Philosophy Is Born in Wonder
Philosophers like to see themselves as dispassionate critical thinkers. Yet, they can and do get carried away, becoming intensely focused to the point of obsession on a philosophical idea or work. Take Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), who at the age of twenty-six happened to pick up René Descartes’s posthumously published Traité de l’homme (Treatise on Man, an account of human physiology) in a Paris bookstall. Malebranche, who disliked the Aristotelian scholasticism he had been taught, found Descartes exhilarating. So head-over-heels was he that “the joy of learning such a great number of new discoveries caused palpitations of the heart that were so severe, that he had to stop reading regularly in order to breathe more easily.”
Philosophy is born in wonder, but philosophical theories can also themselves become a source of wonder. They do so by helping us see the world and what we believed we knew with different eyes. They give us a sense of firstness: namely, of seeing the familiar as wondrous or strange, as if we were encountering it for the first time. We get this sense of firstness in mundane situations, such as when a common word suddenly sounds bizarre, or a common sight suddenly appears alien. Some philosophers cultivate this firstness by encouraging us to consider the weirdness of situations we rarely pause to reflect on. Take David Hume’s case of the billiard balls. When you see a ball roll in a straight path toward another, you assume that it will strike that ball, and you infer that the first ball causes the other one to roll. But without having experienced similar collisions, you would not be able to predict this out[1]come. Hume’s example suggests that causation is not something you transparently observe. Rather, all you see is a ball strike another ball, followed by movement of the struck ball. You infer, through experience, that one is the cause and the other the effect.
Other philosophers wonder at social conventions. Although our conventions and institutions seem like they’re set in stone, in fact they are not, and we have the power to change them. We see this clearly in contemporary philosophy of sex, gender, and race, but also in older works. The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (ca. 369–286 BCE) was sitting fishing when two state officials from the kingdom of Chu came to offer him a prestigious position as chief administrator. Without turning around, he said,
I have heard that in Chu there is a sacred tortoise which died three thousand years ago. The ruler keeps it covered with a cloth in a hamper in his ancestral temple. What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated, or to live and keep on dragging its tail over the mud?
The officials agreed it would rather be alive, so Zhuangzi concluded, “Go your ways. I will keep on dragging my tail over the mud.” This is a startling response. For readers at the time, as now, turning down a cushy position like this, which comes with wealth and honor, would be virtually inconceivable. Zhuangzi evokes a sense of wonder and unfamiliarity by likening that position to being a desiccated tortoise carcass stored away in a box.
Although the ideas that interest philosophers don’t often keep laypeople awake at night, everyone, regardless of their social class or education, has moments of quiet reflection and wonder: for example, we wonder about the amazing series of coincidences that led to us being born, whether there is life after death, or whether God exists. In that sense, we are all born philosophers. Ancient Greek philosophers claimed that philosophy begins in wonder. In the ancient Greek cultural context, philosophy had a much broader scope than it has in contemporary academia. It encompassed fields of study that now have their own dedicated scientific disciplines, such as biology, astronomy, and psychology. Philosophy sought answers to questions such as, Why do our molars seem shaped for grinding food and our incisors for cutting it? How did the universe originate? What’s a comet? How does the eye work? What are the basic human emotions?
The intimate connection between wonder and philosophy is the focus of this chapter. In particular, I investigate the idea that wonder is a motivating passion that urges us to do philosophy, in both its ancient and its modern sense. As we’ll see, especially since the early modern period (since the late sixteenth century), philosophers have employed an increasingly rich and nuanced vocabulary to think about wonder, distinguishing different kinds of wonder, and differentiating wonder from awe. In earlier sources, awe and wonder were denoted by the same words, including thaumazein in Greek and admiratio in Latin. The historical context is important to understand their continued role in philosophy. With this in mind, I present a bird’s eye view of the precursors to our notions of awe and wonder in Western philosophy through works by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Adam Smith.
Thaumazein and admiratio in Ancient Greek and Medieval Philosophy
Plato and Aristotle made a connection between wonder and philosophy. The words that translate as wonder or awe are thauma and related concepts such as thaumazôn. As philologist Glen Most observes, in epic ancient Greek literature thauma denotes joyous, overwhelmed surprise. It is closely related to perception. Its etymology likely traces back to the verb theaomai, “to gaze upon” or “contemplate,” originally by an official spectator at religious ceremonies. In epic Greek poetry, “wonder” denotes astonished surprise at an object or a person (often a god), not at an event. Later, the term was generalized to observation of events and contemplation of problems and abstract questions. The valence of thauma is positive: it is the surprise, joy, and admiration we may feel when we are confronted with a specific object or person.
We see a shift in the concept of wonder in Plato’s Theaetetus (written around 369 BCE), a dialogue between the philosopher Socrates, the brilliant young mathematician Theaetetus, and his tutor Theodorus. Their conversation focuses on the question, “What is knowledge?” Socrates avows that he doesn’t know what knowledge is. Perhaps Theaetetus can shed light on the matter? Socrates proposes he will be a midwife, helping Theaetetus give birth to wisdom. Theaetetus ventures some definitions of knowledge, three of which are discussed in detail: knowledge is perception, true judgment, and true judgment with an account. But, as he is apt to do, Socrates presents counterexamples and difficulties for each of these definitions, and the dialogue ends without a satisfactory definition of knowledge.
Early in the dialogue, Theaetetus expresses his feelings of perplexity and physical dizziness as he navigates the barrage of questions and objections Socrates launches:
Theaetetus: Yes, Socrates, and I perpetually wonder—by the gods I do!—how to make sense of it all; sometimes just looking at it makes me literally quite dizzy.
Socrates: My friend, it appears Theodorus’ guess about your nature wasn’t far wrong. This wondering of yours is very much the mark of a philosopher—philosophy starts nowhere else but with wondering [to thaumazein], and the man who made Iris the offspring of Thaumas wasn’t far off with his genealogy.
Here, Plato confirms the epistemic character of wonder. The genealogy Plato refers to is a pseudo-etymology between Thaumas and thauma in Hesiod’s writings. The connection with Iris is somewhat more puzzling, but Most speculates that Iris is the messenger who brings divine announcements to humans. Iris is also the goddess and personification of the rainbow, a meteorological phenomenon that is a frequent source of wonder. As the mediator between gods and humans, she embodies the activity of philosophy itself, for philosophy is our insatiable human desire for a divine wisdom that we can never fully attain but always strive for. It is fitting that this overall dialogue ends in aporia, a state of puzzlement: despite all of Theaetetus’s proposals, we still don’t know what knowledge is.
Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Plato’s student, also saw wonder as central to philosophy, but with an interesting twist. Born in Stagira, northern Greece, to a well-off family, Aristotle believed that the contemplative life was the privilege of a very small, select elite: namely, wealthy, free-born men. Throughout his writings, his contempt for people of lower social class, for slaves, and for women is clear. Yet, in spite of this elitism, Aristotle believed that the drive to philosophize was given to all people, not only to philosophers. In the Metaphysics, he argues that all philosophy comes from a universal desire to know:
It is because of wondering at things [to thaumazein] that humans, both now and at first, began to do philosophy. At the start, they wondered [thaumasantes] at those of the puzzles that were close to hand, then, advancing little by little, they puzzled over greater issues, for example, about the attributes of the moon and about issues concerning the sun and stars, and how the universe comes to be. Someone who puzzles or wonders [thaumazôn], however, thinks himself ignorant (it is because of this, indeed, that the philosopher is in a way a mythlover, since myth is composed of wonders). So if indeed it was because of [a desire] to avoid ignorance that they engaged in philosophy, it is evident that it was because of [a desire] to know that they pursued scientific knowledge, and not for the sake of some sort of utility.
Aristotle connects wonder to a desire to know and ultimately to wisdom (sophia), one of the core topics of the Metaphysics. He is concerned with “first philosophy,” or the most foundational philosophy. We begin by wondering at everyday phenomena and puzzles, such as, “Why did the vase break when I dropped it?” Starting from such simple questions, we move on to ever more perplexing mysteries, including the origin of the universe, a puzzle that has gripped philosophers and scientists to this day.
In Aristotle’s view, wonder lies at the basis not only of science and philosophy, but also of myth. In the ancient Greek context, this connects wonder to poetry, and what we would now call religion (both of these are encapsulated in the concept of myth). The myth-lover is also a lover of wisdom; Aristotle thus connects religion, science, art, and philosophy to our desire to know, which is born out of wonder. While the reasons for which we do all these things cannot be reduced to a single emotion, Aristotle suggests that wonder provides an important impulse. A wonderer realizes they are ignorant, and from this ignorance is born the desire to know. This desire to know gives rise to philosophical ideas, scientific concepts, theological constructs, and story-telling.
Like the ancient Greeks, medieval scholars also had an interest in wonder. Medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum argues that medieval scholars were interested in admiratio (a term that encompasses both awe and wonder). Admiratio is rooted in Aristotle’s idea of wonder as the source of our desire to know. It is subjective and perspectival: late classical thinkers such as Augustine (354–430) and medieval writers such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) realized that a lot of our wonder is born from ignorance about how the world works. The ancient Greek and medieval concept of thaumazein/admiratio provides a unifying framework for science, religion, and art. These are responses to our sense of joyful contemplation of whatever we find unusual, surprising, and astounding. This idea is echoed in the analysis of wonder by Jesse Prinz. Prinz places wonder at the center of human pursuits and argues that “science, religion and art are unified in wonder. Each engages our senses, elicits curiosity and instils reverence. Without wonder, it is hard to believe that we would engage in these distinctively human pursuits.”
Early modern philosophers developed the idea of passions as motivators and devoted some attention to awe and wonder. For early scientists, awe and wonder are closely connected. They helped them to explore the wider vistas they were con[1]fronted with: distant countries, faraway solar systems, and the alien world under the microscope.
Microscopic and Macroscopic Marvels
In 1665, the Royal Society of London published a stunning book, Micrographia. The development of novel instruments such as telescopes and microscopes led to a radical rethinking of what the world is like. Micrographia features over thirty detailed engravings plus descriptions of a wide range of objects under the microscope, including mites, lice, fleas, mold, and urine crystals, thus giving the wealthy broader public a first glimpse into the world of tiny things.
The author, Robert Hooke (1635–1703), was curator of experiments of the Royal Society. Hooke was a talented draughtsman (apprenticed to the painter Peter Lely). He was an early scientist as well as an architect. He designed and constructed both telescopes and microscopes. In its preface, the Micrographia contains a set of instructions for how to build your own microscope, including which lenses to use.
The intricacy of Hooke’s pictures is dazzling. He drew, among other things, a large, fold-out image of a flea, praising its “strength and beauty.” While the microscope could not reveal more about the flea’s strength than people already knew with unaided perception (fleas are fearsome jumpers), its beauty was only now revealed: “the Microscope manifests it to be all over adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable armour, neatly jointed, and beset with multitudes of sharp pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills, or bright conical Steel-bodkins.”
By contrast, human-made objects look surprisingly imperfect under the uncompromising focus of the microscope. The point of a needle is blunt, a razor blade so rough that it “would scarcely have serv’d to cleave wood, much less to have cut off the hair of beards.” Micrographia was among the first scientific bestsellers. Its detailed engravings opened an amazing world to its audience. In the style of cosmographias, books that chart the world in the midst of colonial expansion and discovery by European explorers, Micrographia took the microscope and mapped out the minuscule in our everyday world. It will “make us, with the great Conqueror [Alexander], to be affected that we have not yet overcome one World when there are so many others to be discovered, every considerable improvement of Telescopes or Microscopes producing new Worlds and Terra-Incognita’s to our view.”
Micrographia also opened to its audience an emotional world: one of awe and wonder including that unmistakable sense of horror that often accompanies the sublime. Mites look like terrifying mastodons, mold swells like lush mushrooms. We still feel this way when first looking through a (decent) microscope, if we’re lucky enough to have a well-stocked science lab at school. In his preface, Hooke expressed optimism that humans can overcome their cognitive limitations through instruments such as telescopes and microscopes. As was common at the time, he believed that our senses and reason had been negatively affected by the Fall from the Garden of Eden, as described in Genesis 3. But thanks to our scientific instruments, we could restore what had been lost:
And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way, not only by beholding and contemplating, but by tasting too those fruits of Natural knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.
What Hooke didn’t bargain for is that lenses don’t just improve our vision; they can lead us to rethink who we are, and open worlds we previously weren’t aware of.
During the same era, introduction of telescopes had a similar effect—it expanded people’s vision to get a clearer picture of the solar system and beyond to many more worlds, potentially inhabited by alien life.
The French science popularizer and early Enlightenment thinker Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) explored the implications of the telescope in his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 1686). The book is styled as a novel.
Conversations takes place over five evenings, and records tête-à-têtes between an unnamed philosopher (who is also the narrator) and an uneducated, but intelligent, unnamed Marquise as they stroll through her gardens in the moonlight. The starting point of these conversations is an idle speculation by the philosopher that “every star could be a world. I wouldn’t swear that it’s true, but I think so, because it pleases me to think so.” In the seventeenth century in this context, “world” usually meant “solar system,” as early scientists and philosophers were taking in the full implications of the Copernican revolution.
Telescopes helped to answer questions, but also raised a host of new ones. While they showed Jupiter had moons, they weren’t powerful enough to establish intelligent alien life in our solar system or beyond, nor the existence of exoplanets. The early moderns looked at the moon with yearning—so close, yet so unreachable! Thus, as the philosopher remarks, “All philosophy [. . .] is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight; if you had better eyesight you could see perfectly well whether or not these stars are solar systems, and if you were less curious you wouldn’t care about knowing.” Early modern authors invented fantastical tales of what life on the moon would be like. The astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote a short novel, Somnium (Dream), published posthumously in 1634, which features the Icelandic witch Fiolxhilde and her son Duracotus who visit the moon and its strange realms by communing with daemons. Soon thereafter followed the publications of Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moon (1638) and Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (L’Autre Monde, ou Les États et Empires de la lune) (1657). Cyrano de Bergerac paid some attention to the practicalities of reaching the moon. The narrator (also named Cyrano) makes several attempts to reach the moon, including one by means of bottles of dew strapped to his body, and eventually succeeds with a kind of rocket. So by the time Fontenelle’s Conversations was published, science fiction stories featuring the moon were an established genre in France and elsewhere in Europe.
Fontenelle’s characters spend their second evening discussing the possibility of life on the moon. However, they don’t stop there. The third and fourth evenings’ discussions feature life on the other planets of the solar system. Eventually, during the fifth evening, the characters discuss the possibility of life in other solar systems. This widening of the universe gives rise to a sense of mental vertigo. The Marquise objects,
here is a universe so large that I’m lost, I no longer know where I am, I’m nothing [. . .]. Each star will be the center of a vortex, perhaps as large as ours? All this immense space which holds our Sun and our planets will be merely a small piece of the universe? As many spaces as there are fixed stars? This confounds me—troubles me—terrifies me.
The philosopher replies,
This puts me at my ease. When the sky was only this blue vault, with the stars nailed to it, the universe seemed small and narrow to me; I felt oppressed by it. Now that they’ve given infinitely greater breadth and depth to this vault by dividing it into thousands and thousands of vortices, it seems to me that I breathe more freely, that I’m in a larger air.
This reveals a tension between what psychologists now call negative and positive awe; I will discuss this in the next chapter. The realization that the universe is huge can lead to a sense of self-annihilation and horror, but it can also give a sense of freedom and a cosmopolitan optimism, a sense that we are all interconnected and part of a wondrous universe.
The wonder evoked by this expanding universe at the microscopic and macroscopic level thus leads to self-contemplation. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, one of the central features of awe and wonder is the cognitive need for accommodation, which is the realization that our familiar frameworks and heuristics do not work anymore. In the absence of our usual ways of thinking, we need to rethink our place in the world. In a passage in the Pensées (1670) that discusses these two newly found levels of the universe, scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) reflects on the wonders that telescopes and microscopes reveal, both the vast and the tiny. At first, we’re invited to contemplate the whole of nature, and the limits of what telescopes can show us:
Let the earth seem to him [humanity] like a point in comparison with the vast orbit described by that star. And let him be amazed that this vast orbit is itself but a very small point in comparison with the one described by the stars rolling around the firmament [. . .]. This whole visible world is only an imperceptible trace in the amplitude of nature.
Pascal then invites the reader to consider a mite with its tiny body that shows “incomparably more minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in its veins, humors in this blood, drops in the humors, vapors in these drops.” You can just go on until your thought is exhausted and you can’t imagine anything of an even smaller scale. This might lead you to think the scaling down ends there, but you would be wrong:
I want to make him [humanity] see a new abyss in there. I want to depict for him not just the visible universe, but the immensity of nature we can conceive inside the boundaries of this compact atom. Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; and on this earth animals, and finally mites, where he will find again what he saw before, and find still in the others the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as astonishing in their minuteness as the others are in their extent! [i.e., the universe in its grandeur] For who will not marvel that our body, imperceptible a little while ago in the universe, itself imperceptible inside the totality, should now be a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, with respect to the nothingness beyond our reach?
More recent exercises along these lines are the two documentaries entitled Powers of Ten made by Charles and Ray Eames (from 1968 and 1977; many versions exist online), where you can see a couple having a picnic zoomed in (on the hand of the man, down to molecules and atoms) and zoomed out (to the earth, solar system, Milky Way, and galaxy clusters). We no longer tend to think of the world of tiny things as harboring infinite universes within universes like a series of Russian dolls. Nevertheless, the quantum world is a very strange world indeed.
Pascal uses the sense of vertigo caused by telescopes and microscopes as a rhetorical device. Thinking of the vast and the minute inevitably leads to self-contemplation: “Where do I fit in nature?” The widening scope of the telescopic and microscopic squeezes humanity between two abysses:
Whoever considers himself in this way will be afraid of him[1]self, and, seeing himself supported by the size nature has given him between these two abysses of the infinite and nothingness, he will tremble at these marvels. I believe that, as his curiosity changes into admiration [Fr. admiration, i.e., wonder], he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption. For, in the end, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, an everything compared to the nothing, a midpoint between nothing and everything, infinitely removed from understanding the extremes [. . .]. [What then will he be able to conceive? He is] equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he derives and the infinite in which he is engulfed.
In this passage, Pascal distinguishes between curiosity and wonder (“curiosité se changeant en admiration”) as two distinct intellectual passions: curiosity is a fickle passion of fleeting in[1]terest, wonder a more enduring disposition. We see a similar contrast between curiosity (uniformly negative) and wonder (appropriate under some conditions) in Descartes as well.
Hooke, Fontenelle, and Pascal show the importance of wonder as a starting point for philosophical contemplation for early modern philosophers. Science doesn’t diminish the sense of wonder, but fans its flames, because it inevitably leads us to contemplate ourselves and our place in the world. Early modern authors also saw wonder as a passion that can be stirred and evoked in a wide range of settings. We see it in popularizing science, as written by Hooke and Fontenelle, but also in theater and opera, politics, magic, and early science. Early modern interest in the passions and mood-managing techniques based on them such as rhetoric and musical harmony came from the following observation: in any given situation people don’t react in objective terms, but based on how they feel. Feelings sometimes trump facts, and while feelings are real, they are not always apt. This forms the basis for many early modern theater plot devices, wherein passions and misunderstandings lead the characters to commit grave mistakes, such as Othello’s murder of his wife Desdemona and Romeo and Juliet’s double suicide. It is unsurprising then, that we see major philosophical theorizing on this, by authors such as Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think (Princeton University Press, 2024). All rights reserved.
