2014.8.31 發現2011年有新平裝版本上市：
A new paperback edition of Dr. Bronowski's classic history of humankind, with a foreword by Richard Dawkins
Dr. Jacob Bronowksi's classic traces the development of human society through our understanding of science. First published in 1973 to accompany the groundbreaking BBC television series, it is considered one of the first works of "popular science," illuminating the historical and social context of scientific development for a generation of readers. In his highly accessible style, Dr. Bronowski discusses human invention from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature. In this new paperback edition, The Ascent of Man inspires, influences, and informs as profoundly as ever.
布羅諾斯基《文明的躍升》給我們的啟示是：人類過去的成就雖然很重要，但它必須受到無數 ...
"我心目中要建的是一個具有教育性的，合乎時代要求國際標準的科學博物館，在學術上要能達到大學研究院的水準，在展示上要能為社會所需要，觀眾所激賞。在此之前，我翻譯了《文明的躍升》，引起很大的迴響。因此我對從科學教育的使命與目標，都有了一定的看法。" 《築人間──漢寶德回憶錄》
http://www.drbronowski.com/
The Ascent of Man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man
The Ascent of Man is a thirteen-part documentary television series produced by the BBC and Time-Life Films first transmitted in 1973, written and presented by ...-
01 OF 13 - The Ascent of Man: Lower Than the Angels (ENTIRE SHOW) - Jacob Bronowski BBC TV 1973
FULL ONE-HOUR (60 minutes) SHOW. Full details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man. -
12 OF 13 - The Ascent of Man: Generation Upon Generation (ENTIRE SHOW) - Jacob Bronowski BBC TV 1973
FULL ONE-HOUR (60 minutes) SHOW. Full details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man 12 OF 13 - Ascent of Man: ...
http://deming.ces.clemson.edu/pub/den/archive/98.12/msg00067.html???
The personal commitment
夫 道 以 人 弘 ． 教 以 文 明 ． 弘 道 明 教 ． 故 謂 之 弘 明 集弘 明 裨 褊
前幾天 作 The Ascent of Man去DEN 找出1998 我以前引過此書的說法
The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual
commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has
made the Ascent of Man.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0#more-151682
The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz
By SIMON CRITCHLEY
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
As a kid in England, I watched a lot of
television. There weren’t any books in our house, not even the Bible.
TV was therefore pretty important, omnipresent actually. Of course, most
of what it delivered was garbage. But in 1973, the BBC aired an
extraordinary documentary series called “The Ascent of Man,” hosted by
one Dr. Jacob Bronowski in 13 hour-long episodes. Each episode was what
he called an “essay” and involved some exotic and elaborate locations,
but the presentation was never flashy and consisted mostly of Dr.
Bronowski speaking directly and deliberately to the camera.
A scientist who warned of ‘the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts — obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.’
Dr. Bronowski (he was always referred to as
“Dr.” and I can’t think of him with any other, more familiar, moniker)
died 40 years ago this year, at the relatively young age of 66. He was a
Polish-born British mathematician who wrote a number of highly-regarded
books on science, but who was equally at home in the world of
literature. He wrote his own poetry as well as a book on William Blake.
He was a slight, lively, lovely man. Because
it was the early ’70s, some of his fashion choices were bewilderingly
pastel, especially his socks, though on some occasions he sported a racy
leather box jacket. He often smiled as he spoke, not out of conceit or
because he lived in California (which, incidentally, he did, working at
the Salk Institute in San Diego), but out of a sheer, greedy joy at
explaining what he thought was important. But there was a genuine humility in his demeanor that made him utterly likeable.
“The Ascent of Man” (admittedly a little
sexist now – great men abound, but there are apparently few great
women), deliberately inverted the title of Darwin’s 1871 book. It was
not an account of human biological evolution, but cultural evolution —
from the origins of human life in the Rift Valley to the shifts from
hunter/gatherer societies, to nomadism and then settlement and
civilization, from agriculture and metallurgy to the rise and fall of
empires: Assyria, Egypt, Rome.
Bronowski presented everything with great
gusto, but with a depth that never sacrificed clarity and which was
never condescending. The tone of the programs was rigorous yet
permissive, playful yet precise, and always urgent, open and
exploratory. I remember in particular the programs on the trial of
Galileo, Darwin’s hesitancy about publishing his theory of evolution and
the dizzying consequences of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Some of
it was difficult for a 13-year-old to understand, but I remember being
absolutely riveted.
The ascent of man was secured through
scientific creativity. But unlike many of his more glossy and glib
contemporary epigones, Dr. Bronowski was never reductive in his
commitment to science. Scientific activity was always linked to artistic
creation. For Bronowski, science and art were two neighboring mighty
rivers that flowed from a common source: the human imagination. Newton
and Shakespeare, Darwin and Coleridge, Einstein and Braque: all were
interdependent facets of the human mind and constituted what was best
and most noble about the human adventure.
For most of the series, Dr. Bronowski’s
account of human development was a relentlessly optimistic one. Then, in
the 11th episode, called “Knowledge or Certainty,” the mood changed to
something more somber. Let me try and recount what has stuck in my
memory for all these years.
He began the show with the words, “One aim of
the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the
material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th
century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable.” For Dr.
Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it —
whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the
door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to
treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.
This is the condition for what we can know, but it is also, crucially, a moral lesson. It is the lesson of 20th-century
painting from Cubism onwards, but also that of quantum physics. All we
can do is to push deeper and deeper into better approximations of an
ever-evasive reality. The goal of complete understanding seems to recede
as we approach it.
There is no God’s eye view, Dr. Bronowski
insisted, and the people who claim that there is and that they possess
it are not just wrong, they are morally pernicious. Errors are
inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires
not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a
personal act of judgment for which we are responsible. The
emphasis on the moral responsibility of knowledge was essential for all
of Dr. Bronowski’s work. The acquisition of knowledge entails a
responsibility for the integrity of what we are as ethical creatures.
All knowledge, all information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only within what we might call ‘a play of tolerance.’
Dr. Bronowski’s 11th essay took him to the
ancient university city of Göttingen in Germany, to explain the genesis
of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in the hugely creative
milieu that surrounded the physicist Max Born in the 1920s. Dr.
Bronowski insisted that the principle of uncertainty was a misnomer,
because it gives the impression that in science (and outside of it) we
are always uncertain. But this is wrong. Knowledge is precise, but that
precision is confined within a certain toleration of uncertainty.
Heisenberg’s insight is that the electron is a particle that yields
only limited information; its speed and position are confined by the
tolerance of Max Planck’s quantum, the basic element of matter.
Dr. Bronowski thought that the uncertainty
principle should therefore be called the principle of tolerance.
Pursuing knowledge means accepting uncertainty. Heisenberg’s principle
has the consequence that no physical events can ultimately be described
with absolute certainty or with “zero tolerance,” as it were. The more
we know, the less certain we are.
In the everyday world, we do not just accept a
lack of ultimate exactitude with a melancholic shrug, but we constantly
employ such inexactitude in our relations with other people. Our
relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We
encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and
approximation. Such is the business of listening and the back and forth
of conversation and social interaction.
For Dr. Bronowski, the moral consequence of
knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some
absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge, all
information that passes between human beings, can be exchanged only
within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science,
literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human
knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge
of uncertainty.”
The relationship between humans and nature
and humans and other humans can take place only within a certain play of
tolerance. Insisting on certainty, by contrast, leads ineluctably to
arrogance and dogma based on ignorance.
At this point, in the final minutes of the
show, the scene suddenly shifts to Auschwitz, where many members of
Bronowski’s family were murdered. Then this happened. Please stay with
it. This short video from the show lasts only four minutes or so.
Dr. Jacob Bronowski’s argument against certainty, made at Auschwitz for his show “The Ascent of Man.”
It is, I am sure you agree, an extraordinary
and moving moment. Bronowski dips his hand into the muddy water of a
pond which contained the remains of his family members and the members
of countless other families. All victims of the same hatred: the hatred
of the other human being. By contrast, he says — just before the camera
hauntingly cuts to slow motion — “We have to touch people.”
The play of tolerance opposes the principle
of monstrous certainty that is endemic to fascism and, sadly, not just
fascism but all the various faces of fundamentalism. When we think we
have certainty, when we aspire to the knowledge of the gods, then
Auschwitz can happen and can repeat itself. Arguably, it has repeated
itself in the genocidal certainties of past decades.
The pursuit of scientific knowledge is as
personal an act as lifting a paintbrush or writing a poem, and they are
both profoundly human. If the human condition is defined by limitedness,
then this is a glorious fact because it is a moral limitedness rooted
in a faith in the power of the imagination, our sense of responsibility
and our acceptance of our fallibility. We always have to acknowledge
that we might be mistaken. When we forget that, then we forget ourselves
and the worst can happen.
In 1945, nearly three decades before “The
Ascent of Man,” Dr. Bronowski — who was a close friend of the Hungarian
physicist Leo Szilard, the reluctant father of the atomic bomb —
visited Nagasaki to help assess the damage there. It convinced him to
discontinue his work for British military research with which he had
been engaged extensively during the Second World War.
From that time
onward, he focused on the relations between science and human values.
When someone said to Szilard in Bronowski’s company that the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki was science’s tragedy, Szilard replied firmly
that this was wrong: It was a human tragedy.
Such was Dr. Bronowski’s lesson for a
13-year-old boy some 40 years ago. Being slightly old-school, I treated
myself last Christmas to a DVD deluxe boxed set of “The Ascent of Man.” I
am currently watching it with my 10-year-old son. Admittedly, it is not
really much competition for “Candy Crush” and his sundry other video
games, but he is showing an interest. Or at least he is tolerating my
enthusiasm. And of course beginning to learn such toleration is the
whole point.
Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas professor
of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and the
author of several books, including “The Faith of the Faithless,” and, with Jamieson Webster, “Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine.” He is the moderator of this series.
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