The rationalism of Rene Descartes built on the assumption that knowledge only develops and is justifiable through rational thought. Everything is based on universal and rationally proven articles of faith, from which basic pattern  the answers to all further questions can be derived. All other sources of knowledge, such as sensory experience, religious revelations or transmissions do not lead to real knowledge. On the contrary: sensory perception is viewed in rationalism as a source of perception which is distinct from reason, which in every case produces undefined and uncertain results. So much for rationalism, which up until today has influenced essential parts of the emergence, editing and assimilation of knowledge.

Yet what is considered knowledge in the curricula of our schools and universities is in large parts rationally proven paper knowledge. And instantaneously obsolete in the moment when it is assimilated into the curriculum, overtaken by even more current, that is to say, the newest knowledge (according to TechCrunch, today we produce as much information and supposed knowledge in two days as the entirety of mankind produced up until 2003). And it gets worse: in part, we don’t know which knowledge is obsolete and which is worth knowing. Because we haven’t learnt to know.

The German word for knowledge, “Wissen”, comes from the Greek IDEIN and from the Latin VIDERE, which in both cases means TO SEE. The German words for idea and vision also come from these roots. Someone who has ideas and vision, who therefore still operates entirely in irrational, non-justifiable territory, has therefore, according to the original definition of knowledge, already intensively begun to know. But: for us, Descartes is still valid. Ideas? Vision? Not justifiable! Be realistic, stick to the facts and the justifiable. And thus rationally transmitted, familiar knowledge often prevents us from developing ideas and visions at all, by cluttering us up with its sheer mass. So that we often abandon knowledge at that exact point, where its actual power unfolds, in favour of knowledge which only actually takes time, energy and nerves.

The Jesuit and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) chose a different way to Descartes. His adage of choice: In uno omnia (in one thing, everything). He studied maths, physics, chemistry, geography, geology, astronomy, biology, medicine, music, languages, philology and history. And in his own very individual way. So his book Magnes (1641), which apparently was to do with magnetism, also dealt with other forms of attraction such as gravity and love (quote: “everything is connected to each other with secret knots”). He developed plans for organs powered by water, climbed Vesuvius in order to study its eruptions, was the first to correctly suspect that plague was caused by microorganisms in the blood, and wrote about China with just as much enthusiasm as he did Egyptian hieroglyphs. And so in his time he became a “one man clearinghouse for intellectual themes”, as the Encyclopedia Britannica describes him.

According to the American historian Paula Findeln, Kircher was “the first scholar with a worldwide reputation”. His reached this significance with a twofold strategy: he took information from his own research and experiments and added information to it which he had collated from his correspondence with over 760 other scientists, physicists and, above all, his fellow Jesuits across the globe. Through this Athanasius Kircher’s knowledge was “from a modern perspective, a mixture of the results of genuine experiments, calculated relationship management, forward-looking intuition, pure speculation and impressive marketing”, as Wikipedia summarises it. For Kircher at any rate, knowledge regularly arose on the basis of intuition and seldom as a detailed knowledge which was carved in stone and proven for all time. So as a Jesuit, he naturally had to represent the Tychonic world model with the Earth at the centre, yet the Copernican model frequently appears in his works. Knowledge was potential, an idea, a comparison, a new approach. But consequently: his contemporary Descartes plainly considered Kircher to be “more of a charlatan than a scholar” who was “possessed of an abnormal faculty of imagination”.

An abnormal imagination? I follow some 200 blogs plus countless amounts of “knowledge” about all possible topics concerning marketing, communication and more every day on the social platforms I use. In doing so I experience these three things over and over again:

1. I will never know everything about a particular topic. Too much new knowledge is added to it daily. And I’m interested in too many topics. So I always take every decision and commit myself to every viewpoint on the basis of insufficient “knowledge”.
2. I can only rarely be certain that the knowledge that I take on in Descartes’ fashion is provable. My knowledge shapes itself in comparison to the various opinions and views of others. And always on a daily basis. New opinions change my view like the colour mosaic pieces in my childhood kaleidoscope, which changed every time I shook it.
3. The stacked up and retained “paper knowledge” always starts to totter especially violently when ideas and visions appeal not only to my rational understanding but also to my sensory imagination.
   

I would be happy to possess the “abnormal faculty of imagination” of Athanasius Kircher, in order to use it to evaluate the incoming knowledge and be able to formulate new insights from out of the crowd and complexity. In times of a surplus of information, and therefore potential knowledge, we need less skill to justify the “excess” rationally as well. Instead we need to establish many more “abnormal imagination” nexuses, in order to let in new experiences and insights on a daily basis and to recognise the value of ideas and visions. Knowledge as a beta-version, constantly subject to the reality test, always ready to correct itself through new insights and to be revised. We need more recognition that imagination is more important than knowledge. Or to put it another way: more Kircher, less Descartes!