. Stay weird

Lastly, we need to accept the fundamental trippy weirdness of imagination, the sheer play of it, and not always reduce it to functional adaptation. There must be room for the surreal, the fantastic, the idealistic and even the nonsensical. Even in the full bloom of the scientific revolution, thinkers of all stripes – Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James and the pataphysical shaman Alfred Jarry – called for a reassertion of imagination to the core of human life.

Imaginology must cultivate a certain tolerance for ambiguity. Sense-making emerges out of nonsense, to be blunt. We need to accept stages of confusion as potentially enjoyable, playful, resources. William James called this generative grey area between sense and nonsense the ‘unclassified residuum’ – anomalous stuff that doesn’t fit in anywhere. Accepting this liminal zone of ambiguity and possibility is important for epistemic virtues such as open-mindedness and humility, providing cognitive and cultural resources for generating novel ideas and behaviours.

It’s time to give imagination its due as a core cognitive power, epistemic workhorse, therapeutic wellspring and maker of adventures. In the end, the institutionalised ‘chasm’ between forms of education is entirely of our own making and, ironically, a creation of our outdated imaginations. The yawning gulf resembles the fictional schism of the human into dualistic parts.

The chasm metaphor is no longer helpful as we consider new forms of education, but geological imagery is still valuable. Consider a different metaphor: imagination as the ‘plate tectonics’ of mind and culture. From this submerged mythopoetic perspective, the divisions between traditional disciplines shrink. Fractured territories on either side of a great divide become mere continents riding on the hidden motions of creativity below. Imaginology beckons us deeper.

Stephen T Asma • Why we need a new kind of education: Imagination Studies | Aeon Essays