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Consider Miles Davis, horn held high, sculpting a powerful musical statement full of tonal patterns, inside jokes, and thrilling climactic phrases – all on the fly. Or think of a comedy troupe riffing on a couple of cues from the audience until the whole room is erupting with laughter. Or maybe it's a team of software engineers brainstorming their way to the next Google, or the Einsteins of the world code-cracking the mysteries of nature. Maybe it's simply a child playing with her toys. What do all of these activities share? With wisdom, humour, and joy, philosopher Stephen T. Asma answers that question in this book: imagination. And from there he takes us on an extraordinary tour of the human creative spirit.
Guided by neuroscience, animal behaviour, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look right at the enigmatic but powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity – the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How is it, he asks, that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience and help us make something completely new?
And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society? As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by "what-ifs", "almosts", and "maybes", an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds.
Stephen T. Asma is Distinguished Scholar and professor of philosophy in the Department of Humanities as well as Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of numerous books, including Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, The Gods Drink Whiskey, On Monsters, and Against Fairness, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.
"This is a terrific book. It is a grand, expansive journey through the central role of improvisation and imagination in everything we experience, think, and do. Asma shows how our marvelous capacity for improvisation – from knapping flint to childhood play to dancing to musical performance to creative science, philosophy, and art – is grounded in our embodied capacities for perception, bodily movement, emotion, and imagination. To support and develop his comprehensive analysis of how we humans came to be improvisers and how this developed into our most impressive creative activities, Asma draws masterfully on anthropology, genetics, biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and embodied cognition studies."
– Mark Johnson, author of Morality for Humans
"This book is appealing in that it does not link creativity with marketing or business innovation, as is currently fashionable, but rather with the nature of artistic endeavor itself and with our understanding of how the mind works. Asma combines his expertise as a jazz performer and philosopher to argue that mental activity, especially in improvisation, is not a matter of symbolic processing, but is rather a matter of emotional reaction and sensory experience. Asma accessibly places familiar arguments from cognitive science within the context of artistic creativity."
– Michael Corballis, author of The Truth about Language: What It Is and Where It Came From
