Why Imagination is not Innovation (and a Wild Meandering)!

In 1932, Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, an Indian philosopher who served as the second president of India from 1962 to 1967, published a chapter on intuition, in “An idealist view of Life.” It’s both enlightening and personally validating. In this essay, though at times dismissing imagination as ‘fancy,’ as in unproductive folly, he also offers this definition: “By imagination we give shape to individual things; by thought we relate images in universal concepts.”

In his view, thoughts are not real, nor is intellectual reason. Thoughts are how we organize reality. Intuition is how we feel reality, how we experience it. Intuition is. It just is.

Innovation, in common practice, is a largely intellectual pursuit. Insights emerge through a series of steps and aren’t so much insight as new ideas. These new ideas are new as compared to older, existing ideas. Innovation has become synonymous with “new.” From Merriam-Webster: “a new idea, device, or method,” and to innovate is “the act or process of introducing new ideas, devices, or methods.”

Imagination, on the other hand, is “giving shape.”

Imagination is “the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality.” (Merriam-Webster). That feels different than a new idea. Imagination is also intuitive. It’s true, there can be steps. I’ve already outlined some and will continue to create more, hopefully with the participation of other creators. But those steps rely heavily on our ability to intuit and draw connections across what could appear on the surface as random. It’s far more creative, and unique, than innovation.

Imagination is being. Innovation is a description of being.

Imagination is an act and it is an art. Innovation is a series of thoughts and it is a science.

“Any two men may hit on the same laws of science….no two men can ever produce the same work of art…” argues Radhakrishnan. Further he asserts that art, like intuition, is real, reality. It is an experience. It is being. Thinking is not ‘the thing’ it is the thought about the thing. Intuition is the thing. Or at least closer. The making of art, not its interpretation, is the thing. And imagination, the act of imagining, is also the thing. By this logic, imagination is reality, but “never before wholly perceived.”

This leads to a much-needed rabbit hole. If imagination is real, but never-before perceived, then imagination is a potential gateway to unlocking our perception of what I (and many others) understand as infinite simultaneous realities. Some might call this The Metaverse. I like DC comics version of the Metaverse as “a central version of reality which influences other versions and alternate timelines.” Octavia Butler creates a version of this in The Patternist series, where time is elastic and experience is multidimensional in “The Pattern.” Buddhists might call it bodhi, or enlightenment. The Hindu might call it Anubhavah, “direct cognition…. ecstatic experience of the divine” (Wikipedia). It’s positively quantum! [this paragraph needs to be its own essay]

Are you still with me?

It comes down to this: imagination is perception, a wholly new one, of an infinite reality that already exists. And why is this so important right now? We stand at the doorway of powerful choices. If you could open a door to any new reality beyond the previously imagined, might you cool the planet, undo the plastic, bring on the REPAIRations (Lauren Hood, Afro Urbanist), and ensure a life post scarcity, post prosperity even, to the year 2400 where we exist only to better ourselves? https://youtu.be/XQQYbKT_rMg

Thoughts?