It is harder and harder to find true polymaths today when almost everyone prides himself or herself as a “specialist” in this or that field. Jacob Bronowski (1908-1974) was a polymath. He was a mathematician, historian, poet, literary critic, television broadcaster and cognoscenti of the arts. Although he was trained as a mathematician (obtaining a First Class in Mathematical Tripos in Cambridge University), his interest was much wider than mathematics; in particular, he edited a literary magazine with another math student while in Cambridge, wrote poetry in his spare time and even published his first book, not on mathematics, but rather The Poet’s Defence (1939) where he argued that art and science are a single thing, united by the fundamental need for humans to express their innermost thoughts. He reiterated the same point in 1956 in his book, Science and Human Values in which he wrote

For me science is an expression of the human mind, which seeks for unity under the chaos of nature as the writer seeks for it in the variety of human nature.

By then, Bronowski was no longer active in mathematics but have turned his fertile mind to biology, paleontology and as a communicator of the arts and sciences in books, lectures and television. In 1973, his encyclopedic work, The Ascent of Man – an ambitious chronicle of mankind’s journey of discoveries about his physical world and his place in it – was adapted into a 13-part BBS documentary series, a work which many critics consider to be a worthy successor to Sir Kenneth Clark’s monumental Civilisation (1969).

Less well known is the The Visionary Eye (1978), a collection of Bronowski’s essays on the unity of the arts and sciences published posthumously by MIT Press. I’m fortunate have this rare book in my personal library. It is a work I want to read over and over for the insights it bring to remind me of how the arts and humanities are not so different from the sciences in their fundamental quest for clarity amid life’s seeming chaos. To give you a flavor of the great man’s thoughts, here are two passages from The Visionary Eye.

How to Read A Work of Art

Each of us reads the same poem, and yet each of us makes his own poem. This is the nature of imagination: that everyone has to reimagine for himself. This is a strange thought, but it is fundamental. No work of art has been created with such finality that you need contribute nothing to it. You must recreate the work for yourself – it cannot be presented to you ready made. You cannot look at a picture and find it beautiful by a merely passive act of seeing. The internal relations that make it beautiful to you have to be discovered by you. The artist provides the skeleton; he provides the guiding lines; he provides enough to engage your interest and to touch you emotionally. But there is no picture and no poem unless you yourself enter it and fill it out.

On Freedom of Expression in Art

To my mind, the spear and the cave paintings are both created in the same temper; they are exercises in freeing man from the mechanical drives of nature. When he must act from necessity his own actions are satisfying and no more. But when he moves into his own domain of liberty, then what he chooses to do is an exercise of pleasure, and is beautiful. It is the human act within the cave paintings which still makes them beautiful to us. It is not the thing done or made which is beautiful, but the doing.

Further study

Jacob Bronowski, The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science (selected and edited by Piero Ariotti), Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993.