Imagination is a theme that, in the course of recent decades, has become more and more the object of discussion, not only in literary and artistic terms, but also in historiographic, scientific and interpretative ones, since it is considered as the true driving force of the journey of humanity. This is the theme addressed in a powerful new book by Francesco Monico.
The author picks up on Jonathan Gottschall’s research on storytelling, in which the human being is conceived of as homo fictus, constructed by imagination, a mode of thought quite different from programming and computation: “Human beings are the only animals that create stories about themselves and their surroundings, and believe them” (p. 227).
It is precisely to imagination that we owe the idea of progress, understood as universal growth to be imposed on the whole of humanity, without considering its historically situated origin: “As Lev Tolstoy wisely wrote: ‘We have noticed the law of progress in the duchy of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with its three thousand inhabitants’” (p.62).
This imaginative mode prescinds from the earth, from the fragile truth that constitutes us as living beings and that ends up turning against the project itself, with catastrophic consequences.
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© Union of Catholic Asian News
2023
