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Bronowski's 'Magic, Science and Civilization'

Author:		Stephen Waters
Posted:		5/11/04; 10:40:36 AM
Topic:		Bronowski's 'Magic, Science and Civilization'
Msg #:		121 (top msg in thread)
Prev/Next:		118/123
Reads:		6310

Magic, Science and Civilization
Author: Jacob Bronowski
Copyright: 1978 Columbia University Press/New York
ISBN 0?231?04485?2
Out of print but available used. This book needs to be reprinted. -- sbw

"My definition of magic is very simple. It is the view that there is a logic of everyday life, but there is also a logic of another world. And that other logic works in a different way and if you can only find the secret key, if you can enter into some magical practice -- particularly if you can find the right form of words -- then either the almighty will be on your side, or you will collect all the votes, or people will believe that because you call it peace, that it's not the same word as war, and all those other things that Orwell has portrayed so brilliantly but which really always come to the same thing: trying to command the world and particularly the opinions of other people by some formula which is other than the truth." -- Pp. 11-12.

"Here we are at the end of this long panorama, Copernicus dethroning man from the center of the universe, Wohler showing that organic molecules are no different from inorganic molecules, Darwin showing that man belongs to the tree of evolution of other animals. Freud, Einstein -- you can make up the rest for yourself. Here we stand at this moment; how are we to heal the breach between man and nature which people like e. e. cummings are pointing to, which they feel?" -- Pp. 14-15.

"There are a great many species-specific gifts -- the one I want to center on here is the fact that human beings guide their conduct by making plans." -- Pg. 15.

"The most important form of plan that we have been able to evolve in practice over the last 300 years is, of course, the scientific plan.
"In summary, first science is not an independent, value-free dissociated activity which can be carried out apart from the rest of human life, because second, it is, on the contrary, the expression in a very precise form of the species-specific human behavior which centers on making plans. Third, there is no distinction between scientific strategies and human strategies in guiding how to live and how to look at the world. Science is a world view based on the notion that we can plan by understanding. Fourth, science is distinguished from magical views by the fact that it refuses to acknowledge a division between two kinds of logic. There is only one logic; it works the same way in all forms of conduct and is not carried out by any kind of formula but by an active view of how you apply the logic of long-term planning strategies to the conduct of the whole of your life. Finally, and most crucially, science is distinguished from earlier forms of trying to achieve a unitary view of the world by the fact that there is only one form of truth in it. There is no distinction between man and nature, there is no distinction between the logic of magic and other logics, and there is no distinction between means and ends." -- Pp. 17-18.

"The form of magic that I shall discuss is the notion that there is a way of having power over nature which simply depends on hitting the right key. If you say "open sesame" then nature will open for you; if you are an expert then nature will open for you; if you are a specialist of some kind or if you are remote, if you are esoteric, if you are an initiate there is some way of getting into nature which is not accessible to other people.
"Now this was the dominant theme of all those centuries up to the fifteenth. ... [They] all come back to this notion: there is a way of having power which is esoteric and does not depend on generally accessible knowledge. Now I think that is fundamentally false and I also think, of course, that it is terribly dangerous, because it recurs in every generation." -- Pp. 20-21.

"I think it is right that we should look at history with hindsight, because I think, for two reasons, that the most important species-specific thing which man possesses and which started him off on his evolutionary career is exactly hindsight. If you make any plans, only hindsight will tell you whether they were any good. Secondly, we know from work on memory, that it is only from hindsight, only from memory, that imagination and foresight develops." -- Pp. 23-24.

"It was Francis Bacon who said in the Novum Organum "we cannot command nature except by obeying her." At this point, the scientific revolution was really complete." -- Pg. 34.

"If I might give you one spectacular example, who would have thought in 1569--when they were well on the way to this concept--that if you really wanted to make the biggest bang that you ever made on earth, you would not in any way call up the sun, call up the volcanoes, call up the mystic power; you would just take ordinary atoms of uranium and you would put the U238 atoms in one box and the U235 atoms in another box and that this simple rearrangement of nature by her own laws would blow up 120,000 people in Japan." -- Pp. 34-35.

Pg. 35 Thos. Aquinas reference.

"I said in chapter 1 that I couldn't think of any way of being a human being other than by being an intellectual. To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them. -- Pg. 36.

"But it seems right to end here by noting that what I have tried to communicate is that at one moment in history, science and the arts rose together, because of the simple sense of man's pleasure in his own gifts." -- Pg. 37.

"In The Identity of Man I wrote: Science is not so much a model of nature as a living language for describing her. It has the structure of a language, a vocabulary, a formal grammar, and a dictionary for translation. ..." -- Pg. 45.

"The evolutionary advantage of language has not only been as a means of communication but also as a means of analyzing the environment so that you can manipulate it in your head.
"Language for us is not only a way of telling somebody else something, of passing an instruction, but also of providing ourselves with cognitive sentences inside our heads." -- Pp. 48-49.

"But the notion that this great truth how [W.B. Yeats, The Tower] the garden dies comes to you by some kind of prophetic inspiration, that that's the only way that you get at what ethics and values are about, I think to be absolutely fallacious. And equally fallacious is the notion that the technologist is another kind of initiate. What's wrong with all these magical views is that they somehow set up a world in which there are people who know and the rest of you chaps down there--you listen, you go away, you say, 'Marvelous man, how does he do it? '
"If there is any reason why the magically point of view must be broken down, it is because the essence of the dualism is that there are magicians; there is a Magus, there is a comforter of the spirit or soul, in the Cartesian terms, who is different from an ordinary human being dealing with daily contact." -- Pg. 66.

"on what can we found the idea that a developing ethic is indeed a proper human expression? Obviously we must found it in the specificity of the human species. We must say that planning is an important part of the way that the human mind works. ... Human beings have these special characteristics of memory, imagination, symbolic representation, and language which make it possible for them to project themselves into futures which have not yet happened (and, indeed, some of which will not happen) to set up artificial futures and make plans toward one rather than another. This is the central act of choice, and it's really quite irrelevant whether there is or is not free will, because that's how people behave." -- Pp. 70-71.