Bronowski Science and Human Values

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ISBN: 978-0-571-28125-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

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

Jacob Bronowski was born in Poland in 1908. At the age of 12 he came to England, and within six years was a brilliant mathematics student at Cambridge. During the war he helped to forecast the economic effects of bombing Germany. After many years working for the National Coal Board, he moved to the Salk Institute in 1964 while developing his career as a broadcaster. In 1973, he presented for the BBC the ambitious 13-part series The Ascent of Man, which made him a household name. He died the following year.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bronowski, Jacob

Leseproben

TWO: THE HABIT OF TRUTH

1

In ‘The Creative Mind’ I set out to show that there exists a single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

I found the act of creation to lie in the discovery of a hidden likeness. The scientist or the artist takes two facts or experiences which are separate; he finds in them a likeness which had not been seen before; and he creates a unity by showing the likeness.

The act of creation is therefore original; but it does not stop with its originator. The work of art or of science is universal because each of us re-creates it. We are moved by the poem, we follow the theorem because in them we discover again and seize the likeness which their creator first seized. The act of appreciation re-enacts the act of creation, and we are (each of us) actors, we are interpreters of it.

My examples were drawn from physics and from poetry, because these happen to be the works of man which I know best. But what is great in these is common to all great works. In the museum at Cracow there is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci called The Lady with a Stoat: it shows a girl holding a stoat in her arms. The girl was probably a mistress of Lodovico Sforza, the usurper of Milan, at whose court Leonardo lived from about 1482 to 1499, amid the violence and intrigue which all his life drew him and repelled him together. The stoat was an emblem of Lodovico Sforza, and is probably also a pun on the girl’s name. And in a sense the whole picture is a pun, if I may borrow for the word the tragic intensity which Coleridge found in the puns of Shakespeare. Leonardo has matched the stoat in the girl. In the skull under the long brow, in the lucid eyes, in the stately, brutal, beautiful and stupid head of the girl, he has re-discovered the animal nature; and done so without malice, almost as a matter of fact. The very carriage of the girl and the stoat, the gesture of the hand and the claw, explore the character with the anatomy. As we look, the emblematic likeness springs as freshly in our minds as it did in Leonardo’s when he looked at the girl and asked her to turn her head. The Lady with a Stoat is as much a research into man and animal, and a creation of unity, as is Darwin’s Origin of Species.12

2

So much may be granted; and yet, where is it to stop? The creative act is alike in art and in science; but it cannot be identical in the two; there must be a difference as well as a likeness. For example, the artist in his creation surely has open to him a dimension of freedom which is closed to the scientist. I have insisted that the scientist does not merely record the facts; but he must conform to the facts. The sanction of truth is an exact boundary which encloses him, in a way in which it does not constrain the poet or the painter. Shakespeare can make Romeo say things about the look of Juliet which, although they are revealing, are certainly not true in fact.

O she doth teach the Torches to burne bright.

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the East, and Juliet is the Sunne.

And Shakespeare himself is aware that these statements differ from those made by exact observers. For he exploits the difference deliberately for a new poetic effect in the sonnet which begins, tartly,

My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne.

This takes its point and pungency from being unpoetic. Shakespeare designedly in this sonnet plays the finicking scientist straight-faced -

Currall is farre more red, then her lips red,

If snow be white, why then her brests are dun

– in order to say at last, overwhelmingly, that even in plain fact his love is incomparable. No doubt Shakespeare would have been willing to argue in other places that the poetic image can be called true: the parable of the Prodigal Son is true in some sense, and so is the pursuit of Orestes by the furies, and the imagery of Romeo and Juliet itself. But the sonnet proves that Shakespeare did not think this meaning of truth to be the same as that which he met in Holinshed’s Chronicles and William Gilbert’s De Magnete, and which now dogs the writer of a thesis on electronic networks.

We cannot shirk the historic question, What is truth? On the contrary: the civilization we take pride in took a new strength on the day the question was asked. It took its greatest strength later from Renaissance men like Leonardo, in whom truth to fact became a passion. The sanction of experienced fact as a face of truth is a profound subject, and the mainspring which has moved our civilization since the Renaissance.

3

Those who have gone out to climb in the Himalayas have brought back, besides the dubious tracks of Abominable Snowmen, a more revealing model of truth. It is contained in the story which they tell of their first sight of some inaccessible and rarely seen mountain. The western climbers, at home with compass and map projection, can match this view of the mountain with another view that they have seen years ago. But to the native climbers with them, each face is a separate picture and puzzle. The natives may know another face of the mountain, and this face too, better than the stranger; and yet they have no way of fitting the two faces together. Eric Shipton describes this division in the account of his reconnaissance for the new route to Everest, on which the later ascent in 1953 was based. Here is Shipton moving up to a view of Everest from the south, which is new to him, but which his leading Sherpa, Angtarkay, had known in childhood:

On the morning of the 27th we turned into the Lobujya Khola, the valley which contains the Khombu Glacier (which flows from the south and south-west side of Everest). As we climbed into the valley we saw at its head the line of the main watershed. I recognized immediately the peaks and saddles so familiar to us from the Rongbuk (the north) side: Pumori, Lingtren, the Lho La, the North Peak and the west shoulder of Everest. It is curious that Angtarkay, who knew these features as well as I did from the other side and had spent many years of his boyhood grazing yaks in this valley, had never recognized them as the same; nor did he do so now until I pointed them out to him.

The leading Sherpa knows the features of Everest from the north as well as Shipton does. And, unlike SJiipton, he also knows them from the south, for he spent years in this valley. Yet he has never put the two together in his head. It is the inquisitive stranger who points out the mountains which flank Everest. The Sherpa then recognizes the shape of a peak here and of another there. The parts begin to fit together; the puzzled man’s mind begins to build a map; and suddenly the pieces are snug, the map will turn around, and the two faces of the mountain are both Everest. Other expeditions in other places have told of the delight of the native climbers at such a recognition.

All acts of recognition are of this kind. The girl met on the beach, the man known long ago, puzzle us for a moment and then fall into place; the new face fits on to and enlarges the old. We are used to make these connexions fin time; and like the climbers on Everest we make them also in space. If we did not, our minds would contain only a clutter of isolated experiences. By making such connexions we find in our experiences the maps of things.

There is no other evidence for the existence of things. We see the left profile of a man and we see the right profile; we never see them together. What are our grounds for thinking that they belong to one man? What are the grounds for thinking that there is such a thing as the one man at all? By the canons of classical logic there are no grounds: no one can deduce the man. We infer him from his profiles as we infer that the evening star and the morning star are both the planet Venus; because it makes two experiences cohere, and experience proves it to be consistent. Profiles and full face, back and front, the parts build a round whole, not only by sight but by the exploration of the touch and the ear, and the stethoscope and the X-ray tube and all our elaborations of inference. Watch a child’s eyes and fingers together discover that the outside and the inside of a cup hang together. Watch a man who was born blind, and who can now see, re-building the touched world by sight; and never again think that the existence of a thing leaps of itself into the mind, immediate and whole. We know the thing only by mapping and joining our experiences of its aspects.13

4

The discovery of things is made in three steps. At the first step there are only the separate data of the senses: we see the head of the penny, we see the tail. It would be mere pomp to use words as profound as true and false at this simple step. What we see is either so or is not so. Where no other judgement can be made, no more subtle words are in place.

At the second step we put the head and the tail together. We see that it makes sense to treat them as one thing. And the thing is the coherence of its parts in our experience.

The human mind does...