published in 1951, is a vivid attempt to explain in ordinary language how science is done and how scientists think. He isolates three creative ideas that have been central to science: the idea of order, the idea of causes and the idea of chance. For Bronowski, these were common-sense ideas that became immensely powerful and productive when applied to a vision of the world that broke with the medieval notion of a world of things ordered according to their ideal natures. Instead, Galileo, Huyghens and Newton and their contemporaries imagined 'a world of events running in a steady mechanism of before and after'. We are still living with the consequences of this search for order and causality within the facts that the world presents to us.

Science and Human Values was originally a lecture by Jacob Bronowski at MIT in 1953. Published five years later, it opens unforgettably with Bronowski's description of Nagasaki in 1945: 'a bare waste of ashes', making him acutely aware of science's power both for good and for evil.After such knowledge, what forgiveness? With care and erudition Bronowski argues that scientific endeavour is an essentially creative act, part of a great shared human interest in ourselves and the world around us; and, routinely, a process of trial-and-error, the end of which is not - cannot be - preordained. 'Above all, Bronowski strove to make science and technology answerable to social progress, to 'human values.' He anticipated the deepening gap between the 'two cultures' and knew that the sciences must be restored to a place in political common sense.' George Steiner

This volume, the Frank Gerstein Lectures for 1963, is the second series of Invitation Lectures to be delivered at York University. The theme “Imagination and the University” was appropriate for, as President Murray Ross states in this Foreword, it is in its early years that a university is sufficiently flexible to utilize imagination in its structure and in its curriculum. York University was in its third year when the Lectures were given.Four distinguished scholars present their views on the importance of an imaginative approach to the different academic disciplines, and to the conduct of life in contemporary society as a whole.Jacob Bronowski, speaking on Imagination in Art and Science, draws a clear and striking analogy between the role of imagination in mathematics and in poetry, drawing on his own experiences and contributions in both areas. He stresses that all creative works in art or science, must conform to the universal experience of mankind and to the private experiences of each man: the work of science, as of art, moves us profoundly, in mind and in emotion, when it matches our experience and at the same time points beyond it.Henry Steele Commager shows how important is the contribution to be made by an imaginative approach to politics, where, as in other fields of human experience, it must not be separated from reality, if it is to find expression in something more than words. He points to examples from the past and the present and asks for more imagination in public thinking, it fit our actions to the reality of change, citing the urgency of such twentieth-century phenomena as the status of Communist China, the predicted population explosion, and the threat of nuclear war. Professor Commager believes that the universities provide the key to this kind of approach, being a supreme example of the creative capacity of mankind, whose function it is to serve the commonwealth of learning.A different kind of insight is offered by Gordon W. Allport, whose subject is Imagination in Psychology. He believes that the present “impertinence” of psychology can best be cured by endowing it with more imagination. He demands a pluralistic approach to psychological investigation, which would not deny the insights yielded by traditional methods, with their characteristic minute analyses, but whose goal would be to fashion a conception of the human person that would exclude nothing that is valid, and at the same time preserve an ideal of rational consistency. This could lead, in turn, to a clear definition of the root motives of mankind, even to discovering new formulas for international peace by offsetting particularistic political demands. Finally, Paul H. Buck describes the Harvard House Plan as an example of Imagination and the Curriculum. This plan, modelled on the Oxford-Cambridge College system which is also followed in some Canadian universities, is an attempt to make all aspects of undergraduate life a process of education. And a truly liberal education for today and tomorrow, Professor Buck is confident, will combine a programme of general education, a programme of specialism, and a collegiate way of living.

Science has called into question many traditional assumptions about human nature. In the age of the human genome project, this truism is even more obvious than it was in 1965, when scientist and historian of ideas Jacob Bronowski first delivered the lectures upon which this book is based. Has science revealed that we are essentially just complex machines? Or is human identity more than the sum of its parts?With his gift for conveying the excitement of ideas, Bronowski discusses the impact of science on our sense of self and the need to re-evaluate ethics in light of the scientific perspective. As both a practicing scientist and an author of books on poetry, he makes interesting connections between the uses of the imagination in science and in literature. Whereas science creates experiments to test hypotheses about the outside world, literature provides "experiments" in poetry and prose, allowing readers to experience what it means to be fully human and relating the individual's inner life to that of every human being. In the quest for understanding, science discovers the facts about reality while art depicts the truth of human experience. Bronowski argues that a true humanistic philosophy must give equal place to the inner, subjective vision of the arts and the outer, objective perspective of science since they are both products of one self-conscious creative imagination. In the final analysis, he emphasizes that these perspectives converge in revealing a more enlightened, universal ethics, one that fosters tolerance, mutual understanding, an appreciation of differences, and a sense that we all share a common destiny as human participants in nature's cosmic drama.