Science and wonder

During interviews and conversations with faculty members over the years, I've heard scientists, historians and artists all mention this same subject: the importance of wonder and curiosity to their disciplines. While some lament the decreasing capacity of wonder in many students today, I can't help but wonder whether it may have, down through the ages, always have seemed like this. Whatever the case may be, most agree that one of their unwritten duties is to help unlock the wonder in their students. As this essay makes clear, it is one of the most important elements to living an examined life:

Undisciplined wonder was thought to induce stupefaction. Descartes distinguished useful wonder (admiration) from useless wonder (astonishment, literally a “turning to stone” that “makes the whole body remain immobile like a statue”). Useful wonder focused the attention; it was, Descartes said, “a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider alternatively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary”. If the “new philosophers” of the 17th century conceded wonder at all, it was as a source of admiration, not debilitating fear. The Northern Lights might seem “frightful” to the “vulgar Beholder”, wrote Edmond Halley, but to him they would be “a most agreeable and wish’d for Spectacle”.

Others shifted wonder to the far side of curiosity – something that emerges only after the dour slog of study. In this way, wonder could be channelled dutifully away from the phenomenon and turned into esteem for God’s works. “Wonder was the reward rather than the bait for curiosity,” write Daston and Park, “the fruit rather than the seed.” Only after he had studied the behaviour of ants to understand how elegantly they co-ordinate their affairs did the 17th-century Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam admit to his wonder at how God could have arranged things thus. “Nature is never so wondrous, nor so wondered at, as when she is known,” wrote Bernard Fontenelle, the celebrated secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

There are so many parts to understanding how we put knowledge together and what it equals when we do. The nature of this operation, even the insistence that it is one of net addition and not zero sum, itself underscores the fact that the routes to it are many and varied. But they begin with a brand of curiosity and wonder, deeply connected to us as individuals but also tied to our group affinities. These are the paths to further investigation into who we are collectively and as individuals. Compiling the tools for this kind of investigation is an emersion in the arts, sciences and humanities. Without even one of these, we are missing constituent parts to the mechanism of understanding the world, itself a prerequisite for making it a better place.

Image: Der Paukenspieler (The Drummer Boy) by Paul Klee, 1940.