Month: May 2017
Why imagination is superior to specialized knowledge

Why imagination is superior to specialized knowledge

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In the previous post, we said that specialized disciplines are not as freeing as liberal learning, which aims at training the imagination first and foremost. Each discipline’s special methods isolate it somewhat from other disciplines. They create a safe and brightly illuminated island where those who accept the current paradigm of thinking can do their work without fear of making errors.

But a dark, unexplored sea of ignorance surrounds the island, a sea on which the discipline has not sailed. When someone spots an object out there in the shadows, it becomes a predicament for the residents. How can they get from their well-understood island to the dimly perceived distant object? The intervening darkness could be full of hidden dangers.

All specialized disciplines approach this problem in the same way. They start a reclamation project. They use the currently accepted methods of their specialty to build out and fill in sea-walls until the boundaries of the island enclosed the distant object.

Occasionally, in the course of the project, the inhabitants discover that illumination on the original island was not as bright as they had first imagined. They discover that modifying some of their earlier assumptions turns up the brightness and the clarity of their thinking. This is the way specialized disciplines like to make progress—little by little, only when forced to by the need to reclaim territory from the sea of ignorance.

Obviously, there are disadvantages to this approach. Preferring bright light and safety, it sticks with its assumptions unless forced to reconsider them. It tries to translate every predicament it meets into its own well understood language, rather than suppose that the unknown object might speak a different language worth learning. And it all but eliminates serendipity, working on the new object with familiar tools and surrounding it with pre-planned outworks.

There is another way of approaching an unknown object, a way that is bolder and takes more risks. One can put to sea and head toward it like an explorer, in ships propelled by imagination. Imagination refuses to prefer the relative brightness and safety of the island to the potential treasures lying offshore in the darkness. It feels free to treat the unknown object as it will, not as precedent dictates.

Is there an opportunity to learn a new language? Let’s get started, says imagination. Is there a chance that assumptions need to be overturned? Let’s get started, it says. Is there a chance that something can be learned by creating stories or dialogues or music or artworks about the new object? Let’s get started, it says. Imagination gets started, and then it improvises its path. It can even abandon the original object for a more promising one that may appear on the journey.

Imagination has this freedom because it is not limited by predetermined ways of connecting things. Specialized disciplines, on the contrary, are constrained by their methods. They have agreed-upon rules about what counts as an object, what counts as evidence, what counts as valid reasoning. Imagination, on the other hand, can always find new metaphors to refill the sails.

It is the freedom inherent in imagination that makes it superior to the reclamation project. Imagination can choose to build a reclamation project—even to temporarily take up residence on a brightly illuminated island—without becoming chained to the island. But island dwellers can never make a journey of exploration without leaving their island behind.

None of this implies that specialists cannot undertake journeys of discovery. It only means that when they do so they leave the brightly illuminated island at least for a time. The brilliant discoveries of a Newton, a Darwin, an Einstein are the results of imagination striking out into the darkness and finding there a new source of illumination.

The power of imagination to find new suns also makes it prior to all specialized knowledge. Imagination, it turns out, is the founder of disciplines. It is only from the universe of all connections that a discipline can select its particular connections. In other words, the special disciplines, each and every one, were established by the power of imagination surveying the universe of connections and choosing the particular connections that would apply in each specialty.

Since a well-trained imagination is the prerequisite for the sort of learning that leads to new discoveries, the question has always been, How do you train up such an imagination effectively? And the answer, as we have said before, is genuine liberal education.

The world has never needed liberal education more. All its dilemmas cry out for well trained imaginative minds to launch risky journeys of discovery. And yet the environment of higher education has never been more inhospitable to liberal education for young people, and the possibilities for ongoing liberal education among adults are almost non-existent.

And the irony is that the materials on which genuine liberal education can be based have never been more easily available to more people at any time in human history.

In the next post, we will take up the problem of how to tackle genuine liberal learning in these times of maximal accessibility and minimal availability.
Command of life through metaphor

Command of life through metaphor

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In the previous post, we said that imagination is trained by studying metaphor. What is metaphor, and how does it train the imagination?

You probably remember the high-school definition of metaphor: an extended simile. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Metaphor, taken in its widest application, refers to all connections of any kind, all links among objects or thoughts, no matter how close or distant they seem upon first consideration.

The study of metaphor, the domain of connections, is crucial in education, because most of our thinking works through comparison. And comparison depends on following the connections among thing while holding them side by side in the mind’s eye. The more we study metaphor, the more we trace the paths of the innumerable relations that among the innumerable items in existence, the better we get at connections, even among the most dissimilar things.

Since everything we think and everything we do depends on our grasp of the similarities and differences among things, the better we are at are seeing connections the more control we have of the whole world around us. This is possible because metaphor transcends all specialized jobs, all divisions of thought into specialized disciplines. Metaphor is at home in all walks of life.

Mathematical proportions are metaphors, as are equations, which are proportions reduced to the single relation of identity. Science too proceeds by metaphor, and all the greatest scientists are metaphor experts, sniffing out connections among the most diverse things and devising ways to show whether the connections they suspect truly exist. And, of course, metaphor is just as important in all the so-called humanistic disciplines, where we continually search for the connections that make sense in history, politics, philosophy, literature, and the fine arts.

The universality of metaphor makes liberal education liberating. It allows us to fly from idea to idea, from thing to thing, freely and without hindrance. With an imagination invigorated by this freedom, we can repeatedly leave the confines of our current lives. We are free to remake our lives using whatever connections we can find or forge in the world around us. As I. A. Richards once wrote, command of metaphor is command of life. (I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric [London: Oxford University Press, 1936], 95.)

An imagination well trained by the study of metaphor, with the ability to follow its inclinations wherever they lead, frees the mind and the heart to take command of life.That is what liberal education is all about.And this a freedom that transcends all the particular knowledges converted by all the different academic specialties—as important and as fascinating as they may be.

More on this in the next post.
To train the imagination, turn to the liberal arts

To train the imagination, turn to the liberal arts

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As I mentioned in the last post, the liberal arts are not primarily about becoming “well rounded.” They are primarily about developing the discernment and judgment to make good choices in life.

A liberal education tries to attain this by developing imagination.

If this seems strange, I suspect it’s because we tend of think of imagination as a special talent belonging to people called “creatives.” But that isn’t true. All human beings have imagination. To see this, let’s begin with a definition.

What is imagination? It’s not something esoteric or mystical. It’s simply the capacity to think things that are not immediately present. Whenever we daydream, conjuring up images in our minds, or whenever we think about what has to be done later in the day, we are exercising imagination.

This is obviously a natural faculty of human beings, as is proved by our universal capacity to use language. In essence, language is a system of signs. And signs are natural or artificial images that stand for things other than themselves. So, every spoken utterance is a thinking of something that is not present, namely the things that the signs stand for. Speech itself is an act of imagination.

Like other natural faculties, imagination can be improved, developed, heightened. There is no question that an aptitude for art, for science, for business, for athletics can be enhanced. In every case, it is done by immersing oneself in the particulars of the field and exercising. In every specialty, the imaginative muscles that make connections in that field are built up by exercise and repetition, so that a trained person makes faster, better, more accurate connections in the field.

Now, imagination too can be trained by exercising the ability to make connections. Why making connections? Because connections, which exist between and among things, are by nature not immediately present. They exist on the borderline between objects and ideas. They can create effects on objects, but they are seen, for the most part, by the mind’s eye. Connections, therefore, are the perfect material on which to exercise the imagination.

The goal of liberal learning is to exercise the connection-making faculty so that the learner becomes able to make connections among all the aspects of life as needed.

A person with this kind of training, who is skilled at making connections in general, can move in and out of specialties with relative ease. It is just a matter of mastering the basics of the specialty and familiarizing oneself with the characteristic modes of connection-making used in that particular specialty.

This generalized competence at making connections is the actual basis of the oft-heard claim that liberal arts students are better at adapting to changes in the workplace than students who pursue a narrow specialty. The claim is usually backed up with talk about how liberal education broadens the mind, but this is misdirection.

It is generalized competence at making connections, not wide-ranging familiarity with different fields of study alone, that makes liberally educated people more adaptable and flexible than specialists. The heightened ability to link together ideas and see connections makes it easier for them to grasp the outlines of different specialties than for those whose connection-making ability has been limited to the kinds of connections typically used in a given specialty.

It is this same generalized competence at making connections that helps liberally educated people with the discernment and judgment needed to make confident choices in life, as mentioned in the last post. The more connections one can see among the various options life presents, the more informed and considered one’s choices will be.

The next question you might be asking is this: How does liberal education develop and enhance the faculty of imagination?

The answer is: through the study of metaphor.

More on this in the next post.
Liberal education—not just about being smarter

Liberal education—not just about being smarter

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Some readers were surprised at the focus on autonomy in my previous post. Why, they asked, did I choose to write about personal freedom instead of the usual topics that crop up when one talks about liberal education—classic texts, arts and sciences, critical thinking, and the like?

Well, of course, liberal education is at least partly about those things. You cannot really get a liberal education—an education pertaining to freedom—without engaging those things.

But liberal learning is much more about developing two key proficiencies that human beings need to meet the demands of life—discernment and judgment. The reason we all need to improve these proficiencies is that we all want to live the best life we possibly can. Discernment and judgment are indispensable in attaining that aim.

Now the classics, the great books in all fields of human activity, are material for developing discernment and judgment. They have stood the test of time. They show how fictional characters or real people have navigated life’s deepest challenges. They provide a fund of examples for us to ponder, to select among, to pattern our lives on, if we so choose.

And critical thinking—which, as far as I can tell, just means thinking better—is of course a crucial part of education. Since we are thinking beings that can hardly get through a few moments of the day without thinking, we should do it well rather than poorly.

But we liberal artists do not immerse ourselves in the great books just to become familiar with canonical examples of human activity. Nor do we try to master critical thinking just to be smarter.

We do these things for a higher purpose. We do them to improve our discernment—that is, adroitness is distinguishing differences or identifying similarities—and to improve our judgment—that is, our confidence in choosing better and worse among alternatives. Life presents us with innumerable objects and situations. We deal with them through discernment and judgment.

The point of improving our discernment and judgment is to live a good a life as we can—a task that is made easier by being able to take account of the objects and situations around us and make confident choices about which are better and more choiceworthy.

If you can’t discern very will the properties of things in the world around you, or if you can’t judge well about what is better and worse, how can you expect anything but random outcomes from your choices in life?

So, liberal education is not primarily about great books or critical thinking. It’s primarily about developing the discernment and judgment to lead the best possible life. And that life, as I said in the previous post, will be an autonomous one in which we use discernment and judgment to determine the laws we will set for ourselves.

Now, contemporary approaches to higher education tend to center on so-called “core competencies,” intellectual skills such as written and oral communication, quantitative reasoning, scientific reasoning, information literacy, and critical thinking.

But these skills are not themselves capable of improving discernment and judgment. How may effective writers and compelling speakers, how many brilliant mathematicians and scientists, how many erudite scholars and precise logicians have neither the discernment or judgment to make wise choices outside of their area of expertise? And yet, most of life lies outside our areas of expertise.

The truth is that all these intellectual skills are not goals in themselves. They are means by which we attain to the higher aim of improving discernment and judgment. By practicing them, we hope to exercise our faculties of discernment and judgment so that we can develop them to the point of making good choices in life generally.

But, it turns out, there is another element that must come into play if we are to attain the discernment and judgment we need. In some ways, this element is even more important that the intellectual skills.

It’s imagination.

More about this in the next post.
Why we all need liberal education

Why we all need liberal education

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Every human being deserves to be autonomous.

Americans, in particular, should agree with this sentiment, because it follows from one of the three unalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence—the right to liberty. It would make no sense to have liberty if we could not direct our own actions. And that is the essence of autonomy—prescribing laws to ourselves to govern our own actions.

Yet human beings are not born free or autonomous. We come into the world full of desires and, at first, our desires control us. It is only much later that freedom becomes possible. When we begin to resist our desires, we acquire options for the first time. And freedom—the ability to choose among options without constraint—arises at the same moment. This first freedom is the seed of autonomy.

But freedom does not spontaneously grow into autonomy. A steady supply of learning must be added. Which choices work out well, which badly? Are there signs or patterns that identify good and bad choices? Is it possible than a bad choice in one area of life may be a good one in another area?

Only by confronting these and hundreds of similar questions do we develop enough control over our freedom and enough consistency of character to begin establishing laws for ourselves. Those who never experience this sort of learning use their freedom capriciously, haphazardly. They are free but not autonomous because they have no laws to direct their choices.

If we had to learn everything on our own, we probably wouldn’t live long enough to become autonomous. So, since long before the first historical records, human beings have speeded up the process through education, which shares out the labor of learning among a community of learners.

Now, education can be used to attain all sorts of aims other than autonomy. By joining educational communities you can learn how to master a skill, how to survive in a hostile environment, how to become wealthy. But learning to be autonomous is the highest possible aim, one which both supersedes and encompasses all other aims. It puts us in control of our lives and gives us the authority to decide which other aims are worth pursuing.

Education for autonomy is called “liberal education.” The “liberal” means “pertaining to freedom.” Autonomy is the highest degree of freedom that human beings can attain. And the “liberal arts” are not, as many seem to believe, useless and impractical subjects. They are the skills that pertain to the best use of freedom, the studies that move us forward on the path toward autonomy. That makes them more practical by far than other arts that aim at lower degrees of utility.

It is sometimes said that liberal education is not for everyone, that some people are better off with job training that will enable them to make a living. It is also said increasingly that liberal education is not for anyone, that education only makes sense as an investment in establishing a remunerative career.

Both of these beliefs are wrong. Liberal education, which helps us make the best use of our freedom, is for everyone in a way that job training can never be.

Getting a job, no matter how lucrative, does not make you autonomous. On the contrary, it makes you subservient to your employer in ways you may not have bargained for. But becoming autonomous makes any job you take part of your life-plan. You decide how much of your existence you are willing to give over to making a living. You decide when or whether to get a new job if your old one stops suiting you. You decide how making a living fits in with your conception of making a life worth living. We all need the sort of liberal education that can help us achieve this level of control over our own lives.

Because every human being deserves to be autonomous.