The posthumous Bronowski industry continues to thrive and we can be
grateful. These particular essays concern the creative forces which
shape both art and science - a favorite Bronowski theme paralleled
in his life. Bronowski the mathematician was also a Blake
authority. While at Cambridge he and classmate William Empson
edited a literary magazine called Experiment, and throughout his
life Bronowski wrote poetry and plays which, if not brilliant,
contribute to his polymath reputation. The main point of the
writings here is that in creative works, whether in the arts or in
science, the creator is conveying knowledge through imagery. (For
Bronowski, imagination is essentially "image-making" and a
specifically human faculty.) Our response to art must be a
re-creation which liberates us; we recognize something hitherto
unperceived, something which changes and enriches us or points a
new direction. Our experience of the work is also bound up with
values. Creative work enables us to cross the divide separating man
from man, showing us our humanness and at the same time providing a
key to the universe within us. None of these ideas is new or
unique. Bronowski's aesthetics has something of Pound's "Make it
new" and something of the dynamics of existentialism. It is a
wedding of style and content in which "Beauty is the byproduct of
interest and pleasure in the choice of action." What makes
Bronowski's formulations exciting are the wide range of example and
information, the wit, and the clarity. This is a man who says life
"has no unique and final solution" and one who clearly followed his
own dictum that "you must always feel that you are exploring the
values by which you live and forming them with every step you
take." Bronowski did just that - with style. (Kirkus Reviews)
Eleven lively essays exploring the human imagination at work across
the spectrum of the arts-music, poetry, painting, sculpture,
architecture, industrial design, and engineering.Mathematician,
poet, philosopher, life scientist, playwright, teacher, Jacob
Bronowski could readily be referred to as a Renaissance Man. But in
the historical context that would do him a disservice: he is, par
excellence, a Twentieth Century Man, who has traced the arts and
sciences of earlier centuries and especially those of his own time
to their common root in the uniquely human imagination. Bronowski
is the author of such widely read books as The Ascent of Man and
Science and Human Values. In 1977, The MIT Press published A Sense
of the Future: Essays in Natural Philosophy. In those essays, the
emphasis is on scientific questions, but in a number of them the
notion of "art as a mode of knowledge" is invoked to make the
science clearer and its human dimension more vivid. The Visionary
Eye serves as a companion volume: here the emphasis is on the arts
and humanities, but (as the subtitle suggests) "science as a mode
of imagination" comes into play to extend the reach of the
visionary eye. The Visionary Eye contains eleven essays: "The
Nature of Art," "The Imaginative Mind in Art," "The Imaginative
Mind in Science," "The Shape of Things," "Architecture as a Science
and Architecture as an Art," and Art as a Mode of Knowledge,
Bronowski's A. W. Mellon Lectures given at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington. The essays discuss examples taken from across
the spectrum of the arts, past and present-music, poetry, painting
and sculpture, architecture, industrial design, and engineering
artifacts-in the coherent context of Bronowski's view of the human
creative process.
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