I like this
Feb. 26th, 2007 07:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyan"I have described the hand when it uses a tool as an instrument of discovery ... We see this every time a child learns to couple hand and tool together - to lace its shoes, to thread a needle, to fly a kite or play a penny whistle. With the practical action there goes another, namely finding pleasure in the action for its own sake - in the skill that one perfects, and perfects by being pleased with it. This at bottom is responsible for every work of art, and science too: our poetic delight in what humans do because they can do it. The most exciting thing about that is that the poetic use in the end has the truly profound results. Even in prehistory man already made tools that have an edge finer than they need have. The finer edge in its turn gave the tool a finer use, a practical refinement and extension to processes for which the tool had not been designed.
...The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action."
[Dr J Bronowski - "The Ascent of Man"]
Now that's how to construct an argument. The way the ideas build on one another, the progressive force of example and extension, the movement out from the specific to the general. Brilliant. And there's a whole book of it.
The really extraordinary thing about that quote, however, is that it is from a television script, and of a show broadcast during peak hours at that. When I dolefully bemaoan what we have lost in television, this is what I am talking about - can you imagine a prime-time programme these days with so much faith in the intelligence of its audience, and their delight in the world of ideas?
"The Ascent of Man" (1972) and its earlier sibling "Civilisation" (1969) may look primitive by the more technologically proficient standards of our own times, but for scope and quality of thought, they (and the slightly later addition to the triumvirate, "The World at War") leave modern documentary-making in the dust...
...The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action."
[Dr J Bronowski - "The Ascent of Man"]
Now that's how to construct an argument. The way the ideas build on one another, the progressive force of example and extension, the movement out from the specific to the general. Brilliant. And there's a whole book of it.
The really extraordinary thing about that quote, however, is that it is from a television script, and of a show broadcast during peak hours at that. When I dolefully bemaoan what we have lost in television, this is what I am talking about - can you imagine a prime-time programme these days with so much faith in the intelligence of its audience, and their delight in the world of ideas?
"The Ascent of Man" (1972) and its earlier sibling "Civilisation" (1969) may look primitive by the more technologically proficient standards of our own times, but for scope and quality of thought, they (and the slightly later addition to the triumvirate, "The World at War") leave modern documentary-making in the dust...
