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وحدة الإنسان
«إن الفكرة الرئيسية التي تدور حولها هذه الدراسات هي أزمة الثقة التي تَنجم عن رغبةِ كل إنسان في أن يكون شخصًا وعقلًا، في وجه الخوف المستمر من أن يكون جهازًا آليًّا. والسؤال الجوهري الذي أطرحه هو: هل يستطيع الإنسان أن يكون آلةً وذاتًا في آنٍ معًا؟»
تدور فكرة هذا الكتاب حول أن الإنسان كِيان واحد يتناغم فيه السعيُ إلى الحقيقة مع التحديق في آفاق الخيال، وتنسجم فيه المعرفة العلمية المتعمِّقة مع الحساسية الشعرية المُرهَفة؛ إذ يرى المؤلِّف أن النزعة الإنسانية لا تتعارض مع العلم، وأن العلم والفن طريقتان متكاملتان يعبِّر بهما الإنسانُ الحديث عن نفسه، وتكمن عناصرُ تحقيق الوَحدة بينهما في الخيال؛ فعملية الاكتشاف في العلم تقتضي الخيالَ بقَدْر ما تقتضيه عمليةُ الإبداع في الفنون، كما أن الخيال يعمل على توسيعِ نطاق اللغة العلمية التي تتَّسم بالضِّيق، وإضافةِ معانٍ جديدة إلى مفاهيمها المتداولة. وقد عبَّر المؤلِّف عن «وحدة الإنسان» من خلال أربعة محاور — الإنسان، والطبيعة، والذات، والعقل — تؤكِّد جميعًا انسجامَ الإنسان وتوافُقه، سواء بين عناصره الداخلية، أو بينه وبين العالَم المُحيط به.
تدور فكرة هذا الكتاب حول أن الإنسان كِيان واحد يتناغم فيه السعيُ إلى الحقيقة مع التحديق في آفاق الخيال، وتنسجم فيه المعرفة العلمية المتعمِّقة مع الحساسية الشعرية المُرهَفة؛ إذ يرى المؤلِّف أن النزعة الإنسانية لا تتعارض مع العلم، وأن العلم والفن طريقتان متكاملتان يعبِّر بهما الإنسانُ الحديث عن نفسه، وتكمن عناصرُ تحقيق الوَحدة بينهما في الخيال؛ فعملية الاكتشاف في العلم تقتضي الخيالَ بقَدْر ما تقتضيه عمليةُ الإبداع في الفنون، كما أن الخيال يعمل على توسيعِ نطاق اللغة العلمية التي تتَّسم بالضِّيق، وإضافةِ معانٍ جديدة إلى مفاهيمها المتداولة. وقد عبَّر المؤلِّف عن «وحدة الإنسان» من خلال أربعة محاور — الإنسان، والطبيعة، والذات، والعقل — تؤكِّد جميعًا انسجامَ الإنسان وتوافُقه، سواء بين عناصره الداخلية، أو بينه وبين العالَم المُحيط به.
126 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 1965
12 people are currently reading
326 people want to read
About the author
Jacob Bronowski
78 books225 followersJacob Bronowski was a British mathematician and biologist of Polish-Jewish origin. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man.
In 1950, Bronowski was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes. Work on this turned his interests towards the human biology of humanity's intellectual products.
In 1967 Bronowski delivered the six Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge. Transcripts of the lectures were published posthumously in 1978 as The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and remain in print.
He first became familiar to the British public through appearances on the BBC television version of The Brains Trust in the late 1950s. His ability to answer questions on many varied subjects led to an offhand reference in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus where one character states that "He knows everything." However Bronowski is best remembered for his thirteen part series The Ascent of Man (1973), a documentary about the history of human beings through scientific endeavour. This project was intended to parallel art historian Kenneth Clark's earlier "personal view" series Civilisation (1969) which had covered cultural history.
During the making of The Ascent of Man, Bronowski was interviewed by the popular British chat show host Michael Parkinson. Parkinson later recounted that Bronowski's description of a visit to Auschwitz—Bronowski had lost many family members during the Nazi era—was one of Parkinson's most memorable interviews.
Jacob Bronowski married Rita Coblentz in 1941. The couple had four children, all daughters, the eldest being the British academic Lisa Jardine and another being the filmmaker Judith Bronowski. He died in 1974 of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York a year after The Ascent of Man was completed, and was buried in the western side of London's Highgate Cemetery, near the entrance.
In 1950, Bronowski was given the Taung child's fossilized skull and asked to try, using his statistical skills, to combine a measure of the size of the skull's teeth with their shape in order to discriminate them from the teeth of apes. Work on this turned his interests towards the human biology of humanity's intellectual products.
In 1967 Bronowski delivered the six Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge. Transcripts of the lectures were published posthumously in 1978 as The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination and remain in print.
He first became familiar to the British public through appearances on the BBC television version of The Brains Trust in the late 1950s. His ability to answer questions on many varied subjects led to an offhand reference in an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus where one character states that "He knows everything." However Bronowski is best remembered for his thirteen part series The Ascent of Man (1973), a documentary about the history of human beings through scientific endeavour. This project was intended to parallel art historian Kenneth Clark's earlier "personal view" series Civilisation (1969) which had covered cultural history.
During the making of The Ascent of Man, Bronowski was interviewed by the popular British chat show host Michael Parkinson. Parkinson later recounted that Bronowski's description of a visit to Auschwitz—Bronowski had lost many family members during the Nazi era—was one of Parkinson's most memorable interviews.
Jacob Bronowski married Rita Coblentz in 1941. The couple had four children, all daughters, the eldest being the British academic Lisa Jardine and another being the filmmaker Judith Bronowski. He died in 1974 of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York a year after The Ascent of Man was completed, and was buried in the western side of London's Highgate Cemetery, near the entrance.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 11, 2018
The late Jacob Bronowski, the thinker, the interpreter of western thought and scientific achievement has been a person I have long admired. I turn to him as a writer and speaker who has a passion for his topics and for his fellow humans. He started his professional life as a Mathematician. Later he escape Nazi persecution and participated in projects that became the atomic bomb. He ended his career as a humanist and philosopher. My hope is that The Identity of Man is not your only contact with Dr. Bronowski.
My copy is the American Museum of Science edition, annotated as Revised. Revised means that there is an addition of a supplement bringing the total page count to 140. The bulk of the book is taken from a series of four lectures presented by the American Museum in March of 1965,
The goal of his talks was to demonstrate his case for the Human as first an animal, or as he would have it an electro chemical machine but one with a mind that defies any definition limited to one that better fits a existing or future machine. He will make appeals to art, especially poetry and science. The basis of his argument in favor as man being more than machine is based on self-awareness and the unpredictability of the mind. Give a machine a set of instructions, of course written in a language the machine ‘understands and the machine will execute exactly those instructions. A human may or may not follow instructions and indeed may even exceed them.
Allowing that we know a great deal more about the mechanics of the human mind and have machines that can very closely mimic human traits. We have to allow that Bronowski was hampered by the degree to which he could imagine what the advances in brain science and machine science might achieve.
This however is not the bases of my disappointment with this book.
Bronowshi never completes his arguments. Present are his wonderful sentences and his love of the human. What is not present is a cogent logical case, build from the evidence, linking logical and necessary arguments into a cohesive and finished whole. Readers will find enough to identify with and accept his conclusions, but…
Too many of his arguments are in too many directions and were the human and the human mind not know to me, it would be hard to understand what he means for us to conclude. It is not enough that Bronowski argues for what may be a popular conclusion, but the lectures do not bring us the more finely constructed histories and philosophies I have savored in other of his writings.
My copy is the American Museum of Science edition, annotated as Revised. Revised means that there is an addition of a supplement bringing the total page count to 140. The bulk of the book is taken from a series of four lectures presented by the American Museum in March of 1965,
The goal of his talks was to demonstrate his case for the Human as first an animal, or as he would have it an electro chemical machine but one with a mind that defies any definition limited to one that better fits a existing or future machine. He will make appeals to art, especially poetry and science. The basis of his argument in favor as man being more than machine is based on self-awareness and the unpredictability of the mind. Give a machine a set of instructions, of course written in a language the machine ‘understands and the machine will execute exactly those instructions. A human may or may not follow instructions and indeed may even exceed them.
Allowing that we know a great deal more about the mechanics of the human mind and have machines that can very closely mimic human traits. We have to allow that Bronowski was hampered by the degree to which he could imagine what the advances in brain science and machine science might achieve.
This however is not the bases of my disappointment with this book.
Bronowshi never completes his arguments. Present are his wonderful sentences and his love of the human. What is not present is a cogent logical case, build from the evidence, linking logical and necessary arguments into a cohesive and finished whole. Readers will find enough to identify with and accept his conclusions, but…
Too many of his arguments are in too many directions and were the human and the human mind not know to me, it would be hard to understand what he means for us to conclude. It is not enough that Bronowski argues for what may be a popular conclusion, but the lectures do not bring us the more finely constructed histories and philosophies I have savored in other of his writings.
jun
February 21, 2018128.3
The Ascent of Man, DVD 501 ASC. The Ascent of Man was placed 65th on a list of the 100 Greatest World Television Programmes voted for by industry professionals and drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000.
other books include:
The Western Intellectual Tradition, From Leonardo to HegelThe Western Intellectual Tradition, From Leonardo to Hegel
The Ascent of Man (book)
The Ascent of Man, DVD 501 ASC. The Ascent of Man was placed 65th on a list of the 100 Greatest World Television Programmes voted for by industry professionals and drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000.
other books include:
The Western Intellectual Tradition, From Leonardo to HegelThe Western Intellectual Tradition, From Leonardo to Hegel
The Ascent of Man (book)
April 29, 2025
لكل كاتب وجهة نظره في موضوعه الذي يكتب فيه، لكن كنت أتنمي لهذا العنوان أن يكون مكتوبا كتابة أخري
الكتاب ركز علي الحديث عن مقارنات بين الأدب والعلم في حديثه عن الإنسن
اتعبني جدا الكتاب فلم أتمه بسب الملل
الكتاب ركز علي الحديث عن مقارنات بين الأدب والعلم في حديثه عن الإنسن
اتعبني جدا الكتاب فلم أتمه بسب الملل
September 11, 2020
Interesting read; I really enjoyed the discussion about the dichotomy between science and art.
May 20, 2014
Bronowski's Identity of Man.
The first two essays of four are not worth reading, because they concern determinism which has been refuted already. Bronowski wants to discern between mechanism and soul, though, for some reason, so he works at it.
The third and fourth essays are interesting.
"Man is conscious that he is different from his environment but more that this he is conscious he is alive and this sense carries him from the past into the future. To be conscious is both to know and to imagine, and our humanity flows from this deep spring. When we imagine nature outside ourselves into the future, we create the mode of knowledge which is science; and when we imagine ourselves alive into the future, we create another mode, knowledge of the self. They are the inseperable halves of the identity of man."
Bronowski suggests that a poem's knowledge has many aspects, while a scientific paper's knowledge has only one aspect. We assume the mind works like one another, but in reality we learn more about minds we come to see that each mind is unique, and that our differences in fact point to a common humanity. So our knowledge of the poetic many in turn illumines the scientific one.
Another way of putting this is that our ability to compose poetry has been outpaced by science. Betrand Russell notes that Ptolemy came up with planetary movement 13 centuries before Dante put it into the poem by which most men came to know about it in the past.
In the fourth essay, Brownowski says just as the self is a process like a poem, so nature is a process like science. He says we can come to know ourselves and nature best through processing scientifically and poetically. He says, we know what it is for a man to be tired, but we do not know what it is like for a metal to be fatigued.
Brownowski is a humanist, and suggests multi-factorial ethics, which is basically relativist ethics disguised as science. He contends that science, like the self, have no end, when in fact we know a lot more about both that did the ancients and have progressed far towards better knowledge.
It is cynical, even nihilistic ultimately, for Brownowski to say that the self and science are processes without an end. That's tantamount to saying they have no meaning at all, which is perhaps why this book is justly obscure.
The first two essays of four are not worth reading, because they concern determinism which has been refuted already. Bronowski wants to discern between mechanism and soul, though, for some reason, so he works at it.
The third and fourth essays are interesting.
"Man is conscious that he is different from his environment but more that this he is conscious he is alive and this sense carries him from the past into the future. To be conscious is both to know and to imagine, and our humanity flows from this deep spring. When we imagine nature outside ourselves into the future, we create the mode of knowledge which is science; and when we imagine ourselves alive into the future, we create another mode, knowledge of the self. They are the inseperable halves of the identity of man."
Bronowski suggests that a poem's knowledge has many aspects, while a scientific paper's knowledge has only one aspect. We assume the mind works like one another, but in reality we learn more about minds we come to see that each mind is unique, and that our differences in fact point to a common humanity. So our knowledge of the poetic many in turn illumines the scientific one.
Another way of putting this is that our ability to compose poetry has been outpaced by science. Betrand Russell notes that Ptolemy came up with planetary movement 13 centuries before Dante put it into the poem by which most men came to know about it in the past.
In the fourth essay, Brownowski says just as the self is a process like a poem, so nature is a process like science. He says we can come to know ourselves and nature best through processing scientifically and poetically. He says, we know what it is for a man to be tired, but we do not know what it is like for a metal to be fatigued.
Brownowski is a humanist, and suggests multi-factorial ethics, which is basically relativist ethics disguised as science. He contends that science, like the self, have no end, when in fact we know a lot more about both that did the ancients and have progressed far towards better knowledge.
It is cynical, even nihilistic ultimately, for Brownowski to say that the self and science are processes without an end. That's tantamount to saying they have no meaning at all, which is perhaps why this book is justly obscure.
January 11, 2016
A fabulous exposition on Bronowski's vision of humanity and it's relation to lived reality. Short and to the point, the book is a collection of lectures that can be read in a single day, but the ideas will have you thinking for long past that.
April 18, 2011
I should read this again now that I'm older! I read it for a college class but that was when I first got out of High School and I'm sure it went over my head to a large degree.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews