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Scientific humanism and liberal education: The philosophy of Jacob Bronowski

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Scientific humanism and liberal education: The philosophy of Jacob Bronowski

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Content SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM AND LIBERAL EDUCATION:
THE PHILOSOPHY OF JACOB BRONOWSKI
by
Robert Joseph Emmitt
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EDUCATION)
May 1982
Copyright Robert Joseph Emmitt 1982
UMI Number: DP24822
All rights reserved
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Dissertation FuMsWing
UMI DP24822
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U N IV E R S IT Y O F S O U T H E R N C A L IF O R N IA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, w ritten by
Robert Joseph Emmitt .
under the direction of A i s . . . . Dissertation C om
mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has
been presented to and accepted by T h e Graduate
School, in p a rtial fu lfillm en t of requirements of
the degree of
[ D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Dean
D ate
To Margaret Janick Emmitt
ii
The nautilus shell, the dynamic symmetry of the
golden rectangle, cellular growth and stellar evolution,
the diffusion of knowledge in learning communities— all
follow the logistic or logarithmic curve of growth based
on the irrational e, suggesting a yet unidentified
principle of unity.
Evolute of e
Chambered nautilus of the sea,
Convolvulus of silvery nacre,
Expound the evolute of e,
The surd within the germ of nature:
The mystery in those spiral walls
That whirl about the static center,
Whose ever outward flowing halls
Caparison the space they enter.
How is it that you hold in troth,
Within your dumb and blinded ells,
The universal arc of growth,
Alive alike in stars and cells,
That balance, beauty, poise makes one,
By exponential absolute,
With Andromeda and Parthenon
And the logistic curve of truth?
Robert Emmitt
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to remember and thank the many
persons who participated in the search for understanding
that this dissertation represents— they have comprised the
personal learning community without which its completion
would probably have been postponed into eternity. Pride
of place goes to William F. O'Neill whose magnanimity of
confidence and comprehension were equal to its conception
and whose sagacious counsel helped me to compass its
realization. Frank Fox, as committee member and Director
of the Washington Education Center, provided unremitting
moral support and assistance with the maddening minutiae of
administration. As the committee member from outside the
School of Education, Chester Newland almost eagerly
accommodated a demanding schedule to what inevitably
became an intricate tale of two cities and thereby con
tributed to its happy conclusion.
Mrs. Rita Bronowski provided bibliographic infor
mation, encouragement, and valuable personal references to
Roger Bingham and George Derfer, who generously shared
experiences and sources. Marjorie Hoachlander was
hospitable and helpful at a time of conceptual chaos and
directed me to Sylvia Bailey, whose advice was second only
iv
to Mrs. Bronowski1s in value. Ian Crellin, principal
curator of the Bronowski archives in the Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library at The University of Toronto, was a
Vergilian guide to its resources.
Finally, my supervisors, Inez Casiano and Gerard
Herbert, provided spiritual and corporal support through
encouragement and a lenient leave policy; and Sidney
Brechin extended the hospitality of his home through the
Mensa network and permitted me an affordable fortnight
for pursuing my researches at the University of Toronto.
The experience leaves me with the reflection that
the search for knowledge continues to evoke the finest
qualities of generosity and respect among the citizens
of our learning societies, perhaps because we sense that
the value that most unites us in a common humanity is, as
Bronowski knew and Shakespeare wrote, "wisdom: a word
that all men love."
CONTENTS
Dedication...................................... = ii
Epigraph.............................................. iii
Acknowledgments.............................. iv
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION.................... 1
Purpose, Perspective, and Plan ........... 1
Scope, Limitations, and Delimitations . . 9
II. BIOGRAPHY.................................... 16
III. A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE .... 50
IV. THE MIND AS MODEL, METAPHOR, AND MATRIX . . 87
Architectonic............................ 87
The Epistemology of Science ....... 98
Epistemology and the Constructive
Imagination............................. 115
The Epistemology of Art .................. 124
The Epistemology of Values................ 137
V. LIBERAL EDUCATION: THE DIALECTIC OF
SELF AND SOCIETY, UNITY AND PLURALITY . . 165
VI. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS . 226
Works C i t e d .................................*. . . . 239
*
vi
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Purpose, Perspective, and Plan
In his Foreword to The Ascent of Man, Jacob
Bronowski declared a lifelong aspiration: ”My ambition
here has been the same as in my other books, whether in
literature or in science: to create a philosophy for the
twentieth century which shall be all of one piece.The
purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which
Bronowski can be considered to have achieved this aspira
tion to unify contemporary scientific, humanistic, and
ethical thought and to assess whether his ’’scientific
humanism” has the substance and appeal, the cogency and
consistency, to support a contemporary philosophy of
liberal education.
In a happy paraphrase, S.E. Luria has character
ized Bronowski’s central message as being ’’that the
integrity of the doer should be matched by the vision of
2
the thinker,” and it is this unity of thought and action
that makes Bronowski’s philosophy a philosophy of educa
tion, however little he may have written about teacher
education or the nature of the young adult as learner.
1
Bronowski, indeed, touched on these and a number of other
traditional topics of education, but his conviction and
commitment are often at least as evident in his career as
doer as in his statements as thinker.
Bronowski’s reputation as a thinker seems to have
suffered principally from three groups— idolators who know
him principally or exclusively through the television ver
sion of ’’ The Ascent of Man,” and view him as a benign
oracle of phosphorescent science; religious antagonists,
both naive and subtle; and academicians who derogate him
as a scientific popularizer prone to overgeneralization.
Fortunately, there is also a large group of edu
cated readers who know Bronowski through his writings as
well as through the television series and who view him as
a scientific humanist who diagnosed and then sought to
heal the break between the scientific and humanistic cul
tures by demonstrating, first, that humanistic values
might be derived from the practice of science, and
secondly, by pointing to the common role of imagination
in the development of both forms of knowledge. Though
this last view is obviously the most accurate and ade
quate, it remains a limited extract from Bronowski’s
thinking that hardly comprises a unified twentieth-
century philosophy.
Thus the boast or claim goes unanswered: Is
there in fact a coherent, unified philosophy in
2
Bronowski’s writings, and if so, on what principle is it
founded? None of the serious studies of Bronowski, dis
sertations and an unpublished book, has enunciated,
examined, or evaluated the unifying principle— indeed,
none has addressed it. All have confined themselves to
an account of Bronowski’s two-cultures thesis and his
* efforts to mend the breach between the exponents of the
opposing camps, as if this were the central issue in his
work or the most original of the ideas he presented for
public discussion. Yet, when he published an article
3
titled "Dr. Arnold’s Ghost” in 1957, Bronowski virtually
pointed to the priority of Thomas Huxley and Matthew
Arnold in raising and debating this issue. Huxley’s ”A
Liberal Education; and Where to Find It” and his ”Science
and Culture” lectures, and Matthew Arnold’s response,
"Literature and Science,” published in the 1880’s, are
familiar reading for students of Victorian literature on
4
both sides of the Atlantic.
Thus the issue began as a difference in educa
tional philosophy, and the question is not where did
Bronowski find it, but where did he take it. In contem
porary terms, the question might be formulated as, Does
Bronowski’s philosophy contain a constructive principle
more comprehensive than the reconciliation of the so-
called two cultures, and can that constructive principle
be used to support a theory of general, liberal
3
education? This dissertation will argue that the ques
tions of unity and of relevance to contemporary liberal
education can both be answered affirmatively. The con
structive principle behind Bronowski*s philosophy can
support a twentieth-century philosophy of liberal educa
tion that reconciles science, humanism, and ethics.
As Luria aptly observes, ’’Bronowski has confi
dence in human reason. His lectures breathe optimism, an
optimism not unlike that of the thinkers of the Enlight
enment, but sobered and refined by the modern view of
nature and the place of the human mind within it."^ The
unity that I find in Bronowski’s multifaceted writings
spanning forty years and beginning with The Poet’s
6
Defense in 1939, is deeply grounded in the Enlightenment,
but scarcely limited to its optimism. In The Poet * s
Defense, Bronowski first states what I would characterize
as an essentially Kantian view of mind and knowledge that
he enlarges and enriches throughout his career while
maintaining the continuity of its central theme.
In view of Kant’s ubiquitous and universally
acknowledged influence on modern philosophy, this is
hardly surprising. As I shall suggest, there is also a
certain similarity between Kant's effort to unite empiri
cism and rationalism in the eighteenth century and
Bronowski’s effort to reconcile the two cultures in the
twentieth. But the two-cultures issue is only one
4
corollary of Bronowski’s major argument. In view of the
implicit evidence and the direct references to Kant, it is
slightly surprising that previous writers have barely
touched on Kant at all. But perhaps it is less surprising
when one considers the wealth of modern scientific, artis
tic, and historical evidence Bronowski adduced to support
his transformation of Kantian principles into the compre
hensive philosophy of contemporary knowledge and,
implicitly, of education that he erected upon it.
The motive and reasons for undertaking this study
are unabashedly subjective. Convention sometimes imposes
a disingenuous scientism on rationalizations for disserta
tion research, as if theses and the energy for pursuing
them were deliverances of an impersonal, value-free,
empirical process. Nothing could be more alien and
antagonistic to Bronowski’s conception of the pursuit of
knowledge; to his insistence on the connectivity of
knowledge and interest; or to his persistent emphasis on
the fact that the answers we get in science and scholar
ship are inevitably a reflection of the questions we care
to put. To begin with such pretensions of disinterested
ness would make unconscious irony of whatever followed.
Briefly, I have found Bronowski’s thinking a continuing
challenge to my own, and I have wished to understand it
better.
5
But beyond this, Bronowski1s writings have seemed
to promise the resolution of a problem that has perplexed
me since I was an undergraduate in the college program at
The University of Chicago in the mid-fifties. This noto
riously controversial program has been accurately
characterized by Boyer and Levine in their recently pub
lished A Quest for Common Learning:
The most hotly debated experiment of the period
was "the College" at the University of Chicago.
The person whose name is inextricably linked with
this venture is, of course, Robert Hutchins. In
reality, the College was a series of experiments.
It was launched before Hutchins arrived and con
tinued not only after he retired, but even after
the initial wave of general interest had long
faded. The College at Chicago was a radical
approach to general education, embodying, in
varying degree, great books, interdisciplinary
courses, early college admission, comprehensive
examinations and a four-year, fully-required
course of study. The prestige of the University
of Chicago and the charisma of Robert Hutchins
caught the nation's imagination. Parts of the
Chicago program were replicated in experimental
colleges, honors colleges, and schools across the
country. St. Johns College is a direct descen
dant of the Chicago plan.'
As Brubacher and Rudy have described this program
in their Higher Education in Transition, its ultimate
basis was an absolutistic metaphysics and its most endur
ing contribution was the stimulus it gave to American
higher education to re-examine its philosophical prem
ises. Of Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, the authors
comment: "Agreeing that there was no possibility of
restoring theology to its former importance, they
6
proposed in its stead to substitute a metaphysics which
drew upon absolutes from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas
about the nature of man, the nature of truth, and the
8
nature of value." They cite Hutchins' notorious sorites
from The Higher Learning in America about the identity and
uniformity of truth and education: "Education implies
teaching. Teaching implies knowledge. Knowledge is
truth. The truth is everywhere the same. Hence education
9
should be everywhere the same."
As Brubacher and Rudy also note, "To the leaders
of this school of thought, science was too empirical,
often anti-intellectual, in its complete absorption in the
accumulation of facts alone.And Hutchins is dispar
aging both about science and about scientists who
undertake philosophy. He characterizes the scientific
spirit as collecting all the facts and hoping for the
best, praises Euclidean geometry for training man in rea
son and logic, and disparages the philosophical
speculations of scientists, which "confuse the public
further about the greatest questions that have confronted
the human mind."^
Valuable though the undergraduate education
ostensibly provided under this rationale was; as Boyer and
Levine imply, it was neither exclusively nor even princi
pally based on these philosophical premises. In fact, no
amount of ingenious scholarly exegesis or audacious wit
7
can make the hierarchical, aristocratic, historically,
socially, and cosmically confined philosophies of
Aristotle and St. Thomas a convincing basis for a modern
democratic liberal education encompassing the sciences,
humanities, and social studies. The curriculum at Chicago
in the mid-fifties was a compromise— in its inclusion of
affective and cognitive, science and art, personal repli
cation of the classic experiments of Galileo, Mendel, and
Lavoisier, in its continual confrontation of the ancient
and modern in all fields, and in its unifying philosoph
ical conception— far closer to Bronowski?s proposed course
of study and the Kantian union of rationalism and empiri
cism than its doctrinal defenses would suggest. But this
judgment anticipates the evidence and argument of the
following pages, of which it is the harvest rather than
the seed.
The plan of this dissertation, supporting and
i
elaborating these statements, is as follows: Chapter II
is devoted to a biography of Jacob Bronowski that provides
the groundwork for what is ultimately an intellectual
history of the ideas, insights, and syntheses of a singu
lar mind working on the events and influences of his
times. Chapter III is devoted to a descriptive and
critical presentation of the substantive Writings about
Bronowski. The chapter surveys and characterizes the
general literature on Bronowskirs work, examines the
8
perceived strengths and weaknesses of the more extensive
studies, as well as the works of some writers whom
Bronowski specifically criticized and with whose views he
explicitly agreed or differed. Chapter IV presents an
analysis and critical appraisal of Bronowski1s philosoph
ical work, with attention to his principal assumptions and
tenets, attempting to exhibit the arguments and the evi
dence he adduces for them, to assess their cogency and
validity and to place them in a philosophical and histor
ical tradition. The issues introduced in this chapter
lead naturally into Chapter V, which considers the educa
tional implications Bronowski drew from his philosophy,
and particularly the potential and original contributions
of his secular post-Kantian humanism to a unified philos
ophy of liberal education, Finally, Chapter VI provides a
summary of the principal lines of argument, a discussion,
and some conclusions for our times.
Scope, Limitations, and Delimitations
Bronowski1s philosophy, while having a sound
theoretical base, is also an intimate, lived-in philosophy
of man and nature. Since Bronowski emphasized the distor
tions inevitably introduced in treating any idea outside
the context in which it was conceived and generated, it
would be a poor, deracinated account of his thinking that
attempted to abstract it from the personal, social, and
intellectual events in which it was developed.
There is, moreover, ample warrant for treating
Bronowski1s ideas in the context of his experience, for
Bronowski introduced himself and his feelings into virtu
ally every major exposition of his ideas. Examples of
Bronowski’s penchant for presenting his ideas and those of
others in the context of his personal experience are evi
dent even in such highly imaginative and theoretical
writings as Nature and Knowledge and "Humanism and the
Growth of Knowledge," which deal with subjects such as
time, genetic mutation, the evolution of species, the
nature of truth, scientific laws and scientific verifica-
12
tion. In fact the persistent ethical emphasis in his
writings, which may ultimately prove to be his major con
tribution to the contemporary philosophy of science,
invariably has its grounding in personal and social expe
rience .
Nevertheless, biography and history remain the
background rather than the foreground on which this
critical explication of his philosophy is focused. The
principal contribution to knowledge that this study
attempts to make is an exposition of the unifying prin
ciples in Bronowski’s thought, of their essential
consistency and their contribution to contemporary secu
lar, scientific, and humanistic educational philosophy.
10
The primary sources are Bronowski1s published
writings, with some reliance on unpublished material exam
ined in the Bronowski archives at the Fisher Rare Book
Library at the University of Toronto. Secondary sources,
where they are relevant, are also considered, criticized,
and cited where appropriate. The main line of argument,
however, is implied in the phrase explication de texte,
informed by some reference to the history of relevant
ideas. The limitations of the existing partial and
peripheral treatments of Bronowskif s thought are pre
sented in the discussion of the literature; they are
perhaps as much the results of differing objectives as of
faulty or inadequate analysis. Of the two dissertations
which have appeared on Bronowski, one is primarily bio
graphical and historical; the other is concerned with the
ethical implications and possible religious uses of
Bronowski1s ideas. Neither considers Bronowski1s philos
ophy both comprehensively and in depth. On the other
hand, I have not attempted to duplicate their historical
scholarship or socio-religious speculation, but have cited
and used their sources where I was able to verify them at
the Bronowski archives.
Although I present Bronowski's philosophy of
liberal education as an alternative to the Neo-Thomism of
Hutchins and Adler, to have undertaken an exposition of
their views, let alone those of Aristotle and Aquinas,
11
would have enlisted me in an interminable crusade of
indefinite direction and uncertain conclusion. Philos
ophies of knowledge and education are not so much refuted
as outflanked by evidence and experience they can no
longer comprehend or compose without multiplying entities
beyond necessity— like Ptolemy's epicycles, Stahl's
phlogiston, or Maxwell's ether, they gradually become
objects of curiosity rather than conviction. Just so, it
seems sufficient to offer Bronowski's philosophy of
liberal education as an alternative requiring less celes
tial machinery and more terrestrial evidence than its
competitors, and leave the matter of supercession to
history and evolution.
Another restriction on the scope and conclusions
of this study should also be made explicit. Although I
point out extensive parallels with Kant in the discussion
of Bronowski's philosophy, they are simply that: paral
lels useful in exposition and discussion. They do not
imply any necessary direct influence or any conclusion
about the provenance of Bronowski's ideas. Apart from
Bronowski's references to Kant in The Western Intellectual
Tradition and his comment that he is continuing Kant's
abandoned program of analyzing the physiological founda
tions of cognition in The Origins of Knowledge and
Imagination, judgments of influence must remain conjec-
13
tural in the absence of external evidence. Fortunately
. 12
such evidence is not essential to the line of argument or
analysis.
Given these limitations and qualifications, I
nevertheless think that this dissertation may claim to be
the first comprehensive analytical and critical presenta
tion of Bronowskifs ideas as a whole, from a perspective
that I think he would find congenial, and with the breadth
and attention that I think they deserve. Since I, as well
as others, consider Bronowski1s principal contribution to.
have been in the area of education, I have also attempted
to present the implicit and explicit philosophy of educa
tion contained in his writings and to consider its value
as a rationale for liberal post-secondary education.
13
Notes
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1973), p. 15.
2
S.E. Luria, Foreword, The Origins of Knowledge
and Imagination, by Jacob Bronowski (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978), xii.
3
Jacob Bronowski, "Dr. Arnold's Ghost," The
Observer, 7 October 1956; rpt. Journal of the Institution
of Electrical Engineers, NS 3 (March 1957), 156-57.
4
Thomas H. Huxley, "A Liberal Education and Where
to Find It" and "Science and Culture;" Matthew Arnold,
"Literature and Science;" in Charles F. Harrold and William
Templeman, English Prose of the Victorian Era (1938; rpt.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 1316-38;
1222-34.
^ S.E. Luria, xii, xiii.
Jacob Bronowski, The Poet's Defence: The
Concept of Poetry from Sidney to Yeats (Cambridge, England,
1939; rpt. Cleveland: World, 1966).
7
Ernest L. Boyer and Arthur Levine, A Quest for
Common Learning: The Aims of General Education
(Washington, D.C.: The Carnegie Foundation for The
Advancement of Teaching, 1981), pp. 10-11.
14
8
John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher
Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges
and Universities, 1636-1976, 3rd ed. rev. (New York:
Harper, 1976), p. 295.
9
Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in
America (1936; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1974), p. 66.
Brubacher and Rudy, p. 296.
Hutchins, pp. 101, 84, 104.
12
Jacob Bronowski, Nature and the Growth of
Knowledge: The Philosophy of Contemporary Science
(Eugene, Oregon: Oregon State System of Higher Education,
1969); "Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge," The
Philosophy of Carl R. Popper, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, The
Library of Living Philosophers (La Salle, 111.: Open
Court, 1974), I, 606-31.
13
Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western
Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel (New York:
Harper, 1960), 473-79 et passim; The Origins of Knowledge
and Imagination, p. 5, et passim.
15
CHAPTER II
BIOGRAPHY
Jacob Bronowski was born in 1908 in Lodz in what
is today the second largest city in Poland and the center
of the Polish textile industry. It was at that time part
of Russia and did not revert to Poland until after the
First World War. In 1912, the family moved to another
textile-milling center, Plauen, now in East Germany. In a
series of four interviews broadcast by the Public Broad
casting Service in 1971, Bronowski implied that his early
years in Germany were shadowed by poverty, and after 1914,
by his family's status as enemy aliens. He recalled
standing in seemingly endless bread and milk lines with a
ration card under conditions so desperate that even his
highly ethical parents encouraged him to try to get bread
without a card.'*'
Following the Versailles Treaty in 1918,
Bronowski had recollections of civil disorder and "the
dark coming down again" until his family moved to England
in 1920. In England the family moved into "the enormous
Jewish slum" centered on Petticoat Lane and bordered by
Chinatown, where his father attempted to revive the
16
traditional family textile business which he had practiced
before the war. Bronowski's later memories were of the
"warm, throbbing humanity" of East End and of his delight
with learning to read and later to speak the English lan
guage, which he thought as ordered and elegant as the
science he was soon to learn with it. It was to this
simultaneous exposure to what seemed to him "simply two
languages for experience that I learned together" that
Bronowski attributed the sense of the indissoluble unity
of science and literature that later became a central
theme in his philosophy of knowledge.
Bronowski attributed his decision to study
mathematics more to social circumstances than to any
preference of his own. The East End, where he attended
the Central Foundation School from 1920 to 1927 was,
during this period, being slowly "engulfed by the poor"
and Jewish children being directed towards an intellec
tual career were encouraged to study mathematics as the
key to advancement and recognition. Bronowski’s aptitude
for mathematics ultimately won him a scholarship to
Cambridge University's Jesus College, but his love Of and
aptitude for language enabled him to excel in other sub
jects as well.^
These early experiences of poverty, social
instability, and ostracism, contrasted with the expe
rience of light, learning, tolerance, and democracy in
17
England were to instill a deep sense of gratitude in
Bronowski, to make him prematurely aware of the human
implications of social order and disorder, and sensitive
to the clarity, felicity, and force of the English lan
guage. He later recounted how, after arriving in England
knowing only the words "Good afternoon," he was introduced
by a librarian at the Whitechapel Public Library to
Midshipman Easy, a book which he later claimed had cast
his prose style and set him on a course of voracious
reading.^
In The Ascent of Man, Bronowski invoked the
lasting impression of these years and the union of democ
racy, literature and intellectual aspiration: "Erasmus
made two lifelong friends,; Sir Thomas More in England and
Johann Frobenius in Switzerland. From More he got what I
got when I first came to England, the sense of pleasure in
the companionship of civilised minds. From Frobenius he
got a sense of the power of the printed book. . . . What
did those three men and their books mean . . .? To me
this is the democracy of the intellect; and that is why
Erasmus and Frobenius and Sir Thomas More stand in my mind
as gigantic landmarks of their time. The democracy of the
4
intellect comes from the printed book. ..." The view
that democracy was essential to the successful pursuit and
propagation of the truth in the scientific and scholarly
communities and in society at large was central to
18
Bronowski1s later derivation of values from scientific
activity.
With his entrance into Cambridge in 1927,
Bronowski had the sense that his life was opening into a
"miraculous world.Bronowski entered into this atmos
phere of intellectual ferment and generation with mixed
exhilaration and trepidation. It was an intellectual
turning point many have experienced, and Bronowski "walked
through Cambridge full of awe, feeling both ignorance and
n6
ecstacy.
As Bronowski later put it, "There were people at
Cambridge who have remained the leaders of their genera
tion in every field." Among those mentioned by Bronowski
were Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Arthur Eddington,
Paul Dirac, J.J. Thompson, J.B.S. Haldane in physics;'7
Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophy;
and finally Albert Einstein, who came to lecture like
Jefferson, en pantoufles, and whose humanity and humility
of manner and dress impressed Bronowski as much as his
physics. Bronowski noted that Einstein spoke not about
his achievements, but about the problems he was then
engaged with. In his dedication to substance rather than
form, Einstein became an exemplary symbol of what
Bronowski regarded as an intellectual "guardian of
8
integrity."
19
But Bronowski was undaunted by this constellation
of luminaries. With William Empson and Humphrey Jennings,
he founded an ephemeral undergraduate literary magazine,
Experiment. As one of the co-editors, Bronowski reviewed
manuscripts by T.H. White, Boris Pasternak and James Joyce
and rejected a collection of letters by Ezra Pound. The
enterprising undergraduate also contrived to meet James
Joyce and his secretary Samuel Beckett, and to obtain an
interview with T.S. Eliot, during which they discussed
their shared appreciation of W.H. Auden, then a novice
9
poet at Oxford.
In characterizing these times, when the atom was
being smashed for the first time in Cambridge's Cavendish
Laboratory and the positron was presented for the first
time to a lecture audience as the photograph of an
aberrant curve among the electron tracks in a cloud
chamber, Bronowski emphasized the sense of intellectual
community that made no distinctions between the realms of
art and science. Physicists, mathematicians, and astron
omers said to each other "Have you heard that T.S. Eliot
is lecturing tomorrow? We'll all go along.
It was obviously a time of intellectual intoxica
tion, an experience that enriched Bronowski's appreciation
for British culture and served as a standard against which
to measure less liberal educational experiences and
examples, such as those of the German universities
20
Bronowski was later to criticize. In effect, the expe
rience at Cambridge contributed to Bronowski’s idealized
democratic intellectual community which generated human
values in the uncompromising pursuit of knowledge. It was
Bronowski's personal paradigm of the democracy of the mind
modeled on the Socratic dialogues and Platonic Academy,
which forever fused democracy and knowledge in the con
sciousness of Western civilization.
But despite Bronowski’s intellectual triumphs, he
was aware of and, in fact, involved in the social events
of the time. The Depression hit England as hard as it hit
any European country, and added an economic incentive to
excel and escape from the ghetto. Bronowski observed and
participated, and the development of his social conscience
can be read both in his actions and in his empathic eye
for human detail that marks the vicarious comprehension of
misery:
So far as England was concerned the Depres
sion had really been going on for a long time.
There had been a ghastly Coal Strike— when I was
still In school I remember as a small boy
addressing envelopes on behalf of the miners.
There had been the General Strike of 1926, and
then of course the waves engulfed the world. So
that by the time 1930 came along the economic
picture was unbelievably dark. . . . we were very
hungry when young. And I do not just mean when
boys. . . .
It is difficult to picture a country like
England to have millions unemployed, with men
marching in the rain, as I have seen them march.
21
Coming down from the north through Cambridge when
I was a graduate student with the rain coming in
through their boots.H
But it was Hitler’s accession to power in Germany
in 1932 that most profoundly affected Bronowski, shook the
intellectual citadel of Cambridge and ultimately charged
Bronowski’s human sensibility with a sense of mission.
"And yet Hitler’s coming struck a most powerful blow at me
and my generation. I suddenly realized that being happy,
being human, being a scientist, being with friends was not
enough. And particularly being an academic, which I was
then destined to be, was not going to be enough. Quite
suddenly it became clear that whatever one did with one’s
life after 1932, one had to bear witness for what one
12
believed to be the foundations of human decency."
In "Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge,"
Bronowski has described the impact of this event on his
fellow students at Cambridge, and'particularly their dis
satisfaction with the inhumanity of the then fashionable
positive philosophies. Bronowski may excusably project
his own views somewhat in his description of the motives
of scientists, "Scientists were actively trying to break
out from the aura of impersonality and even inhumanity
with which tradition had hallowed their work and awed the
public. And here they were to be herded back to the
ancient postures, because philosophers were trying to con
struct a system of science which positively aspired to be
22
13
impersonal and inhuman." Nevertheless, he is certainly
right in his depiction of the general sense of aimlessness
and malaise that turned many of his contemporaries toward
the reassuring certainties of Marxism. "They were looking
for some coherent ground on which to build a consistent
code of personal actions in face of a mounting set of
social disasters— the Wall Street crash, the hunger
marches, war in Manchuria, the rise of Hitler, Stalin’s
crusade against Trotsky, the civil war in Spain, the
Anschluss with Austria, and the surrender of the
Sudetenland.
What most appalled Bronowski about Hitler was his
inhumanity not only to Jews, but to socialists, pacifists,
Nobel prizewinners and poets. As Bronowski recounts it,
it was a sense of outrage at these barbarities that led
him to make a personal assessment and to conclude that his
powers of persuasion in speaking and writing could be
used to reach a wider audience. "And I never looked back.
It was then that I began to write about science in
general, to address people who were not in university
classes, and to go out to do the kind of thing that I
became classic for, namely to give the sort of lectures
that have been enshrined in my book Science and Human
Values .
That Bronowski came by his liberal sympathies
naturally and early is suggested both by his reference to
23
addressing letters on behalf of the miners as a boy and by
Mrs. Bronowski’s account of how she and Bronowski’s mother
assisted Jewish children to escape from Spain to the
16
British Mandate of Palestine.
Bronowski1s analysis at the time was that the
nationalistic, parochial, scholastic higher educational
system in Germany had failed the people and made them
vulnerable to the exhortations of a demagogue. Among the
first literary products of this conviction were two essays
that Bronowski wrote for the Cambridge journal, Granta,
which were published in 1933. In "The Nazi Movement and
the Universities," Bronowski accused the German univer
sities of having tolerated and even encourged the Nazis
because of their narrow pride in German culture and their
belief in German superiority. The rejection of Einstein’s
physics because of his Jewish origins was a cardinal
example of this astigmatic view of scientific truth.
In the second article, "Hitlerism," Bronowski
further indicted the German professoriate for their
specialism, for a technical and experimental approach to
science that neglected its human implications, for being
xenophobic and numb to the wider human dimensions and
implications of their knowledge. He felt that scientists
bore a special culpability for the ignorance of the German
citizenry."^ As he commented later, in the sequence on
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in The Ascent of Man,
24
"It is a major tragedy of my life-time and yours that, here
in Gottigen, scientists were refining to the most exquisite
precision the Principle of Tolerance, and turning their
backs on the fact that all around them tolerance was
18
crashing to the ground beyond repair."
After leaving Cambridge in 1933, having obtained
a Ph.D. in mathematics, Bronowski and a close friend,
James Reeves, took their savings and went to Majorca,
Spain, where they rented a workman's cottage. There they
joined the select literary circle of the American poet
Laura Riding and Robert Graves and engaged in what
Bronowski subsequently described as "endlessly arguing
19
about poetry." At the end of the winter Bronowski
returned to England and took a position as Lecturer in
Mathematics at the University of Hull, a position he held
until 1942. During this period, Bronowski published some
sixteen scholarly articles dealing with algebraic geometry,
topology, statistics, and applications of mathematics to
anthropology.^
But Bronowski did not lose his interest in English
literature and poetry during these years; in addition to
his academic duties, he lectured to adult education
21
students on the English novel. He also continued his
work on his first book, The Poet's Defence, which was
published in 1939, followed shortly by Spain 1939: Four
Poems, a small volume of verse about the Spanish Civil
25
22
war. In these poems, Bronowski drew upon his observa
tions of misery and poverty among the Spanish peasants,
and expressed his horror and disgust at the violent
extirpation of liberal aspirations for the freedom of the
Spanish people. Both Bronowski and Rita Coblenz, to
become his wife in 1941, were personally and emotionally
involved. Bronowski spoke as late as 1971 with some
bitterness about the abject failure of liberals to have
any real influence on the outcome: Mthere was a pell mell
of attempts to help the Spaniards. But in fact it simply
showed that the world laughed at the revolutionary parties,
the world laughed at liberalism. I am married to my wife
because her young man went into the Spanish Civil War and
23
was killed. Killed by whom? Nobody now knows. . . ."
In the Preface to the 1966 edition of The Poet1s
Defence, Bronowski relates that the book was widely read
and discussed. He felt, however, that his argument for a
unique, non-discursive, universal truth distinct from that
of science convinced no one who was not already of his
persuasion. He therefore conceived a second book and a
new method to demonstrate his thesis. He would subject
his conception of the independence of poetic truth to an
"empirical test" by comparing Alexander Pope before and
William Blake after the Industrial Revolution. Owing to
the fortunes of war and publication, only the second half
of Bronowski's draft appeared, as William Blake, 1757 to
26
1827: A Man Without a Mask in 1944.^
As is detailed in the fourth chapter of this study,
these two books are of interest because they show
Bronowski1s philosophy in germinal form. The Preface to
The Poet's Defence makes this explicit: "At bottom, I was
looking not so much for a criticism as for a philosophy of
literature." Also evident in this Preface, and in the
books themselves, are two contrasting themes that were most
successfully reconciled in Bronowskifs mature works.
Bronowski was seeking to show "the independence" of an
ideal poetic truth "in the face of social change" and to
25
do it by means of an "empirical test." The effort to
reconcile this antithesis between empiricism and rational
idealism begins in his theory of literature, but ultimately
comes to characterize his whole philosophy.
Entering the Home Service Office in 1942,
Bronowski became head of a statistical unit dealing with
the economic and strategic effects of bombing. Bronowski
developed computational techniques for the assessment and
projection of urban and industrial damage and civilian
casualties and was credited with a key role in Britain's
successful defense against the Nazi submarine offensive
2 6
in March 1943. His skills led to his being assigned to
the Joint Target Group in Washington, D.C. and subse
quently, to his appointment as Scientific Deputy to the
27
British Chiefs of Staff Mission to Japan in 1943 to study
the effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and
Hiroshima.
Bronowski’s profound intellectual, moral, and
visceral shock on confronting the desolation in Nagasaki,
unforgettably described as a "universal moment" in his
Science and Human Values, initiated a re-evaluation of the
use of science and the role of the scientist in warfare.
It seemed to Bronowski as if the moral challenge of the
bomb hung like a mocking refrain in the still evening air
over the ruins of Nagasaki: "The moment of recognition
when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present
to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it. I see
the warm night and the meaningless shapes; I can even
remember the tune that was coming from the ship. It was
a dance tune which had been popular in 1945, and it was
called, 'Is You Is Or Is You Ain't Ma Baby?'
The immediate product of this experience was an
arid, technical monograph, The Effects of the Atomic
Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which assessed the
damage, the number of men and women killed at work in
offices and factories, the number of schoolchildren
immolated at their desks, the percentage of deaths and
buildings partly or totally destroyed by shock and fire at
what distance from ground zero, an extrapolation of these
28
28
effects to British cities. The personal result for
Bronowski was that other scientists might follow the
dictates of their own consciences, but for his part,
Bronowski would "not learn war any more": "You know, when
I came out of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I was never going to
29
go back into that kind of work: once was enough."
Bronowski relates that he suggested to colleagues
in the government and the United Nations that Nagasaki be
preserved as a site for future disarmament negotiations,
thinking that the location might have a sobering and
chastening effect upon representatives convened to weigh
the fate of mankind. But the proposal came.to nought when
it was objected that the site would undoubtedly make the
delegates uneasy.
In 1946, Bronowski returned to England and began
to recast his life. He entered the British Ministry of
Works and began applying his computational skills to the
reconstruction of British cities and to the investigation
of new methods for building homes. Bronowski continued
with the Ministry of Works until 1950, except for a leave
of absence in 1948 to serve as director of ill-fated "Food
and People" project for UNESCO under Julian Huxley, which
perished for lack of support under Huxley's successor as
31
Director-General.
29
In 1950, Bronowski was invited to establish a
research laboratory under the auspices of the National
Coal Board. Except for a year's leave of absence to serve
as Carnegie Visiting Professor at M.I.T. in 1953, during
which he delivered the lectures which became Science and
Human Values, Bronowski remained with the Coal Board until
1964, working principally on the development of smokeless
fuels from coal to alleviate Britain's critical problem
with air pollution. Although Bronowski's laboratory was
successful in creating an inexpensive, smokeless fuel
known popularly as "Bronowski's briquettes," their wide
spread use was obviated by the development of other
32
technologies for eliminating industrial smoke.
Beginning in 1946 with a ten-minute B.B.C. radio
broadcast on the occasion of an American atomic test at
Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, Bronowski developed a
concurrent career as a radio and television commentator
and panelist. Owing to a fortuitous set of circumstances,
Bronowski achieved something like instant celebrity with
his first appearance on radio. "And I had just one of
those fantastic pieces of good fortune which nobody ever
has: something like fifteen million radio listeners were
all glued to their radio sets trying to hear what was
going on in Bikini. Nothing was going on except a lot of
atmospherics. The only thing that was going on was me in
30
the studio in Broadcasting House saying solemnly in a
small voice with a Polish accent what had happened at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And overnight I became a famous
broadcaster.
In December of the same year, Bronowski made the
first of what was soon to become a regular series of
weekly radio, and later television broadcasts on the B.B.C.
’’Brains Trust” program. Bronowski continued to appear
regularly as a panelist on this forum for intellectual and
philosophical discussion until 1957, when he resigned over
a staff appointment that he regarded as calculated to turn
the program into a comedic quiz show.
But Bronowski certainly did not end his broad
casting career in resigning from ’’The Brains Trust.” As
early as 1951, Bronowski had appeared in the television
broadcast, ’’Enquiry into the Unknown.” In 1953-54, he
had collaborated in the series, ’’Science in the Making.”
After his resignation from the panel show, Bronowski
narrated his first television series, ’’New Horizons,” in
1958; in 1960, he developed a series titled "Insight;” in
1967, he narrated a program on Leonardo da Vinci, ’’Tell
Me If Anything Ever Was Done,” and in 1969, a program on
34
William Blake, ”As a Man Is, So He Sees.” Bronowski’s
culminating achievement in television broadcasting was,
of course, ’’The Ascent of Man,” first broadcast in
31
Britain by the B.B.C. in 1973 and in the United States in
1974, shortly before Bronowski's death on August 22, 1974.
Radio and television broadcasting were only one
means Bronowski used to propagate his ideas, at once the
most popular and dramatic, but in some respects perhaps
also the most limited. Sylvia Fitzgerald Bailey, an
editorial associate of Bronowski who was deeply involved
in translating the script of "The Ascent of Man" into the
book of the same name, attested to the limitations and
distortions which are the inevitable price of instruction
by spectacle: "Dr. Bronowski tried to keep the thread of
each program as clear as possible without overwhelming the
audience. Therefore, in the script, important omissions
35
were deliberate."
Bailey further commented about the limitations of
the book as a scholarly presentation of Bronowskifs
thought, owing to its genesis, and about Bronowski's full
educational objective: "Because the text was limited by
space, by time and by the fact that we couldn't deviate
from the programs with too much verbiage, Bronowski wanted
at some future date to do a college edition of Ascent
using material not included in the television program. It
was to be a 'magnum opus,’ a very scholarly, four-volume
set with bibliography and cross references. The person
who considers the present book a college text would be
shortchanged.
32
As noted earlier, between 1933 and 1943, Bronowski
published a score of papers in algebraic geometry and
topology; in 1951-1952, two papers on using multivariate
analysis to differentiate between human and ape teeth; and
in the latter half of the decade, several technical papers
on operations research and coal technology. However,
following his conversion on the road from Nagasaki, the
volume of essays addressed to the public soon surpassed
and ultimately supplanted those written for technical
specialists.
It is to Bronowski1s books, articles, and care
fully crafted lectures delivered to academic audiences
that one must look for his most nearly finished thought.
A more detailed discussion of works with their philosoph
ical implications will be presented in the following
chapters.
In 1950, the year that he became Director of
Research for the National Coal Board, Bronowski achieved
eminence in another, quite disparate field. After study
ing and pondering the paradox of the dissident who is at
once the antagonist and the beneficiary of society,
pariah and prophet, Bronowski rejected his plan for a
book and cast the conflict in the form of a drama, The
Face of Violence, which was broadcast by the B.B.C. and
which subsequently won the Italia Prize as the best
33
3 7
European play for the 1950-51 season.
The underlying perception seems reminiscent of
Freud's comments about the constructive and destructive
uses of aggression in Civilization and Its Discontents
and in his correspondence with Einstein. But for
Bronowski it had an intense personal meaning borne in to
him by his experience at Nagasaki. Bronowski already had
an appreciation of the value of dissent in art as well as
in science. He had paid tribute to the value of English
dissent in literature in William Blake: A Man Without a
Mask and at least partly adopted Blake's creative syn
thesis of opposites in which the Tyger and the Lamb are
equally essential in man and in the economy of the world.
The importance of English dissent in science is emphasized,
in the Fabian Lecture, The Lessons of Science, delivered
in 1950, in which Bronowski asserts that the Nonconformist
tradition was the backbone of science in England in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.^
The conclusion of The Face of Violence may be
taken as Bronowski's formulation of the irony by which
scientists were made accessories to the violent destruction
of humanity and civilization that they had sought to avert:
"At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had dehumanized the enemy
and ourselves in one blow. Perhaps that was Hitler's
worst crime. Perhaps it is the worst crime of evil men,
34
that they make good men enforced wrong-doers of the same
39
kind.” The resolution is not in the righteous certainty
of self-appointed avengers like Mark who become what they
abhor, but in the compassionate pity and reconciled
humanity of Crump, the child-murdering Nazi prison guard
and Clarissa, the child’s mother, who marry to raise
another child. It is the Greek stylization that makes
this symbolic, almost ritual, reconciliation of victim and
violator dramatically credible.
Recognizing the murder in his own heart, Mark, the
.avenger, rides down the hill on his bicycle to his own
back yard, presumably the wiser for having recognized the
identity of the violence in his own breast with Crump’s
and all mankind's. This conclusion of the action and
resolution of the conflict in the detached antistrophe of
Castara and Pollux, "the heavenly twins," undoubtedly
tests the willing suspension of disbelief. But it is of
biographical and philosophical interest because it indi
cates Bronowski's effort to come to grips with the
unenlightened, irrational and passionate face of man— the
aspect that most directly challenges the meliorist
assumptions of contemporary humanism.
There appears to be a certain symmetry in
Bronowski’s answer to similar questions in The Poet's
Defence and in his many defenses of science: the
35
degeneration of the best is the worst. As Philip Sidney
argues in his Defence, poetry can be used to bedizen the
lewd and paint the debased in appealing colors, but its
right use can elevate the mind and engage the passions in
the pursuit of virtue. Similarly, science and knowledge
can be made the instruments of destruction, but they need
not be if directed to their proper use. Their cultivation
has been the glory and progress of the human race and the
source of man's unexampled pace of evolution.
In a similar way, the aggressive instinct of dis-
sention has been the mainspring of man's intellectual
creativity and political freedom. Violence and disaster
are the products of its misuse, but by using his fore
sight, man has the power to choose: "I began by saying
that I am an optimist and a scientist, and you now see
that the two go together. There is plenty of grounds for
pessimism in world affairs, and perhaps we shall not
avoid the suicide of mankind. But can we not? Can we not
prevent the leaders of nations from being proudest of
those scientific inventions which make the loudest bang?
We must, exactly because science has so much better uses
40
to offer for its fundamental discoveries."
Between the constructive and destructive use of
all knowledge, be it in art, science, or affairs of state,
there is no third way in the world of reality: the path
36
of renunciation or blissful ignorance has been barred
ever since Eve ate the apple. There is no retreat from
human identity or evolution.
Atomic energy is not destructive, it is
dangerous. And biological knowledge is not
destructive, but it could become dangerous. In
the hands of evil men anything can become dan
gerous. And if you want to build a civilization
to protect yourself from evil men, take your
clothes off, go out and live in the wilds, eat
grass, you know like Nebuchadnezzar.41
This is, as it were, the self-evident truth, the
underlying faith of Bronowski's philosophy, rather than a
rational deduction from it. Given the assumption that it
is worth being a human being blessed or burdened with
knowledge and the insatiable urge to acquire more, what
are the consequences for thought and action? The evidence
is that for Bronowski the conviction was forced upon him
by events early in life. To communicate, reform, and
inform that conviction with examples was the task of a
lifetime.
Bronowski wrote several other plays for radio,
none quite so successful as The Face of Violence, the most
noteworthy being The Abacus and the Rose, broadcast by the
B.B.C. in 1962, and first published in The Nation in
/ 2
1964. This play, a commentary on the two-cultures
debate of Snow and Leavis, is a dialectical summary of
Bronowski's arguments for the two species of intellectual
endeavor. His other plays include The Closing Years and
37
The Mission to Japan, based on his wartime experiences,
43
and My Brother Died, a play with musical accompaniment.
The final pages of The Abacus and the Rose point
towards what was to be the final, consummatory adventure
of Bronowski’s life. Professor Lionel Potts, F.R.S. is a
molecular biologist, and he uses the peroration of the
play to recapitulate the progress of science and to project
its future advance through the application of the tools of
44
physics to unravelling the molecular structures of life.
In 1963, Bronowski accepted appointment to The Salk
Institute in La Jolla, California where he was to concern
himself primarily with the human implications of the
advance of biological knowledge and the synthesis of
physics and biology that was at that time attracting some
of the best and most daring minds in science.
The time was propitious; The Centennial of the
National Academy of Sciences was celebrated in the autumn
of 1963, and the proceedings, published in 1965 under the
title, The Scientific Endeavor, bear eloquent testimony to
a profound revolution that united the enterprises of
45
science under an expanded concept of evolution. For
some who were educated with the caveat that the applica
tion of evolutionary terminology beyond the confines of
biology was tantamount to anthropomorphism, the degree of
unanimity among the contributors was nothing less than a
38
revelation of converging intellectual endeavor, as sweep
ing as Genesis in its conception and far more compelling
in its logical power.
The prevailing consensus and its import was
perhaps best expressed by Roger Revelle in his Introduction
to the First Scientific Session on the History of the
Universe:
Life could not have arisen in the first
stages of galactic evolution, when only hydrogen
and perhaps helium existed. It was necessary
first to form stars in which several stages of
nuclear fusion could occur. The elements so
created then had to be spewed out into the
interstellar gas and reformed into second or
later generation stars. Many of these later
stars may have evolved planetary systems. But
for highly organized life to develop in such a
system, at least one planet had to be formed at
a distance from the star such that its surface
temperature would permit liquid water to exist.
At this temperature, the planet would probably
be stable for the long period required for
organic evolution only if it consisted primarily
of silicon, and the other heavier elements, plus
oxygen. It would need to be large enough to
retain sufficient light elements to provide an
atmosphere and liquid water on its surface.
The advent of free oxygen in the earth's
atmosphere allowed living things to develop
respiration and thereby to obtain energy in
high concentrations. . . . Warm blooded land
animals, producing 10,000 times as much energy
per gram of body weight as the sun, could not
have evolved before respiration was invented and
the ozone layer appeared. Only then could man
evolve— that tool-making, time-binding, star-
questioning animal . In him, and almost cer
tainly in other creatures like him throughout
the starry universe, a new age begins, the age
when matter starts to understand its past and
consciously to shape its future.4-6
39
Bronowski has described the sense of adventure and
the promise of discovery with which this new prospect in
science was then infused both in his own publications,
such as Nature and Knowledge: The Philosophy of
Contemporary Science (1969) and in personal interviews.
There was, perhaps, for those scientists who had partic
ipated in war work, witnessed its destructiveness, and
sensed its direction, a wish to contribute to the under
standing and enhancement of life as opposed to continuing
to devote their lives to its extermination. In addition,
scientists, at least Bronowski, though the implication
included others— Szilard, Crick— had grown weary of
government surveillance, secrecy, and the tacit suggestion
47
that scientists were somehow innately suspect.
For Bronowski personally, the invitation from
Jonas Salk offered an opportunity to pursue the conse
quences of his philosophy of human uniqueness and its
educational and social implications into the realm of the
life sciences. The first landmark in this new direction
in Bronowski’s thought was The Identity of Man, which was
an amplified presentation of the Man and Nature Lectures
given at the American Museum of Natural History in New
48
York in 1965. Seen reflectively and retrospectively,
evolution seems to have served to synthesize and to
provide a wealth of supporting evidence for Bronowski’s
philosophical ideas in much the same way as it served as a
______________________________________________ ; ________________ 40
unifying conception among the physical, astronomical,
biological, and behavioral sciences in the proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences Centennial quoted above.
The progress of Bronowski’s investigations at the
Salk Institute is marked by such essays as ’’Human and
Animal Language,” ’’ Language, Name and Concept,” ’’Language
in a Biological Frame,” and ’’New Ideas in the Evolution
49
of Complexity.” In 1970, he was made Director of the
Council for Biology in Human Affairs, a post which he
held until his death in August 1974. During the 1960’s,
the generative pattern of Bronowski’s book publishing and
the character of his presentation were well established.
After the publication of The Western Intellectual
Tradition in 1960, all Bronowski’s major statements
originated as lectures. Some of these, published post
humously, are the source of his most fully formulated
philosophy of education and of knowledge.
Among them are the Frank Gerstein Lectures
delivered at-York University in 1963, subsequently pub
lished in Imagination and the University by the University
of Toronto Press; Magic, Science, and Civilization,
delivered at and published by Columbia University; The
Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, delivered at Yale
in 1967; and ’’Art as a Mode of Knowledge,” delivered at
the National Gallery of Art in 1969 and subsequently
41
published in the Visionary Eye by M.I.T. Press in 1978.“*^
The most celebrated, though certainly not the
most characteristic, scholarly, or profound of these
published ’’lectures," for reasons noted above, were the
thirteen segments of "The Ascent of Man" television
series. In terms of pedagogical effectiveness; the range
of audience reached; dramatic, forceful, and original use
of a new medium for instructional purposes; persuasive
presentation of secular scientific humanism; and estab
lishment of its narrator as a public educator, "The Ascent
of Man" was at the time of its presentation, and remains,
a unique achievement.
That Jacob Bronowski, in all his protean public
and professional roles, was first and foremost an educator
is, though implicit in this biography, so evident as to
obviate a running commentary. His first professional
affiliation, his manifold endeavors in adult education,
his copious popular and scholarly writings, his professed
objectives of making science public and domestic knowledge
rather than the purview of a specialized elite, his
insistence on the public morality and ethical significance
of the practice of science— all these made him a teacher
to his profession as well as to the public. C.P. Snow,
Robert Oppenheimer, I.I. Rabi, may have shared and
expressed similar opinions in the course of their careers,
42
but none of them practiced their educational principles
with anything like his dedicated zeal.
The purpose of the following chapters is to argue
that in the course of this career, he developed a
contemporary philosophy of education that can provide
continuing interest and instruction.
43
Notes
^ The chief sources for the biographical data
presented in this chapter are Jacob Bronowski: 20th
Century Man (San Diego: The Salk Institute for Biological
Studies, 1976), transcripts of four interviews with
Bronowski broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in
1971 and first published by San Diego Magazine, hereafter
referred to as 20th Century Man; Ian Crellin, The Legacy
of Jacob Bronowski (Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library, The University of Toronto, 1977); and Bernice I.
Cattanach, Jacob Bronowski: A Twentieth Century Pontifex,
Diss. Northern Arizona University 1980 (Ann Arbor:
University Microfilms, 1980).
?
20th Century Man, pp. 2-4; Crellin, pp. 2-3.
3
Jacob Bronowski, "Knowledge and Education,"
[British] Library Journal, 83 (1958), 340.
t ^
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1973), p. 429.}
20th Century Man, p. 3.
Jacob Bronowski in a filmed interview with
Andres Deinum, Portland, Oregon, March 1, 1967, quoted in
Cattanach, p. 4.
44
^ Jacob Bronowski, "Time of My Life," film tran
script, December 16, 1973, in Bronowski Archives, box 133,
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, The University of Toronto.
Hereafter referred to as Bronowski Archives.
g
Bronowski, Ascent of Man, pp. 256, 429.
9
Cattanach, p. 5.
Bronowski, "Time of My Life."
^ 20th Century Man, pp. 5-6.
^ 20th Century Man, p. 5.
13
Jacob Bronowski, "Humanism and the Growth of
Knowledge," in The Philosophy of Karl R. Popper, ed. Paul
A. Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers (La Salle,
111.: Open Court, 1974) I, 606-631; rpt. in Jacob
Bronowski, A Sense of the Future: Essays in Natural
Philosophy, ed. Piero E. Ariotti and Rita Bronowski
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1977), p. 77.
14
Bronowski, A Sense of the Future, pp. 77-78.
20th Century Man, p. 5.
16
Personal interview with Rita Bronowski by Bernice
I. Cattanach 3 November 1979, cited in Cattanach, p. 20,
n. 75.
^ Jacob Bronowski, "The Nazi Movement and the
Universities" and "Hitlerism"; rpt. in The Best of Granta,
ed* James Philip (London: Cambridge University Press,
1967), pp. 85-88.
45
18
Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, pp. 365-67.
19
Bronowski, Preface to the 1966 Edition, The
Poet’s Defence (Cleveland: World, 1966); rpt. "The Nature
of Art," The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts,
Literature, and Science, ed. Piero E. Ariotti and Rita
Bronowski (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1978), p. 1.
20
Crellin, p. 3.
21
Personal interview with Professor Alan White,
Hull University, 12 February 1981.
22
Jacob Bronowski, Spain 1939: Four Poems (Hull,
England: Andrew Marvell Press, 1939).
23
20th Century Man, p. 6.
24
Jacob Bronowski, William Blake, 1757-1827: A
Man Without a Mask (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1944);
revised and reissued as William Blake and the Age of
Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
25
Bronowski, "The Nature of Art," The Visionary
Eye, pp. 2-4; Crellin, p. 7.
2 6
"J. Bronowski," The Nation, 7 September 1974,
p. 65; "Bronowski," Obituaries from the Times (Reading,
England: Newspaper Archive Development Ltd., 1978).
2 7
Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New
York: Julian Messner, 1956), p. 10.
28
[Jacob Bronowski], The Effects of the Atomic
Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (London: Her Majesty's
Stationery Office, 1946).
46
29
20th Century Man, pp. 12-13.
30
Bronowski, Preface to the Revised edition,
Science and Human Values, rev. ed. (1936; rpt. New York:
Harper, 1965), p. xiv.
31
Cattanach, p. 25, n. 96.
32
Personal interview with Alan White, Professor,
Hull University, 12 February 1981.
^ Crellin, p. 4.
^ Cattanach, pp. 28-30.
35
Transcript of personal interview with Sylvia
Bailey, 15 January 1977, in Marjorie E. Hoachlander, The
Ascent of Man: A Multiple of Uses? (Washington, D.C.:
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1977) II, 71.
3 6
Sylvia Bailey, quoted in Hoachlander, p. 70.
37
Jacob Bronowski, The Face of Violence, broadcast
on Third Programme, British Broadcasting Corporation,
28 March 1950; (London: Turnstile Press, 1954); rev. and
enlarged, The Face of Violence: An Essay with a Play
(Cleveland: World, 1967).
3 8
Jacob Bronowski, Lessons of Science, Fabian
Tract No. 285 (London: Fabian Publications, 1950), p. 7.
39
20th Century Man, p. 8.
^ Jacob Bronowski, ”1984 Could Be a Good Year,"
The New York Times Magazine, 15 July 1962, p. 45.
^ 20th-Century Man, p.. 14.
47
^ Jacob Bronowski, The Abacus and the Rose: A New
Dialogue on Two World Systems, The Nation, 96 (4 January
1964), pp. 4-17; rpt. in Science and Human Values, rev. ed.
(1956; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
^ Crellin, p. 6.
44
Bronowski, Abacus, p. 118.
The Scientific Endeavor, Proc. of the Centennial
of The National Academy of Sciences, 1963 (New York:
Rockefeller Institute Press, 1965).
46
Roger Revelle, Introduction, "The History of the
Universe," The Scientific Endeavor, pp. 8-9.
^ 20th Century Man, pp. 12-13.
48
Jacob Bronowski, The Identity of Man, rev. ed.
(1965; rpt. Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1971).
49
Jacob Bronowski, "Human and Animal Languages,"
"Language in a Biological Frame," "New Ideas in the Evolu
tion of Complexity," in A Sense of the Future, pp. 104-31;
132-54; 175-95; Jacob Bronowski and Ursula Bellugi,
"Language, Name, and Concept," Science 168 (1970) 669-73.
Jacob Bronowski, "The Imaginative Mind in Art"
and "The Imaginative Mind in Science," in Imagination and
the University (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1964), pp. 3-38; rpt. The Visionary Eye, pp. 8-32; Magic,
Science, and Civilization (New York: Columbia University
48
Press, 1978); "Art as a Mode of Knowledge: The A.W. Mellon
Lectures in Fine Arts for 1969," The Visionary Eye,
pp. 57-170.
CHAPTER III
A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
The most sustained and substantive discussion of
Bronowski's life, work, and contribution has been presented
in two doctoral dissertations, the first by Marie Novak,
titled Science: Dilemma and Opportunity for Christian
Ethics: Jacob Bronowski, a Case Study, published in 1976,
and the second by Bernice I. Cattanach, Jacob Bronowski:
A Twentieth Century Pontifex, published in 1980.-*- As I have
indicated previously, I feel that both these studies are
limited by their failure to see Bronowski's philosophy
steadily and to see it whole and by their preoccupation
with the two-cultures monothematic theory of Bronowski’s
thinking. In fairness, it should be acknowledged that
both make significant contributions to discussion and
information about Bronowski and his thought, and that both
have theses that are distinctly different from the one
presented here.
Novak’s dissertation, the earlier of the two, is
impressive for sheer magnitude: published in two volumes
by University Microfilms, it is more than six hundred
pages long. Her reading in the history and philosophy of
50
science is extensive, the questions she asks are intel
lectually significant, and she has an excellent grasp of
the details of the Bronowski source material available to
her. Yet, despite these considerable merits, to which a
fluent style should be added, the dissertation as a whole
suffers vitiating limitations and defects.
In the first place, the dissertation was published
before some of the most significant and mature of the
Bronowski writings had been published both as individual
titles and as collections of essays. Examples of major
Bronowski writings excluded by this accident of chronology
are The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination; Magic,
Science and Civilization; "Humanism and the Growth of
Knowledge," which, though published in 1968, does not
appear in her bibliography; "Art as a Mode of Knowledge:"
and miscellaneous shorter essays which were also repub
lished in A Sense of the Future, 1977, and The Visionary
Eye, 1978. In fact, all the books mentioned were pub
lished in 1977 or 1978, after Novak's dissertation.
This fact and one of similar consequence, her
inability to consult the original materials in the Jacob
Bronowski Collection at the University of Toronto's Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, donated in 1977, probably serve
to explain the somewhat restricted focus of her study, as
well as a few errors of interpretation which would
51
probably have been avoided given access to Bronowski's
later and more comprehensive writings and the useful
compilations edited under the direction of his wife.
However, these limitations are secondary to what
I consider the pre-eminent defect of the study: the
subordination of an account of Bronowski1s ethical and
ontological views to a preconceived and uncongenial
religious perspective. Despite concessionary tributes to
Bronowski's stature as a practicing moralist and skillful
expositor of science, Novak begins with an array of con
victions that are incompatible with scientific humanism.
Their application expectably leads to what seem arbitrary
and inconsequential conclusions drawn from the premises
rather than Bronowski's writings. But before going into
critical detail, it would be preferable to present Novak’s
thesis.
The thesis is that the dangers of modern science
and technology, described by Max Born, Jaques Ellul and
others, mandate cooperation based on an ethical consensus
between Christians and non-Christians. Novak proceeds to
examine and reject a number of religious and philosoph
ical approaches to such a consensus ethics and finally
decides that Bronowski’s ’’ non-neutralist” ethic of
science and Luther's Law-Gospel ethic show the greatest
promise of meaningful reconciliation (Chapters I and II,
pp. 1-225). Novak apparently believes this possible
52
because of Luther's sharp distinction between the spiritual
law of the Gospel and the secular application of "the
Law,1 1 which serves as a "bulwark against the powers of
sin" (p. 112). Luther's Christian prince is, in effect, a
benevolent despot. But, a Christian might modify Luther's
tenets in accord with contemporary natural law. Such a
reinterpretation would be "more in keeping with the way
Luther lived his life than with the practical conservatism
that marked his social theory" (pp. 116-18).
A "helpful non-neutralist ethic," would be
properly subordinated and confined within a comprehensive
Christian ethic "grounded in God's redemptive activity"
(p. 123). Novak proceeds in the course of the disserta
tion to examine three levels of Bronowski's effort to
build "bridges" between the arts and sciences and to
consider his non-neutralist ethic as a means of building a
bridge to Lutheran ethics.
Given her presuppositions, it is not surprising
that Novak finds Bronowski's ethic wanting. His deriva
tion of values and his description of the human emotions
is inadequate to account for the "truly horrible" sins of
the common man which are better explained by Niebuhr's
account of original sin. Bronowski ignores Tillich's
ontic anxiety of all mankind, the "thirst for the
infinite" and other self-evident truths of the
53
existential-theological school of Angst, anxiety, guilt,
absurdity, and redemption. In sum, Novak concludes that
’’Bronowski1s philosophy was too simplistic to do justice
to the complex dynamics characterizing the totality of the
human experience" (pp. 609-10).
Less critical but equally idiosyncratic are
Novak’s distaste for what she misconstrues as Bronowski's
"acquiescence" in the elimination of species; her mistaken
view that Bronowski derived only positive values and dis
positions from art; her summary view that complexity could
not possibly have arisen by chance, suggesting a dismissal
of Nature and Knowledge without any real consideration of
2
the concept of stratified stability.
There seems to be inadequate comprehension of or
sensitivity to Bronowski's larger plan, despite, or
perhaps because of, the impressive mastery of detail. The
suggested synthesis of an adulterated Lutheran ethic with
an adulterated humanism seems pointless. One can imagine
Bronowski’s, if not Luther’s, reaction to the proposal to
make them Procrustean bedfellows. If Novak forgot the
Peasant’s Revolt of 1525 in her eagerness to excuse
Luther’s "social theory" by "the way Luther lived his
life," Bronowski certainly did not. He recounts Luther's
discreditable cultivation of the powerful princes; his
contradictory statements about the use of fire and sword,
- - - - - '54
and his urging the German princes to slaughter 100,000
peasants for protesting the extortions of the nobility.
Bronowski compares Luther with Machiavelli and Bismark.
Given Bronowski's socialist sentiments, few proposed
3
alliances could be more repugnant to him.
But despite her criticisms of Bronowskifs ethic,
her disregard for evidence contrary to her thesis, and her
insensitivity to the experimental, progressive conviction
behind Bronowski's ethics, Novak does not scruple to
propose using it for all it is worth:
The modern secular spirit cannot be ignored
by the Christian theologian seeking to develop
a natural law ethic with broad general appeal. As
discussed earlier, if the theologian adopted the
general framework of Luther's Law-Gospel ethic,
such a natural law ethic could serve a function
analogous to the "political" use of the Law, i.e.,
it could help human sinfulness and foster the
earthly welfare of human beings by promoting
civic righteousness, peace and justice. If a
natural law ethic is to fulfill these functions
successfully, it must seem reasonable to the
modern spirit. . . .
This is why Bronowski's third level attempt
to justify his non-neutralist ethic in a philosophy
of humanity intrigues me. Despite his failings,
Bronowski does point the Christian theologian in
a direction which may be fertile with opportunities
for future development. (p. 561)
Without wishing to be excessively harsh, since
Novak's dissertation contains a store of excellent
resource material and analysis, one is nevertheless
reminded by this proposed kidnapping, of Huxley's reply
to the bishops who suggested he suppress his agnosticism
55
in the interest of public harmony. ’’Surely, the attempt to
cast out Beelzebub by the aid of Beelzebub is a hopeful
procedure as compared to that of preserving morality by
4
the aid of immorality.” It seems to me that, even if
feasible, such a misuse and misrepresentation of
Bronowski's principles would be unethical.
One may note in passing that these alternatives to
Bronowski's optimism and "unrealistically high evaluation
of the moral character of human beings" also have their
difficulties. Niebuhr’s insistence on the inexpugnable
original depravity of man may undermine his democratic
commitment more than he acknowledges. The assumed
universal validity of Tillich's ontic analysis does not
seem to be matched by the universal appeal or even com
prehensibility of his extenuated equivalent for God. One
may reasonably ask for the evidence of ontic anxiety among
Trobrianders, Dobuans, Papuans, and Bushmen. Meanwhile,
the West's technology rather than its religion seems
destined to convert the inscrutable East.
In sum, the Novak dissertation is wanting as an
exposition and discussion of Bronowski's philosophy because
of: (1) an intentional limitation of consideration and
conclusions to Bronowski’s ethical writings, (2) an
unavoidable restriction of scope and inference owing to
publication before several of Bronowski’s most substantive
56
philosophical statements, (3) lack of access to primary
unpublished documents and manuscripts and published
materials of limited availability, (4) focus and organiza
tion based on the over-emphasized and simplistic two-
cultures theory of Bronowski's philosophy and ethics,
(5) the intrusion of extraneous personal predilections and
judgments into the presentation and evaluation of Bronow
ski 1 s ideas, (6) a failure to cite, consider or counter
readily available textual evidence incompatible with her
conclusions, and (7) a grievous misunderstanding of or
disregard for the fundamental individualistic, anti-
doctrinal, and antiauthoritarian conviction behind both
Bronowski's philosophy.and ethics.
Bernice I. Cattanach1s dissertation differs from
that of her predecessor in a number of respects, despite
a certain predilection both seem to have for metaphorical
bridges, evident in Cattanach's title: Jacob Bronowski:
A Twentieth Century Pontifex, in which she apparently
refers to the etymology of the title rather than to its
more familiar association with the Pontifex Maximus,
high priest of the ancient Roman Pontifical College. The
similarity of allusion appears to be purely coincidental,
however, since Cattanach makes no reference to Novak's
dissertation in her bibliography and shows no evidence of
being acquainted with it.
57
Cattanach remedies some of the defects of compre
hensiveness that afflict the Novak dissertation:
Cattanach appears to have had access to all the published
materials by Bronowski through 1978, when The Visionary
Eye, the last major compilation and transcription of
Bronowski's lectures and essays was issued. Cattanach
also appears to have made extensive use of the Bronowski
Archives at The University of Toronto Library, and, in
addition, to have collected additional information about
Bronowski by means of taped interviews with his wife and
other relatives and associates. In fact, the most
valuable part of Cattanach’s dissertation in many respects
is the detail and continuity she has added to previous
written accounts of Bronowski' s life."*
Ca'ttanach’s professed purpose is distinctly dif
ferent from Novak’s as well. Novak has clearly argued the
thesis that scientific knowledge has become so perilous
that the morally concerned believers and non-believers
must unite under the aegis of a new Christian naturalism
to confront the coming Armageddon. I argue that in
contrast to Bronowski’s democratization of the individual
and communal quest for values, Novak’s conclusion contem
plates a benevolent patristicism under which given
Christian values are inculcated in the name of science—
a proposal that undermines the foundations of democracy
58
and democratic education as we know them— precisely what
Bronowski fought all his life to prevent.
But if Novak’s evidence and argument fail to
support her conclusions, Cattanach has few if any signif
icant or original conclusions to show for her extensive
researches, travels, and correspondence. In fact, her
stated objective tends to exclude judgments of the kind
the present study specifically undertakes to consider.
Her introductory statement of purpose is ’’The primary
objective of this dissertation is not to make judgments
about the validity of Bronowski’s philosophy and beliefs.
Rather it is the traditional one of the historian, to
preserve and present in a lucid manner that philosophy and
those beliefs and their impact on society” (p. iv).
This seems a just proposition and a justifiable
approach. Displaying the previously inaccessible and
clearly and informatively organizing and presenting the
accessible are widely accepted justifications for
research. In presenting Bronowski’s biography and in
compiling and organizing the materials which went into it,
Cattanach has made a contribution to scholarship and
provided a valuable context for considering the continuity
and cohesion of Bronowski’s ideas. The notes in my first
chapter constitute acknowledgement of Cattanach’s contri
bution to the development of Bronowski's biography. ,
59
Unfortunately, Cattanach seems considerably less
successful in developing or adding to what was already
available or in exhibiting what was already known about
Bronowski’s thought through his numerous writings,
transcripts, and films. Too often the abbreviated para
phrases of Bronowski’s works are distractingly reminiscent
of the originals and add little to their content by way of
discussion or insight. It is perhaps the fidelity to the
originals and the desire to avoid "judgments about the
validity" that give the unpleasant effect of turning care
fully integrated arguments into loose collections of
trite, sententious, homilies. For example, the conclusion
of the second chapter, "Art and Science" reads in part:
The discoveries of science and the works of
art are creative explorations of hidden like
nesses. Science and art are imaginative and
thereby creative activities; one is as much a
part of the other as are the Renaissance and the
Scientific Revolution. . . . The findings of the
artist are no less truthful than the findings of
the scientist. As scientists look for answers
concerning the natural world, the artist asks
questions concerning the self. Every great work
of art is an analysis of human motives, a dis
covery of truth within the human being, a self
discovery. The artist works as seriously and
devotedly to find the hidden likenesses of his
vision as does the scientist. But whereas
science attempts to arrive at the truths of the
natural world, art attempts to express the
universal human condition. Each is a process of
creativity, and each is a result of the human
imagination. In his attempt to bridge the gap
between science and art, Bronowski made a
complete culture, a unity out of variety. . . .
(p. 85)
60
Reasonable people have differed and no doubt will
continue to differ about matters of content and style, but
one senses here a lack of intellectual engagement and a
transformation of gold into dross.
Had Cattanach adhered to her original intention of
describing rather than critiquing or analyzing Bronowski's
phil osophy and beliefs, more serious difficulties might
have been avoided. Her accounts of his books and posi
tions might have provided a useful precis of his writings,
greatly enhanced by the new material in the biography.
Unfortunately, however, she chose to abandon this*course
in what would seem the worst possible place. In a final
chapter entitled "Bronowski: The Educator," Cattanach
undertakes to criticize the accuracy and historicity of
The Ascent of Man. The inadvisability of selecting this
work as an example of Bronowski's scholarship has already
been suggested by the quotation from Sylvia Bailey in my
second chapter. Although Cattanach probably did not have
access to the transcript of these comments by Bailey, made
in her interview with Marjorie Hoachlander on January 15,
1977, Cattanach might have readily inferred them from
common knowledge of the distortions and foreshortenings
introduced by television’s need for compression.
What is more difficult to account for is
Cattanach's failure, like Novak's, to compare Bronowski's
historical vignettes in The Ascent with his more adequate
61
and extended treatments of the same subjects in The
Western Intellectual Tradition. The failure is particu
larly ironic in Cattanach's case, as she iridicts Bronowski
for the omission of detail and is then rather censorious
about the role and responsibilities of the historian. On
page 148, she writes "... Bronowski seemed to ignore
material which might bring into question his conclusions.','
And in her treatment of Bronowski's role as educator,
before finally exonerating him as "premiere [sic]
pontifex" (p. 175), she first censures him for his alleged
omissions, which will be discussed below: "However, of
[sic] the historian, these complexities are the essence
of history; if the details of the past are eliminated,
nothing of significance remains. When the science teacher
introduces historical materials, he must do so in a
selective manner because his primary purpose is to teach
theories and techniques more effectively; he takes from
the past only that which seems to have significance for
the present. The final result may be a series of
interesting anecdotes or Whiggish distortion, but not the
history of science" (pp. 173-74).
Unfortunately for the credibility of her argument,
Cattanach also seems to ignore material which might bring
her conclusions in question; in addition, she makes a
multiplicity of serious as well as vexatious errors of
62
scholarly reference and citation that detract from the
positive contributions mentioned earlier. Citations are
far too often inaccurate, irrelevant to the line of argu
ment, or simply misinterpretations. Nowhere are these
various flaws more evident than in Cattanach's criticism
of Bronowski1s historical treatment of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, his disregard for the evidence that "religion
was the cradle of science," and his accounts of the dis
covery of oxygen and of the development of atomic theory.
The reason for considering some of these points in
detail is that despite Cattanach1s disclaimer of intention
to "make judgments about the validity of Bronowski1s
philosophy and beliefs," this chapter in fact constitutes
Cattanach's evaluation of Bronowski's educational philos
ophy; and again, despite her stated intention to confine
herself to The Ascent of Man, she makes selective excur
sions into some of Bronowski1s other writings. The effect
is, frequently, to charge Bronowski with scientific and
historical distortions on behalf of his philosophy that
in fact he did not make.
The nature and course of Cattanach’s rationale is
as follows: First, she argues that Bronowski1s educa
tional philosophy is Progressive rather than Essentialist,
there apparently being no third alternative in the rather
limited schema she adopts, "Within the realm of
63
educational philosophy, there are two fundamental schools
of thought, the Essentialist, or conservative, and the
Progressive," Then, "Bronowski's educational objectives
were similar to those Progressive educators favoring a
more liberal approach, especially John Dewey" (pp* 144-45).
Thus, it is the best work to examine for Bronowski's
educational philosophy because, "The Ascent of Man gave
Bronowski the opportunity not only to present his
'philosophy for the 20th century,' but also to practically
implement the educational objectives and methods he deemed
necessary" (p. 147).
Cattanach's first allegation is that "To glorify
the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, Bronowski
downgraded the achievements of the Middle Ages." She
cites Magic, Science and Civilization, "The Creative
Process," "The Fulfillment of Man," and The Ascent of Man> ?
as providing evidence for her assertion, and she quotes
Bronowski's statement that "There was no science, except
in secrecy, in the Dark Ages before the Renaissance."
Bronowski's religious views and the context of this state
ment will be considered in due course. However, Cattanach
attributes the sentence to "Leonardo da Vinci's Scientific
Interest as a Clue to the Character of His Genius,"
Scientific American 208 (July 1963) 172 with a second
reference to The Ascent of Man, p. 140 (Cattanach, 149).
64
The quotation in fact comes from "The Fulfillment of Man"
(A Sense of the Future, p. 259) and the article about
Leonardo appears in volume 207 (June 1963) and, if any
thing, provides a counter-example to Cattanach’s quotation
at the beginning of the paragraph.
Bronowski1s only reference in the Leonardo article
to the Middle Ages is as follows: "He had above all a
highly concrete mind. He had heard of the quarrels about
the principles of mechanics between the dissident philos
ophers of Paris and the traditional followers of Aristotle
and Aquinas. But these abstractions did not engage his
mind" (p. 172). The other reference in the note, from
Ascent, merely states that Paracelsus took his pseudonym
to dramatize his contempt for Celsus and other medical
authors a thousand years dead whose texts were still
current in the Middle Ages (p. 140). But this is a state
ment of fact, not opinion, and in the absence of
refutation, cannot simply be treated as evidence of
Bronowski’s bias rather than Paracelsus’s.
If these erroneous ascriptions were occasional
isolated instances, they would merit no more than a stoic
silence; they are, however, pervasive, frequently cast
doubt on the propositions they are supposed to support, and
are a source of continuing frustration to the reader
attempting to examine the evidence on which Cattanach’s
arguments are presumably based.
65
In fact, Bronowski repeatedly noted and emphasized
the contributions of the school of Paris, whose teaching
and writings fell close to the onset of the period com
monly taken to mark the boundaries of the Renaissance,
1350 to 1600, with the crowning of Petrarch as poet
laureate in Rome in 1341 being only one of many putative
beginnings.^ In "The Clock Paradox,l ? a Scientific '
American article about the beginnings of uniform motion
in a line as the foundation of theories of physics
including relativity, Bronowski wrote:
The turning point was before Newton, among
the dissident philosophers of Paris in the 14th
century. Until that time the physics of Thomas
Aquinas had followed the Greeks, and particularly
Aristotle, in asserting that an arrow continues
on its flight only because the air pushes it from
point to point. This was first contradicted by
Jean Buridan and other Parisian philosophers in
the 14th century, when they propounded the
doctrine of impetus . . . They first understood
that motion, the flight of an arrow, persists
of itself.
Modern physics is founded on this principle.^
In The Western Intellectual Tradition, Bronowski
and Mazlish acknowledge the contribution several times:
"As Pierre Duhem has shown in his work on the school of
Ockham, first Jean Buridan and then Nicholas of Oresme in
the fourteenth century put forward the view that unequal
objects fall equally fast; and their view was held in the
University of Paris for the next century and longer. More
66
recently, other scholars have found this view expressed
even earlier, about 1335, by the Mertonians in Oxford"
(p. 118) and again, "At the same time, Galileo's work
also implied a breach with Aristotle's belief that an
arrow is kept in flight only so long as the air pushes it.
This belief also had been doubted long ago by Jean Buridan
and Nicholas of Oresme in Paris" (p. 121).
This evidence hardly justifies Cattanach in
citing Pierre Duhem, A.C. Crombie, Lynn White, Charles
Homer Haskins, and Edward Grant in support of her state
ment that Bronowski downgraded the achievements of the
Middle Ages in order to glorify the Renaissance and
Scientific Revolution (p. 153). Certainly it does not
warrant, after citing Edward Grant's "extreme defense" of
the Middle Ages in arguing "that the work of Galileo and
Newton could be viewed as an elaboration of the beginnings
made by the Merton College School, Jean Buridan, and
Nicole Oresme," Cattanach's faintly condescending conces
sion that "Perhaps the enthusiastic Medieval scholar such
as Grant claims much, and, admittedly, Bronowski allowed
too little," or the conclusion that, given the problems
of periodization, "one cannot be overly censorious of
Bronowski's presentation" (p. 155). One might only add
that all the references to Buridan and Oresme taken from
that book are readily located by means of the index of
67
names in The Western Intellectual Tradition.
This matter of the relative importance and even
the dating of the Renaissance and Middle Ages is one that
has long exercised historians, depending on whether, as
Elder Olson of The University of Chicago once commented in
a lecture, they are "lumpers" or "splitters." In an
effort to show that Bronowski was contradictory about the
role of magic in the transition between these periods and
modern science, she appears principally to contradict
herself. On page 97, she writes, "Magic was an evolu
tionary step to science, but it did not die out in the
Scientific Revolution. According to Bronowski, magic is
a dualistic world view which has never completely dis
appeared;" whereas on page 150, she writes, "Contrary to
Thorndike, Bronowski believed that the concept of magic as
a pre-eminent science died out after 1500 and thus no
longer influenced the development of science." Both these
statements are attributed to pages 23 through 28 of
Bronowski's Magic, Science, and Civilization. Admittedly
Bronowskifs view of the role of magic, summarized below,
is complex, but one somehow feels here that certain
essential distinctions have been missed.
And, to give one last example, on page 151,
Cattanach, using The Ascent of Man as her source, attempts
to quote Bronowski against himself:
68
"We think of Italy as the birthplace of the
Renaissance. But the conception was in Spain in
the 12th century, and it is symbolized and
expressed by the famous school of translators
at Toledo . . ." Later, in the same work,
however, Bronowski picked a piece of artwork of
1350 as representative of the Middle Ages and
actually dated the Renaissance in Italy as the
1500!s where man "steps out of the shadowland of
secret and anonymous knowledge into a new system
of open and personal discovery."
Apparently Cattanach failed to recognize Bronowski1s
figurative use of "conception" and to consider that it is
typically followed by a more or less protracted period of
gestation. The Florentine fresco painted in 1350 is not
identified as belonging to the Middle Ages and certainly
not used to establish a historical period; it is simply
used to contrast art in Italy before and after the advent
of perspective in the fifteenth century (Ascent, p. 178).
And the moment when man "steps out of the shadowland" into
"open and personal discovery" is a contextually clear
reference to the moment when Paracelsus, treating
syphilis with mercury in 1527, stepped out of the world
of alchemical magic and into the modern world of medical
science (Ascent, p. 142).
Of course Bronowski held neither of the contrary
simplistic views of magic and science or of the transition
between the Middle Ages and Renaissance that Cattanach
discredits him with. The position of Bronowski and
Mazlish on the dating of Medieval and Renaissance is
69
expressly addressed on the first two text pages of The
Western Intellectual Tradition, 3 and 4, and in an
expansive footnote with multiple citations on the
historical controversy and its protagonists' positions.
They sensibly observe, "Obviously, one's decision as to
what the Renaissance was affects one's idea of when it
occurred." And, in the footnote, they state their position
explicitly and extensively:
We believe that a history of the Italian
Renaissance would show the continuity between the
Renaissance and the Middle Ages and, therefore,
would lessen the emphasis on the "newness" of the
period and its culture. This is a correct view,
from that perspective of the historian. On the
other hand, we believe it a mistake to go so far
in this direction as to lose all sight of the
originality and fundamental modernity of the
culture produced in Italy at this time; we take
the position that the Renaissance is the origin
of the modern world, without overlooking the
fact that the Renaissance is, in turn, and quite
naturally, based on the Middle Ages. (p. 4, n. 1)
A final comment on Cattanach's dissertation seems
in order. As I have previously intimated, it is unfor
tunate that the real contribution of her research should
be obscured and even impeached by a lack of sufficient
care in the citation of references and sources. For the
most part, this is merely a nuisance to the reader:
scrambled footnotes, inaccurate page and volume references;
or an embarrassment, such as the faulty alphabetization of
bibliographic entries. But some could have more serious
consequences. In what was probably intended as an
70
extended quotation, paragraph two, page 49, of Cattanachfs
dissertation turns out to be identical with paragraph one,
page 1 of Ian Crellin's The Legacy of Jacob Bronowski,
with the following exceptions: fourteen words in one
sentence and three words in a short parenthesis have been
omitted, the word "arts1' has been changed to "humanities,"
and the spelling of "labour" and "centre" has been
Americanized. Perhaps Cattanach felt that her thanks to
Ian Crellin and the staff of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library on page v of her Preface made further acknowledge
ment superfluous.
The other topics mentioned above, Priestley's,
Lavoisier's, and Dalton's contributions to chemical and
atomic theory as described in The Ascent, Bronowski's
inadequate account of religion as the "cradle of science,"
are infected with the same infirmities, making further
iteration of the flaws in Cattanach's argument that
Bronowski's Progressivism in education disposed him to
superficiality and "process" needless and tiresome.
Cattanach, herself, after exhibiting the minimum profes
sional captiousness to demonstrate independence of minds
ends by exonerating Bronowski's historicism by the
inspirational effectiveness and popular appeal of his
pedagogy. In this she is at least gracious, but I think
I have written enough to demonstrate that this provides no
71
adequate account of Bronowski's philosophy, educational or
otherwise.
To sum up, Cattanach's dissertation suffers from
the following debilities as an account of Bronowski's
ideas: (1) vacillation between a descriptive and analytic
approach, (2) superficial treatment of many of Bronowski's
writings and themes, (3) inappropriate use of The Ascent
of Man as the principal exposition of Bronowski's educa
tional philosophy, (4) failure to consider major
Bronowski statements relevant to her historical criticisms,
(5) lack of care in ascription, documentation, and credit
ing sources, (6) an inadequate and perfunctory theory and
analysis of Bronowski's educational philosophy, and
(7) misreading and confused exposition of Bronowski's
ideas.
Apart from these two dissertations, there has been
very little that has even attempted serious and sustained
discussion of Bronowski's life and ideas; certainly
Theodore Roszak’s jibe in The Making of a Counter Culture
"Jacob Bronowski is among the most cultivated of the
science boosters. . . . I find it interesting how
Bronowski's views (e.g., ' . . .men have asked for free
dom, justice, and respect precisely as the scientific
spirit has spread among them') parallel those of the right-
wing 'objectivist' theologue, Ayn Rand," hardly qualifies
8
as serious discussion. Similarly, Malachi B. Martin's
_______ 72
ad hominem "Requiem for Jacob Bronowski" is not so much an
argument as a counterattack on Bronowski's accusations
that the Roman Catholic Church has been the historical
antagonist of science and the chief proponent of dogmatism
9
in modern times. These accusations, implied and overt
in The Ascent of Man, are admittedly not couched in terms
that would encourage reasoned refutation, and Martin
attempts none: "It is this misadventure coming at the end
of his life as a scientist, together with the dehumanized
condition of soul which it presupposes in Bronowski, that
makes him an object of pathos, and deserving of a religious
Requiem" (p. 299).
It should be apparent that the religious issue is
simply not avoidable in a review of the scholarly as well
as the popular literature on Bronowski. As has been
noted, both Novak and Cattanach raise it in distinctly
different forms. Martin's article is mentioned not so
much for its content as for its notoriety and influence.
Cattanach cites it, as does David R. Topper in a brief,
modest survey of what he sees as Bronowski's five major
themes: (1) the popular comprehensibility of science,
(2) the generation of values from science, (3) the open,
non-axiomatic character and growth of science, (4) the
common creative origins of science and art, and (5) the
imaginative uniqueness of the human species. Topper's
73
article is a useful, though expectably not deeply analyt
ical or evaluative review. In his closing paragraph,
Topper writes "In some instances, I believe that Bronowsk'i
may have carried his defense of science a bit too far.
Indeed, his writings are often repugnant to those with an
orthodox religious outlook.” Topper then cites Martin in
a footnote.^
Although this seems fair enough, I think some
distinctions are in order. Martin’s article is based, to
all appearances, solely on The Ascent of Man, which may
once more exclude some of the qualifications and sub
tleties of Bronowski’s religious convictions. Opposition
to the historical and even contemporary principles and
practices of the Roman Catholic Church and other orthodox
religions is not necessarily equivalent to the condemna
tion of all religion or all religious practices. Though
a humanist by conviction, Bronowski was not simply anti-
religious and did not exclude what he regarded as the
positive effects of religion from his other works on
literary, scientific, or intellectual history. He
repeatedly noted the contributions of English dissent to
experimental science and democracy, of Protestantism to
political and religious individualism and the rise of the
middle-class and nation state. And he insistently
emphasized the influence of Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism,
74
and Cabalism on Renaissance individualism and the convic
tions of Copernicus, Kepler and others. Tolerance was
among his derived virtues, but he unequivocally opposed
what he regarded as the authoritarian, anti-democratic
imposition of religious conformity, a view that certainly
merits consideration in a contemporary evaluation of the
implications of his philosophy for liberal education.
That the eternal vigilance advised by Jefferson is not yet
outdated in education or other areas of civil liberty is
evident in a recent speech by Yale University President,
A. Bartlett Giamatti, in which he identifies aggressive
fundamentalism as a present threat to the values and
12
principles of democratic liberal education, and a late
article in a national newsweekly magazine that documents
a current fundamentalist crusade to oust "secular
humanists” from positions of trust in government and edu-
13
cation.
A more substantive and philosophical challenge to
Bronowski's view of Catholicism in the history of Western
science has, however, been presented by Father Stanley L.
Jaki in the 1975 and 1976 Gifford Lectures at the
University of Edinburgh, published as The Road of Science
and the Ways to God.^ Jaki begins with questioning the
reasons why an enormous and ancient civilization such as
that of China failed to develop anything comparable to
75
Western science in the course of its long history. Jaki
argues that it was the absence of theological convictions
about the lawfulness and intelligibility of a universe
designed by an intelligent creator, such as were intro
duced by Aquinas into the "Medieval consensus," that
caused Chinese, Indian, Chaldean, Egyptian, Babylonian,
Arabic— yes, and even Greek science— to become lost in
blind alleys and endless cycles of recurrence. It was the
Christian belief in a Divine legislator that sustained
the line of inquiry through Buridan, Oresme, Copernicus,
Galileo, Newton and Einstein, Bohr and others (pp. 3-50
et passim). The only rational or responsible ethics is
one based on orthodox theology: "Ethics has its source
in the sense of guilt, and this is why the true Sisyphus is
always the one who tries to turn pain, of which ethical
guilt is the most unbearable, into an impassable roadblock
on the ways to God" (p. 312).
Father Jaki’s book is thus virtually an absolute
antithesis to Bronowski's philosophy, except insofar as
they paradoxically agree on what constitute the scientific
virtues they derive so differently (pp. 308-09). It would
take another book of five hundred pages to effectively
challenge, let alone confute, Jaki1s powerfully argued
counteroffensive against secular scientific history. But
one may offer a few brief objections in passing: Why the
76
selectivity in explaining a complex of behaviors so varied
that it is not regarded as a single method with a single,
determining cause? Why the manifest preference for
science as the phenomenon requiring explanation? Are not
the absence of democracy and the printed book equally
entitled to deterministic explanations; did they have no
effect upon the growth and spread of science in the West?
And if determined at all, why is a single cause more
probable than multiple causes in explaining the develop
ment of science in the West?
Like many of the classical arguments for the
Existence, Jaki’s historical argument has a telltale
£ posteriori quality. First we are challenged to explain
the existence of a negative— the failure of most ancient
civilizations to produce Western science. Then we are
told that one necessary, if not sufficient, causal ele
ment will alone serve to complete the explanation of its
unique existence. The mind reels at the explanatory
scope of this deterministic history of science. For
example, does the absence of causal monotheism and a pre
occupation with cycles explain the Incas’ failure to
invent the wheel? Are we really expected to believe that
any two sets of circumstances in history were virtually
identical in all significant particulars, except for the
key element of the Thomistic belief in the intelligibility
of the Creator’s work?
7,7
But there is no evading the fact that Jaki1s chal
lenge is direct, philosophically serious, and deserving of
consideration:
This ethical infantilism will not be overcome
as long as Darwinians and pragmatists set the
tone of moral philosophizing on the basis of
science. That tone is a shriek of contradictions.
. . . It is again contradictory to try, with
Bronowski, to overcome positivism by pragmatism
and then to fall back on it by creating the
impression that there is an ethical sense in the
dictum, "This is the scientist’s moral: that
there is no distinction between ends and means.”
That such philosophizing will not promote a true
"Ascent of Man” can easily be guessed by a brief
recall of that maddening resolve by which one
nation after another forces its way into the
nuclear club, an effort clearly justifiable on
the basis of the pragmatist principle that there
is no difference between the "ought" and the
"is." For once their difference is completely
abolished, the circularity remains wholly intact
in the "social axiom" of justifying action by
action as proclaimed by Bronowski: "We OUGHT to
act in such a way that what IS true can be
verified to be so.n It is that circularity which
underlies the subtle transforming by pragmatic
action of the hallowed motto quo Urania ducit,
a noble urging to follow the voice of superior
wisdom, into quo uranium ducit, the clever though
tragic labeling of the runaway course toward the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. The course is
that of infants who keep playing with the burner
even after having badly burnt their fingers.
Examples of unwitting support of that ethical
infantilism turn up in every effort in which
science is set up as the foundation of values.
(p. 304)
Thus Jaki implicitly charges Bronowski with
justifying nuclear proliferation and explicitly with
justifying or absolving guilt for the bombing of Japan:
"Worshipers of science gladly swallowed J. Bronowski1s
78
claim that science was not responsible for Hiroshima . .
(p. 329). Of Science and Human Values, he writes ’’This
smallish book is burdened throughout with sweeping
generalizations, with a pseudophilosophy, and with a
shallow acquaintance with the history of science coupled
with its exploitation on behalf of an agnosticist humanism"
and answers Bronowski’s contention that "like the other
creative activities which grew from the Renaissance,
science has humanized our values” with the summary judg
ment on the man and his work, "Obviously then, science is
not the source of values which, even according to
Bronowski's implicit admission, it can only ’humanize,’ an
admission that can only be implicit as long as a propa
gandist of scientism tries to appear a humanist" (pp. 449,
457) .
Anyone who is inclined to think that Jaki’s prop
ositions are mere theory devoid of consequence for society
and education should consider carefully the last sentence
of his book: "It is our chief cultural task to transmit
to the upcoming generation that inspiration which will be
theirs in the measure in which they, inspired we hope by
our example, will keep in mind about scientific history a
fundamental facet: the tie binding the road of science to
the ways of God" (p. 331).
The personal strictures' on Bronowski are standard
polemic and do not require an answer any more than those
________________________________________________________________79
of Roszak, or Martin; and Jaki*s chop-logic dilemma between
science as generator or humanizer of values is easily
answered with the -assertion that it does both. ’'Truth is
not the monopoly of science, and the values that derive
from truth were known before the Scientific Revolution.""^
The solution is obviously that for Bronowski these values
are generated and regenerated in the practical pursuit of
truth in science as well as other disciplines.
The implication that the atomic bomb was devel
oped, dropped, or that it has proliferated as the result
of pragmatist action for action’s sake is gratuitous. The
bomb was developed, dropped, and, in some measure, dis
pensed by people of a variety of ethical persuasions, no
doubt including a large contingent of Christians. As
Oppenheimer attempted to communicate long ago, there was
no way to prevent other nations (and ultimately, even
college students) from building the bomb themselves: the
best hope of mankind was to make the beneficial uses of
atomic energy available to other nations to discourage
their undertaking the cost, labor, and danger inherent in
making it themselves.
The humanist’s answer to Jaki’s line of argument
is given with characteristic incisiveness by Herbert J.
Muller in criticizing T.S. Eliot for the lack of the
historical sense he prides himself on. ’’This is a common
80
deficiency in religious thinkers, who habitually demon
strate the inadequacy of secular ideals by emphasizing
their shortcomings in practice, contrasting them to an
ideal Christianity, while disregarding the shortcomings
16
of historic Christianity." And as for the consequences
of an ethics of inquiry based on guilt and a sense of
original sin, he adds:
Granted what any sensible person knows, that men
are naturally inclined to be selfish and frail,
I do not think it clarifies matters to give their
unoriginal sins this name. Instead it tends to
obscure the historical fact that the doctrine of
original sin was for many centuries a basic argu
ment for the subjection of the common people, as
it was for serfdom and slavery, and that democracy
rose only when the doctrine was questioned, and
more faith in ordinary human nature was declared.
It may obscure the logical necessity of such
faith for a free society; for if this has plainly
been too optimistic a faith, possibly the "disas
trous heresy" that Herbert Butterfield called it,
there can be no hope for a free society unless
men are good enough to be trusted with the rights
and liberties that neither the medieval church
nor the Protestant reformers saw fit to grant
them, and that the leaders of the Soviet also
deny them. (p. 98)
The final commentary to be considered in this
critical review of the literature on Jacob Bronowski comes
from an altogether more congenial viewpoint, and leads
naturally into the following chapter on Bronowski1s
philosophy. In Book II of Volume XIV of The Library of
Living Philosophers, Karl Popper replies to the comments
of the reviewers and critics who contributed to Book I.
To this compendium, Bronowski contributed a major statement
81
of his philosophy, "Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge,"
which has a high degree of concurrence with Popper’s. In
his response, Popper makes some observations, characteri- .
zations, and distinctions that are significant in
themselves, but that also describe and question certain
aspects of Bronowski1s philosophy. Popper opens his reply
with a statement of general comparison: "Bronowski1s
essay 'Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge1 is unique in
this collection in several senses. Fundamentally, there
is far-reaching agreement. There are several minor lines
of cleavage between our opinions, and one major one. But
there is complete agreement about which cleavages are
minor and which one is major. It is only here— the
applicability to scientific theories of the correspondence
theory of truth— that I feel a strong urge to defend
myself. . . . " ^ Popper proceeds to point out that he
and Bronowski agree that the "richness" of a theory, that
is, its total range of associations, is of the greatest
importance. He also notes that both he and Bronowski agree
that the principal function of scientific theories is to
serve as explanations. Bronowski maintains that the
procedural qualifications Popper has put on his tests of
"falsifiability" impair their distinctness from verifi
ability theories, and Popper demurs.
82
The major difference Popper notes between them is
based on Bronowski's view that theories such as those of
Newton and Einstein differ qualitatively from factual,
descriptive, correspondence statements of fact in being
essentially explanations rather than descriptions of the
world. Popper essentially rejects the sharp distinction
between descriptions and explanations implied in what I
would call Bronowski's metalanguage view of scientific
theories as inventive versions of reality. The precise
nature of the difference between them, which is essentially
irresovable, is less pertinent for my purposes than the
discussion which Popper uses to characterize it. Popper
comments:
First, I agree that scientific theories are our
inventions; but this Kantian idealism is limited
in my case (and I believe in Bronowski's too) by
the anti-Kantian qualification that we cannot
simply impose our inventions upon the world.
Kant thought that our mind not only produces
Newtonian theory, but forces it upon experience,
thereby forming Nature. I think very differ
ently . . . This reality, this world, was there
before man, and our attempts to impose our
theories on it turn out, in the majority of
cases, to be vast failures: thus Kant's idealism
is wrong, and realism is right.
I suppose that Bronowski is just as good a
realist as I am. But we differ over the inter
pretation of Tarski's theory of truth, and also
over whether our explanatory theories might not,
as well as explain facts, also describe facts;
strange facts, highly abstract regularities of
nature. (pp. 1093-94)
It is this difference, this tension between
Kantian idealism and empirical realism that I have alluded
_______________ 83
to before, and that, for me, provides a key to the
structure, intent, and achievement of Bronowski's
philosophy that I shall begin to discuss in the next
chapter.
84
Notes
1
Joan Marie Novak, Science: Dilemma and Oppor
tunity for Christian Ethics: Jacob Bronowski, A Case
Study, Diss. The University of Iowa, Theology, 1976 (Ann
Arbor: University Microfilms, no. 77-13,120, 1976);
Bernice Isabella Cattanach, Jacob Bronowski: A Twentieth
Century Pontifex, Diss. Northern Arizona University, 1980
(Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, no. 8017871, 1980).
Further page references to these and other works under
discussion are made parenthetically in text, except where
fuller citation is necessary to insure clarity.
^ Novak, p. 439, n. 36; Novak, p. 609, cf.
Bronowski, Identity, p. 76 and Sense of the Future, p. 170;
Novak, pp. 294, 407.
3
Bronowski and Mazlish, Western Intellectual
Tradition, pp. 88-89.
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Agnosticism and
Christianity," in Harrold and Templeman, p. 1341.
^ See Cattanach, esp. Preface, pp. iii-v; Chapter
I, pp. 1-50; and Bibliography, pp. 186-213.
Neal W. Gilbert, "Renaissance," The Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, 1967, rpt. 1972.
^ Scientific American, 208 (February 1963), 134.
85
8
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture:
Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful
Opposition (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969) p. 300.
^ National Review, 14 March 1973, pp. 285-99.
David R. Topper, "Jacob Bronowski: A Sketch of
His Natural Philosophy," Leonardo 12 (1979) 51-53.
See Tradition, p. 106; Ascent, p. 144; Blake,
P* 65; Magic, pp. 26-30; Origins, pp. 62-63.
1 2
A. Bartlett Giamatti, "For the Record," The
Washington Post, editorial page, September 2, 1981.
13
Kenneth L. Woodward and Eloise Salholz, "The
Right's New Bogyman," Newsweek, 6 July 1981, pp. 48-49.
14
Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the
Ways to God (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1978) .
15
Bronowski, Identity. p. 107.
16
Herbert J. Muller, Religion and Freedom in the
Western World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1963), p. 97.
17
Karl Popper, in The Philosophy of Karl Popper,
ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court,
1974) II, 1091.
86
CHAPTER IV
THE MIND AS MODEL, METAPHOR, AND MATRIX
The whole of natural theology . . . resolves
itself into one simple, though somewhat ambiguous
proposition, That the cause or causes of order in
the universe probably bear some remote analogy to
human intelligence I !
David Hume
Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion
Architectonic
Epistemology is unquestionably the keystone of
Bronowski’s entire philosophy of nature, man, science,
art, human history, evolution, specificity, and education.
It is the innate quest for and interaction with knowledge
that distinguishes man from the other animals, specifi
cally his acquisition of knowledge by means of imagination,
foresight, the use of the hand, the study of his own
history— all of which are aspects of the learning process—
the archetypal interaction between biology and culture.
It is the use of language to analyze, resynthesize, and
-compare—images-of—the world and intuitions about others
with external reality and with the reality of our own
emotional experience. Bronowski’s epistemology, in art,
science, in ethics, is the apotheosis of trial and error—
87
of imagining, planning, and testing, revising and
retesting— and the unity man ultimately reaches in all
these endeavors is the unity of his own mind.
In the quotations in the last chapter, Bronowski
was referred to as a "Progressive,1 1 by Cattanach; a
"pragmatist," by Jaki, and something between a Kantian
idealist and a realist by Karl Popper. In addition,
Bronowski characterized himself at various times as an
"idealist," a "materialist," a "scientific humanist," and
eventually, even as a "scientific existentialist." What,
if any, meaning can all these appellations have, partic
ularly these, in chronological order, that were self
imposed?^
All these terms, some of them apparently contra
dictory, may suggest that Bronowski was as changeable
and motley in his philosophical positions as a court
jester, and about as consistent in his thinking; or, what
I think more just, that all such denominatives were
intended and should be used as descriptive adjectives
that point to a particular aspect of a philosophy, rather
than as so many catchall categories into which one can be
sorted. In the casei of Bronowski, I think that these
different and sometimes contrasting designations testify
to the inadequacy of philosophical definitions and point,
in addition, to a rich dynamic tension between the
empirical and rational components of Bronowski's
88
philosophy whose union gives his philosophy some of Kant’s
comprehensiveness, hopefully without his occasional
obscurity and ambiguity.
There is another aspect of Bronowski's thought
which makes his effort at self-description appear to be
more than mere groping after a fashionable label. From a
philosophical perspective, Bronowski’s proposals for
joining the dissevered literary and scientific cultures may
imply a deeper effort to unite the literary, humanist,
existential philosophies of the Continent with the some
what antagonistic empirical, analytic, and positive
philosophies, which after merging with the vestiges of the
Vienna Circle, have become dominant in England and the
United States. Perhaps this is why, having committed
himself to an ’’idealist” view of the nature of poetic
truth in The Poet’s Defence, Bronowski proposed to ratify
the independence of that truth in the face of social
change by an "empirical test,” as he recounts in the
2
Preface to the second edition. But even if Bronowski did
not consciously attempt such a synthesis of empiricism and
existentialism, he may still implicitly have achieved, or
at least initiated it, raising philosophical issues that
have not been adequately considered.
Given Kant’s influence on modern philosophy,
variously described as "immense,” . ’’incalculable,”
89
"unmatched in modern thought," it would appear difficult
for a philosopher in the Western epistemological tradition
who regards the reconciliation of knowledge of the self
and knowledge of the world as a legitimate problem that
cannot be defined away as nominalist or essentialist con
fusion 3 not to be a "Neo-Kantian" of one description or
another.
But Bronowski is "Kantian" in a more readily
substantiated sense than this: there is evidence in his
earliest work of a striking resemblance to Kant that
developed over the years and was acknowledged most fully
in one of Bronowski's last and most definitive philosoph
ical statements, The Origins of Knowledge and. Imagination.
This central component of Kantianism, reconstructed and
enlarged, and supported with a wealth of modern scientific
evidence and esthetic example, gives Bronowski's thought
its unity and continuity. This strong amalgam of empir
icism and rationalism, developing from his earliest
writings, such as Poet1s Defence, and The Common Sense of
Science, may account for much of the conviction and
authority with which Bronowski repudiated the philosophies
of the left and right, as it were, the subjective excesses
of existentialism on the one hand, and the objective
excesses of positivism and operationalism on the other.
As suggested in the opening paragraph, the meta
phor that best illustrates the common organizing principle
______________ 90
of Bronowski's thought as well as Kant's is the human mind
in all its faculties, operations, and functions as a
reciprocal organ of active knowledge. It is to this con
ception and implicit vision that Bronowski repeatedly
returns: the mind which compares and tests theory against
theory against fact; the mind that resembles and reflects
the perceived universe in its rich connectivity; the mind
that can step outside its inadequate formal models of
reality and build others that more nearly approach what
Kant called the noumenal world of things-in-themselves;
the mind that can intuit the truth in works of art,, relive
the creative experience they embody, and sympathetically
participate in their depiction of the human condition; the
mind whose epistemological, ethical, and esthetic con
structions are forever limited by their paradoxical
richness of self-reference and their dependence on the
selective precision of sense perception.
It is no accident that so many of Bronowski's
titles carry some reference to the mind in its intel
lectual, perceptual, interior operations, or to their
external manifestations as knowledge, truth, or culture.
The fact that Bronowski rejects mind-body dualism does
not impair the characterization, because the conception
refers to the human mind as it functions interactively
with the body in perception, integration, and action.
91
Thus the double vision of Kant’s Copernican revolution
that simultaneously puts man in the world and the world in
man is maintained without Kant’s outdated Newtonian
a priori categories of time, space, and cause, without
Wolff’s Leibnitzian architectonic, and without subordi
nating matter to mind as Fichte, Hegel, and other
post-Kantian idealists were prone to do. The central
Kantian insight, that the only mind we can know is the
human mind and the only knowledge we can possess is human
knowledge, remains intact in Bronowski's philosophy.
Although there are some major as well as many minor dif
ferences of principle and detail, this primary
epistemological and ontological perspective is the same.
Clearly the interpretation of Kant that supports
these contentions is the interpretation that sees him as
holding rationalism and empiricism in dynamic equilibrium.
Kant resolved these intellectual antipodes in a manner that
was tenable within an eighteenth-century world view.
Bronowski’s effort to reconcile the twentieth-century
scientific and humanistic world views led him to refor
mulate the Kantian synthesis and to support and inform it
3
with modern evidence. Bronowski's is by no means a
slavish imitation, but rather a creative reconstruction
that exhibits the full humanistic educational implications
of a philosophy founded on the capacities and limitations
92
of the human mind. A major contribution is Bronowski's
development of a categorical moral imperative more closely
integrated with the epistemological and ontological
definition of man as the being who pre-eminently seeks for
and evolves through knowledge than is Kant's imperative
derived from an a priori sense of duty alone.
As indicated earlier, the extent and means of
Kant's influence on Bronowski must remain conjectural in
the absence of explicit evidence, but fortunately, in the
case of their common objective in defining a philosophy
of knowledge, Bronowski left no room for conjecture: "So
it would be quite right to say that all my life I have
been preoccupied with the special character of knowledge.
. . . Two hundred years ago, when Immanuel Kant in
Konigsberg first proposed something on these lines, it
could only be lip service to the intangible. But now we
know a great deal about both the biological and functional
connections of the mind. And I think we stand nearer to
an understanding of knowledge, and ultimately of human
self-knowledge, than we could ever have done until almost
4
the last generation.
Moreover, the indirect evidence is extensive,
consisting of historical relationships among philosophers
of science, textual and conceptual similarities of the
writings of other philosophers with both Bronowski and
93
Kant, and finally, of marked similarities of structure and
detail that can be demonstrated by specific comparisons
between the two. It is only the last type of evidence
that can be given extensive treatment in this study, and
this is done in the exposition of Bronowski1s philosophy
in the following chapters. A brief summary of salient
aspects of the historical and philosophical context is
appropriate to the general discussion of this section.
Common antecedents link Bronowski with the seminal
American and British pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce,
F.C.S. Schiller, and Frank Ramsey. The associations
between pragmatism and Kantianism and pragmatism and
humanism run deep, as Peirce freely acknowledges in "What
Pragmatism Is":
For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism.
Some of his friends wished him to call it
practici sm or practicalism, (perhaps on the ground
that praktikos is better Greek than pragmatikos).
But for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant,
as the writer, along with nineteen out of every
twenty experimentalists who have turned to
philosophy, had done, and who still thought in
Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and
pragmatisch were as far apart as the two poles,
the former belonging to a region of thought where
no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make
sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter
expressing relation to some definite human
purpose.^
A few pages later, Peirce mentions Ferdinand
Canning Scott Schiller, the brilliant though now somewhat
neglected early British advocate of pragmatism, who taught
94
principally at Oxford from 1897 to 1926, then also for
part of each year at The University of Southern California
until 1935, where he was full professor until his death in
1937. Many of Schiller’s views agree with Bronowski's,
particularly those concerning the conventional and provi
sional nature of scientific laws, a matter also treated
with rigorous logic by Bronowski1s teacher Frank Ramsey in
his "Theories," posthumously published in 1931.
Schiller's "Axioms as Postulates" was published in 1902.^
Peirce interestingly credits Schiller with a
modern use of the much worn,, if not defaced, term
"humanism" to designate his version of pragmatism:
Next, the admirably clear and brilliant thinker,
Mr. Ferdinand C.S. Schiller, casting about for a
more attractive name for the "anthropomorphism"
of his Riddle of the Sphinx, lit, in that most
remarkable paper of his on "Axioms as Postulates,"
upon the same designation "pragmatism," which
in its original sense was in generic agreement
with his own doctrine, for which he has since
found the more appropriate specification
"humanism," while he still retains "pragmatism"
in a somewhat wider s e n s e . 8
Bronowski acknowledged the filial tie to pragmatism
in Science and Human Values in explaining his approach to
a definition of truth: "My method derived from the tradi
tion of pragmatism which, since William James advanced it
about 1890 (and Charles Peirce before that), has been the
most original philosophical thought in America. It took
for its model of truth the reality of things. How do we
95
9
come to believe that there is such a thing as Everest?”
The answer to this question which Bronowski offers was in
Kant before it was in Peirce or James, as will be docu
mented below.
Bronowski1s complete and mature philosophy also
shows many affinities with Cassirer’s Marburg Neo-Kantian
philosophy of symbolic forms as briefly recapitulated in
his Essay on Man.^ It would be an interesting and
rewarding investigation to compare Bronowski, Cassirer,
and Popper, though probably inconclusive for determining
influence, and certainly digressive in the present
context. The key point is that all these philosophies
draw their ideas from, or at least define their positions
in relation to Kant, and this is a study of ideas rather
than of influences. Specific resemblances to philosophers
of science whom Bronowski commented on frequently or
extensively are discussed in the following section on the
epistemology of science. For the rest, to avoid an
endless pursuit of mirages, one must be content with
reference to Kant to apply without prejudice the maxim
Bronowski quotes from Leonardo: "He who has access to the
fountain does not go to the water-pot."
The most mature, complex, and comprehensive state
ments of Bronowski1s epistemology are contained in several
late works: The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination,
96
Nature and Knowledge, "Humanism and the Growth of Knowl
edge , M "Science, Poetry, and Human Specificity," and
Magic, Science and Civilization. A much earlier work,
The Common Sense of Science, contains many of the central
ideas in germinal form.^ Of these, the first three are
by far the most significant statements of epistemology.
Before going into these works in some depth, it is impor
tant to note that epistemology takes the central role in
Bronowski's philosophy for several reasons: when man is
defined as the animal who seeks knowledge and who evolves
in interaction with it, ontology becomes an extension of
epistemology; and when ethics and the arts are defined as
alternative modes of acquiring knowledge, axiology, too,
becomes an adjunct and extension of epistemology.
Despite the emphasis on similarity and continuity
in the comparisons which follow, there is no intention to
suggest that Bronowski's philosophy is derivative from
Kant or from anyone else. It is in the very nature of the
philosophy that Bronowski developed that it should be
part of an intellectual tradition in which scientific and
experiential knowledge requires a communal enterprise for
its verification and correction, no progress towards a
common truth being possible without the community within
which it grows. Yet Bronowski's reworking of his source
materials was certainly extensive enough and his original
97
contribution to and creative improvement of the Kantian
synthesis important enough to enable his philosophy to
stand on its own. This is as true for Bronowski as for
Ernst Cassirer or Karl Popper, whose philosophies show
distinctive differences from as well as marked similarities
with Bronowski and each other as well as with Kant.
The Epistemology of Science
Bronowski begins his account of epistemology in The
Origins of Knowledge and Imagination with the statement that
we need to review our natural philosophy in the light of the
last fifty years of scientific development. What he pro
poses to do is to take a program that Kant abandoned in the
1760's when, in love with Euler's Newtonian geometry, he
decided to leave science for the practice of philosophy.
This program, in modern times, is to write an account of
how the "knowledge of the world depends on our modes of
perception. . . . and write philosophy as a description of
12
the structure of the world as seen by man."
Part of the presentation of such a contemporary
view of man's knowledge of the world must allow for the
fact that science has returned to a relativistic
Leibnitzian view of the universe. In addition, of course,
a contemporary epistemology must take into account our
recent knowledge of the biological and evolutionary modes
98
of perception, about which Kant knew virtually nothing,
having preceded the Darwinian revolution by nearly a
century.
The perceptual gifts on which Bronowski focuses
are those which differentiate man from the other animals,
the qualities which constitute the distinctive component
of what he calls "human specificity.” These modes of
acquiring knowledge are sight, which is intimately bound
up with imagination, planning; and hearing and speaking,
which are intimately related to the ability to utter and
comprehend cognitive sentences. Bronowski suggests that
vision and the visual functions are those by which we
chiefly relate to the outer world of our environment,
whereas sound and speech are those by which we relate to
the intersubjective world of other human beings.
Bronowski also notes the relationship of these modes of
apprehension to the visual and plastic arts on the one
hand, and to poetry and drama, on the other.
Bronowski singles out vision as cardinal in the
evolution of the species, beginning with the life of the
lemur in the trees, progressing through stereoscopic
ability to accurately gauge distances, to the eventual
development of science. Bronowski cites recent research
into the character of human vision by George Wald, which
subsequently won him the Nobel prize, as illustrating that
99
the refinement in human vision over that of the great apes
has not to do with greater accuracy of the lens or finer
texture of the retina, but rather with a ’’wiring system"
of controls and feedback connections that selects for
sharpness of outline and for color. Thus the eye, so
essential for our evolutionary, cultural, imaginative, and
projective activities of foresight and choice, presents
even the brain with a view of the world that has been
selected for detail rather than panoramic inclusion.
Bronowski begins the second chapter with a note
that Kant was unable to see some of these relationships
because he died five years before Darwin was born. In
fact, in his discussion in this chapter of the functions
of speech and the mental discriminations and processes
which he believes it makes possible, Bronowski emphasizes
that much of the information on which he depends about the
selective evolution of the visual and manipulative centers
of the brain; about the temporal lobe in which speech, vis
ual memory and integration are largely localized, was only
developed in the last 20 years. The differences between
human and animal speech which Bronowski notes, are the
ability to delay response, to which he attributes man’s
ability to separate information from affect in communica
tion; the ability, associated with the emergence of
foresight, to refer to absent events in the past or
100
future; thence the ability to internalize language to talk
or refer to oneself, thus to distinguish internal and
external worlds and generate paradoxes of self-reference;
and, finally, the ability, derived from a capacity animals
lack, to alter the message by reordering the sounds and
thus, ultimately, to analyze the world into objects and
actions.
Bronowski then argues that it is the application
of this last process of analysis into actions and entities
that constitutes the practice of science as the decoding
of a giant cryptogram [Die Weltratzel] which results in
three kinds of components: (1) the grammar, or rules of
allowable operations, (2) the inferred objects or entities
like atoms, or, in a formula, m for mass or £ for the
speed of light, and (3) the "dictionary of translation" by
which we apply the sentences to our common realm of expe
rience .
At this point Bronowski rhetorically interrupts
himself with an imaginary interlocutor who puts the ques
tion: "Aren’t you just a thorough-going idealist? Do you
13
really believe that there are not any atoms?" Before
answering, Bronowski interestingly invokes the suicide of
Ludwig Boltzmann when he despaired of convincing his
colleagues of the reality of atoms. The resemblances
between Bronowski’s theory of science and Boltzmann's will
be discussed shortly.
101
But in the process of answering the question,
Bronowski makes as much of an explicit confession of
philosophic faith as he makes anywhere in his writing:
Now I believe that everybody in this room is real.
I really believe that you are all there. More
over, I believe that your blood is circulating
just the way that Harvey said, and not the way
that Galen said. In other words, I believe that
all the kind of scientific descriptions that we
can make about one another are perfectly real.
And yet, I believe that any theory that we as
human beings make at any point in time is full
of provisional decodings which to some extent
are as fictitious as the notion of force in
Newton. . . . I believe that the world is totally
connected: that is to say, that there are no
events anywhere in the universe which are not
tied to every other event in the universe. I
regard this to some extent as a metaphysical
statement . . . But you cannot carry on science
on the supposition that you are going to be able
to connect every event with every other event.
. . . We make a cut.l^
Among the three components of the language of
science that Bronowski talks about are, again, the
"inferred units" or theoretical concepts; the "grammar of
explanation" which is the axiomatic system; and finally,
the "dictionary of translation," which is the interpre
tation of the theory in terms of the real world.
Bronowski argues that we judge the grammar of
explanation, the axiomatic, theoretical, and explanatory
portion of our description of truth "(insofar as there is
a truth)" by its consistency, its absence of contradiction,
or, in other words, its coherence. The truth of the
"dictionary of translation," on the other hand, is truth
102
to fact, truth to experience, and this we judge by its
correspondence with that experience. He then argues that
this view resolves the coherence versus correspondence
dispute about the nature of truth, since, in practice, any
theory of science must meet both tests in a totally con
nected universe.
In fact, the entire method of science consists in
alternately testing proposed theories for coherence with
the received body of scientific theory to which they ma*y
be related, and for correspondence with the facts believed
to come within their ambit. And yet this means that all
such axioms are pre-ordained to be false, not only because
they select from the total connectivity of the world, but
also because they simultaneously attempt to serve as a
language describing the world (correspondent) and as a
metalanguage describing themselves (coherent) and are thus
inevitably caught up in a paradox of self-reference.^
And this is why the program of science, though
limited, will never arrive at final truth and yet will
never come to a standstill. It is an axiomatic, closed-
plan tactic for seeking to describe an open-plan universe;
and though evidently fallible, it is the best strategy we
have available. Happily, however, man himself appears to
be an inconsistent, open-plan creature like the universe,
who is endowed with an invaluable gift of "superb
103
optimism” that enables him to cope with the inconsistent,
fallible models that he builds: ”You know, the thing
16
breaks down, and by Jove, next day they are at it again.”
A further implication Bronowski draws from this
reasoning is that you then have.only one reason for pre
ferring one axiomatic system of science to another,
namely, that it is more richly connected. And this state
ment of principle, Bronowski argues, is equivalent to the
metaphysic of Occam, because the more richly connected * -
your axiomatic systems, the fewer hypotheses or entities
they presuppose.
In the fifth chapter of Origins, Bronowski relates
this refined epistemology of trial and error to the themes
of statistical and mutational deviations from the norm,
individual death and species evolution through the accumu
lation of random error, which marks the progress of life
towards greater complexity over the course of time by
means of ascent from one level of biological stability to
another— in opposition to the downward course of inanimate
matter towards entropy. -However, Bronowski alludes to
these themes by suggesting that the imaginative inspira
tions and intuitions of the artist and scientist are
somehow analogous to the successful deviations among the
18
random errors of mutation.
For elegance of exposition as well as for its
original contribution to our speculative understanding of
104
man's role in an evolving universe, Bronowski1s initial
presentation of these themes in Nature and Knowledge
deserves direct quotation:
Thus the build-up of a new level of stability,
away from the older average, increases the content
of information that its members incorporate. The
cycles in an organism express and repeat its store
of information; and the organism conserves its
information by preserving its loops or cycles.
They link and conserve the two basic measures of
what is recognized in its features, namely infor
mation and time. Thus the conservation laws of
biology, in so far as they are peculiar to living
things, are different in kind from the conserva
tion laws of physics and chemistry. Life
conserves information in the form of topological
loops iii the abstract space of states.
The answer lies in the common mechanisms of
life, which drive both the closed cycles of the
organism and the unbounded plan of evolution. In
a living organism, growing old is not a thermal
decay, and death is not a fall into the average
such as the Second Law describes. As we under
stand old age, the cells in the organism age
individually when they happen to make errors in
their internal copying and when these errors are
of a kind which repeat or perpetuate themselves.
This is also and precisely the mechanism which
underlies evolution. The cell cannot accommodate
the errors because they do not fit into its
organization, which is closed. But in the open
field of evolution, the errors which are able to
repeat or perpetuate themselves are the stuff of
creation.19
Earlier in Nature and Knowledge, Bronowski pays
lavish tribute to Ludwig Boltzmann, and, in a sense,
acknowledges his debt to Boltzmann. The conception of the
preferred stable states, the rungs of Stratified Stability,
is, of course, Bronowski's own formulation of the
105
evolution of complexity by means of random mutations, a
major contribution which bears comparison with Erwin
20
Schrodinger's classic What Is Life?
As Bronowski points out, Boltzmann was greatly
impressed by Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection as a
statistical procedure, from which viable variations were
selected from among random mutations. Bronowski quotes
Boltzmann as beginning an address on The Second Law of
Thermodynamics to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Austria
with a summary of recent advances in science and ending
with "Nevertheless I believe it is not these triumphs that
impress their seal on our century. If you ask me for my
most inward conviction, whether it will later be called
the iron century or the century of steam or of electricity,
then I answer without hesitation that it will be called
the century of the mechanical conception of nature, the
21
century of Darwin."
But Bronowski1s citation in his bibliography to
Boltzmann's "Der zweite Hauptsatz der mechanischen
Warmtheorie," (1886) in Boltzmann's Populare Schriften,
1925, suggests the possibility of a wider influence of
Boltzmann on Bronowski, both by virtue of the similarity
of many of their epistemological principles and by virtue
of Boltzmann's influence on figures such as Popper,
Poincare, Duhem, and even Albert Einstein, all of whom
106
subscribed to some form of what has been called
conventiona1 i s m, the view that scientific theories are
free, and in some measure, arbitrary inventions of the
human mind. It should be noted that Boltzmann's antidog-
matic, antiobscurantist criticisms of Berkeley, Kant,
Schopenhauer, Hegel and Herbert, notwithstanding, there is
an idealist, Kantian cast to his thought. It should be
noted, however, that since Popper holds that theories
reflect some "highly abstract regularities of nature"
which are exceptionless, he is not technically a conven
tionalist. He does admit, however, that such a belief on
his part is "metaphysical" and that "they are too deep for
us," which may make him a conventionalist with reserva
tions .
What Boltzmann had that Kant did not, of course,
was the theory of evolution, which he combined with the
atomic theory he defended, quite literally, to the death,
by suicide in a fit of depression, in 1906. Boltzmann,
like Bronowski, criticized dogmatic systems of thought
(axiomatic, in Bronowski's usage) on both biological and
logical grounds. / He held that both life and thought were
the result of biological processes of adaptation by trial
and error, and that while Ideas such as the Euclidean
character of space might be "inborn" as the result of
adaptation, "it would be a fallacy to assume, as did Kant,
23
that they are therefore absolutely correct." This, it
________________________________________________________ 107
may be noted, is precisely the argument Popper uses in his
answer to Bronowski's formulation of the coherence versus
correspondence function of explanatory theories as opposed
to descriptive statements, presented above and in his
"Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge."
Boltzmann's logical arguments also have a familiar
ring. Although one might try to adhere as strictly as
possible to the facts and thereby to obtain a physics free
of hypotheses, it is questionable whether such a physics
would be desirable, even if possible. "The bolder one is
in transcending experience, the greater the chance to make
24
really surprising discoveries . . ." Theories for
Boltzmann are idealized statements that comprehend more
than is contained in our experiments. The greater part of
a theory is "an arbitrary invention of the human mind"
that can be judged only by its simplicity and fruitful-
25
ness. It is, moreover, conceivable that two equally
simple and experimentally valid, thus equally correct,
theories might be formulated, which could only be sub
jectively preferred one to the other.
It would seem that the wave and particle theories
of light would be a modern instance. The strong influence
of Boltzmann on Einstein is demonstrated by Feyerabend in
a quotation from Einstein's On the Method of Theoretical
Physics, in which he states that the status of theories as
108
"free inventions of the human mind" was made fully clear
only with the advent of the general theory of relativity.
It might also be noted that Boltzmann’s original statement
of these propositions probably antedated F.C.S. Schiller's
"Axioms as Postulates," and Frank Ramsey's "Theories"
which give pragmatic and logical formulations of the same
propositions. The family resemblances among these various
theories and Bronowski's views, suggest that Boltzmann,
Duhem and Popper were allies of if not influences on
Bronowski.
In "Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge,"
Bronowski argues in favor of Willard Quine's and Pierre
Duhem's conception that any challenge to a theory in the
scientific system involves the entire network of inter
related theories, in opposition to Popper's contrary view.
Bronowski maintains that for the axioms that govern
science at a given time: "A set of axioms is a topolo
gical network, in which the knots or joints are the
inferred or theoretical entities which the science has had
to create so that it will hold together as a unity. The
network is given its character by the pattern of linkages
that it forms across the joints, and it is the topological
invariants of connection that describe it which I call the
richness of the system. A new theory changes the system
of axioms, and sets up new connections at the joints
2 6
which change the topology."
109
Despite the religious and rationalist aspects of
Duhem’s philosophy, there are some striking similarities
of detail and conception between Bronowski's language of
scientific theory, developed most fully in Origins and
cited above, and Peter Alexander's description of Duhem's
account of how theories are constructed:
There are four fundamental operations in their
construction.
(1) Among the observable, measurable proper
ties that we wish our theory to represent, we look
for a few that can be regarded as simple and as
combining to form the rest. Because they are
measurable, we can represent them by mathematical
symbols. . . .
(2) We construct a small number of principles,
or "hypotheses," which are propositions arbitrar
ily connecting our symbols in a manner controlled
only by the requirements of convenience and
logical consistency. . . .
(3) We combine these hypotheses according to
the rules of mathematical analysis; again there
is no question of representing the real relations
between properties, and convenience and consis
tency are still our guides.
(4) Certain of the consequences drawn out by
our third operation are "translated" back into
physical terms. That is, we arrive at new state
ments about the measurable properties of bodies,
our methods of defining and measuring these
properties serving as a kind of "dictionary" to
assist us in the translation. These new state
ments can now be compared with the results of
experiments; the theory is a good one if they
fit, a bad one if they do n o t . 27
There is no intention to suggest, however, that
Duhem's analysis directly influenced Bronowski's formula
tion— nor, on the other hand, any intention to deny that
110
it might have. Norman Robert Campbell, a contemporary of
Duhem, a fellow at Trinity College in 1904 and a research
assistant at the Cavendish Laboratory from 1903 to 1910,
influenced by Mach and Poincare, in turn influenced
Ramsey, Braithwaite, and Nagel, personally, and through
The Principles of Electricity (1912) and Physics : The
Elements (1920). Campbell analyzed scientific and mathe
matical statements into concepts, hypotheses, and, other
than in purely mathematical theories, a ’’ dictionary” of
rules of correspondence. Because of his proximity and
influence on Ramsey, Bronowski's teacher, Campbell is more
likely to be Bronowski's progenitor, if progenitor there
i-i 28
need be.
A more useful way to interpret these similarities,
is, however, to see them in terms of the ebullition of
ideas and interactions among figures such as Boltzmann,
Poincare, Mach, Campbell, Duhem, and Popper, across
national and linguistic boundaries— an invisible college
of philosophers of science whose agreements and differences
obviously stimulated one another, all questions of pre
cedence, priority, or proprietorship aside. Since the
days of the dispute between Newton and Leibnitz, recog
nition of the frequent occurrence of coincidental
invention or discovery in science has come to be widely
acknowledged: the co-occurrence and common ownership of
29
ideas should be at least as readily accepted.
Ill
In any event, Bronowski seems to have followed the
practice of freely adopting, modifying, or rejecting any
idea which had entered the common discourse. He was cer
tainly never reticent about taking an independent stand,
even when this involved sharp public disagreement with
philosophical allies and friends. This is particularly
evident in reference to Karl Popper, perhaps his closest
philosophical ally.
In both Nature and Knowledge and "Humanism and the
Growth of Knowledge," Bronowski emphasized the view of
scientific theory over which he disagreed with Popper, the
difference between the explanatory and denotative func
tions of scientific statements. Put differently, this is
a distinction between theories as explanatory statements
as opposed to descriptive statements of fact. "I think it
is misleading (and a perennial source of misunderstanding)
even to say that science describes facts. Statements in
science do not have the factual form of a predication,
’snow is white.' . . . The statements in science have the
form 'snow melts at such and such a temperature,' and this
is different in kind: it is an active statement and not
a predication, it asserts that something changes and often
it derives the change from an action on our part— 'when
you heat snow, such and such happens.' . . . In short,
science does not deal in predicates but in actions; and to
112
have a fixed melting point or a wide band of reflection is
not a predicate or a property in the same sense in which
to be white is.11^
In terms of the comparison with Kantian termi
nology, this is strikingly similar to the distinction
between analytic statements (which contain their
predicates within them) and synthetic statements (in which
an additional character is superadded). This is not,
however, strictly a Kantian distinction, since it was
first made by Hume. Kant added the still controversial
a priori-a posteriori principles of cross-classification
to create a four-cell system of statement categories.
In addition to the difference over the function
and reference of theories based on Tarski’s theory of
truth, Bronowski was explicitly critical of Popper's
tendency, particularly in his late works, to discuss
scientific method principally in terms of theories and
tests, as if it were a series of propositions and chal
lenges, as if its purpose were to test theories rather
than to arrive at a coherent explanation of the world.
In the Bampton Lectures, delivered at Columbia in
1969 and subsequently published as Magic, Science, and
Civilization (1978), Bronowski pointedly criticized this
view:
And though I have a great admiration for my friend
and colleague Karl Popper, in his recent work he
has begun to stress the notion that there is a
113
great problem solving element in making laws of
science. I think he suffers, as so many of his
colleagues do, from the fact that he really isn’t
used to how a laboratory carries on. There aren't
any clear-cut problems; there certainly aren't
any decisions in which you set up an experiment
and you say, "Here's a law, here's a hypothesis,
I challenge it, I'm going to negate it." Instead,
it all works by a highly tentative and experi
mental- process.
Bronowski's point is, of course, that we do not
proceed in science in a neat, precise, orderly, and linear
fashion— from hypothesis, to test, to falsification, to
reformulation; but, based on the working notebooks of
scientists, in a messy, imprecise, disorderly, and hap
hazard way— from random speculation, to curious sidelight,
to startling insight, to the laborious deduction of con
sequences and the discovery of difficulties requiring
32
revision, and all back and across and around again.
The principal point being emphasized is Bronowski's
debt to conventionalism, which may be loosely defined as
the idea that scientific theories are free, imaginative
inventions of the human mind, traceable to Kant's original
insight that the order we find in the world is in some
manner conditioned by the "shape" of the human mind.
Though Kant was not precisely a conventionalist himself
because of his view that our theories were imposed by
universal properties of the mind rather than freely
chosen, Poincare, one of the principal founders of this
view, acknowledged a debt to Kant.
114
Moreover, conventionalism is not necessarily incom
patible with realism, as Popper’s response to Bronowski,
cited above, seems to imply. It is incompatible, however,
with Popper’s ’’ metaphysical” belief that explanatory theo
ries correspond to ’’strange facts, highly abstract
regularities of nature” which may be too deep for us to
discover. However, Popper’s implied identification of con
ventionalism with idealism is misleading; Poincare, like
Bronowski, was a realist, believing in a truth which
33
scientific theory approaches more and more nearly. The
similarity to Kant’s noumenal world is self-evident.
Epistemology and the Constructive Imagination
The view of Bronowski as a conventionalist is
primarily constructed upon a linguistic analogy with
scientific descriptions of the world. This is a model
that Bronowski used widely, in The Origins of Knowledge
and Imagination, quoted earlier, in his essays on the
epistemology of science, such as ’’ The Logic of the Mind,”
3 ^ 4 *
and in The Identity of Man. This model is perhaps the
one that communicates most readily with the public, who
are more_familiar with language than with any other symbol
system in general use. As was shown above, this analogy
was widely employed among the scientists who shared
Bronowski's perspective on scientific laws earlier in the
115
century.
There is another mode of perception, another door
to epistemology, that is less familiar and perhaps more
strikingly original in Bronowski's analogical charac
terizations of nature, natural laws, and even of man's own
self-perception. This is the constructive visual imagina
tion of concepts. This approach to the epistemology of
science, art, values, and human selfhood is highly distinc
tive in the case of Bronowski, who frequently emphasized
his gif;t of being able to manipulate even four-dimensional
objects in his mind's eye, and it performs a singular
function in Bronowski's philosophy. I believe, in fact,
that it unites his scientific, mathematical, literary,
artistic, evolutionary, human, and ethical interests in a
unique way. In effect, it provides a fretwork that links
the various components of Bronowski's philosophy into a
whole— a function it shares with the common origin of the
various arts and sciences in the human mind.
As Bronowski describes this gift in "Science,
Poetry, and Human Specificity," after accounting his
sensitivity to language as his first gift, ". . .1 have a
vivid pictorial imagination. That is, I work by manipu
lating complicated symbols in my head. When I used to do
geometry, I had no problem visualizing multidimensional
figures and manipulating them mentally in ways it is
116
impossible to do in a three-dimensional space. I see even
statistical problems in graphic and, so to say, active
..35
configurations.
Anyone who consciously looks for it will find the
evidence of visualization manifested throughout Bronowski's
work, ranging from the "shape of the mind" in The Poet's
Defence, through Blake's visualization of "vortices" in
which the union of opposites anticipates Hegelian syn
thesis by twenty years; in the conflation of observer and
observed into observation in The Common Sense of Science;
in the "experience-space" in Bronowski's critical review
of Roy Harrod's Foundations of Inductive Logic in 1952;
and in Bronowski's fascination with Leonardo da Vinci's
3 6
capacity for visual analysis.
This constructive imagination is in the unifying
vision of truth which Copernicus saw in the sun, Kepler in
the orbits of the planets, and Shipton's Sherpa guide in
connecting the faces of Everest which he had formerly seen
37
only successively and separately.
Science and Human Values is perhaps the most Kant
laden of Bronowski's books; the anecdote about the Sherpa
guide is a virtual translation of Kant's argument in The
Critique of Pure Reason for an a priori category of time
that permits us to form a single conception out of sue-
3 8
cessive perceptions of a house from different angles.
117
But Bronowski did not accept the given Newtonian concepts
of space and time on which these categories were based.
Instead, I believe, he gradually constructed an Einsteinian
space-time continuum of process into which the Kantian
concepts of artistic freedom, imagination, law, and others,
39
could be transposed and reformulated.
In the course of this geometrician's projection of
Kantian concepts from a rectilinear Newtonian world of time
and space into a finite, curved, and expanding universe,
Bronowski went beyond Kant, to meet the three major
impediments to the acceptance of Kant’s philosophy in
modern times: (1) his commitment to Euler's view of
Newtonian space and time as absolute preconditions of
human thought; (2) Kant's historically determined lack of
knowledge about evolution which was partly discussed in
the presentation of The Origins of Knowledge and Imagina
tion, in which Bronowski gave a post-evolutionary view of
the unity of mind and experience;^ (3) the widespread
unacceptability of Kant's categorical imperative, which
will be treated in the section on Bronowski's epistemology
of values.
Examples of instances where Bronowski went beyond
Kant in the visualization and unification of concepts have
already been quoted, in the discussion of evolution in
Nature-and-Knowledge, where Bronowski writes that "Life
118
conserves information in the form of topological loops in
the abstract space of states" and of the "unbounded plan
of evolution” of both organic and inorganic matter up the
41
strata of stability to greater levels of complexity.
Similarly, his idea that the novelty and power of a new
theory inhere in its structure as part of "a topological
network, in which the knots or joints are the inferred or
theoretical entities which the science has had to create
so that it will hold together as a unity,” is a striking
geometric vision of the interrelationships of scientific
theories.^ And finally, in Magic, Science, and
Civilization Bronowski applies the geometric vision to man
himself, to consider how he derives values:
After all, what makes man unique among species?
It is precisely that he is the only creature who
sees the world both inside and outside, who is
capable of looking into his own motives and at
the same time looking at other people as if they
were, not himself repeated, but some alien
species.
The subject which I have been practicing is
called by me "human specificity.” And what makes
the human species special is, in my view, the
crucial link in building a view of the world in
which nature and man are really joined into a
unity. One thing that makes the human species
special is exactly the ability to see ourselves
both as inside and outside. We have the ability
to make a unitary view just as if we were turning
the topology inside o u t . 43
The term Bronowski used in Magic, Science, and
Civilization to project symbols and forms into coherent
wholes, both in the present and in the future is
119
constructivism, and it applies equally to visual forms and
to the referents of words:
I do think that the human brain, like every animal
brain, has certain inbuilt limitations. But I
do not think that our subsequent ways of seeing
the world, and language in particular, are embedded
structures. On the contrary, the philosophy that
I—am—putting forward I would call a constructivist
philosophy. I am saying that by this analytic
point of view we take, we construct, the laws of
nature as we see them. . . . And the whole of our
imagination process is carried on in this way;
that is, our capacity to do this in the brain is
built on the fact that we are able to attach
symbols to our memory and project them forward
as foresight, and in this way we are able to
manipulate by imagination the environment as it
might b e . 4-4
Although Bronowski is here using the analogy of language,
it is clear from other contexts that language is only one
of the forms we use t_o imagine. For example, in The
Identity of Man, he approvingly quotes John von Neumann,
"Logics and mathematics in the central nervous system,
when viewed as languages, must structurally be essentially
different from those languages to which our common expe-
45
rience refers.” And on the following page, Bronowski
refers to the "picture of the world" that we manipulate in
our minds. "The picture is made by, it is made of, our
activity, all the way from the logic of the brain to the
use of the plow and wheel. It is the implication and the
expression, in symbolic form, of all our dealings with
nature. The picture is not the look of the world but our
12Q
way of looking at it: not how the world strikes us but how
. m46
we construct it.
The term constructivism has an ancient and
honorable history in the field of mathematics. In an
article on the foundations of mathematics, Charles Parsons
traces the philosophical origins of the concepts oh which
it is based as far back as Book III of Aristotle's Physics
47
and his analysis of the idea of infinity. Its modern
origins are traceable to Kant, who can be interpreted in
constructivist terms. Its principal contemporary pro
ponent is Jan Brouwer, of whom Bronowski writes in
reference to the philosophical and mathematical situation
at Cambridge in the 1930's "In the first place, it was
already doubtful whether mathematics could be made quite
as tidy as Whitehead and Russell had tried. Jan Brouwer
long ago had thrown doubt on their approach to mathematics;
and though he was shrugged off as a maverick, the doubt
48
remained. Brouwer's "intuitionist" form of construc
tivism was the chief line of opposition to the
set-theoretic logicism of Cantor, Russell and Whitehead and
other "platonists" before the self-referencing paradoxes
of set-theory were revealed and later proved inherent and
inevitable by Kurt Goedel and others.
Bouwer, also a topologist, argued that logic is
too narrow a method and consistency too limited a test to
121
serve as foundations of mathematics, which depends for its
development upon unique, free acts of the imagination,
intuitions that create the integers and construct the more
complex theories of mathematics. Contradiction he holds
to be an insufficient basis for proving the existence of
mathematical entities, and insists that they should admit
of construction, at least in principle, in a finite
number of steps. Most curious and suggestive in terms of
Bronowski's later discussion of Blake's view of unity in
opposites, is Brouwer's rejection of the "law of the
excluded middle," that every proposition must be either
true or false, or that opposites cannot both be true.
Similar ideas were held by Leopold Kronecker in
the nineteenth century and were voiced by Poincare and
others in their criticism of platonism, the mathematical
basis of positivism, which Bronowski rejected along with
other formal and axiomatic mechanisms of scientific and
49
philosophical discovery. Kant makes many references to
the intuitive, a priori synthetic constructions of mathe
matics , both geometrical and numerical in The Critique of
Pure Reason among which one of the most general and
emphatic is the following: "Philosophical cognition is
the cognition of reason by means of conceptions; mathe
matical cognition is cognition by means of the construction
of conceptions. The construction of a conception is the
122
presentation a priori of the intuition which corresponds
. , u . ,,50
to the conception."
More readily visualized, of course, is the example
rather than the principle:
Take, for example the proposition: "Two straight
lines cannot enclose a space, and with these
alone no figure is possible,1’ and try to deduce
it from the mere conception of a straight line
and the number two; or take the proposition:
"It is possible to construct a figure with three
straight lines,” and endeavour . . . to deduce
it from the mere conception of a straight line
and the number three. All your endeavours are
in vain, and you find yourself forced to have
recourse to intuition, as, in fact, geometry
always does. ^
Elsewhere, Kant demonstrates the application of the same
52
line of reasoning to numbers, but even more interesting
in terms of its implications for Bronowski's construc
tivist epistemology of values is the following quotation
from Kant's The Science of Right:
Now, as in pure mathematics, we cannot deduce
the properties of its objects immediately from a
mere abstract conception, but 'can only discover
them by figurative construction or representation
of its conceptions; so it is in like manner with
the principle of right.^3
But, apart from its application in mathematics and
prior to its application in the realm of values, the con
structive imagination has its freest and most natural
compass in the domain of art, which Kant styles the field
of aesthetic judgment, or taste:
The result to be extracted from the foregoing
analysis is in effect this: That everything runs
up into the concept of taste as a critical faculty
123
by which an object is estimated in reference to the
free conformity to law of the imagination. If now,
imagination must in the judgement of taste be
regarded in its freedom, then, to begin with, it is
not taken as reproductive . . . but as productive
and exerting an activity of its own (as originator
of arbitrary forms of possible intuitions).-^
Thus for Kant, as well as for Bronowski, the mani
festations of the constructive imagination range from the
symbolic conceptions of language, through the geometrical
visions of space and time, to the epistemology of values,
by way of the spontaneous, liberating knowledge of art.
The Epistemology of Art
The earliest evidence of Bronowski's Kantian
philosophical inclination appears in The Poet’s Defence,
a philosophical interpretation of English poets and their
theories of criticism. This is Bronowski1s earliest book,
published in 1939, and its credo is stated with charac
teristic boldness in a Preface in which the Kantianism is
strongly implicit:
I hope that this book makes plain that I believe
in one worth only: Truth. I defend poetry because
I think that it tells the truth.
In science, that is true which can be checked by
others. Science therefore finds its knowledge of
the world by mass measurement, that is by social
means. It finds it through the senses, and what it
finds is never true but more and more nearly true.
But I believe that there is truth which is free
of the society within which it has been found.
I believe that the mind of man has a steady shape
124
which is the truth. We know the truth about the
mind by looking from this'a priori truth outward.
No scientific near truths and nearer-truths can
give this shape as we can give it ourselves. The
rules of reasoning are part of this steady shape
without which the mind cannot be. . . . The urges
of passion are part of the steady shape of the
mind. All these are true in all societies. They
make an absolute truth, which I believe is the
truth of poetry.
I believe in ideal truth. The word Ideal is in
bad odour today, and rightly so; and I wish that
I could have found another w o r d . ^ 5
It is uncertain to what extent this post-Kantian
conception of artistic truth is informed by direct contact
with Kant's Critique of Judgement. Certainly a tincture of
Kantian idealism was widespread in literary commentary and
criticism both at the time Bronowski wrote these words and
well before. As Monroe C. Beardsley indicates, this view
of artistic insight and imagination was held by at least
one author for whom Bronowski professed lifelong admiration
and whose theory of the imagination Bronowski largely
adopted, William Blake. Under Romanticism, Beardsley
writes, "A new version of the cognitive view of art becomes
dominant in the concept of the imagination as a faculty of
immediate insight into truth, distinct from and perhaps
superior to, reasoning and understanding. The imagination
is both creator and revealer of nature and what lies
behind it— a romanticized version of Kant's transcendental
idealism, ascribing the form of experience to the shaping
power of the mind, and of Fichte's Ego positing the
125
non-Ego. A.W. Schlegel, Blake, Shelley, Hazlitt,
Baudelaire, and many others spoke of the imagination in
5 6
these terms." Blake's influence on Bronowski will be
treated more fully in the following pages.
The qualities in Bronowski's statement in the
Preface which call for comparison with Kant are that the
truth of poetry is ideal; it is absolute, immediate,
a priori; it is universal, a shape or form of the human
mind; it is complete and non-discursive; it includes both
reason and passion. All these are characteristic of what
Kant calls, in The Critique of Judgement, synthetic
a priori truths.
It is easy to see that judgements of taste are
synthetic, for they go beyond the concept and even
the intuition of the object, and join as predicate
to that intuition something which is not even a
cognition at all, namely, the feeling of pleasure
(or displeasure). But, although the predicate
(the personal pleasure that is connected with the
representation) is empirical, still we need not go
further than what is involved in the expressions
of their claim to see that, so far as concerns
the agreement required of everyone, they are
a priori judgements, or mean to pass for such.
This problem of the Critique of Judgement, there
fore, is part of the general problem of
transcendental philosophy: How are synthetic
a priori judgements possible?^?
Kant proceeds in Section 37 to argue that the
synthesis of pleasure with the representation of an object
is internal, singular, and yet asserted to be valid
universally, by common consent as a necessary a priori
construction of the mind that harmonizes the imagination
126
and understanding; thus it combines these two faculties of
knowledge in a free pleasurable union. This pleasure,
though non-conceptual, is universally communicable, inter
sub jectively . The judgment becomes a matter of common .
sense, or common human understanding when we put "ourselves
58
in the position of everyone else." Kant goes on to
write rather poetically of this experience, "Only when the
imagination in its freedom stirs the understanding, and
the understanding apart from concepts puts the imagination
into regular play, does the representation communicate
itself not as thought, but as an internal feeling of a
59
final state of the mind." (italics added) One is some
how reminded of Dylan Thomas's "sea tumbling in harness."
In sections 41 and 42, Kant discusses the informal
and empirical relationship of the beautiful with man's
natural social inclinations, and argues that the intel
lectual interest in the beauty of nature is "akin to the
6 0
irioral" though all these attributions are, as it were,
accidental rather than essential to the faculty of
appreciating the beautiful.
These are among the most lucid and surprisingly
eloquent passages in Kant, and the agreement of Bronowski's
esthetic with the principles enunciated, implied in the
passage quoted above, will be developed and documented in
the examples which follow. Art as the free yet partly
bounded and confined play of the imagination which enables
127
us to put ’’ourselves in the position of everyone else," is
clearly continuous with the constructive imagination that
builds visual, verbal, and mathematical models of the
universe— this, and the role of art in informing our under
standing of "everyone else" with the values of "tenderness,
kindliness, human intimacy, and love;" the affinity of the
beautiful and the moral— all these are incorporated,
demonstrated, illustrated and developed in Bronowski’s
esthetic, personal, and social ethic.
In describing the imagination, Kant uses precisely
the same locution as Sidney, and though the vagaries of
translation and the limits of synonymy between the lan
guages prevent our drawing specific conclusions; still the
coincidence is the more striking in view of the conceptual
parallelism. Both Sidney and Kant write of the poetic
imagination as a "second nature."
The passage quoted and emphasized by Bronowski in
his discussion of Sidney reads: "Neither let it be deemed
too sawcy a comparison, to ballance the highest point of
mans wit, with the efficacie of nature: but rather give
right honor to the heavenly maker of that maker, who
having made man to his owne likeness, set him beyond and
over all the workes of that second nature, which in
61
nothing he sheweth so much as in Poetry. . . .” And
Kant, discussing the faculties of the mind which constitute
genius, writes, "The imagination (as a productive faculty
128
of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it
were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it
by actual nature."^
The purpose of the quotation from Sidney in The
Poet1s Defence is to illustrate Bronowski's view of the
poet as conveyer of a distinct, non-discursive mode of
truth, a form of culture which Bronowski calls an "other
nature," but one, as Bronowski was later to enlarge the
idea, that influences the evolution of man's mind: "In
the moments when the poet does not fail, the ideal 'other
nature' works through him and shapes the nature of man.
6 3
In those moments man learns Virtue." This is the
germinal idea from which Bronowski was later to derive the
intimate, humane values in The Identity of Man.
It is remarkable, and may well be significant, in
tracing the affinity of Kant's and Bronowski's thought to
note that, in The Critique of Judgement, Kant places
poetry at the very pinnacle of the fine arts:
Poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to
genius and is least willing to be led by precepts
or example) holds the first rank among all the
arts. It expands the mind by giving freedom to
the imagination and by offering, from among the
boundless.multiplicity of possible forms
accordant with a given concept, to whose bounds
it is restricted, that one which couples with the
presentation of the concept a wealth of thought
to which no verbal expression is completely
adequate, and by thus rising aesthetically to
ideas. It invigorates the mind by letting it
feel its faculty— free, spontaneous, and
independent of determination by nature— of
regarding and estimating nature as phenomenon in
____________ . 129
the light of aspects which nature of itself does
not afford us in experience. . ." . It plays with
semblance, which it produces at will, but not as
an instrument of deception; for its avowed pur
suit is merely one of play, which, however,
understanding may turn to good account and employ
for its own p u r p o s e . 64-
Perhaps it is not amiss to see in this Kant's own "apology
for poetry," particularly in the last sentence, which
answers, if not Gosson, to whom Sidney addressed his
defense, then Plato, whom Gosson invokes in his attack.
Sir Philip Sidney is the hero of Bronowski's
selective intellectual history of English literary
criticism. Bronowski states in his Preface to The Poet's
Defence that he is interested only in the writings of
poets who also expressed their critical canons in prose.
He traces the decline of the ideal of poetic truth from
Sidney, who most fully epitomizes the view that poetic
truth is an ideal in the mind of the poet to Shelley, and
to Swinburne and his heirs, whose poetic ideals Bronowski
views as corruptions of Sidney's view.^ For Bronowski,
one should note, this is not a Kantian, but rather a
Renaissance plea "to live both in the world and the ideal;
the Renaissance search to hold together, almost by force,
6 6
the contradiction between the actual and the ideal."
But it was in the mystic vision of William Blake
that the actual and the ideal, the flesh and the spirit,
and all the other oppositions and antinomies reached
their united realization. As Bronowski puts it in William
130
Blake and the Age of Revolution, "The mystery is that the
one and the many are parts, each of the other; that in the
beginning is the end, and that the centre meets the cir
cumference. To hold together two such poles, in whatever
form— the subject with the object, the ego with the id,
man with society— this is the oneness for which the mystic
strives. . . . All Blake’s symbols link the one with the
6 7
many, inside with outside, the face with the mask."
But, lest this view of Blake as antithesis within
synthesis, of the toplogical union of opposites, seem
idiosyncratic, a mere byproduct of Bronowski1s penchant
for paradox, listen to Northrop Frye, whose Fearful
Symmetry is among the most respected contemporary works on
Blake, and consider the line of analogy and terminology
that has been traced from science, through mathematical
topology, with allusions to space-time and self
perception, to poetry, and which is projected into the
plastic arts, personal and social ethics:
According to Blake, man is a working or con
structing imagination— the creative artist is
normative man. In this context there is no dif
ference between human essence and existence, for
the imagination is the human existence itself
and is also essentially human nature. Works of
art are neither intellectual nor emotional,
motivated neither by desire nor by reason, neither
free nor compelled: all such antitheses become
unities in them. Even more important, the
imagination destroys the antithesis of subject
and object. Man starts out as an isolated intel
ligence in an alien nature, but the imagination
creates a world in its own image, the world of
cities and gardens and human communities and
domesticated animals.^ ,
William Blake was a complex man and a complex
symbol for Bronowski: Blake was the dissenting revolu
tionary who helped Thomas Paine escape from Dover minutes
before the warrant for his arrest arrived from London and
whose The French Revolution may have been halted at the
printer’s by the anticipation of the Proclamation Against
69
Seditious Writings in 1792. He was the prophetic
visionary whose prophetic writings were thereafter filled
with an opaque and shifting symbolism, but whose poetry
and letters depassed the boundaries of the contemporary
philosophy, science, and religion, whose dialectic of
opposites anticipated Hegel, and whose vortices seem to
foresee Einstein's curved, limited, and multi-dimensional
universe in which space and matter conform to shape each
other:
The nature of infinity is this: That every thing
has its Own Vortex, and when once a traveller
thro1 Eternity Has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives
it roll backward behind His path, into a globe
itself infolding.^0
Finally, Blake is, for Bronowski, the poet who
unites reason and sense in the ideal poetic imagination of
a transcending truth, which "is the faith of every great
poet from Philip Sidney to Blake," and for whom "what is
done always distorts what has been imagined" though it "is
not fully imagined until it has been done." And lastly,
Blake's impoverished, cowed, and neglected life is an
132
emblem of the values that are suppressed with dissent:
"The right to ask and to be answered, truth; the right to
judge and to choose, dignity; these, and justice, and
pity, and love, and reason, are of the shape of man's
mind." And these are the values which Bronowski was to
derive from the practice of science and the production and
appreciation of art in The Identity of Man.^
Bronowski's application of the same linguistic and
spacial insights to the plastic arts is evident in a
sequence of essays extending from "The Shape of Things"
(1952) to the A.W. Mellon Lectures in The Fine Arts,
delivered in 1969 and published as "Art as a Mode of
Knowledge" in The Visionary Eye (1978). The Kantian
influence is evident in the earliest essays, and vestiges
of it remain even in the last, in the conception of art as
a form of liberty or play, and, especially in "Architecture
as a Science and Architecture as an Art" (1955): "I hope
it is becoming clear of itself why I chose to present this
theory of aesthetics in the context of architecture. For
I know no other work of man which is so profoundly a
72
balance— no, a fusion— of freedom and necessity."
In fact, Kant spends the entire Introduction to The
Critique of Aesthetic Judgement joining the realms of under
standing and reason, which he, himself, had put asunder in
the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical
133
Reason, the realms, respectively of law, or necessity, and
of moral freedom. Suffice it to say that ultimately
judgment, which is the realm of art, mediates between
understanding, which is the realm of natural law, and
practical reason, which is the realm of free choice, with
73
imagination as the operative faculty.
But in his esthetic works, Bronowski also moves
beyond Kant's static conceptions of time and space into
the evolution of man in interaction with art and into the
evolution of the plastic arts themselves through their
union with the sciences in the exploration of new
topologies which change through time. And thus Bronowski
addresses two of the three major limitations of the
Kantian static formulation of the architecture of the
world noted above. And, in addition, it will be argued
in the section on the epistemology of values that
Bronowski also introduced the notion of process into Kant's
moral imperative.
Bronowski begins in the first of these essays,
"The Shape of Things," with the active rather than the
contemplative approach to art by asking what prompts men
to make something they regard as beautiful. And even
this earliest answer implicates the dynamic of foresight
in freeing man from his immediate environment and directing
his evolution towards greater liberty: "In these words, I
have put the central concept of my aesthetic: evolution
____________ „ 134
has had, for man, the direction of liberty.” "If we
appreciate the thing, it is because we relive the heady
freedom of making it. Beauty is the by-product of
interest and pleasure in the choice of action.11^ Here,
as he was later to do in The Ascent of Man, Bronowski
invokes the cave paintings at Altamira as evidence of
man's effort to control the absent environment.^
The unity of artist, artisan, and scientist and
their interaction and common concern with form, as well
as the theme that art evolves along with the scientific
and mathematical knowledge of structure and space, is
another major theme that appears early in Bronowski's
writings about the plastic arts. Two of its most explicit
formulations are "The Creative Process" (1958) and "The
Discovery of Form" (1965). In the latter, Bronowski
traces the interaction of geometry, anatomy, roentgen
ography, microscopy, and topology with the development of
art from Phidias, to Leonardo, Vesalius, Rembrandt, the
French Impressionists, Picasso's Cubism, and finally to
7 6
the abstract geometry of Henry Moore.
Bronowski unifies these themes in his last and
most comprehensive statement about art, "Art as a Mode of
Knowledge" with the argument that art, contrary to common
usage and expectation is an experimental mode of expressing
and transmitting knowledge about human experience and
values. Unlike science, art does not explain reality; but
135
like science, it is both predictive and practical. The
creative potential of art in the cultural evolution of
man is conveyed in every artifact, which simultaneously
challenges us with two questions: What is he trying to
do? and Why did he do it that way? Though some regard this
as a question of content and form, Bronowski feels that as
structure and message, they are inseparable in the work of
art.
In music and poetry, and more evidently in the
plastic arts and architecture, structure and message
communicate as a unity. In the case of poetry and the
visual arts, the communication is by means of vivid
images that evoke a re-creative sympathetic response in
the auditor or spectator. Though the message may not be
subject to formulation or even conceptualization, at some
level it communicates the common humanity and common
predicament of the artist, or one of his creations, and
the recipient, and of all mankind, because the artistic
communication, though cloaked.in the particular, is really
as general in its consequences and implications as the
scientific formula.
And, in a discussion that anticipates the subject
of the next division, Bronowski describes participation in
the work of art as participation in an open plan, an
experiment in vicarious living that assists us in forming
value strategies for coping with life. Thus, art becomes
_______________________________________________________________ 136
an extension of our experience of what it means to be
human, an enlargement of our memories and our foresight,
an education in provisionally and temporarily resolving
the intractable dialectic of conflicting values and
loyalties that constitutes the human predicament.^
The Epistemology of Values
In many respects, Bronowski’s epistemology of values
is the apex and most original component of his philosophy.
While it is rooted in the Kantian view of truth as the
cardinal moral value, it transcends the stationary position
of Kant by making truth the object of a quest, in the pur
suit of which other moral values are generated.
Bronowski's fully developed ethic shows signs of having
progressed analogically with his view of science from the
conception of truth presented in The Poet1s Defence which is
essentially an isolated, ideal conception, to an evolving
dialectic of values. Bronowski did not write much in his
later years about an ideal vision of truth, poetic or
otherwise, and this marks his own development towards view
ing all values as dialectically personal and social rather
78
than as transcendental and immutable.
The values which ended the study of Blake were
both personal and social values, with emphasis on Blake’s
role as a constructive dissident and the values which he
137
imagined as coming into existence in successive civiliza
tions in which man creates their embodiments, but
inevitably fails to fulfill himself. A tie with Sidney in
The Poet’s Defence, in the Renaissance effort to unite the
ideal vision of truth and its realization in a work of
art is evident, but Bronowski1s emphasis seems to have
shifted from an ideal truth unaffected by social change to
a reality progressively approached by the creative
imagination.
Bronowski writes of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, etched about 1790: "The book is named to show the
progression of its contraries, and of Swedenborg's. And
it shows that Blake made for himself, twenty years before
79
Hegel, the dialectic of Hegel's formal thought." But
Blake's was a creative dialectic of the interactive
development of man and society, not the historically
determined dialectic of Hegel, whose thesis proving the
number of planets could not exceed the classically
determined seven Bronowski never tired of comparing to the
logic of Lear's fool, who concluded that the "seuen
Starres are no mo then seuen" because they are not eight—
80
a piece of reasoning fit to qualify any man as a fool.
But Bronowski points to the reach of Blake's
vision beyond the present society to the nature of man:
the dialectic of self and society:
138
For Blake did not shirk this last step: beyond
how man is to live, to what man is to be. That
is why the states of man symbolized in his cities
are not threefold but fourfold. The threefold
is society, its energetic contrary, and their
progression to a new society. But this new
society is itself only the first of a new three
fold, in the same cycle. This progression makes
an endless set of social threefolds. There is
an end to this for Blake, not in societies, but
in man. 8-1
The original version of William Blake and the Age
of Revolution was published in 1944, before Bronowski's
experience in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and before his
decision to leave war work, but the creative or destruc
tive conflict between the dissident and his society seems
to have continued to preoccupy him. In The Face of
Violence, presented in 1950 and described earlier in this
paper, the darker side of this irreconcilable dialectic
seems to have commanded his attention: how was it
possible to abate the war of each against all without
destroying the creative, revolutionary impulse and
individual on the one hand, or the just state and rule of
law on the other?
Bronowski’s answer in The Face of Violence seems
to be that no more than a temporary truce is possible in
the final analysis because the dialectic of conflict
between socialization and individual self-assertion is a
real dilemma of values inherent in the human condition.
And yet, perhaps violence can be avoided or at least
139
minimized if society recognizes and acknowledges the pro
testing man. A solution might be found in a truly
responsive democracy that permits the maximum of free
« - •- 82
expression to its citizens.
The Common Sense of Science was published at about
this time, 1951, and, in the chapter on ’’ Truth and Value,"
Bronowski for the first time addressed the relation
between science, democracy, and the other values within
the covers of a book. But the brief chapter in The Common
Sense, apart from its emphasis on the need for judgment in
all scientific endeavors and the unifying commitment to
the quest for truth, specifically disclaims any intent of
deriving values from science: "There are other values:
goodness, beauty, right conduct. They have their echoes
even in science; and there is one value, freedom of human
ideas, which is the essential condition for the health of
science. But it is not my point to show laboriously that
science as much as the arts creates and implies all the
human values."^
As is well known, that original and richly pro
ductive demonstration was initiated in the Science and
Human Values lectures in 1953 and given its fullest
development in the Identity of Man lectures in 1965.
Bronowski's continuing and final view that values evolved
from the scientific dialectic of reason and experiment
140
holds the greatest promise for a unified, modern world
view is contained in the final chapter of Magic, Science,
Civilization.
I believe that it is his view of the creative
imagination that ultimately underlies, supports, and
informs Bronowski's own creative contributions to the
theory of ethics— his derivation of the personal and com
munal intellectual virtues from science and the
complementary intimate virtues from the arts. The con
structive imagination becomes the source of creative
dialectics between theory and experiment, science and art,
empiricism and rationalism, and between the self and
society, which generate values that are themselves open
strategies and imperfect solutions of the existential
dilemmas of life.
The wedding of Blake's creative dialectic of
contraries and Kant's architectonic enabled Bronowski to
make his most radical improvement on Kant's philosophical
system, which I have called the epistemological imperative:
"We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be
verified to be so.
That this principle is circular is precisely the
point that Jaki perceives and misses, for that is arguably
how many have now come to experience life, not as a
linear sequence of causes and effects, means and ends,
141
progressing from a Prime Mover towards "one far-off divine
event, to which the whole creation moves," but in medias
res, reaching out from infantile solipsism with Bronowski's
epistemologies of science, art, and values to discover,
create, and possess the True, the Beautiful, and the Good,
so far as in us lies. At least, since Kant made such a
view intellectually tenable some two hundred years ago, it
has shown unprecedented success in meeting that ultimate
test of ideas in any democracy of the intellect: the
assent of man.
It is from this epistemological imperative of the
quest for truth that all Bronowski1s other values are
ultimately derived— not a pure, ideal, eternal, or objec
tive truth towards which man proceeds by linear, inductive,
axiomatic systems; isolated contemplation; or the manipula
tion of atomic facts and operations— but a mutable union
of imagination and experience that engages a fellowship
committed to the same end and to the subsidiary personal
and social values necessary for its approximate realiza
tion. It is a vision that imposes a strategy of discovery.
Bronowski1s point of departure in Science and
Human Values is the observation that truth cannot be dis
covered and verified in a world of atomic facts, atomic
observations, isolated atomic scientists or atomizing
philosophers. Contrary to the positivists, analysts, and
operational!sts, scientists are dependent for verification
142
upon a community of scholar's on whose veracity they can
rely and upon whose prior or contemporary research they
can largely depend. The mechanical theories of verifica
tion abstract a ’’scientific man” from the context of
research much as political scientists were sometimes wont
to abstract an "economic man” in order to support their
social theories.
In prder to pursue verifiable truth, scientists
must construct a society of veracious men and govern it
with such rules of conduct and liberties of inquiry and
debate as will advance the overall purpose. Bronowski
immediately mentions the virtues of a fellowship that is
"free, uninhibited, and communicative." Though it is
incidental to the main body of the argument, it is worth
noting, particularly in view of some of the immoderate and
sectarian criticisms that have been leveled at his thesis,
that Bronowski states at the outset that the society of
scientists "derives its traditions, both of scholarship
and of service, from roots which reach through the
Renaissance into the monastic communities and the first
85
universities." For an uncompromising foe of dogmatic
religion, this is a just, generous, and even courtly
acknowledgment of historical debt.
Secondly, Bronowski, as has been briefly noted
before, does not suggest, as some of his critics have
143
implied, that the virtues he commends are the exclusive
prerogative of scientists. He in fact states that
integrity, modesty, civility, dispassion and tolerance "are
the general virtues of scholarship,” though they are
86
particularly the virtues of science. Neither are their
virtues the result of personal or temperamental distinc
tion, for scientists have "in the main the scholarls
temperament, which is shared by historians and literary
8 7
critics and painters in miniature."
The virtues and values of science are distinctive
to the scientific community only insofar as they are
inescapable conditions for the pursuit of scientific
truth. They begin with independence of observation and
judgment; boldness and originality of conception; and the
perseverance in its advocacy and defense that constitute
dissent— the personal counterpart of the communal values
of free inquiry, free thought, free speech, and tolerance
for fiercely held differences of opinion. As Bronowski
rather tactfully though directly puts it, "These freedoms
of tolerance have never been notable in a dogmatic society,
even when the dogma was Christian. They have been
granted only when scientific thought flourished once
before, in the youth of Greece." And it follows that
"the society of scientists must be a democracy. It can
keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between
144
dissent and respect, between independence from the views
of others and tolerance for them. The crux of the ethical
problem is to fuse these, the private and the public
88
needs.” And it is naturally, from this discourse of
commitments and values that Bronowski subsequently draws
and enumerates the corollary values of justice, honor,
human dignity, and self-respect.
In accord with the line of thought that has been
pursued in the preceding pages, two aspects of this deriva
tion of values deserve emphasis. The first is the
derivation from a process that consists of a contest of
contrary values and in their temporary or provisional
reconciliation. It is almost precisely the opposition of
contraries that Blake posited, and, indeed, Bronowski
invokes Blake in one of the two aphorisms Bronowski quoted
most frequently: "to be an Error & to be Cast out is a
89
part of God’s design." But the very verbs Bronowski
uses to express this process in science are sufficient to
convey the conception in themselves: "Science confronts
the work of one man with that of another and grafts each
on each. . . ."
The second point to be emphasized is that
Bronowski universalizes the values he has derived from the
dialectic of science by stating that democracy is necessary
for the practice of science. Both in Science and Human
Values and in his subsequent books, he was to expand and
145
generalize this analogy and association in a number of dif4
ferent ways. In Science and Human Values, he states that
science has "humanized our values;" he adds that our social
problems with science stem from the fact that we have not
allowed the tolerance or empiricism of science to pene
trate our values deeply enough to overcome the entrenched
90
prejudices by which we govern ourselves. At other
times and in other places, e.g., in the "Lessons of
Science" Fabian Tract, he was to argue that science and the
technological freedoms produced by its success were
largely responsible for the spread of democracy and its
penetration of contemporary society. In The Origins of
Knowledge and Imagination, Bronowski was to argue that
"Democracy is a way of organizing the state which has
shown its success exactly as science has, because it is
91
constantly able to transform itself." Again the dialec
tical element is inescapable. And not merely scientists,
but all intellectuals become guardians of democratic
integrity as a result of witnessing this influencing and
transforming power of science.
In The Identity of Man, Bronowski argues that the
values derived from experiencing the human dilemmas of
choice universalize the complementary knowledge of self and
the social predicament, and thus, by implication strengthen
the sense of community and humanity necessary for democ
racy. And finally, Bronowski argues in Magic, Science,
146
and Civilization, that the theoretical, empirical verifi
cation of knowledge in science, art, and values provides
the last, best hope for mankind of developing a unified
set of strategies for planning and guiding our behavior
as individuals and as a species. And we seem to be on the
threshold of Kant's "Idea of World History with Cosmo
politan Intent," and his famous codex of principles for
92
"Eternal Peace."
In the Man and Nature Lectures at the American
Museum of Natural History, delivered and published in 1965
as The Identity of Man, Bronowski in a real sense com
pleted the overview of man's intellectual and ethical
self which he had begun in Science and Human Values. In
developing the human values of tenderness, kindliness,
intimacy, love, and their kindred virtues from the crea
tion and appreciation of art, which Bronowski argued
everywhere accompanies the practice of science, he began
with the definition of man as both a machine and a self—
the self being that part of human consciousness which
cannot be formalized or programmed, which is an open-
ended process, like the universe or the perimeter of a
growing spiral. "The self is not something fixed inside
my head. If it exists at all, my self is a process: the
unending process by which I turn new experience into
93
knowledge." And, as he subsequently explains, the
147
included new experience comprises fantasy, speculation,
foresight— all the faculties of the body, understanding,
and imagination. And he explains that this study of the
developing self is also a study in epistemology.
As Bronowski develops the argument and was later
to exemplify it in an ancillary essay, "The Logic of the
Mind," the mode of knowledge of the self transmitted
through the arts differs from the knowledge of the world
developed in science in exploiting the multiple associa
tive qualities of language (or form) rather than attempting
to exclude them as ambiguities: to treat them as har
monics of the thematic message, rather than as noise, to
essay a personal analogy.
Bronowski also develops the thesis that the knowl
edge of how to be rather than how to act, which is imparted
by art, is also an experimental process by which we enter
the lives and entertain the value conflicts of the protag
onists, using drama as the prototype of art, or of the
artist himself in art forms in which he is not present in
a created persona. In this fashion, we experiment with
alternative values, choices of self, and alternative
futures, enlarging our selves in the process and enlarging
our knowledge of humanity in all its raptures, serenities
and despairs, without ever closing off the open field of
valuing, choosing among values, and experiencing the
148
irresolution of provisional choices and the loss in those
that are inevitably exclusive.
Bronowski makes the central point that empathy,
and specifically the feelings of one person for another,
are the values and emotions that most preoccupy us in
literature: "The most masterful of these values is love,
,94
and we may take it for the pattern of them all." This
is the core of the social emotions of tenderness, compas
sion, respect, and friendship, and it contains in the
most intense form the double aspect of devotion to a
person or group that completes my self. The same prin
ciple underlies the less intimate though related emotions
95
of duty and loyalty, grandeur and sacrifice.
Finally, when the quest for truth about nature and
the quest for truth about the self are joined in a society
which makes the ongoing search for truth its primary
objective, the values of science and those of art are
unified in the sense of human dignitys which consists of
respect for another’s work and tolerance for his individ
ual opinions and emotions. And all this is made possible
by the unique topology of man’s mind, which is capable at
once of seeing outward and inward, of seeing the self by
itself in the world and in itself in its relation to
others, a topology which is growing and stretching and
changing its relationships in the open plan of the
96
universe.
____________ 149
In The Identity of Man, Bronowski reunites on the
ethical, experiential level the two modes of apprehending
truth which he had distinguished as far back as The Poet's
Defence and continued to differentiate in "The Logic of
the Mind" and in so late a work as The Origins of Knowledge
and Imagination. These two distinct modes of cognition,
which are yet a unity, have proved a stumbling block for
students and admirers of Bronowski, just as the corre
sponding modes troubled Fichte and other followers of
97
Kant. How can the mind be at once a duality and a
unity? How can the human understanding be bisected and
yet remain whole?
On a philosophical level, this objection to the
division of man's mind, being, and culture has been ably
answered by Ernst Cassirer, whose affinity with both Kant
and Bronowski has already been suggested:
A philosophy of culture begins with the
assumption that the world of human culture is not
a mere aggregate of loose and detached facts.
It seeks to understand these facts as a system,
as an organic whole. . . . But have we been able
to prove this essential point? Did not all our
individual analysis show us just the opposite?
For we have had to stress all along the specific
character and structure of the various symbolic
forms— of myth, language, art, religion, history,
science. Bearing in mind this aspect of our
investigation we may perhaps feel inclined to
favor the converse thesis, the thesis of the
discontinuity and radical heterogeneity of human
culture. . . .
. . . But for a critical philosophy the
problem assumes another face. Here we are under
no obligation to prove the substantial unity of
150
man. Man is no longer considered as a simple
substance which exists in itself and is to be
known by itself. His unity is conceived as a
functional unity. Such a unity does not presup
pose a homogeneity of the various elements of
which it consists. Not merely does it admit of,
it even requires, a multiplicity and multiformity
of its constituent parts. For this is a dialec
tic unity, a coexistence of contraries.^
But in both Kant and Bronowski the division and
characterization of the faculties invites comparison with
recent neurophysiological findings by Sperry and others
about the differentiation of functions between the left
and right cerebral hemispheres. Harold H. Bloomfield, a
physician, has recently written a brief synopsis of the
faculties attributed to the two hemispheres:
What are these two separate modes of cons
ciousness? The left hemisphere generally
specializes in analytic, rational thinking,
especially in verbal and mathematical functions.
It processes information in an orderly, linear
fashion and is responsible for our time sense.
The right hemisphere is predominantly concerned
with synthetic and intuitive patterns of thought.
It is primarily responsible for our spatial
relationships, artistic endeavors, body image
and recognition of faces. Its verbal ability is
quite limited. In the normal person, the corpus
callosum functions as the channel for an abundant
flow of information between the two hemispheres.
Bloomfield goes on to comment, "For the first time
in history, however, a possible neurophysiological basis
for our familiar psychological and cultural dualities has
99
been identified."
This research would appear to provide an objective
correlative in the biological sciences for the two modes
151
of apperception proposed by Kant and Bronowski. Bronowski
was certainly aware of it and might have been expected to
embrace it as vindication.'*'^ And yet he seems to have
shown a certain circumspection in adopting and extrapolat
ing from this research to his own philosophy and beyond.
Perhaps he felt that the conclusions were a little too
facile and the picture of the brain a little too simple to
justify an uncritical credence.
It seems probable that further research will chal
lenge or complicate this simple model of complementary
mental functioning. Indeed, research in levels of
cortical arousal has already begun to challenge the
premise that creativity consists primarily of the
coordinated functioning of the two hemispheres.'*'^'*'
The evidence of differential hemispheric func
tioning that roughly corresponds with Kant’s and
Bronowski’s two modes of cognition is still more remote
from Bronowski’s derivation of complementary ethical
values from activities satisfying these two capacities
for grasping the world. Identification of the left
hemisphere with the values of truthfulness, independence,
tenacity, tolerance and respect and the right hemisphere
with the intimate values of love, friendship, empathy
seems tenuous indeed. And yet there is something tempting
and provocative in the assocation withal. The two modes
152
would seem to have a better basis in contemporary
biological psychology than Freud’s ego, superego, and id.
We seem, in Plato’s phrase, to be moving toward rather
than away from first principles.
In the context of Bronowski's contributions to
modern ethical theory, it is interesting to consider some
of Kant's most humanistic writings in terms of their
continuity and possible provocative or inspirational
effect. It would be an overstatement to deny any evidence
of evolutionary theory in Kant’s writings, or to conclude
that his system as conceived is entirely incompatible with
it. In Section 80 of The Critique of Judgement, Kant
briefly considers some of the arguments for and against
a theory of evolution as it was understood in his time.
He entertains a thesis that sounds very much like natural
selection when he suggests that nature may have "given
birth to creatures whose form displayed less finality, and
that these again bore others which adapted themselves more
perfectly to their native surroundings," but he concludes
that the forms were eventually fixed at their present
stage of development. He even considers the derivation of
man from forms back to the polyp, mosses, and lichens,
though he balks at extending the process beyond the
threshold of "crude matter." Nevertheless, given the
state of knowledge at the time, these are the remarkable
insights of preternatural intelligence. ,
153
Much more likely to have exerted some influence on
Bronowski, both in terms of its overall content and because
of small contextual similarities, is ’’The Idea for a
103
Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784).
"The Idea for a Universal History” presents an argument
for the "evolution" of human endowments towards the
establishment of a "completely just civil constitution"
and ultimately towards a confederation of constitutional
democratic republics that would outlaw war. In fact, Kant
urges the employment of education towards this end.
It is not these large generalities, but several
specific details that suggest the possibility of famili
arity: Kant's derivation of human culture and law from
man's "asocial sociability" is reminiscent of Bronowski's
repeated references to man as "the unique and double
104
creature: man, the social solitary." Moreover, the
social generativity of this quality, "I mean by antagonism
the asocial sociability of man, i.e., the propensity of
men to enter into a society which propensity is, however,
linked to a constant mutual resistance which threatens to
dissolve this society," causes man to evolve from barbarism
to culture, enlightenment, and law. This sounds like the
dialectic of the dissident, the social solitary, whose
contest with society results in creative originality or
. - | 105
violence.
154
In comparing Bronowski’s thinking with Kant’s
’’Idea of a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent," it
is worth remembering that the dialectic was liberally
employed by Kant before it was used by either Blake or
Hegel, and this is only one of a number of striking
resemblances of thought, individually inconclusive as
evidence of influence, perhaps, but collectively provoca
tive. Kant's principle that in man alone reason seems
destined to find fulfillment in the species is reminiscent
of Blake's vision of an indefinitely approximated self-
realization of man as well as Bronowski's creative
synthesis of individual mutational death with species
evolution, as the process which gives a direction to time,
whose random events would otherwise appear to move indif
ferently forward and backward, like the processes in many
u • i <-• 106
chemical reactions.
Surely it is a testament to Kant's incredible
creative foresight that he should have written in the "Idea
of a Universal History," in November 1784, that the
problem of reconciling strong central government with
individual liberty was one of the most difficult facing
mankind, but especially in terms such as these:
The rule of man is therefore very artificial.
We do not know how things are arranged with the
inhabitants of other planets and their nature but
if we execute this mandate of nature well we may
properly flatter ourselves that we occupy a not
inconsiderable position among our neighbors in
the cosmos. Perhaps with these neighbors an
155
individual can achieve his destiny in his own
life. With us mortals it is different: only
the species can hope to do so.^-O?
It reminds us that Kant, too, was a creator of spiral
"vortices,” as the originator of the Kant-Laplace nebular
hypothesis of the evolution of the solar system.
As was acknowledged in the Introduction to this
paper, however, no accumulation of such parallels can con
stitute proof of direct influence, particularly in the case
of a philosopher of such global influence as Kant. The
most that can be established and that is being attempted is
to demonstrate a congruent, isomorphic pattern of humanis
tic convictions that might serve as the basis for a
contemporary philosophy of liberal education founded on a
profoundly considered and yet historically responsive
theory of man, nature, and culture. To the degree that
Bronowski's reformulation of Kant meets the test of such
continuity, it holds promise as a modern philosophy of
liberal education.
To have employed Blake's creative dialectic to
modify the moral philosophy of Kant in a way that is
coherent, consistent with his overall philosophical design,
and also compatible with evolution; with the relativity of
objects and events in space and time; and that merits the
interest and respect of the educated modern adult is an
intellectual accomplishment of high order. The following
chapter will argue that it has not only a present but also
156
a future application to society and to education conceived
in liberal or libertarian terms.
157
Notes
Bronowski, Poet’s Defence, p. 11; Nature and
Knowledge, p. 74.
2
Poetfs Defence; rpt. "The Nature of Art," in
The Visionary Eye, p. 3.
3
e*S* Qrlgfns, pp. 5, 21.
^ Bronowski, "Science, Poetry, and ’Human
Specificity1: An Interview with J. Bronowski," by George
Derfer, The American Scholar 43 (1974), 389.
Charles S. Peirce, "What Pragmatism Is," Values
in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S.
Peirce (1839-1914), ed. Philip P. Wiener (Garden City:
Anchor-Doubleday, 1958), p. 183.
^ Frank Plumpton Ramsey, The Foundations of
Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, ed. Richard B.
Braithwaite (London, 1931) pp. 212-36.
^ Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, "Axioms as
Postulates," Personal Idealism, ed. Henry Sturt (London,
1902), pp. 47-133.
o
Peirce, p. 186.
9
Bronowski, Science and Human Values, rev. ed.
(New York: Perennial-Harper & Row, 1965) p. 52.
158
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduc
tion to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944; rpt. Garden
City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1953).
11
Jacob Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science
(1951; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1967)
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Origins, p. 5.
p. 54.
p. 58; emphasis added,
pp. 83-88.
86.
pp. 86-89, passim.
p. 111.
Nature and Knowledge, pp. 82-84.
Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1944; rpt. New York:
Doubleday, 1956); Nature and Knowledge, pp. 31-34.
21
22
23
Nature and Knowledge, p. 32.
d . 85.
Ludwig Boltzmann, Populare Schriften (Brauns
schweig, Germany: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1979) trans.
and quoted by Paul Feyerabend, "Boltzmann, Ludwig," The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Collier MacMillan
1972) I, 334.
24
25
Boltzmann, in Feyerabend, pp. 334-35.
d . 335.
159
26
Bronowski, "Humanism and the Growth of Knowl
edge," in A Sense of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, 1977) p. 102.
27
Peter Alexander, "Duhem, Pierre Maurice Marie,"
The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972.
9 f t
Gerd Buchdahl, "Campbell, Norman Robert," The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972.
29
Thomas H. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Chicago: Phoenix-University of Chicago
Press, 1962) pp. 54-65.
30
Nature and Knowledge, p. 39 also "Humanism and
the Growth of Knowledge," A Sense of the Future, p. 90.
^ Magic, p. 54.
32 c, cc
pp. 54-55.
33
Peter Alexander, "Poincare, Jules Henri," The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972.
^ Identity, pp. 38-51; Origins, 43-62.
^ American Scholar, 43 (1974) p. 393.
^ P°et's Defence, p. 10; Blake, p. 138; Common
Sense, p. 107; Rev. of Foundations of Inductive Logic by
Roy F. Harrod, The British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science, 8, No. 32 (1958) p. 331; Intellectual Tradition,
p. 12.
37
Science and Human Values, pp. 11-12.
160
31
38
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason in
Kant, Vol. 42 of Great Books of The Western World, ed.
Robert Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Inc., 1952), pp. 77-78; hereafter cited as
Kant: followed where needed by a short title of the major
work, e.g., Pure Reason.
39
Cf. Bronowski, Science and Human Values, pp. 30-
^ Origins a PP* 21-24.
^ Nature, p. 82.
^ ’’Humanism” in Sense, p. 102.
43 - I c
Magic, p. 15 .
44 qn
p. 50.
^ Identity, p. 34.
46 oc
p. 35.
47
Charles Parsons, "Mathematics, Foundations of,”
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972, V, 204.
^ "Humanism," in Sense, p. 75.
^ Parsons, V, 204.
Kant: Pure Reason, p. 211.
^ p. 31.
p. 69.
53 p. 399.
Kant: Aesthetic Judgement, p. 493.
Poet’s Defence, p. 10.
161
56
Monroe C. Beardsley, "Aesthetics, History of,
1 1
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972, I, 29.
57
Kant: Aesthetic Judgement, p. 516.
58
p. 519.
59
p. 520; emphasis added.
60
pp. 520-22.
61
Sir Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie, quoted in
The Poet's Defence, p. 36.
62
Kant: Aesthetic Judgement, p. 528.
63
Sidney, Poesie, quoted in Poet's Defence, p. 55:
64
Kant: Aesthetic Judgement, p. 535.
65
Poet's Defence, p. 11.
66
p. 49.
67
Blake, pp. 32-33.
68
Northrop Frye, "Blake, William" Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, I, 320.
69
Blake, p. 72.
70
p. 138.
71
pp. 183; 189.
72
Visionary Eye, p. 51.
73
Kant, pp. 466; 475.
74
Visionary Eye, p. 34.
75
Ascent, p. 54.
76
Jacob Bronowski, "The Discovery of Form,"
Structure in Art and Science, ed. J.H. Kepes (New York:
Braziller, 1963), pp. 55-60.
f
162
77
Visionary Eye, pp. 57-170.
78
Cf. Identity of Man, p. 75.
79
Blake, p. 129.
80
Nature and Knowledge, p. 40; Ascent, p. 360.
81
Blake, p. 131.
82
The Face of Violence, p. 81.
83
Common Sense, p. 136.
84
Science and Human Values, p. 74.
85
Values, p. 75.
86
p. 75.
87
p. 76.
88
pp. 74-80.
89
p. 82.
90
p. 90.
91
Origins, p. 136.
92
Immanuel Kant, The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel
Kant's Moral and Political Writings, ed. and trans. Carl
J. Friedrich (New York: Modern Library-Random House,
1949), p. 430.
93
Identity, p. 18.
94
p. 104.
95
p. 105.
96
Cf. Magic, pp. 61-88.
97
Telephone interview with George Derfer,
9 September 1980; Lewis White Beck, "German Philosophy,"
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1972, III, 302.
163
98
Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, pp. 278-79.
99
Harold H. Bloomfield et al., TM: Discovering
Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress (New York: Delacorte,
1975), p. 41.
Cf. "The Speaking Eye, The Visionary Ear," in
The Visionary Eye, p. 87.
Colin Martindale, "What Makes Creative People
Different," Psychology Today (July 1975), pp. 44-50.
1 02
Kant: Aesthetic Judgement, pp. 578-580.
103
Friedrich, Kant’s Moral and Political Writings,
pp. 116.
104
Identity, p. 114; Moral and Political Writings,
p. 120.
,105 ' Blake; The Face of Violence, discussed above.
Nature and Knowledge, p. 83.
Kant’s Moral and Political Writings, p. 123,
n. 1.
164
CHAPTER V
LIBERAL EDUCATION: THE DIALECTIC
OF SELF AND SOCIETY, UNITY
AND PLURALITY
Every thoughtful man who hopes for the creation of
a contemporary culture knows that this hinges on
one central problem: to find a coherent relation
between science and the humanities. In education
in particular, this problem faces us in two forms.
We have to give the future scientist an abiding
sense of the value of literature and the arts;
and at the same time we have to give to those
whose preoccupation lies with the liberal arts a
glimpse of the methods, the depth, and the inspi
ration of science. These are living problems all
the way from the school desk through the univer
sity and beyond, into the daily life of all
thoughtful men. They are, however, focused most
sharply in the universities where the traditional
division between science and the humanities cannot
be rooted out of the timetable in one generation. ,
The Western Intellectual
Tradition, Bronowski &
Mazlish, vii.
The foregoing statement may be taken as an early
formulation of Bronowski's mature view that the dialogue
of ideas that engages us in liberal education, in the free
play of the mind between tradition and innovation, self
and society, unity and plurality— like Kant’s play of the
mind between the imagination and understanding in the
creation and appreciation of art— is continuous with our
165
epistemological forays into the open universe of scien
tific, artistic, and ethical knowledge. Education, like
all constructive knowledge, is an art by which we imagine
ourselves from past and present into the future; but in
liberal education we imagine ourselves forward not only in
our economic identity, but in our entire human identity
and responsibility.
Liberal education in a democracy is part of the
domain of disciplined freedom: a liberating and valuating
encounter between the formative intelligence of the
future and the provisional solutions and unresolved
problems of the past. The need for a liberal, existential
education that will equip the learner to develop strate
gies of' unity amid change and strategies of choice amid
the apparent divisions of past and present, self and
society, art and science, information and knowledge,
expediency and ethics is as fundamental as the periodic
need for the generation of new syntheses in science or
new strata of stability in evolution.
Bronowski1s epistemological imperative: "We
OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS can be verified to
be so," as an individual and common directive for educa
tion and conduct, provides a point of departure for the
examination of Bronowski1s view of liberal education in a
democratic society. In line with his view of knowledge
166
as a recursive process that asymptotically approaches
towards truth, Bronowski's most mature statements of his
educational convictions were broader, more inclusive, and
comprehensive than some of the specific technical recom
mendations he made for curriculum reform in the forties
and fifties, which were largely devoted to encouraging
the inclusion of more mathematics and science in the
curriculum.
But it would not be difficult to sustain the
argument that Bronowski was an advocate of liberal educa
tion all his life; certainly his comments about the
profound impact of such an education at Cambridge on his
imagination, and his role in being the first, if not the
most notorious, recent speaker and writer to call
attention to the cultural trench between specialized
scientists on the one hand and specialized humanists on
the other would serve to establish his early advocacy of
liberal education. But these sympathies and perceptions
would not alone qualify him as a constructive thinker in
the field of liberal education. Fortunately both his
early and late proposals for curriculum reform make his
continuous and developing concern for liberal education
unequivocal.
In Bronowski1s first generally published excursion
into the school curriculum, "Mathematics," in 1947,
certain elements which are both persistent and indicative
______ 167
of his mature view of the function, relations, and justi
fication of the basic skills are already evident.^ Among
these are an emphasis on the social function of educa
tional skills, an understanding of their relevance to
public affairs and matters of general human interest, and
a distaste for purely formal, axiomatic, and merely manip
ulative techniques of education. In this specific case
Bronowski deplores instruction by drill and memorization,
rigorous proofs, and facile manipulation in complex opera
tions, often to the exclusion of any comprehension of how
the involved rituals and incantations apply to a world in
which an understanding of differences in quantity, size
and shape, certainty and probability, is essential.
Bronowski argues for the teaching of mathematics as a
language for discoursing about the aspects -of reality that
are quantifiable, with an emphasis on the relation between
symbol and object, and on the ideas of magnitude and
V
ordering which are the mortar of communal social life. He
specifically advocates the inclusion of statistics and
probability in place of elegant formal proofs to five
decimal places, and the substitution of topology for the
specious school reconstructions of Euclidean geometry in
the name of logical training— a notion as outdated as the
American chestnut that instruction in Latin strengthens
7
the muscles of the mind.
168
In terms of the role of education in the overall
system of Bronowski1s philosophy, the points particularly
worth noting are not so much the practical emphases of
Bronowski’s recommendations, as the antipathy to meaning
less formalisms and the long view towards the place of
mathematics in "the very structure of communal civiliza
tion," to repeat the phrase with which he ends the piece.
In 1956, Bronowski published two articles based on
previous lectures which continued and amplified his
earlier recommendations regarding mathematics. "The
Educated Man in 1984," the longer of the two pieces, con
tains more by way of a philosophical context for
Bronowskirs curricular recommendations, is more complete
and apparently closer to the address given before Section
L (Education) of the British Association for the Advance
ment of Science meeting at Bristol, England, in
2
September 1955. The second, "Science for Modern Life,"
was comprised of two pieces, "Dr. Arnold’s Ghost," and "A
Syllabus for Schools," published in The Observer on
October 7 and 14, 1956.^
In both pieces, Bronowski makes a five-point
recommendation for the revision of the syllabus of schools
and universities, considerably broadening the intended
area of application for his proposed reforms in 1947,
which were directed specifically to mathematics teaching
169
in the secondary schools. But before entering on the
enumeration of his specific proposals, Bronowski devoted
the first half of his address to a distinction between
vocational and cultural education by explaining that while
he learned Italian in order to read mathematics papers in
that language, he once knew a retired mathematics profes
sor who learned Italian in order to be able to read Dante
in the original. As Bronowski puts it, ”He was fitting
himself to derive from the work of Dante a larger, a
deeper sense of the many-sidedness of human life that had
reached and stirred him in translation. He was fitting
himself, even at the age of 65, not to make a living, but
to live, and to take not merely his place but his share in
human society."^
English and arithmetic are taught in the schools
for the same reason, for they are not the property or
concern of a single vocation but skills that maintain the
possibility of a common social intercourse. Bronowski's
thesis is that science is part of that common social
fabric and that its importance to contemporary culture has
been neglected. As Bronowski had made the point in The
Common Sense of Science, he holds that science is one of
the humanities and should be cultivated with them. Evi
dently Bronowski is here maintaining his argument in
’’ Mathematics," that the higher purpose of education is to
170
support.a common culture, but now he has a broader program
of change in mind and a wider reformation.
The term "reformation," though he does not use it,
is apt, for he emphasizes that in 1785, the British Society
for Establishment and Support of Secondary Schools adjured
its teachers to Mbe diligent in teaching the children to
read well,” obviously with the Bible in mind.
Bronowski also notes that at about the same time
the dissenting academies, through their spokesman, Joseph
Priestley, were advocating that all education have for its
end the pursuit of truth and the exercise of virtue, and
that their practice, in contrast with that of Oxford and
Cambridge, was to cultivate these moral activities within
a context of logic, medicine, modern languages, mathe
matics, and the elements of science against the resistance
of the grammar schools, which persisted in the belief that
the only true education was one in Latin and Greek.
Bronowski demonstrates with these examples that
the vocationalism of the dissenting academies gradually
made its way into the generally accepted curriculum, and
that this is the pattern of curricular change, one in
which the vocational subjects which are culturally essen
tial gradually make their way into the communal culture.
Some subjects in the syllabus remain vocational
subjects; indeed, even as their vocational use
may shrink in time until, like spherical trig
onometry and graphical statics, they shrink out
of the syllabus. Other subjects turn out to
171
have a wider range of uses; men find that whether
they are farmers or mechanics or bank clerks,
they cannot do without them as members of society,
whatever their profession. So in time these
subjects cease to be the prerogative and the
burden of specialists, and become general needs.
English and arithmetic and history and now French
have moved in this way, from the special to the
universal, from the vocational subject to a place
in our culture. This is the sense in which I
have defined a cultural subject. And it is this
sense, this movement, that is now patent in the
growth of science in our society.5
Bronowski argues that science has become such a
necessary part of the equipment of the informed citizen
and informed representative of the public, that they
cannot afford to leave it in the hands of specialists—
the tall, elegant engineers of H.G. Wells, the Mustapha
Monds of Brave New World, or the thought police of 1984.
What Bronowski clearly has in mind is the takeover by the
Nazis from an uninformed German public in 1933, a subject
which prompted him to write several popular articles on
the responsibilities of the scientist for public educa
tion, as well as those of citizens and their representa
tives for becoming informed about science. "The Educated
Man in 1984” differs in containing specific recommenda
tions for curriculum reform, and in developing and
specifying the distinction between vocational and liberal
or general education as a preliminary to the recommenda
tions .
172
The first proposal is the same one that Bronowski
put forward in his address to the secondary mathematics
teachers: a shift in emphasis from manipulation to inter
pretation, the inclusion of statistics and the mathematics
of shape and arrangement'. The second proposal is for the
early introduction of the atomic model into physics and
chemistry. The third is for the inclusion of more biology,
preferably related to statistics and structure. The fourth
is for teaching science as a dialectical or dialogical
process of rational debate between induction-deduction and
experiment. Last of all, Bronowski makes a plea that
every undergraduate be required to do one small piece of
personal scientific research.
Apart from the introductory rationale for making
science a part of the common culture, the distinction
between vocational and cultural education, and the inter
esting discussion of the way in which the curriculum
evolves from vocational to cultural and gradually drops
those subjects which time proves to be irrelevant to the
common culture, the article is obviously a plea for an
enlarged role for science and mathematics in the curric
ulum. But the context in which this plea is made is
significant— it is obviously not an exhortation to beat
the Germans or catch up with the Russians, but rather an
appeal based on social concern that mathematics and
173
science be integrated into the curriculum and into the
intellect and interest of the informed citizen.
Nonetheless, the focus of these recommendations of
the late fifties differs sharply from the observations and
proposals Bronowski was to make in the sixties and seven
ties at colleges and universities in the United States and
Canada. Of course, Sputnik did change the educational
priority of science in 1957, but there is evidence of a
broadening perspective and a more comprehensive develop
ment of Bronowski1s guiding concern with a common culture.
The transition is evident in two addresses
delivered at women's colleges, Bennington and Smith in
1965 and 1967. In the address at Bennington, "The Place
of Science," Bronowski takes note of the transition that
has occurred in the ten-year interval, recalls the
earlier address and its five points, which he does not
enumerate, but he also acknowledges that "The public
interest in science has doubled and redoubled. > There has
been as large an. increase and an improvement in the
teaching of the physical sciences, and particularly to
children. At the same time, more English and American
colleges have tried to interest all their students in the
history of scientific discovery and the evolution of
scientific methods."^ Bronowski attributes the change
largely to the Russian space initiative, but there is now
174
a broader emphasis on the intellectual pleasures of
science and a recognition that producing more scientists
is not the same as the scientific acculturation of the
public. Bronowski argues that a women's college is
opportunely situated to make science a part of the general
culture and that in terms of liberal education, women's
colleges have often been able to be more radical in
initiating cultural education because they have been less
pressured by vocational demands.
8
It is in "On Being an Intellectual," an address
delivered at the opening of the Clark Science Center at
Smith College, that a shift in perspective from the past
neglect of the sciences to their future prospects and role
in the changing culture of the twentieth century is fully
evident, for Bronowski chooses to identify the opening of
the center as a mark "that no experiment can now make
sense which does not include science as a solid segment of
9
the curriculum, for men and women alike," Once again,
but this time with more powerful and pregnant phrasing and
a clearer orientation towards the future, Bronowski
emphasizes the importance of science in a liberal curric
ulum intended for the broad acculturation and avocational
instruction of the public. "A positive and rounded
curriculum is a microcosm of the intellect, which tries to
forecast the totality of the culture that lies a genera
tion ahead. A university curriculum is therefore a
175
commitment to the culture of the future. To devise a
curriculum requires us first to decide what has become
fundamental to our culture, how it came to be so, and how
(as a consequence) its inner balance will shift when we
. .. „10
move on m time.
The point to be marked and emphasized here is that
although Bronowski1s moral is drawn from the future, his
conception of how a curriculum is formed depends as much
upon what is perdurable in our culture as upon what is
nascent, indeed, upon that part of the new that shows
greatest promise of becoming part of the indispensable
thesaurus of knowledge. Thus, in speaking of the curric
ulum, Bronowski emphasizes not merely the past, nor only
the future, but the relationships that associate and
integrate them:
Being an. intellectual means having a share in
whatever is alive and original in the thought of
your day. You cannot claim to be an intellectual
if you are content to be an ignoramus in any of
the underlying concepts that give the world its
modern character. And your ignorance is not
merely a matter of being ignorant of the facts.
What is truly pitiful is to be indifferent to
the subtle relations within the world, the
civilized ideas of nature and of society, and so
to remain an ignoramus in sensibility.
It does not matter whether you are a man or
a woman, a scientist or an artist; if you are not
historian enough to catch the echo in our own age
of the age of revolution two hundred years ago,
you are an ignoramus. If you are not poet
enough to be shaken by the same irrational pity
for the murder in Othello and in Marat Sade, you
are an ignoramus. if you are not artist enough
to seize in your eye and your mind together the
176
force of William Blake's phrase "fearful symme
try"— alas, you are an ignoramus. And if you
are not musician enough to feel in your ear and
your heart the fall of a line by W.H. Auden,
"The earth turns over, our side feels the cold,"
then yes, you have guessed it, you are an
ignoramus . "11-
Invoking Mathew Arnold's touchstones, Bronowski
then cites an array of similar examples from the sciences—
why there are just five regular solids in space, why every
astronaut or satellite takes no less than ninety minutes
to fall around the earth, why the spectra of the elements
differ, why more men are color-blind, why skin rejects
foreign grafts, how animal ritual and human behavior are
alike. Those, Bronowski argues, who are uninterested in
these facts and their reasons are equally ignorant, and
are forgoing the intellectual excitement and pleasure in
unraveling the "guiding thread of simplicity in the elab
orately woven designs of nature and of men."
And to this equal emphasis on the cognitive and
affective pleasures of being an intellectual, Bronowski
adds the moral observation that to allow oneself to become
ignorant in either of these domains is to make oneself
vulnerable to the chronic anger, intolerance, frustration,
and impulsive violence of the ignorant when confronted with
a changing world which they can neither comprehend nor
control. In summing up, Bronowski argues that to be an
intellectual and to take part in the intellectual
177
activities of one's time is to participate in the cultural
evolution of humanity in the world: "Do not let anybody
tell you that being an intellectual is hard work, or
colorless, or second best. It is the best and most sym
pathetic, because the most human thing in the world:
taking personal pleasure in new concepts, and sharing the
12
excitement which the human mind feels in all knowledge."
In this address, Bronowski makes explicit what
might otherwise have been only implicit, even though
evident, that the epistemological divisions which organized
and differentiated the sections of the preceding chapter
are also the structural components of his philosophy of
education in general and of his philosophy of the educa
tional curriculum in particular. It seems to me that the
addresses at Bennington and Smith show Bronowski reconcil
ing several of the contemporary dichotomies within the
context of a liberal arts curriculum for colleges and
universities: the dialectics of opposition between science
and art, between fact and value, between the cognitive and
the affective, between invention and tradition, between
vocational and cultural, between self and society— these
oppositions indicate the extent of the challenge,
especially since they form shifting alliances and varying
value-complexes in the public mind.
One is inevitably reminded of the dire reflections
in the closing chapters of The Education of Henry Adams,
178
’’The Dynamo and the Virgin,” of the accelerating centrif
ugal forces which seemed to Adams to threaten the
continuity and integrity of society which had been at apex
in the thirteenth century under the aegis of the Virgin of
Chartres. It is surely one of those ironic coincidences
of history so savored by Adams that the beginnings of his
idealization of medieval Thomist Unity and his reluctant
formulation of the dynamic theory of modern disintegration
should have virtually coincided in time and space with the
founding of the University of Chicago in 1892 and the
opening of the Great Chicago Exposition of 1893 along the
Midway, where Adams repeatedly returned to gaze with
horrified fascination at the silently pulsating energy of
the dynamo.13
Adams presents interesting points of comparison;
he is perhaps the most eminent and urbane of the humanists
who, try as they might, could not reconcile themselves to
science, democracy, progress, and complexity. Evidently
Adams tried— he relates how he pursued his education among
the great philosophers and found them unanimous in seeing
unity as the ultimate nature of reality, but among Mach,
Pearson, Poincare he could apparently find nothing that
’’sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shud
der. Instead, he found that ’’the scientific synthesis
commonly called Unity was the scientific analysis commonly
179
called Multiplicity."^”* And his wry summary of his excur
sions among the philosophers was: "To Thomas Aquinas, the
universe was still a person; to Spinoza, substance; to
Kant, Truth was the essence of the ’I1; an innate convic
tion; a categorical imperative; to Poincare, it was a
16
convenience; and to Karl Pearson, a medium of exchange."
This account of The Education would be a mere
digression if it did not, by means of its coincidences and
its content, represent a Zeitgeist, or what Carl Becker
17
calls a "climate of opinion," among men of literary
culture, perhaps the most elegant and influential state
ment of its kind. Adams was, beyond doubting, an
aristocrat of the intellect, a Boston Brahman who intro
duced the seminar method of teaching history at Harvard
while serving as editor of the North American Review. His
nine-volume History of the United States from 1801 to 1817
secured him a prominent place among scholars, but perhaps
his best-known and most influential books were Mont-Saint-
Michel and,Chartres (1913), which Henry Cabot Lodge
informs us in his Preface, was to be subtitled "A Study of
Thirteenth-Century Unity," and The Education of Henry
Adams, which Adams had proposed to label "A Study of
18
Twentieth-Century Multiplicity."
Thus Henry Adams was not only an early and widely
influential expositor of the humanist’s suspicion of
180
science and technology, he was the author of one of the
most beautiful and evocative celebrations of medieval lit
erature, architecture, and unity, expressed in Amiens
Cathedral and the works of Thomas Aquinas. The Education,
which has been called one of the world's great biographies
and which propagated the grim assessment of Yeats's The
Second Coming, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," rather surprisingly
became a best seller, as James Truslow Adams remarks in
the Introduction to the Modern Library Edition, published
19
in 1931, "especially among the younger generation."
That Adams wanted to promulgate a theory of educa
tion is made clear by Lodge in his Preface when he relates
Adams's unhappiness with his book's ending: "Probably, he
was, in fact, trying only to work into it his favorite
theory of history, which now fills the last three or four
chapters of the 'Education,' and he could not satisfy
himself with his workmanship. At all events, he was still
pondering over the problem in 1910, when he tried to deal
with it in another way which might be more intelligible to
students. He printed a small volume called 'A Letter to
American Teachers,' which he sent to his associates in the
American Historical Association, hoping to provoke some
20
response." But he was paralyzed by a stroke in 1912.
181
Who can say how far Adams succeeded in his effort?
Surely it is one of those meaningless coincidences of
history that Robert Maynard Hutchins became president of
The University of Chicago in 1931, the year that the first
large popular edition of The Education was printed by
Random House.
Bronowski took his sharpest issue with the back to
Aquinas solution to the educational and philosophical
quest for unity in Magic, Science, and Civilization, in
which he argued that Aquinas established unity only by
espousing the doctrine of two truths, one as it were for
the everyday physical world and another for Sundays— and
this Bronowski views as a division of the world into
science and magic, whether advocated by Aquinas or by
Descartes. Bronowski argues that Aquinas was trying to
combine the truth of logic and the truth of faith, but
that this divided commitment has invariably led to
resigning the naturally inexplicable to the world of the
supernaturally explicable, that is, in his terms, to the
world of magic. Whether it be the black magic which seeks
to reverse nature, or the white magic of Ficino and the
Neo-Platonists and Hermeticists such as Bruno and
Mirandola which superseded it between 1400 and 1300, magic
is simply not the answer to the problem of unity. The
white magic that became popular between 1500 and 1550
182
contributed the humanistic idea that man was in a pre-
established harmony with nature and thus encouraged science
and scholarship, but between 1550 and 1600, the most
inquiring minds, such as Pomponazzi1s, had begun to deny
the need for angelic or demonic powers to explain the
world, until finally, between 1600 and 1620, Francis Bacon
concluded that commanding nature, whether by black or
white magic, simply would not. work. One could command
nature only by "obeying" her, and the concept of natural
law was born.^
This is, of course, a simplified outline of what
Bronowski excuses as a foreshortened and oversimplified
account in its original form, but it lays the essential
groundwork for Bronowski’s central argument that only in
the application of a rational, empirical, and imaginative
science can we now hope to achieve a unified view of the
world or an acceptably coherent scheme of operative
values. This is the basis of Bronowski1s scientific and
humanistic alternative to the Thomistic medievalism of
Adams, as well as to that of Hutchins and Adler, and the
basis of his proposals for a liberal arts curriculum,
though he clearly agreed with all three about the essential
unity of the world, and the complexity and multiplicity of
the changing and accelerating avalanche of experience.
But it is the clear thesis of Magic, Science, and
Civilization that only a humanized, ethicized science can
183
provide the foundation for a modern, unified view of the
world. He views science as an irreversible step in the
evolution of Western Civilization and the only modern
system of thought that can unify our moral strivings with
the scientific way of thinking and flwhat it entails, a
22
technological way of acting, and we cannot go back."
And Bronowski reiterates a recurring theme in his writings,
that scientists bear a "heavy, and in my view, an increas
ing responsibility from now on, for exhibiting the human
implications not merely of what they do, but of their way
of thinking. The 'scientific way of thinking is a human
way of thinking1; and it is becoming for us the only human
23
way which we can treat as a unifying discipline." And
by "humanizing science," Bronowski of course means that
scientists must also educate the public and themselves in
the public morality of science.
Bronowski deals most fully with the educational
challenge of accelerating change in "The Discovery of the
Self," an address before the American Personnel and
Guidance Association in May 1967, which was subsequently
24
published in Man in Perspective. Bronowski opens the
address with an account of the development of the child's
cognitive powers, beginning with the ability to recall and
anticipate absent objects, later to assist this process
with the symbols of speech, then to internalize these
184
symbols as imagination, which children use in play to
project themselves into adult life and alternative life
styles and persona. In the inquisitive adolescent, the
play of the imagination becomes the testing of the natural
and symbolic environment for patterns of coherence that
becomes the reasoning process of the adult.
With this prelude, Bronowski turns to the last and
possibly most intractable of the dialectical opposites
confronting a unified philosophy of liberal education— the
opposition of self and society. He starts by comparing
human and animal behavior, beginning with the ethological
rituals of grebe, rat, wolf, and chichid fish, which unite
and fix individuals within a static social order. In
contrast, as Bronowski sees it, human behavior has been
increasingly characterized by change to the point where
change itself has become a unifying aspect of our contem
porary civilization. Readiness to deal with change is,
in effect, a principal aspect of acculturation. But it
confronts us with the dilemma that change in society
begins with dissent, and, as Rousseau proclaimed, the
individual demand for freedom and the social need for
order cannot be finally resolved even in a democracy, or
perhaps, especially in a democracy, since democracy is
founded on individual change, freedom, and dissent. The
particular challenge of large contemporary democracies is
*
185
the scale of the educated aspiration of each individual to
be a unique mind and yet a part of society.
This calls for an almost paradoxical common cul- '
ture that permits and, indeed, fosters individuality:
"The word culture in our sense should mean an arrangement
of social institutions and habits to which people can
25
conform broadly without having to conform uniformly.”
And an important, perhaps a paramount, function of such a
culture is to provide not only a common fund of practical
experiences and physical opportunities, but a common fund
of imaginative experience, ”a pool of light in which they
will see their own experiences more sharply and more
brightly.
Therein lies the peculiar modern challenge to
education:
The problem of education in our age is to
make the imagination of the young reach up to a
reality so prodigious that it seems to dwarf
them. I and other educators like me have a hard
enough job just to plan a curriculum that will
keep up with reality in the school hours of
work. Yet we need to keep up as hard with the
new emotional and intellectual reality in the
hours of imagination. . . . Perhaps we have
presented the new knowledge only as something
to be learned; and we now need to find a way to
treat it as we treat the older knowledge— as
experience which fits and grows naturally in the
imagination of men even if they do not plan to
earn their living by it. Freedom and imagina
tion in our society must go together. We shall
have to accept that as an educational task— if
we mean our students really to inhabit the
modern world, and not merely to work in it.
Truly to live in a world of change is to live
186
the life of every man in it, and particularly of
the agents of change, the adventurers and dis
senters. A modern mind must be in direct
sympathy with them all; and when a young man's
imagination creates that sympathy of itself,
then indeed he has taken the great step towards
the discovery of s e l f . 27
It is this persistent commitment to the preserva
tion of the right to protest and dissent in the dialogue
between self and society that prompted Bronowski to make
his clearest and most comprehensive statement of what he
believed essential for a "core curriculum" in the liberal
arts. In two articles, "Protest— Past and Present,"
2 8
published in The American Scholar, and a more extended
version under the title "Protest and Prospect," in
29
Tradition and Revolution, Bronowski begins with a
spirited defense of protest in society, and particularly
in a university community: "Progress by dissent then is
characteristic of human societies. . . . this is how a
democratic society invigorates and renews itself in change
as no totalitarian society can." "Finally, it is natural
that all through history the protesters have belonged to
the younger generation, and the defenders of tradition
have been the older men. This is one reason why dissent
has usually come from the centers of learning, and has
often begun as an intellectual movement before it became
i „30
a popular one."
Bronowski felt that the protests of the late
sixties differed from previous movements in being more
187
concerned with the rights of individuals and minorities,
in being non-doctrinal, that is, equally opposed to col
lectivism and mass manipulation in communist and capitalist
countries, and in being principally an ethical protest
against governmental and establishment hypocrisy. ’’They
are criticising the system of values by which their elders
live everywhere. So the students’ protest is not
doctrinal because it goes much deeper: it is concerned
31
with ethics.”
Bronowski’s characteristic response was to accept
this as a deserved challenge: ”As intellectuals, we have
done little to formulate afresh an ethic of liberalism on
foundations which are modern and valid now. In my view,
this is the central criticism that can be directed against
32
intellectuals today, in and out of the universities.”
”So we are now engaged in the experiment of finding a core
curriculum and a culture to embody the aspirations of mass
33
democracy.” "But the problem is the same for the
majority, and is worldwide: what is the central content of
contemporary knowledge that every young man and woman (and
not just a few) ought to have in order to feel and act as
34
educated citizens?”
To bring about social justice and to encourage its
willing acceptance, Bronowski argues that we need an
academic program based on an ethics of human specificity
and identity; -and he asserts that the humanities faculties
188
and particularly those of philosophy are blameworthy for
having failed to address themselves to the need for such a
curriculum: "Only in this way, by understanding as
-exactly and as sympathetically as we can what men are, can
we make the generations (past and present) agree to be
what men should be. In my view, this is a very practical
task: for an agreed ethic must be based on a common
culture, and a common culture must be expressed in what
35
is taught in schools and universities.”
As we examine Bronowski's specific proposals for
a core curriculum based on a common culture of what makes
man uniquely human and that tries to derive individual
and social ethics from that knowledge, we are reminded
that the same call for a common culture is again being
sounded a decade after Bronowski's proposals, complete
with his emphasis on its social and ethical purpose.
Bronowski1s liberal arts curriculum has three
components: one in science, a second in the social
studies, and the third in the humanities.
In science, students need in the first place
to learn enough physics, chemistry and mathe
matics (including some statistics) to make a
foundation for biology in its contemporary form.
As soon as they have the foundation, they should
go on to biology as the central science in the
curriculum. The accent in biology should be on
evolution: the evolution of life, of molecular
structures and processes, of organs, of species
189
and their behaviour, and in the end of man. The
purpose should be to build up a picture of man as
he is by nature, within the order of nature:
what I have called elsewhere "an understanding of
the evolution and the place of man” as a single
conception. . , . Evidently this does not look
like the physics and chemistry and even biology
that is taught in school and university labora
tories today. . . . But the teaching of science
to non-scientists has a different purpose, for
which the professional and the specialist can
supply no substitute: the purpose of making the
physical world personal to each of us in our own
abilities and experiences. Therefore science for
non-scientists needs to be directed towards an
understanding of nature as she expresses herself
in us, the human creatures. We need to feel a
personal pleasure in the way her machinery works,
and above all in the very special gifts of coor
dination and knowledge which the machinery of
nature has created in u s . 36
-II
As the second leg'in what I will call my
tripos curriculum I have chosen anthropology. I
prefer it to other branches of social study
because I think students should not be preoc
cupied only with the forms of social
institutions (including government) but should
unravel the underlying beliefs and values which
those express. Anthropology is the best disci
pline for the study of values, not as arbitrary
social norms, but as expressions of human aims.
It seems to me important in particular that
we make it clear to ourselves (and our students)
that culture is as much a part of man's equip
ment as is the opposable thumb and visual acuity.
Indeed it was the cultural use of these biolog
ical gifts that gave them a selective advantage,
and thereby accelerated their biological evolu
tion in man. The capacity for culture is a human
universal. Moreover, there are universals in all
cultures, some of which are so difficult to
explain (the prohibition of incest, for example)
that they must be of unusual importance to the
species. Thus the comparison between cultures,
190
both when they are alike and when they differ,
is a major intellectual requirement in the
twentieth century.37
III
For the third leg of my tripos, I propose one
of the dramatic arts: the drama itself, or
literature extended to include the novel as well,
or the cinema which is the modern form of the
drama. The choice among these arts is not
crucial, but the presence in the curriculum of
at least one of them is. If I have to make my
own choice, then I propose literature, for two
' good reasons: that language is the single most
important human gift, and that there is a long
tradition of literature which joins us to other
cultures. . . . The arts are important in the
curriculum because they express the human condi
tion directly, and as powerfully as the sciences
expound it. Literature in particular should
give the student a sense of the immediacy of
human problems, an open door into the minds and
passions of men, within which he finds himself
to be both singular and universal. The gift of
imagination makes man able to live his own life
and a thousand others, and to draw from that
network of experience a central concept of him
self that can be a better guide to conduct than
any book of moral precepts. Since I have
presented these views in The Identity of Man I
need not argue them here;-! think they leave no
doubt that literature can be as important a
constituent in founding a modern ethic as can
the sciences of biology and anthropology.
Bronowski concludes these recommendations for a
contemporary liberal arts curriculum with the judgment
that the absence of such a universal contemporary ethic
was what turned the college protests of the sixties and
early seventies towards self-righteous violence. As he
had argued in The Face of Violence in 1950, the
191
confrontation of dogma with dogma in the absence of under
standing can produce little else: "The fundamental
distinction is between liberal and bigot, and at bottom it
is the distinction between human and inhuman. At the base
of any educational reform, this is the distinction for
which we have to find a secure, contemporary, and universal
39
foundation."
Despite the emphasis on what is contemporary and
modern in the proposals for a core curriculum, it should
be evident that it is the organization and emphasis, and
not merely the content that is modern. We have a common
past and a common future, and a knowledge of both is
essential to an appreciation of the human identity. It is
important, I think, to generalize Bronowski's comments on
how vocational subjects enter or leave the common culture
of the educational curriculum. What Bronowski wrote about
the curriculum in "On Being an Intellectual" bears
repeating, "To devise a curriculum requires us first to
decide what has become fundamental in our culture, how it
came to be so, and how (as a consequence) its inner balance
will shift when we move on in time."^
Thus the liberal arts curriculum is always a nice
adjustment between the present and future interpreting
the past; for in a biological as well as a historical
sense, man is a creature who discovers his plan only in his
history. And so Bronowski1s examples in "On Being an
192
Intellectual," "Protest— Past and Present," like those in
The Ascent of Man, typically involve a yolking of appar
ently anachronic images almost as disparate as those in
the poetry of John Donne. Thus we have the contrastive
pairing of Blake and Auden, the juxtaposition of the
Pythagorean solids and the orbiting astronaut, the
counterpoint of murder in Othello and Marat-Sade: and,
finally, the heady visual and intellectual mix of Galileo,
Newton, and Einstein; Darwin, Mendel, and Crick;
Paracelsus, Leakey, Leonardo, and von Neumann; the cave
paintings of Altamira, cathedrals of Rheims and Beauvais,
and the towers of Simon Rodia— all arrayed to display an
infinitely variegated but unbroken arc of unity between
the most remote and the most recent times.
In the context of this continuity between the
traditional and the contemporary in culture and curriculum,
one might expect to find extensive and unembarrassed
affinities between Bronowski and Kant in educational
philosophy, and even between Bronowski and Rousseau,
especially insofar as Kant modified and incorporated
Rousseau’s theories of man and society into his own more
comprehensive, critical, and antithetically balanced
philosophy. In fact, such affinities are precisely what
one finds— similar interpretations of the faculties and
the destiny of man that are even more striking than those
193
noted in the preceding sections on epistemology, along
with an implied rejection of much that is primitive and
retrogressive in Kant’s thought— such as faculty psychol
ogy, the theory of humors, and the ineducability of women—
and the incorporation of what is valuable into an enlarged,
enriched, original and contemporary synthesis.
Indeed, it can be cogently argued that education
forms the capstone of both Kant’s and Bronowski’s philos
ophies, a contention that is supportable in terms of at
least one school of contemporary Kant interpretation. But
because of the importance of both the similarities and the
differences between Bronowski and Kant, and because of
the original aspects of Bronowski’s philosophical and
educational synthesis, it will be necessary to attempt to
distinguish and delineate these separate aspects of
Bronowski1s educational philosophy.
Since at least the turn of the century, a humanis
tic re-evaluation of the intent and direction of the main
thrust of Kant’s philosophy has been underway. New
interpretations have placed more emphasis on the place of
the triad of great Critiques in the whole corpus of Kant’s
works, and particularly in the reflected light of some of
his late works, such as the Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View,^~*~ which was not fully translated into
English until 1978 and the Ueber Padagogik, translated and
194
interpreted by Edward F. Buchner as The Educational Theory
42
of Immanuel Kant. Buchner, in an introductory com
mentary, makes the noteworthy observation that out of
Kant’s experience as a private tutor and public university
teacher ’’grew his Anthropology,— a great repository for
pedagogical material,
In the process of tracing the continuity of
Bronowski’s thought with its possible antecedents, we
shall have occasion to note a number of remarkable
similarities of philosophical, anthropological, and
educational views between Bronowski and Kant, expressed in
the Anthropology, Kant’s last personally edited work, first
published in 1798, complemented by material from
Buchner's commentary and translation and from the
Critiques.
Perhaps Carl J. Friedrich of Harvard is most
succinct in characterizing this new view of Kant when he
writes, in his dedication of The Modern Library edition
of The Philosophy of Kant, of "Kant's dictum never to use
himself or another merely as a means, but always to con
sider man as an end in himself— the core of true
humanism."^ In his Introduction to the Anthropology,
Frederick P. Van De Pitte makes the point rather more
fully and the place of education in Kant's humanistic
philosophical commitment more explicit: "All of Kant's
philosophy is ordered to a single purpose: By means of an
195
analysis of the essential principles of human nature, it
discloses his proper destiny, and indicates how he must
work towards its fulfillment”:
There can be no doubt that the most important
philosophic impact of the Anthropology is in its
ability to clarify for the student of Kant the
precise purpose which his philosophic system is
intended to fulfill, and the manner in which the
parts of that structure are related. Kant sees
himself not only as indicating to man the kind of
program of self-education which must be under
taken if he is to fulfill his destiny, but also
as having removed the primary impediments to
that education, and having outlined the social
and political programs which would enhance and
promote it.
It would not be surprising if the contempo
rary reader were to judge the anthropology of
Kant a curious anthropology indeed. But that is
only because the English-speaking world has too
long restricted its consideration to a purely
empirical anthropology. Such an anthropology
can, of course, only describe man as he has
expressed his nature in the course of histor
ical events. But this will only give us the
various roles that man has played, the various
masks that he has worn from time to time. We
will still know nothing of his essential nature,
and of what man ought to be. Kant’s formula
tion, on the other hand, is a prescriptive, and
even a creative anthropology— it emphasizes man’s
responsibility to become what he can be, that
is, to fulfill his potential.^5
It seems not only easy but unforced to see in this
program of self-education to help man fulfill his destiny
and in the role of a philosophical anthropology to aid him
in discovering ”what man ought to be,” the seeds of
Bronowski's proposal to add a moral anthropology to the
core liberal arts curriculum: "students should not be
preoccupied only with the forms of social institutions
______________ 196
(including government) but should unravel the underlying
beliefs and values that those express. Anthropology is
the best discipline for the study of values, not as
arbitrary social norms, but as expressions of human
,,46
arms."
In "Science, Poetry, and 'Human Specificity'; An
Interview with J. Bronowski," published in The American
Scholar by George Derfer, certainly one of the last
summary statements by Bronowski of his views and their
place in his life and work, the discussion began with a
definition of "human specificity" and the development of
Bronowski’s interest in species specific characters.^
Bronowski placed the original stimulus in 1950 when he
used multivariate analysis to show that the teeth of
Australopithecus were closer to human than to ape teeth.
In response to an interesting comment by Derfer that even
in The Poet's Defence Bronowski was concerned with the
anthropological context of knowledge, Bronowski both
defined his quest and acknowledged Kant's speculative
anticipation; in a passage partly cited earlier:
So it would be quite right to say that all my
life I have been preoccupied with the special
character of knowledge. (I mean human knowledge—
in our sense there is no other kind.) And I have
been closing in more and more in the last ten
years on the constituents of the human being that
give the capacity to create knowledge.
Two hundred years ago, when Immanuel Kant
in Konigsberg first proposed something on these
lines, it could only be lip service to the
intangible. But now we know a great deal about
___________________197
both the biological and functional connections
of the mind. And I think we stand nearer to an
understanding of knowledge, and ultimately to
human self-knowledge, than we could ever have
done until almost the last generation.48
Given these clues, it seems evident how the
domains of knowledge are united for Bronowski as for Kant,
in the faculties and functions of the human mind, and how
education becomes for both the ultimate means of cultural
evolution. And to this Bronowski would add, of biological
evolution as well. Kant does not use the term ’’liberal
education,” and according to Buchner, the absence Of
provisions for educating the emotions through art is one
49
of the great deficiencies of his educational theory, but
there is ample evidence in the closing sections of The
Critique of Aesthetic Judgement that Kant, at some stage
included humanistic education in his vision of human
cultural progress as morally educative. The central role
of education in cultural progress is nowhere put more
forcefully than in the Introduction to the Anthropology:
All cultural progress, which represents educa
tion of man, aims at putting acquired knowledge
and skill to use in the world. The most
important object of culture, to whom such knowl
edge and skill can be applied, is man because
he is his own ultimate purpose. . . .
A systematic doctrine containing our knowledge
of man (anthropology) can either be given from
a physiological or a pragmatic point of view.
Physiological knowledge of man aims at the
investigation of what nature makes of man,
whereas pragmatic knowledge of man aims at what
man makes, can, or should make of himself as a
freely acting being.^0
198
That the fine arts and humanities are included in
this vision of cultural progress is quite patent in the
Appendix to Part I of The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,
where Kant writes of teaching art:
The master must illustrate what the pupil is to
achieve and how achievement is to be attained,
and the proper function of the universal rules
to which he ultimately reduces his treatment is
rather that of supplying a convenient text for
recalling its chief moments to the pupil's mind,
than of prescribing them to him. Yet, in all
this, due regard must be paid to a certain ideal
which art must keep in view, even though complete
success ever eludes its happiest efforts. Only
by exciting the pupil's imagination to conformity
with a given concept, by pointing out how the
expression falls short of the idea to which, as
aesthetic, the concept itself fails to attain
and by means of severe criticism, is it possible
to prevent his promptly looking upon the examples
set before him as prototypes of excellence, and
as models for him to imitate. . . . This would
result in genius being stifled, and, with it,
also the freedom of the imagination in its very
conformity to law— a freedom without which a
fine art is not possible, nor even so much as a
correct taste of one's own for estimating it.^l
Here Kant is almost certainly describing the educa
tion of the artist, the practitioner, of the arts, but he
universalizes his principles to the audience who must
appreciate art and evaluate it, in the closing sentence.
In the following paragraph, he extends his consideration
to preparatory education in the humanities as part of the
education of mankind in the universal moral feelings of
affinity. This is surely a germ of the education of the
emotions which Bronowski was to bring to efflorescence in
The Identity of Man:
199
The propaedeutic to all fine art, so far as
the highest degree of its perfection is what is
in view, appears to lie, not in precepts, but in
the culture of the mental powers produced by a
sound preparatory education in what are called
the humaniora— so called, presumably, because
humanity signifies, on the one hand, the uni-
versal feeling of sympathy, and, on the other,
the faculty of being able to communicate uni
versally one’s inmost self— properties
constituting in conjunction the befitting social
spirit of mankind, in contradistinction to the
narrow life of the lower animals.
In the conclusion of this section, Kant determines
that, through a ’’certain analogy in our reflection on
both,” taste is a critical faculty that judges the
representation of moral ideas through sense, and thus the
true preparation for the cultivation of taste is the
culture of the moral feeling in its universal application
to all mankind. One might quarrel with this conclusion
depending on what one judges Kant to mean by the culture of
the moral feelings, but once again, in the passages quoted,
he astonishes by his penetration, anticipation of detail,
as well as by his humanity. Indeed, in view of the last
paragraph, one feels justified in adding, by his humanism.
Kant, too, in the Anthropology, was interested in
the differentiating characteristics of man and sought them
in man’s unique and distinctive gifts. This is most
comprehensively and clearly treated in the final section
of the book, ”0n the Characteristics of the Species,” in
which Kant places these characteristics in the context of
53
a total theory of anthropology. Van De Pitte most aptly
200
describes this theory with a quotation from Ernst
Cassirer’s Rousseau-Kant-Goethe: "what is truly permanent
in human nature is not any condition in which it once
existed and from which it has fallen; rather it is the
54
goal for which and toward which it moves."
Kant's view of the character and destiny of man
is rather trenchantly expressed in the following paragraph:
Consequently, in assigning man his place
within the system of animate nature, and thereby
characterizing him, all that is safe for us to
say is that he has a character which he himself
creates, because he is capable of perfecting
himself according to purposes which he himself
adopts. Consequently, man as an animal endowed
with capability of reason can make himself a
rational animal. On these grounds he first
preserves himself and his species; secondly, he
trains, instructs, and educates his species for
social living; thirdly, he governs the species
as a systematic whole (arranged according to
principles of reason) which belongs to society.
But in comparison with the idea of potential
rational beings on earth, the characteristic
of the human species is that nature has planted
in the species the seed of discord, and that
nature has willed that the human species, through
its reason, turn discord into concord or at least
create a constant approximation of it. Concord
contains its purpose in its idea, whereas dis
cord as action contains, within the plan of
nature, the means of a supreme and for us
unfathomable wisdom. This wisdom is to effect
the perfection of man through cultural progress,
even if this should mean some sacrifice of the
pleasures of his life. ^
Man's ultimate goal is the "progressive organiza
tion of the citizens of the earth within and toward the
species as a system which is united by cosmopolitical
bonds.This, Kant envisions as a world league of
201
republics, the republic being the only true civil form of
government, that which combines authority with freedom and
law.~^ Because of the limitations of the individual, both
in the accumulation of knowledge and the perfection of
character, this end can only be approached by the species
through education and cultural evolution. For the reader
who has followed the description of Bronowski’s views on
dissent, cultural evolution, democracy, human fallibility,
and the functions of education this far, the congruence of
conception needs no belaboring.
Of the fourteen or so species specific traits that
Bronowski distinguishes in The Ascent of Man (the count
may vary depending on how one associates or separates
certain biologically related characters)— self-awareness;
adaptability; variability; hand-brain coordination; cul
tural creativity; speed of evolution; hemispheric
differentiation; neoteny; minimal sexual dimorphism;
speech, and the related capacities of analysis, synthesis,
and delayed response; specialized cerebral lobe develop
ment; imaginative foresight— Kant anticipates perhaps a
half-dozen. This is not to say that Kant, himself, was
the first to distinguish the faculties he identified, any
more than Bronowski was the first to identify the rest.
Some, such as the analysis of the world into objects and
actions through speech, go back at least as far as Plato
and Aristotle.
202
As presented above, they are a congeries of
behavioral and biological characters which Bronowski was
able to correlate, as he suggests in his interview with
Derfer, in a way that Kant was not. These faculties are
relevant to the discussion of liberal or cultural educa
tion because, with the possible exception of dimorphism,
they make epistemology and education possible, and the
union of biological and socio-cultural-moral evolution
conceivable. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to
go. We have, to some extent, arguments for human peace
and morality based upon man’s inferred behavioral traits,
but none based, as yet, on his biological differentia— we
cannot map the moral centers in the brain. But the open
ing of an epoch in the understanding of the biological and
behavioral functioning of the brain is hardly a time for
, . 58
despair.
Despite, or perhaps because of the limitations of
the biological knowledge of his day, Kant’s anticipations
of Bronowski’s species specific traits are remarkable.
Of foresight, Kant writes, ”T0 possess this faculty is of
greater interest than anything else because it is the
condition of all possible practice and all possible
purposes to which man relates the use of his powers. All
desire contains (doubtful or certain) anticipation of
what is possible through foresight. Recalling the past
__________________________ 203
(remembering) occurs only with the intention of making it
possible to foresee the future; we look about us from the
standpoint of the present in order to determine something,
59
or to be prepared for something.”
In the Ascent, Bronowski restates what he had
many times written elsewhere about the hand driving the
brain, "Consider the hand first. The recent evolution of
man certainly begins with the advancing development of
the hand, and the selection for a brain which is particu-
60
larly adept at manipulating the hand." In the
Anthropology, Kant identified the technological gift as
the first level of human differentia: "The characteriza
tion of man as a rational animal is found in the form and
organization of the human hand, its fingers, and finger
tips . Nature has made them partly through their
construction, and partly through their sensitivity, not
only for manipulating objects in one particular way, but
also in an open-ended way. Nature has made them, there
fore, fit to be used by reason, and thereby nature has
indicated the technological gift, or the gift for skill,
61
of this species as that of a rational animal."
Of human variability, Bronowski wrote: "Should we
make clones of human beings— copies of a beautiful mother,
perhaps, or of a clever father? Of course not. . . .
Evolution is founded in variety and creates diversity;
and of all animals, man is most creative because he carries
204
and expresses the largest store of variety. Every attempt
to make us uniform, biologically, emotionally, or intel
lectually, is a betrayal of the evolutionary thrust that
6 2
has made man its apexV; Kant wrote, "Instead of
assimilation, which was intended by the melting together
of various races, nature has here made a law of just the
opposite. In a nation of the same race (for example, of
the white race), instead of allowing the characters to
develop constantly and progressively toward resembling one
another, whereby ultimately only one and the same portrait
would result as in prints taken from the same copper
plate, nature has preferred to diversify infinitely the
characters of the same stock, and even of the same family
6 3
as to physical and spiritual characteristics."
One more species specific characteristic to which
Bronowski repeatedly recurred, as has been demonstrated in
previous references to man’s self-awareness and his ability
to view himself simultaneously from within and without as-
a result of the development of self-reference in language,
has been discussed in relation to The Identity of Man,
The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, and Magic,
Science, and Civilization. Similarly, Kant discusses this
as a distinguishing human trait, "The fact that man is
aware of an ego-concept raises him infinitely above all
other creatures living on earth. Because of this, he is a
person; and by virtue of this oneness of consciousness, he
205
remains one and the same person despite all the vicis
situdes which may befall him. . . . He enjoys this
superiority even when he cannot yet give utterance to his
ego, although it is already present in his thought, just
as all languages must think it when they speak in the
first person, even if the language lacks a specific word
to refer to this ego-concept.
The purpose of this extensive review of Kant1s
educational views and the commonalities with the views
developed by Bronowski has been to demonstrate the central
cultural and philosophical position of education in the
philosophies of both men in order to answer several ques
tions raised in the introduction to this paper: "Is
there in fact a coherent, unified philosophy in Bronowski1s
writings, and if so, on what principle is it founded? . ...
Does Bronowski’s philosophy contain a constructive prin
ciple more comprehensive than the reconciliation of the
so-called two cultures, and can that constructive principle
be used to support a theory of general, liberal education?"
In short, can Bronowski1s claim to have presented a
twentieth-century philosophy of one piece be justified
generally and specifically in relation to liberal educa
tion?
The comparisons with Kant have sought to demon
strate Bronowski’s continuity with a major philosophical
206
tradition in which education plays a central role. This
role is perhaps best presented in Kant's Anthropology, in
which education stands as the second, pragmatic gift, the
means by which man is transformed from an animal with a
potential for reason into a man with a potential for
perpetual peace and cosmopolitan self-government. In
Kant's words, quoted above, man "trains, instructs, and
educates his species for social living," and thus evolves
culturally towards his destiny as a species. Bronowski
would undoubtedly add that he evolves biologically as well,
and, as I have attempted to show, Bronowski provides a
wealth of scientific argument, evidence, and fundamental
moral insight that modernizes the organization and
strengthens the humanistic foundations of a set of common
philosophical convictions.
Bronowski's philosophy of knowledge most clearly
differs from Kant's in Bronowski's derivation of man's
powers of reasoning and planning from language, in a
series of articles noted earlier, and in "The Logic of
the Mind." Here Bronowski develops a biological and
cultural theory of interactive language and thought. Kant
only treats language in poetry and rhetoric in the third
Critique. Bronowski's treatment of geometry, relativity,
quantum mechanics, causality, and evolution presupposes a
rejection of Kant's categories of space, time, cause, and
207
epigenesis. In addition, Bronowski develops original
conceptions of an open universe, open strategies of
behavior, the physical and biological evolution of
complexity by means of stratified stability, and of
scientific progress by means of the formation and over
throw of axiomatic theories. He develops a theory of
man's moral growth through affective education in the
arts, and finally, he formulates an epistemological
imperative for moral behavior that represents an advance
over Kant in unifying the affective, cognitive, and moral
self-education of man. Bronowski also formulates a
clearer, more balanced educational curriculum than Kant in
Ueber Padagogik or Anthropology.
Yet the comparisons with Kant support the claim
for the unity, coherence, and breadth of Bronowski's
philosophy of knowledge, of his epistemological and educa
tional convictions and the depth of their roots in an
Enlightenment philosophy of man and nature, rather than in
a medieval or classical tradition incompatible with a
modern scientific world view. Thus these comparisons
support Bronowski's having realized his ambition to
create a philosophy that is "all of one piece." The
contemporary aspects of his epistemology having been
addressed in the preceding chapter, it remains to consider
whether he also provides a basis for a twentieth century
philosophy of liberal education.,
208
In 1974, in Leonardo, Bronowski wrote what almost
amounted to a summing-up. "A Twentieth Century Image of
Man" was actually written before June 1973, but was pub
lished the year of his death, and it constitutes a major
summary of his philosophy in brief, drawing together its
major themes in a masterly recessional.^
Bronowski begins with the thesis previously
developed, that we live in a civilization with a high
content of scientific, verifiable, knowledge, dependent
upon the wide spread of education, that, since the dis
persion of the printed book in 1450, has constituted
modern society a democracy of knowledge. Despite this
process, which has been advancing for five hundred years,
it is only recently, during the twentieth century, that
we have come to require that to command general assent,
proposed knowledge must not be merely established by
authority, but open to verification— that it must be, in
6 6
the phrase of John Ziman’s title, Public Knowledge.
Bronowski holds that open knowledge of this kind is a
necessary condition for the establishment of a democracy
of knowledge in an urban civilization.
The element chiefly preventing the recognition and
acceptance of the role of scientifically verifiable knowl
edge in modern times has, in Bronowski's view, been an
outdated 19th-century view of the scientist as an elite
and aloof aristocrat, spawning monsters, and a gothic
209
parody of science as mechanism run wild, usurping the
identity of man and converting him into a malevolent or
unfeeling automaton— a version which has run from Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein and Jules Verne's Phineas Fogg to
the contemporary images of man portrayed or implied in
6 7
the works of B.F. Skinner.
Bronowski sees the persistence of this parody of
scientific man as responsible for the decline in general
culture; indeed, he specifically notes liberal education .
as one of the casualties:
The liberal arts have been impoverished and
drained of talent by what is in effect an
ideological retreat from the most lively areas of
modern knowledge. The young have joined their
reactionary elders in a facile abuse of all
technical innovation, without asking themselves
even the simple question, how it has come about
as a matter of mechanics that their assertion of
self (which went unrecorded a hundred years ago)
is heard and heeded today. The shift in educa
tion that has made this possible, the principle
that what should be taught is not vocation but
knowledge, not an ability to do but to think,
is now derided as irrelevant. . . . Most deeply
and most sadly, the foundations for a liberal
ethic are still sought in the past and thereby
separated from the living sources that the new
knowledge of the 20th century can create for
them.68
Bronowski sees a number of elements as coalescing
to continue this 19th-century view of mechanical man and
inhuman and unfeeling if not downright malignant science
and technology. In "Technology and Culture in Evolution,"
Bronowski had attacked the counterculture and those
components of the ecology movement that were not so much
210
69
pro-environment, as anti-technology. Bronowski conceded
some justice in the concern with clean air and pure water,
but argued against an element of anarchism and social
irresponsibility in the writings of counter-culture
spokesmen like Theodore Roszak, and a failure to recognize
and acknowledge that the environmental and social problems
against which they inveighed were the result of the ethic
of equality and plenty to which they owed an unadmitted
debt.
Though Bronowski does not wander from his purpose
to trace the origins and affiliations of this anti-
scientific ethic, many have done so in the past. Its
roots are usually traced to Rousseau's noble savage, whose
absorption into the literary ethic and genres of the 19th
and 20th centuries, Cesar Graha ably traced in Bohemian
Versus Bourgeois . ^ Graha begins with the. notebooks of
Flaubert, Stendahl, and Baudelaire and traces the develop
ment of the non-productive, self-cultivating code of the
aristocrat displaced by the rising bourgeoisie, into the
literary ethos of the 19th and 20th centuries. In addition
to a rejection of rational bourgeois economics and a sus
picion of science and technology, this literary ethic
includes the glorification of the individual as opposed
to society, of personal introspection or impulsive actiop,
of sexual self-assertion, of mysticism rather than
211
religion, of criminality rather than conformity— in short,
despite changing styles of expression, Grana shows the
continuity of the social and technological alienation of
71
the Romantic and the Beat.
Writing from a historical perspective, Herbert J.
Muller has been equally explicit and mordant about the
profligacy of intellectuals who would claim the benefits
of modern prosperity while denouncing its sordid
materialism:
It would seem obvious that material wealth and
power are the essential basis of civilization,
and that they are essentially only the basis, the
means to other ends. No high civilization, no
golden age, has been poor and weak. The crea
tion and transmission of the spiritual
achievements of a society depend upon its
material achievements, its monuments testify to
both its artistic and its technological power,
its ideals and its wealth. Yet the values of
the mind or spirit remain the "higher" values,
the ends of civilized life. Although the great
writers and thinkers do not agree on precisely
what they are . . . their disagreements come
down to different versions of the abiding y^
trinity— the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
But in "A Twentieth Century Image of Man," which
is, in some respects in the nature of a last will and
testament, Bronowski leaves his counterculture critics,
if not to heaven, then to history, and makes several state
ments that deserve our attention in constructing the role
of liberal education in his philosophical legacy.
There is a curious and perhaps unexpected sense in
which Bronowski1s persistent emphasis on the provisional,
212
uncertain, and relative nature of knowledge in the work of
Heisenberg, Planck, and Einstein is relevant to liberal
education in the sense of a common, shared heritage of the
intellectual development of what Hannah Arendt called homo
73
faber, artist, artisan, and scientist. There is a
radical sense in which knowledge does not exist until it
is shared, has no being outside the communal moral context
of humanity, within which it is chosen and through which
it enters the process of man's biological history and
cultural evolution. Perhaps in this manifold relationship
"The mystery is that the one and the many are parts, each
of the other; that in the beginning is the end, and that
the centre meets the circumference." But perhaps one
runs less risk of betraying Bronowski to the lure of the
mystic and picturesque if one permits him to speak for
himself:
Einstein showed that the laws of physics are
universal, that is, are formulated in the same
terms by every observer, but only because he
carries his own universe with him. Time as you
measure it may be different from my time, mass
as you measure it may be different from my mass,
speed and momentum and energy may all be dif
ferent; it is only the relations between them
that remain the same for us both. Each of us
rides his personal universe, his own travelling
box of time and space, and all that they have
in common is the same structure or coherence. .. . .
These principles express a far-reaching revision
in the idea of knowledge. They shift the
emphasis away from the impersonal record and they
put in its place a relation from which the human
observer cannot be abstracted. . . . There is no
reality, there are no laws, that can be
213
separated from the process of their discovery;
the human condition is also the necessary
condition for the recognition of order in the
world.74
And, in the concluding paragraph of this summing
up, Bronowski makes a further statement about the inter
relationship of knowledge and values whose implications
can be emphasized by juxtaposition with the foregoing
passage:
All knowledge, I have shown, represents an
essentially provisional and personal choice that,
however, can only be confirmed and developed by
common consent. That is why science also entails
a personal ethic of integrity. This is a com
mitment of the mind that is laid equally on all
of us with intellectual aspirations. No system
of values is needed to stumble on the facts or
would be generated by mere stumbling— it is
needed to find and recognize them for what they
say and what they mean in the mobile nexus of
the known.7^
There is, I think, buried in the often misunder
stood etymology and denotation of the word "relativity,"
a relevance to the contemporary issues of liberal or
general education advanced by Ernest L. Boyer and Arthur
Levine in A Quest for Common Learning: The Aims of
General Education, a prelude to publication of the
proceedings of a Colloquium on Common Learning, held at
76
the University of Chicago in April, 1981.
Boyer and Levine contend that the terms "general"
and "liberal" education are often confused. They maintain
that general education should refer to that part of the
214
curriculum which all students have in common, and that
liberal education should be confined to the desired out
come, when general, major, electives, and non-classroom
experiences are combined. With all due submission, one
cannot help feeling prompted to offer Alice's objection
77
to Humpty Dumpty. In the usage observed here, the terms
are for the most part synonymous, the preferred term
"liberal," being used to connote the liberating function
which such an education serves in freeing the student from
the narrowness and limitations of his past experience and
opening his vision to the prospects of what he can do or
become. It thus conveys an indispensable vitality which
"general" does not.
Boyer and Levine List six areas in which they feel
all students should have a common bonding experience: the
shared use of symbols, memberships in groups and institu
tions, producing and consuming, relationship with nature,
a sense of time, and values and beliefs. There is con
siderable novelty in the contents of some of these
bracketings, but it is difficult to avoid a fleeting
vision of old shadows in new bottles; the old designations
obtrude themselves: English, foreign language, mathe
matics; art, music, literature; sociology; economics; the
physical and biological sciences; history; philosophy and
- u * 7 8
ethics.
215
Boyer and Levine note that general education can
take place off campus in a variety of settings, seminars,
all-campus convocations, TV broadcasts, selected museum
experiences. Of course. But their hope that cooperation
between colleges and secondary schools will help distrib
ute and therefore realize the objectives of general
education seems a bit overfond. William Rainey Harper
tried it nearly a century ago without much notable suc-
79
cess. As I read this experience and Hutchins’ The
Higher Learning in America, unless the colleges and uni
versities make the acculturation of the mind their
business, they have little warrant or precedent for
expecting that anyone else will.^
Despite the fact that the authors warn us that in
19 7 7 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching described general education as a ’’disaster area,"
81
they are hopeful about the future. They sense signifi
cant changes and stirrings across the land. The political
and economic divisive factors of the past may have brought
about their own antithesis. They sense a new spirit of
community replacing the activism of the 60's and the
narcissism of the 70's; widespread hope that general
education will halt the seepage of Watergate morality,
academic performance, responsible citizenship, premature
specialization and vocationalism; and finally, they per
ceive a growing institutional conviction that general
216
education will lower instructional costs and improve teach
ing opportunities.
This combination of factors, with evidence of a
sampling of entering freshmen in 1981 who ranked general
education as one of their top three reasons for seeking
higher education, persuades them that the times are highly
propitious for the introduction of well-structured pro
grams. Though they acknowledge that among experienced
students in one survey twice as many were highly satisfied
with their majors and electives, as with their general
education courses, Boyer and Levine regard this as a chal
lenge to the quality rather than the principle of general
8 2
education programs.
The keynote of the monograph' by Boyer and Levine
is contained in the statement "We do have a shared cul
tural heritage, a shared agenda of urgent contemporary
problems, and a shared future that cannot be ignored.
Uniformity and interrelatedness are not synonymous. As a
global society, we simply cannot afford a generation that
fails to see or care about such connections," and further,
"While affirming diversity, we also must acknowledge the
claims of the larger society that gives meaning to our
lives. General education should be reaffirmed not as a
sentimental tradition, but precisely because our future
well-being, and perhaps even our survival, may depend on
217
whether students understand the reality of inter
dependence .
All but obscured by the widespread acceptation of
’’relative” and ’’relativity" as referring to whatever is
contingent, circumstantial, or wholly conditional is an
etymological tie between Bronowski’s view of knowledge as
the structure of coherence in the relationship between the
knower and the known and Boyer and Levine’s view of
liberal or general education as the interrelation between
the individual and his society and the knowledge that
unites them. "Relativity” and "interrelated," and indeed,
"tolerate" are all derived from the same source as "refer,"
the Latin relatus, past participle of referre, to bring or
carry back. Perhaps this is why Bronowski preferred to
describe Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as the prin
ciple of tolerance, the double connotation being of that
which simultaneously implies the connectedness of things
84
and the imprecision of the bonds which unite them.
"Charity with clarity," to borrow the closing phrase of
Bronowski's The Identity of Man.
And the unacknowledged and perhaps unrecognized
debt to Bronowski is nowhere clearer than in the closing
passages of Boyer and Levine’s Quest for Common Learning,
which looks for general education to be reborn among the
faculties and disciplines of the university as well as
among its students:
218
The wall dividing the two cultures— scientific
and humane— is still standing, but it is being
continuously breached; the pattern of intel
lectual investigation is being rearranged.
More than at any time in our memory,
researchers feel the need to communicate with
colleagues in other fields. And this episte-
mological change may have profound impact on
the future of general education. As new
investigative links are drawn, scholars at all
levels will— of necessity— make new connections
between their own disciplines and the disciplines
of others. A more integrated view of knowledge
and a focus on the larger questions in our teach
ing and research will create, we believe, a
climate favorable to general education in the
nation's colleges and schools.
Nearly forty years ago in Liberal Education,
Mark Van Doren wrote: "The connectedness of
things is what the educator contemplates to the
limit of his capacity. No human capacity is
great enough to permit a vision of the world as
simple, but if the educator does not aim at the
vision no one else will, and the consequences
are dire when no one does." Seeing "the con
nectedness of things," is. we conclude, the
goal of common learning.
Perhaps when that goal is more nearly approached,
if not reached, those seeking a common learning will dis
cover that Jacob Bronowski— who tirelessly preached the
unity of art and science and ethics, of epistemology,
biology, culture, and evolution across the length and
breadth of the Atlantic English-speaking ecumene with all
the formidable powers of language, letters, and art at his
disposal— also proposed a philosophy of liberal education
capable of uniting the enduring values of our Enlighten
ment tradition with the latest insights of an evolving
scientific humanism.
219
Notes
^ Jacob Bronowski, "Mathematics,” in The Quality
of Education: Methods and Purposes in the Secondary
Curriculum, eds. Denys Thompson and James Reeves (London:
Frederick Muller, 1947), pp.. 179-95.
2
Science 123 (1956), 710-12
3
Journal of the Institution of. Electrical
Engineers , rpt. NS 3 (March 1957), pp. 156-57.
4
"The Educated Man in 1984," p. 710.
3
p. 711.
6
"The Place of Science," The Bennington Review
(Fall 1965), pp. 1-6.
7
p. 3 .
8
"On Being an Intellectual," Smith Alumnae
Quarterly (August 1967), pp. 11-13.
9
p. 11.
10
p. 12.
11
p. 12.
12
p. 13.
13
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams,
[pvt. print., 1907], (1918; rpt. New York: Modern Library-
Random House, 1946), p. 339 et passim.
14
p. 505.
2 20
^ p. 431.
^ p. 456.
The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century
Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932),
p. 5 et passim.
18
Henry Cabot Lodge, Editor’s Preface, The
Education, p. vii.
19
p. v
James Truslow Adams, Introduction, The Education,
20
Editor’s Preface, p. viii.
^ Magic, pp. 19-37.
22 0
p. 2 .
23 ,
p.. 4.
24
ed. Dyckman W. Vermilye, No. 1 (Washington, D.C.:
American Perspnnel and Guidance Association, 1967).
25 /0
p. 42.
26 y o
p. 43.
^ pp. 44-46.
28
Jacob Bronowski, "Protest— Past and Present,"
The American Scholar, 38 (1969), 535-46.
29
"Protest and Prospect," in Tradition and
Revolution, ed. L. Rubinoff (New York, St. Martin’s, 1971,
pp. 155-73.
30
pp. 157-58.
31
p. 139.
32 1 A*
p. 16 3.
221
3 3
"Protest— Past and Present," p. 541.
Q /
"Protest and Prospect," p. 164.
35
p. 168.
^ pp. 168-69.
3 7 1 7 0
p. 170.
o o
"Protest and Prospect," p. 170; "Protest— Past
and Present," p. 546.
39
"Protest and Prospect," p. 173.
40
"An Intellectual," p. 12.
41
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View, trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell, ed. Hans H.
Rudnick (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1978).
42
Immanuel Kant, The Educational Theory of Immanuel
Kant, ed. Edward F. Buchner (1904; rpt. New York: AMS
Press, 1971).
43
p. 22.
44
p. v m .
45
pp. xx-xxi.
46
"Protest and Prospect," p. 170.
47
George Derfer, "Science, Poetry, and 'Human
Specificity': An Interview with J. Bronowski," The
American Scholar 43 (Summer 1974) 384-404.
48
p. 389.
49
Buchner, pp. 89-94.
Kant, Anthropology, *p. 3.
222
^ Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, p. 548.
52 p. 549.
Anthropology, pp. 237-251.
54
Ernst Cassirer, quoted, Introduction, p. xiv.
55 p. 238.
56 p. 251.
^ p. 248.
58
Paul Rappoport, in "Divided Opinions on the
Split Brain," The Chronicle of Higher Education, n.d.,
pp. 9-10, quotes Alan Kaufman, Associate Professor of
Psychology at the University of Georgia, who formerly
worked with Wechsler on the revision of the WISC, as
suggesting that "skills such as interpreting gestures,
holistic-spatial-gestalt skills, creativity, non-verbal
auditory processing and the interpretation of the
emotions" may be right brain functions, the last, in
particular, suggesting a possible biological basis for
the "two modes" of Bronowski and Kant.
59
Kant, Anthropology, p. 77.
6 0
Bronowski, Ascent, pp. 416-17.
61
Anthropology, p. 240.
^2 Ascent, p. 400.
^ Anthropology, pp. 236-37.
64
Anthropology, p. 9.
6 5
"A Twentieth Century Image of Man," Leonardo 7
(1974) 117-21.
223
6 6
John Ziman, Public Knowledge (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1968).
67
Rev. of Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F.
Skinner, Political Science Quarterly 87 (1972) 653-55.
f i 8
"Twentieth Century Image," pp. 118-19. ,
69
"Technology and Culture in Evolution," The
American Scholar 41, No. 2 (Spring 1972), pp. 197-211.
^ Cesar Grana, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois (New York
Basic Books, 1964).
71
pp. 185-205, et passim.
72
Herbert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past:
Profiles of Former Societies (New York: Galaxy-Oxford
University Press, 1952), p. 49.
73
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago:
Phoenix-University of Chicago Press, 1970).
74
"Twentieth Century Image," p. 119.
75 191
p. 121.
76
Ernest L. Boyer and Arthur Levine, A Quest for
Common Learning: The Aims of General Education
(Washington: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement
of Teaching, 1981).
^ "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down
argument'," Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty
Dumpty said*in a rather scornful tone, "It means just what
I choose it to mean,— neither more nor less." "The
224
n
question is,” said Alice, "Whether you can make words mean
so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty
Dumpty, "which is to be master— that’s all.
7 8
Boyer and Levine, pp. 35-45.
7 9
Brubacher and Rudy, p. 252.
80 pp. 89-119.
81
Boyer and Levine, p. 33.
82 / Q
p. 48.
83 pp. 20-22.
8^ Ascent, p. 365.
8 5
Boyer and Levine, pp. 51-52.
225
CHAPTER VI
SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS
The challenge presented by the work of Jacob
Bronowski and introduced in the opening chapter is to
evaluate his success in realizing the ambition he announced
in the Foreword to The Ascent of Man, "to create a philos
ophy for the twentieth century which shall be all of one
piece." This phrase has been so often quoted at the
beginning of recent works on Bronowski as to have become a
cliche, yet it is then discussed no further, as if the
unity of Bronowski's philosophy were self-evident. But it
is not— certainly he did not achieve his ambition in
The Ascent of Man, by his admission an exhibit of brilliant
animated dioramas of critical stages in the natural or
cultural history of man. The composite unity it offers is
implied or presented rather than described; each program
adds another tile to the mosaic pattern discoverable only
in the full range of Bronowski's works.
It is the contention of this study that when
Bronowski's work is considered as a whole it does exhibit
the unity, consistency, and comprehensiveness to justify
Bronowski1s claim. In addition, it provides a philosoph
ical alternative to Aristotelianism or Neo-Thomism as a
226
philosophy of liberal education that is superior to either
in its ability to integrate contemporary ideas of democracy,
human nature, and the nature of the universe.
Nonetheless, Bronowski has become identified in
the public mind with the spectacularly successful thirteen-
part B.B.C. series from which The Ascent takes its name.
Ironically, the very success of this series and the
popularity of his lectures has led to Bronowski’s sometimes
being dismissed in academic circles as a mere popularizer.
At the other end of the spectrum are uncritical lay
idolators who take the television series as the complete
expression of Bronowski's ideas. A third group, who have
read Bronowski's books^ seem to think of him almost
exclusively in terms of the two-cultures issue debated by
Sir Charles Snow and F.R. Leavis in the fifties. All these
views of Bronowski tend to lead to an inadequate apprecia
tion of the scope and depth of his ideas.
The unity that is identified in this dissertation
is evident in Bronowski's multifaceted writings spanning
forty years, beginning with The Poet’s Defence, published
in 1939, in which Bronowski first states what is charac
terized as an essentially Kantian view of the identity of
mind and culture that he enlarges and enriches throughout
his career while maintaining its central continuity. The
educational implications of this philosophical position
are profoundly humanistic, and by virtue of its inclusion
227
of affective and cognitive, art, science, ethics and
practice as extensions of the faculties of the human mind,
it contains an epistemological and educational principle
comprehensive enough to support a contemporary curriculum
for liberal education.
Bronowski's biography is of interest because it
provides insight into the personal foundations of his
philosophical and social convictions. Twice an emigrant,
first from Poland to Germany as a small child, and later
from Germany to England by the age of twelve, Bronowski1s
early experiences were marked by poverty, ostracism, and
his family's status as enemy aliens. Thus, after he came
to England, Bronowski's delight in democracy, the freedom
to learn language and science, influenced his later ideas
about the democracy of the intellect, the unity of science
and literature, and his view of scholars and scientists as
guardians of integrity. All these values were associated
in Bronowski's mind by his experiences of learning to read
English and to do mathematics upon his coming to England.
In addition, scholarship, and particularly mathe
matics, was presented to Bronowski as the way out of the
ghetto. Cambridge reinforced these convictions by exposing
Bronowski to such literary figures as Eliot, Joyce,
Beckett, Auden and to the intellectual ferment in the
sciences represented by Einstein, Rutherford, Chadwick,
Eddington, Dirac, and Thompson in physics, and Popper,
228
Ramsey, Russell and Wittgenstein in philosophy and social
consciousness.
The Depression, unemployment, and the workers’
marches of the thirties activated Bronowski’s social
sympathies, as did the Civil War in Spain, both of which
led him to develop socialist, liberal sympathies, a devo
tion to social democracy and openness in government and
learning. Later, the advent of Hitler turned him from an
isolated mathematics researcher and academic poet into a
public writer and lecturer, as well as a defender of the
technological and material progress of the Scientific
Revolution as the basis of modern democracy. Hitler’s
ascension to power also emphasized in his mind the need
for an informed public, assisted by socially responsible
universities and educational practices.
Bronowski’s unique contribution to literary
criticism at about this time was that he recognized in
Blake, for the first time, a thwarted social conscience,
the voice of the common man, and personal integrity
grounded in the constancy of poetic truth rather than the
demented ravings of an incomprehensible mystic. His
assessment of the damage at the ruins of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima awakened him further to the social and educa
tional responsibility of scientists for maintaining
democracy through a commitment to making science public
knowledge and led to his personal decision not to lend his
_______________________________________ 229
talents further to war research.
After the war, Bronowski turned his mathematical and
research talents to such domestic tasks of restoration as
the rebuilding of British cities, new methods of construc
tion, and the development and improvement of natural fuels
such as coal. Between 1946 and 1964, Bronowski worked
principally in conducting and directing such research for
The Ministry of Works and the National Coal Board, except
for two leaves of absence, one in 1948 to serve as director
of an ill-fated "Food and People" project for UNESCO which
ran into bureaucratic difficulties after Julian Huxley
ceased to be Director-General, and another in 1953 when
Bronowski took a leave of absence to serve as Carnegie
Visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Concurrently with these activities, Bronowski
developed another career as a radio and television
commentator, panelist, and playwright. The purpose of the
radio and television appearances was to continue the effort
to democratize scientific knowledge, to humanize and
familiarize science for the British public. The most
successful of many plays was The Face of Violence, which
won the Italia Prize as the best European play in 1950-51,
and which dealt with the paradox of individual freedom to
dissent as the origin of democracy as well as the source of
social discord and violence. Bronowski was obviously
preoccupied with this fundamental division between
230
individual and social values. The conclusion was that
although violence cannot be eliminated, it can be reduced
by permitting recognition of essential and unavoidable dis
cord in a democracy.
The last period of Bronowski's life began when he
accepted appointment to the Salk Institute in La Jolla,
California, where he was to concern himself with the human
implications of the advance of biological knowledge and
the application of methods developed in physics to the
investigation of the structures of life. The Salk appoint
ment gave Bronowski the background for developing the
organic, process, aspects of his philosophy of knowledge
with an emphasis on the life sciences as an ultimate test
of its pragmatic reality and an opportunity to synthesize
the biological, physical, social sciences, and arts into
the most finished form of his philosophical system.
The critique of the literature argues that previous
critics have failed to grasp the overall philosophical
implications and the relationships of elements within that
completed synthesis, including physical science, logic
and mathematics, anthropology and art, education and ethics
These critics have exhibited a tendency to criticize from
preconceived, antagonistic, religious preoccupations that
distort Bronowski's philosophical and educational objec
tives. The two previous dissertations have also suffered
from disabling flaws in reporting his views accurately and
____________________________ 231
in evaluating them adequately. The treatment of Bronowski’s
educational philosophy and its place in the whole of his
philosophy has been particularly inadequate. Those critics
who have given the most satisfactory and sympathetic
accounts of Bronowski’s ideas have failed to recognize the
Kantian influence, despite several clues in Bronowski’s
writing, and have therefore been unable to grasp the
organizing principles of his philosophy and to recognize
its place in a developmental tradition or the significant
ways in which it differs from that tradition in its union of
rational and empirical, discursive and intuitive.
Finally, because of Bronowski1s individualistic,
antiauthoritarian, and anti-doctrinal views on religion and
ethics and his success in making those views and the sup
porting evidence for evolution, secular truth, and
anticlericalism popular, he has been subject to much
personal villification and ad hominem attack in both
popular and academic publications. Among those who have
discussed Bronowski1s ideas, only Karl Popper has recog
nized the Kantian character of his epistemology.
On the most general level, Kant's and Bronowski1s
philosophies share the perspective of the indistinguish-
ability of the activity of the mind and its faculties and
the world insofar as man can know it. This entails in
both the recognition of the identity between the mind
considered in its intellectual, perceptual, interior
232
operations and their external manifestations as knowledge,
truth, or culture. It also entails recognition of the
unity of rational and empirical, and discursive and
intuitive modes of acquiring knowledge. In addition, it
implies the social evolution of knowledge and the social and
experimental, as well as individual, character of truth—
an aspect of their common humanism that is more fully
developed in Bronowski than in Kant.
Bronowski adduces and reconciles a wealth of modern
evidence correlating the behavioral and biological aspects
of man's species specific characters, and he formulates an
ethical imperative based on the social character of man’s
epistemology— an "epistemological imperative" that is more
integral to the scientific and artistic modes of acquiring
knowledge than is Kant's categorical imperative. Bronowski
thus offers a modern resynthesis congenial to contemporary
evolutionary and relativistic theories of reality, in
effect making a unified Kantian world view both acceptable
and appealing to the twentieth century intellectual and
layman.
Blake's unique contribution to this philosophical
synthesis is his view of man as a constructive imagination,
bringing new realities into being through his creative
foresight, actively participating in the dialectic of
cultural evolution. The esthetic historian and philosopher
Monroe Beardsley has seen this view of the imagination as
233
a romantic outgrowth of Kant’s transcendental idealism,
represented in English literature by Blake, Shelley,
Hazlitt, and Coleridge. In Bronowski1s philosophy, this
visual conceptualization of knowledge extends from
Einstein's vision of space-time, Jan Brouwer's construc
tivist mathematics, and Bondi's expanding universe, to
Bronowski's own vision of the expanding geodesic structures
of axiomatic science and the topological loops of evolving
organisms ascending strata of stability in space-time
towards higher levels of complexity, and finally, to
modern art and architecture's effort to reveal inner struc
ture .
Finally, Bronowski's ideas about structuring a
modern core curriculum around the human center of these
unified though diverse intellectual and cultural enter
prises are applied to the question of the practical
implications of his philosophy for liberal education. His
ideas about education and its place in his philosophy are
compared with the increasingly humanistic and socially
responsive themes of Kant's late writings in The Critique
of Aesthetic Judgement, The Idea of a Universal History,
and Anthropology; and extensive similarities are noted.
Bronowski's progressive, optimistic view of
history and education and the possibility of attaining a
unified world view mediated by science in a universe of
chance and change are contrasted with Henry Adams's
________________________________________________________________234
idealized view of the Neo-Thomist synthesis and his fear of
the disintegration of society, culture, and education as a
result of the ineluctable advance of technological change
symbolized by the centrifugal forces of the whirling dynamo.
Bronowski rejects Neo-Thomism as an answer- to the quest
for unified knowledge because of its fundamental commitment
to a dualistic, magical view of two truths, natural and
supernatural.
Instead, Bronowski proposes a core liberal arts
curriculum for a time of change and ethical protest that
he believes will unify the discursive physical and
biological knowledge of science, with the social and cul
tural knowledge of anthropology, and with the ethical and
emotional knowledge of the arts— all in relation to the
species specific characteristics of man. After these
proposals are shown to be highly compatible with Kant’s
view of the purposes of education and the nature of man,
they are shown to anticipate the latest calls for a revival
of general, liberal education in the interest of reconciling
the two cultures of science and the humanities, without,
however, acknowledgment of Bronowski's precedence in rais
ing the issue and advocating liberal education as its
solution.
The evident conclusion to be drawn from these argu
ments is that Bronowski did indeed formulate a coherent,
unified philosophy for the twentieth century that contains
________________________________________________________________235
a constructive principle comprehensive enough to reconcile
the two cultures and support a modern theory of general,
liberal education. That this philosophy is ample enough
to reconcile many other psychic and intellectual divisions
in our contemporary culture seems^equally evident.
A further conclusion is that Bronowski provides a
more than adequate humanist alternative to a Neo-Thomist
or Aristotelian philosophical base for liberal education.
His philosophy has the advantage of integrating the
Enlightenment social ideals which undergird our
Jeffersonian democratic commitment to education— the
separation of church and state, the right of access for
all, the interdependence of education and citizenship, the
rights of debate, dissent and free inquiry, the belief in
the perfectibility and equality of man— wi.th an equally
fundamental commitment to the pursuit of creative truth
wherever it may be found and to its ethical propagation to
all mankind.
Educators and citizens who share the commitment to
an open society and liberal education that support and
inform each other but whose commitment lacks a philosophical
base; who are clearer about what they reject in fundamen
talism and intellectual or theological conservatism in
education than about why, might do well to study Bronowski
for the rational, empirical, and historical foundations of
their beliefs.^- As Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti 1 s *
236
address to the 1981 freshman class, "A Liberal Education and
the New Coercion,1 1 and a recent Newsweek article attest, a
fundamentalist coalition of self-declared anti-humanists
is making the most concerted and militant attack on these
values in decades, using political pressure, public denun
ciation, intimidation, television, direct mail, and
economic boycott to impose their judgments on books, texts,
courses of study, sex-education, class prayer, and the
2
teaching of evolution in the schools.
Surely Bronowski1s philosophical arguments, which
derive ethics from the practice of science and scholarship,
and from the accumulation and creative production of knowl
edge, now more than ever merit reconsideration as the
basis for the free consensus on which our modern values
and liberal education are in fact based, and as a vision
of how those values and that education can continue to
evolve together in an open and pluralistic society.
237
Notes
^ See William F. O'Neill, Educational Ideologies:
Contemporary Expressions of Educational Philosophy (Santa
Monica: Goodyear, 1981), pp. 62-66 et passim.
2
A. Bartlett Giamatti, "A Liberal Education and the
New Coercion," Freshman Address, Yale University, August
31, 1981; Kenneth L. Woodward and Eloise Salholz, "The
Right's New Bogyman," Newsweek 98 (6 July 1981), pp. 48^49.
238
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Creator Emmitt, Robert Joseph (author)

Core Title Scientific humanism and liberal education: The philosophy of Jacob Bronowski

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

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