Why imagination is superior to specialized knowledge
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.