Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision

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Conceptual or Abstract thinking refers to an individual’s ability to form thoughts about the information presented to them using complex concepts and ideas. Abstract thinking is a critical aspect of social interactions and communication as it allows individuals to study non-verbal cues, comprehend humour, analogies and other symbolic representations. The ability to think in this manner usually develops in late childhood and adolescence. Abstract thinkers also perform well on standardised intelligence tests. CNS: While you were the President of the Juilliard School, you reiterated the importance of humanities studies for music students, encouraging them to read extensively. Why do you regard humanities studies crucial to music students? Does it have anything to do with your own musical path growth? Grandin proposes imagining a church steeple. Verbal people, she finds, often make a hash of this task, conjuring something like “two vague lines in an inverted V,” almost as though they’ve never seen a steeple before. Object visualizers, by contrast, describe specific steeples that they’ve observed on actual churches: they “might as well be staring at a photograph or photorealistic drawing” in their minds. Meanwhile, the spatial visualizers picture a kind of perfect but abstract steeple—“a generic New England-style steeple, an image they piece together from churches they’ve seen.” They have noticed patterns among church steeples, and they imagine the pattern, rather than any particular instance of it.

Perhaps that thought arose last week as you watched the cringe-worthy presidential debate, which pundits have called "a disgrace" and "an embarrassment for the ages." Our public discourse has been in decline for so long that it was bound to come to this, right? The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake, by Steven Novella What is striking in such works that have drawn inspiration from Imagined Communities is which elements have captured the attention of historians and inspired their subsequent studies—and which have not. Interestingly, the main features of Anderson’s historical explanation for the origins and spread of nationalism—the existence of sacred script communities, divine monarchs, cosmological time, and their erosion by print capitalism—do not appear to have influenced most of the historiography on nationalism in significant ways. 49 Rather, it is Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community,” and its reorientation of our analytical gaze toward the role of human cognition in the emergence of nationalism, that has attracted by far the most attention among historians. In this sense, it was Anderson’s conceptual originality and evocative theoretical formulations, rather than his historical arguments, that ultimately influenced the historiography of nationalism in significant ways in the decades following the 1983 publication of Imagined Communities.Answers to these questions can be pursued through the telling of a set of interconnected stories. The first is the story of Anderson himself—who he was as a scholar and how the world in which he lived shaped his unique approach to nationalism. The second is the story of the reaction to his book in the immediate aftermath of its publication, and the subsequent ways in which historians derived inspiration from his work. The third and final story concerns the lasting contribution of Imagined Communities. Today, more than three decades after its publication, it would seem that much of Anderson’s historical explanation for the origins and spread of nationalism has had its day. Many scholars, including historians, have engaged with his arguments about the importance of linguistic transformations, the rise in dissemination of printed materials, and changing perceptions of time in making it possible for people to imagine themselves as belonging to “nations.” But today, the lasting contribution of Imagined Communities does not seem to be its specific historical explanation for the origin and spread of nationalism; rather, it is Anderson’s reorientation of his readers’ analytical gaze away from focusing largely on ideology, elites, and socioeconomic change, and toward cognitive processes of nationalism. Anderson provided historians of nationalism with a fresh sense of processual verbs for examining ways of thinking that he believed were central to a sense of “nation-ness”—imagining, restoring, remembering, dreaming. In so doing, he provided those seeking to tell histories of nationalism with a new conceptual vocabulary to excavate and explain human agency, and specifically the role of the imagination, in the making of nationalism into a real political force. It is this contribution—more than any of the specific parts of his historical explanation for nationalism—that gave, and continues to give, his short book such tremendous and long-lasting influence.

President Emeritus Joseph W. Polisi led The Juilliard School for thirty-four years (1984–2018), the longest presidential term in the history of the school. In 2015, The Juilliard School announced the establishment of its first overseas campus in Tianjin. In 2018, Dr. Polisi became the chief China officer of Tianjin Juilliard.

His book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, foreshadowed his pragmatic philosophy. In it, he argues that religious experiences are human experiences and discusses the possible causes of mystical events. His long-outdated text Principles of Psychology was immensely popular and influential in shaping early American psychology. When measuring by citations, James was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. For my own education, I started studying music at a very early age but was also very interested in history and international affairs, and actually was an undergraduate major in political science, and received a master's degree in international relations. I truly believe that those studies and the intellectual discipline that was required to complete my course of study, enhanced my abilities as a performing musician and an educational administrator. Through a broad understanding of the world, young musicians will better understand their ability to positively influence our global culture through their artistry, communicating the very best human values that are embodied in their music. You can’t satisfy everybody; especially if there are those who will be dissatisfied unless not everybody is satisfied. – Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Joseph W. Polisi: There is no question that China is already a major international center for the teaching and performance of Western classical music, and this phenomenon will only grow in the time ahead. I have always seen the Tianjin Juilliard School as a catalyst to develop new educational and performing initiatives in China and beyond. Tianjin Juilliard School is well-positioned to function in this way, and we look forward to substantive interaction with our sister Conservatory's in China, in East Asia, and around the world. Divergent and convergent thinking are both considered to be types of creative thinking which involve finding solutions to problems by exploring a vast array of ideas and possibilities. Whitman reinvents American poetry in this peerless self-performance, finding cadences that seem utterly his own yet somehow keyed to the energy and rhythms of a young nation waking to its own voice and vision. He calls to every poet after him, such as Ezra Pound, who notes in “A Pact” that Whitman “broke the new wood.” By using this service, you agree that you will only keep content for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services Despite Anderson’s reluctance to use his knowledge of nationalism to help save the supposedly imperiled field of Soviet studies, Imagined Communities continued to gain in influence throughout the 1990s. This was due in part to some aspects of the book that became widely referential and inspirational for many historians of nationalism.

The three primary elements of thought are – concepts, signs/symbols, and brain functions. Concepts are ideas and notions that arise in the mind when we are presented with objects or information. For example, if we were to hear the word “dog”, we would not only think of the animal but also the concepts that the animal represents (loyalty, protection, etc.). Signs and symbols also represent and often substitute actual objects or ideas. A red traffic signal, a danger sign, songs, flags, etc. act as signs/symbols that convey information to our brains. Lastly, and most importantly, the brain is the organ that performs the act of thinking. Objects, language, signs and symbols in our environment, once registered by our sensory organs, are interpreted in the brain to create thoughts. In reflective thinking, we reflect upon past experiences and learn from them. For example, if an individual left their house at 9 am to go catch a bus but missed their bus, they would perhaps consider leaving home five or ten minutes earlier the next time. Critical Thinking Anderson’s influence on how historians wrote about nationalism was not limited to those writing about Europe. Historians of East Asia, such as Prasenjit Duara, were inspired by Anderson’s concept of the “imagined community.” In his seminal 1995 study Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Duara drew on Anderson’s work in examining the ways in which historical actors engaged in imagining themselves as belonging to a national community. But his study of this non-European case, while appreciating the notion of the “imagined community,” also challenged Anderson’s empirical arguments in various ways, especially by calling into question what he saw as Anderson’s overly strong portrayal of a modern versus premodern polarity in explaining the development of nationalism. 48