Seeking What Is Good in Wonder

Depending on the company they keep, some wonders are respectable and others disreputable; but none [today] threatens the order of nature and society. Scientists have yet to explain many, perhaps most, wonders, but they subscribe to an ontology guaranteeing that all are in principle explicable. If the first criterion for distinguishing respectable from disreputable marvels is whether they are real, the second is whether there are explanations to reassure us that the apparent exceptions only conform to nature's laws. In practice, the second criterion often decides the first.

— LORRAINE DASTON AND KATHARINE PARK, WONDERS AND THE ORDER OF NATURE

WONDER AND ITS COGNATE TERMS

What does it mean to wonder? Wonder is almost routinely exalted as a laudable state, but perhaps not all expressions of it deserve to be celebrated. Wonder seems to exist at the border of sensation and thought, aesthetics and science. It has the power to transfix as well as transport us. It is characterized both as a childlike capacity, closely aligned with sensory and emotional engagement, and as a kind of scientific virtue. Wonder is both the province of the wide-eyed child in the woods and the wild-eyed scientist in the lab. Aristotle considered wonder to be the beginning of philosophy, and René Descartes famously categorized wonder as the first of the passions, an intellectual passion that orients us toward understanding the object of wonder. Yet, while wonder is often assumed to hold a privileged place in the production of scientific and philosophical knowledge, it is a deeply ambiguous place as well. In romance languages, wonder's etymological origins show connections to an Indo-European word for "smile," but this is not the case in German and English, where wonder (Wunder) may be traceable to wound — a tear in the fabric of the ordinary, an "uncanny opening." Wonder, typically expressed as awe, may border on terror or horror in the presence of something that overwhelms the mind with its sheer enormity or power. Wonder in the form of terrifying awe is often associated with encountering something holy or otherworldly, as with God's interrogation of Job from the whirlwind. The ambivalence or outright fear evoked by wonder may be met with a desire to control and domesticate the world, to "systematically insulate it against the intrusion of strangeness." Wonder's terrifying and even painful elements are captured in the more secular category of the sublime. Often distinguished from the beautiful, which connotes something more pleasing than threatening to the mind or the senses, the sublime may be experienced in the presence of nonsupernatural but vast and imposing or powerful phenomena, such as high mountains or a violent, stormy sea.

Yet another distinction emerges between wonder and wonders. The former refers to an experience or response and the latter designates objects themselves, such as odd or interesting items, novelties and marvels housed (as they often were in early modern Europe) in curio cabinets. A catalogue of wonders might include a two-headed dog or a lodestone. Historically, the category of wonders has merged the sacred with the secular, including such phenomena as "plants, animals, and minerals; specific events and exotic places; miracles and natural phenomena; the distant and the local; the threatening and the benign." Although contemporary discussions tend to focus more on wonder than wonders, this distinction helps us to appreciate that, in judging wonder's appropriateness or ethical value, we need to attend both to its forms of expression and to its objects.

That wonder and its associated terms can align with such seemingly disparate experiences, ranging from childlike delight to profound destabilization and even pain and death — a "cognitive crucifixion" — suggests its unusual status among our repertoire of responses to the world. Wonder, in its frequent association with scale, may foster a sense of our own smallness or insignificance in relation to its objects, perhaps even a sensed loss of the self. That experience may produce either fear or a more uplifting sense of awe or exhilaration — depending upon how one feels about self-loss! The experience of loss of self, of letting go of ego-dominated rationality, is one of the links between wondering responses and experiences often termed religious, as theorists such as William James have noted. In such moments of profound receptivity to the unexpected, we may sense our connection to something that is ontologically or spiritually more (as James termed it) than what is given in our daily experience of the world or the world as filtered through familiar categories of knowledge. Loss or decentering of the self, and dispositions that flow from such decentering, can have important ethical value: "openness, availability, epistemological humility in the face of the mystery of being, and the ability to admire and be grateful." On the other hand, as I will argue, wonder that manifests as blunt and irreverent curiosity, or that follows in curiosity's wake as a form of admiration at our knowledge, may have the opposite potential of puffing us up with pride. How can we make sense of the fact that wonder variously engenders or accompanies a salutary sense of smallness and humility, as well as aggrandizes admiration of our own feats?

Wonder is a tapestry rich with meanings, but its very richness makes it easy to pull out particular strands while ignoring others. I want to focus critical attention on a few, very particular meanings of wonder that have often been isolated from their broader context. These include: wonder assumed to be (primarily) a function of ignorance; wonder as the force that drives ongoing discovery and successive puzzle-solving — what I call "serial wonder"; and wonder characterized by admiration or pride at that which is assimilated and known. These strands, which are often intertwined in modern discourse on wonder, actually represent only a small portion of all that wonder has signified, in theology, philosophy, and science, over a span of many centuries. Wonder — properly understood — is not merely an ephemeral response to what is poorly grasped or appears novel; it persists even after ignorance is erased or newness wears off. A strong association of wonder with successive puzzle-solving imputes motives to wonder that more properly belong to curiosity (some of those motives prove problematic, as I will argue). To wonder at the vast store of human knowledge may be understandable, but this orientation effectively strips wonder of much of its ethical potential and admirable dimensions. The stripping away of wonder's virtues also makes wonder the...