J. Bronowski, "The Identity of Man" 에서

 

 

 

 

J. Bronowski, "The Identity of Man," Revised Ed. (1971)

 

 

"For to assert that man is a part of nature surely denies

(or seems to deny) that he is unique.... It is the perpetual

heresy, for which men went to the stake at least as

long ago as 1600. Giordano Bruno was asked then

to abjure, and would not.

 

"I do not share this anxiety to find a special dispensation

beyond the laws of nature to breathe life into some of

the unexpected configurations of atoms. And indeed,

I think this is something of a philosopher's fraud....

Man is above the other animals not because

he is alive as they are, but because

he has a life unlike theirs.

 

"[T]hey called it the problem of the soul at one time,

of free will at another, and the mind-body problem at

a third.

 

"The central question that I ask is;

Can man be both a machine and a self?

 

"A self must have some consistency ...

Spinoza said that three hundred years ago, in effect,

and found in it his own impersonal ground for

reconciling free will with determinism.

 

"If it exists at all, my self is a process: the unending

process by which I turn new experience into knowledge.

 

"What makes man unique is

the nature of his knowledge: this is my theme.

 

"[S]cientific knowledge is only one of its modes ...

the other mode ... is knowledge of self.

 

"Our experiences do not merely link us to the outside

world; they are us and they are the world for us;

they make us part of the world.

 

"Science then is not so much a model of nature

as a living language for describing her.

 

"Imagination takes advantage of ambiguity, in the

language of science as well as in the language of poetry.

 

"Of course it is true that when scientists write out

their findings, they try to rid their language of ambiguity

and to make it exact. Aldous Huxley in his last book

presented that  as the crucial difference between

the two parts of his title Literature and Science.

But this confuses the language in which science is

invented with that in which it is explained -- the

thought with its formal communication.

 

"I hold that each man ... enlarges his self by experiences

... from their inner experiences as well as their outer.

 

"What distinguishes literature is that

it can not be understood unless

we understand what it is like to be human.

 

"[S]cience and literature, science and art, belong

together as matched haves of what is unique

in human experience.

 

"I have called the unique faculty ... imagination....

The largest hoard of images that we create, and

the most powerful method that we have for using

them, is language.... A large part of the new brain

in man is set aside for storing and manipulating

the concepts in this language.

 

"Many logical problems grow from this common root,

namely that the range of reference of any reasonabley

rich system necessarily includes reference to itself.

... The Cretan paradox ... the contradiction implied

by the statement of Epimenides the Cretan that

all Cretans are liars.

 

"All thinking about thinking implies self-reference."