Two cultures: Jacob Bronowski

I posted recently on C P Snow's Two Cultures essay from 1959, and promised to return to the masterful treatment of the issue by Jacob Bronowski.  He is most famous for the wonderful BBC series, The Ascent of Man, and there are two clips here, on the dangers of absolute knowledge and on how knowledge is gained in the same way in painting and physics.  Watch them if you can - Bronowski is a compelling presenter - but be warned the first one may make you weep (in memoriam GHJ).  But also well worth reading - and not at all technical or intimidating - are two books of essays or lectures - The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and The Visionary Eye.

In The Visionary Eye, Bronowski argues passionately that reasoning and science are not different activites from imagining and creating:

Reasoning is constructed with moveable images just as certainly as poetry is ... We do great harm to children when we accustom them to separate reason from the imagination ... For imagination is not confined to wild bursts of fantasy.  Imagination is the manipulation inside the mind of absent things, by using in their place images or words or symbols.

In The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Bronowski takes two sentences, one from the arts and one from the sciences, and compares them, so that we can see what the differences really are.  One is from Blake:

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

And the other is a statement of Newton’s law of gravitation, that the gravity between any two objects is proportional to their masses divided by the distance between them squared – one of the fundamental propositions of the universe:

G = kmm’ / r²

What is the difference, what are the similarities between them?  Bronowski argues that the differences are threefold, but the similarities still very great.  They are both general statements of wide application, telling us something important and widely applicable, and they are both bold statements which required imagination and creativity to forge.  But, he says, everyone knows what the Blake means, and knows exactly – your exactly may be different from my exactly, but we are each assured of understanding the real meaning completely; but although it is apparently more precise, more  definite, the gravity equation is taken on trust by most of us (stand fast Dark Puss).  Second, the Blake is only an affirmation and a conviction, it is not, even in principle, susceptible of proof as the equation is.  But the third difference is the key one: the grammar of the Blake allows other similar sentences, such as

A Robin Red breast in a Box

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

or

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Mankind in a Rage.

 

The first doesn’t rhyme, and the second is distinctly different in meaning, as well as scanning less well; but they mean something, and they mean something quite close to the original.  But

G = kmm’ / r³   or  S = kmm’ / r²

just don’t mean anything at all – they’re not true – they’re just not allowed.

For anyone who is not a scientist (or, indeed, for anyone who is) who is interested in the passionate humanism of a man who loved the arts and the sciences, thought them one facet of a human whole, and thought them - and all knowledge - forces for good if humbly considered, I cannot recommend Bronowski too highly.

Comments

[Dark Puss]

I completely agree!