Uncertainty Demands Imagination

We will not think or argue our way out of modern culture’s pessimism. We will have to imagine our way out. We live, as Robert Graves said, in a web of language. The bigger our web, the bigger our world. In the philosopher Richard Rorty’s words (paraphrasing Percy Shelley), imagination sets the bounds of thought: imagination breaks the path that rea... See more

In our society, the spaces for adults to play are mostly constrained, for example, to sports, or going to the pub. And opportunities to live a life of imagination are reserved for exceptionally privileged people, like designers, actors, artists and film directors. This lack of imagination in our lives is an existential risk for society and humanity... See more

The world into which we are born was shaped by a capacity to generate the new through billions of years of evolution. Now, for us, a comparable capacity to imagine, together, is a vital aspect of what it means to be free and alive. Imagination liberates us from the illusion that the way the world is now is the only way it can be. In this sense, ima

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If artists have the capacity to make work that defies time, it is because instead of trying to force-fit a predetermined idea of the future, they have learned to live productively with ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration. Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes.

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Why are we so incapable of coming together to create, sustain and carry out a vision in which we capably address global crises and enjoy our lives more in the process? It seems as though we are becoming less imaginative at the very time in history when we need to be at our most imaginative. Our imagination muscle should be taut and well exercised;

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