issue 105

桌子上的梨

It is the popular wisdom that imagination plays a fundamental role in our daily life, after all, imagination is exerting profound impact on the way we live, work, play and study. However, when it comes to people who lack experience are freer to imagine, I suspect the directness and effectiveness of the path. Moreover, I would like to allocate some bets on several other approaches.

In the first place, imagination profits people the world over. Consider the artists exploring the internal sources of human expressiveness which was free of characterization, storytelling, and the theatrical exhibition of skills. Their free imagination serves to lift the human spirit and to put us more in touch with our feelings, foibles, and fate—in short, with our humanity. Or consider technician create automatic machines even unthinkable before-- nowadays, with a click on the mouse, we can connect with every corner in the world. Just imagine without the imagination and other creative thinking, how can we achieve these accomplishments.

However, these cases don't indicate the fact that imagination is more important than experience especially when considering the world we living in is so complicated that we can't understand it all by ourselves. Admit it or not, we are all travelers in time who constantly draw on our past individual experiences in judging the present; and if we haven't individually experienced anything similar to the present situation that we are in, we draw on our collective memory--the very thing that we call history. And since we view present occurrences from this time perspective, the past decisions and actions also set precedent for our future options and precautions. This is exact where the free thinking comes from. From these, we learned how to organize our behaviors and handle the difficulties we have met.



Yet, experience has other lessons to offer us as well. It helps us formulate informed values and ideals for ourselves, inspires us to great achievements, points out mistakes to avoid, and helps us appreciate our cultural heritage. On the contrary, by discarding the experience have come along with some effects we are not intended or hoped for. After all, human's progress means a continuous accumulation of experience, and without these experiences we can never form informed imagination.



The vital judgment, in my perspective, should be based on a case-by-case analysis. When it comes to the realms of art, imagination can be more important than experience. When speaking of communication or technology and other realms of social activity, experience can be more important in providing pragmatic guidance. If we can find approaches both generate innovation while meet the need of avoiding risk we will have found a way to reduce debate on this issue. This task is open-ended, it can never be finished. But a conscious effort to surmount these difficulties will definitely be helpful.

竹林中人

LZ的写作形式慢慢固定了，继续努力