To train the imagination, turn to the liberal arts

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.