Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition

One The Cultivation of the Imagination

B { 1 } It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing them and tending them as I would flowers in my garden. —Charles Sanders Peirce (1893) One The Cultivation of the Imagination The Imaginative Imperative For the two children, the season began as a wild dash—a race against the length of summer days. But by mid-August, the days proved too long and hot for their short attention spans. The unconstrained freedom of vacation exhausted itself or, more accurately and more ironically, exposed itself as a type of aimless discontent. Freedom from chores, school, and responsibility revealed itself as boredom to me and my brother on a humid afternoon. The toys and blocks that had once riveted our attention lay thrown and neglected about the playroom. Haphazardly discarded games no longer occupied our full attention. Surrounded by a chaos of playthings, my brother and I sat bickering in the middle of the room. At least bickering gave us something to do. My mother had been listening to us for some time from the garden. The injunction that came to us through the back window was as simple as it was emphatic: “Boys! Stop Squabbling! Be Imaginative!” 2 The Cultivation of the Imagination Being imaginative is no simple matter for two tired youngsters. More often than not, we needed a bit of encouragement. My brother and I had contented ourselves with our discontent, objecting to any force that might jostle us out of the odd comfort of bickering. Encouragement came in the form of an order. Get up off the ground, pick up our blocks and games, and come outside to help in the garden. If being imaginative meant helping in the garden, my brother and I wanted no part in it. How could imagination play freely if it was forced to help with mundane chores? Gardening, however, if done properly, is an engaging activity, and our reluctance was short-lived. It is, after all, difficult to be reluctantly imaginative. Planting a bed is a type of play that rarely grows old. After a short tutorial in gardening etiquette, my mother set us free on a small plot. We were, however, not wholly free, at least not in the negative sense of being free from school or free from chores. This gardening may have been free play, but it was also serious business that deserved our full attention. In being imaginative, my brother and I came to understand the rules of play, the guidelines that determined the arrangement of shrubs and hosta, as they emerged unexpectedly in the interaction with a variety of plants and in a particular garden. This variety was not embodied in the random scattering of discarded toys or blocks but rather in the gathering together of various plants into the felt harmony of a well-planted garden. Even youngsters can learn that such a novel but harmonious gathering is the meaning of being imaginative. I had not yet read John Dewey’s Art as Experience, of course. But I did in a certain intuitive way understand that the imagination is a way of seeing and feeling things as they compose an integral whole. It is the large and general blending of interests at the point where the mind comes in contact with the world. When old and familiar things are made new in experience there is imagination. The free play of growth and cultivation is a process that involves a child even against his will. Being imaginative means getting your hands dirty. Really dirty. After a stint in the yard, my mother would joke that it was difficult to see where the dirt ended and the skin began. In truth, such distinctions—between the human and the natural—are difficult to make in the midst of imaginative planting. It is here that we get at least a The Cultivation of the Imagination 3 vague sense of the issues that will emerge over the course of this relatively thin book. In its everyday use, the imagination is understood as a creative power—perhaps the creative power—by which human beings get on with the meaningful business of living. It is the imagination that allows us to escape the mediocrity of our daily lives, to transcend the self-imposed boundaries—conceptual, personal, and social—that limit our growth. It is the imagination...