Between comprehensive imagination and compassionate imagination. Notes for a pedagogy

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Belén Altuna
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Belén Altuna
Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

The text asks about the possible functions of imagination in the ethical-political sphere and argues in favour of the pedagogical promotion of two different, albeit strongly related, forms of imagination: the comprehensive imagination, which involves developing “a broad way of thinking”, as Hannah Arendt characterises it, and the compassionate imagination, which involves an enhancement of not only the cognitive aspects of this faculty but also of the affective and empathic ones, as Martin Hoffman stresses. Finally, we review some authors and pedagogical traditions that have promoted one of these forms of imagination or, even better, a combination of both. We are talking about educational training that aims to broaden the mind and cultivate humanity, helping to form critical citizens committed to the search for fairer and more equitable forms of coexistence.

Keywords
imagination, sympathy, perspective-taking, mental representation

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How to Cite
Altuna, Belén. “Between comprehensive imagination and compassionate imagination. Notes for a pedagogy”. Artnodes, no. 29, pp. 1-9, doi:10.7238/artnodes.v0i29.393021.
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(c) Belén Altuna, 2022


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Author Biography

Belén Altuna, Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

Doctor of Philosophy and teacher of Ethics and Political philosophy in the Faculty of Education, Philosophy and Anthropology from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), in Donostia-San Sebastián. Among her published works are the books Euskaldun fededun. Euskaldun ona izateko modu baten historia (Alberdania, 2003; in Spanish El buen vasco. La tradición ‘Euskaldun fededun’, Hiria, 2012) and Una historia moral del rostro (Pre-Textos, 2010), as well as numerous articles.  After the ethics and anthropology of the face and the otherness developed in the latter book, inspired among other things by the school of thought of Emmanuel Lévinas and Paul Ricoeur, her research has aimed to go into depth on some of the mechanisms that operate in a true “banality of evil”: the biases and limitations of our empathic capacity, the difficulties we face when putting ourselves in others’ shoes, and the various forms of moral bias. Faced with this, she has studied the ways in which an ethical imagination could be driven at the level of the challenges of our time, tied to a principle of responsibility which has been appropriately expanded, which she will pick up in a book soon to be published.

References

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