Wonder a grammar 9781438455532, 9781438455549, 1438455534, 1438455542

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Wonder

Wonder A Grammar

Sophia Vasalou

SUNY P R E S S

Cover image: Magnolia (oil on canvas), List, Wilhelm (1864–1918) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2015 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Jenn Bennett Marketing, Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Vasalou, Sophia.   Wonder : a grammar / Sophia Vasalou.     pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-4384-5553-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-5554-9 (ebook)  1. Wonder (Philosophy)  I. Title.   B105.W65V37 2015  128'.3—dc23                                    2014014975 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my father, whose childlike wonder is only a small part of his wisdom

“Why don’t you put pen to paper yourself, Zorba, to clear up all the mysteries of the world for us?” “Why don’t I, you ask? Because I live them, the mysteries you talk about, and I’ve no time left over. . . . And that’s how it came to be that the world was made over to the scholars; those who experience the mysteries have got no time [for writing]; and those who’ve got time, don’t experience the mysteries.” —Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others? Doubting Wonder Knowing Wonder

11 11 19

DELIGHT: Histories of Wonder between the Rainbow and the Harpies Telling Wonder (I): Consequence Telling Wonder (II): Concomitance Short Tales from Wonder’s Ethical Past The End of Wonder?

33 33 55 70 77

SUDDEN: On Seeing the Extraordinary; or: On the Different Ways of Being Struck Wonder Striking Stoking Wonder

86 86 103

PRODUCES: Practices of Wonder 121 121 Wonder as Doing, as Practice of Speech Wonder as Doing, as Self-­Undoing, as Aesthetic Conquest 136 Wonder as Doing, as Philosophical Ascent, as Askesis 154 OBJECT: Why Wonder? Wonder as Stimulus: The Ethics of Inquiry Wonder as Judgment: The Ethics of Sight Wonder Judging Wonder: Sight as Self-­Knowledge

168 168 194 207

Notes 221 Bibliography 263 ix

Acknowledgments

It is one of the quieter themes of this book that we owe our emotional lives—including our arrival at emotional experiences important enough to compel us to make them the subject of thought—to complex journeys of formation whose roots and foundations are not always open to view. Yet if, scratching the topsoil of my own history, I were to search for my debts, I would find the first one in my encounter with the early Arabic philosophers as a postgraduate student in London many years ago, and especially with al-­K indi, whose reformulation of philosophical arguments against the eternity of the world opened doors in my mind to possibilities of wonder that turned my own world on its head. The vein of experience has followed its usual vicissitudes since then, sometimes thinning, other times thickening, and all the while increasing the debts I owe not only for experiences of wonder, but also for the possibility of making these experiences the subject of more reflective thought. For the latter, I am particularly grateful for the opportunities I was given during my term as a junior research fellow at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, which allowed me unfettered time to think about things that mattered. I am also grateful to the participants of the conference on wonder I organized with Olivier Doron in Cambridge in 2008—many of them contributors, later on, to a book of interdisciplinary essays on wonder—as well as to the British Society of Aesthetics and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities in Cambridge, which supported the event. More recently, I owe a concrete material debt to the Andrea von Braun Stiftung, which provided financial support for the later stages of the writing. The very last stage of writing was made possible by a research fellowship at Oxford Brookes University, and I would particularly like to thank Constantine Sandis for lending a thoughtful eye to parts of the work, and the participants of a xi

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Acknowledgments

seminar on the topic for their comments and questions. I am also grateful to my editor, Andrew Kenyon, for his warm support throughout this process, and for believing in the book. These debts are just a handful of many others, lying deeper in the ground and scattered more diffusely. With such a history of debts, this book would be content if it could one day figure in the history of someone else’s debts for experiences or thoughts that made a difference. An earlier version of chapters 1 and 2 appeared as “Wonder: Toward a Grammar,” in Practices of Wonder: Cross-­Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. S. Vasalou (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012), 16–63, and is used by kind permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com.

Introduction

Wonder: known and unknown, familiar and strange; arched with rainbows, tensed with shadows; source of pleasure and cause of suffering; pointing beyond itself, pointing to nothing but itself. The work that follows—pitching itself on the side of the question rather than the side of the answer, on the side of the long essay (with its heuristic undertones of experiment and overture) rather than the complete treatise (with its overtones of mastery and closure)—took shape because of a hunch that a closer reflection on wonder was long overdue. Yet why even talk of “hunches” or of dues, as if one’s thinking was always concerned to be on the pulse or in tune, scenting out intellectual mood or cultural tempo and making sure it is in time or ahead of it? The simple truth is that it belongs to wonder’s physiognomy that it commands to be thought out when it has once struck; and this is because thinking it is one of the few means by which one might hope to retain it, and if nourishing were possible, even conceivably to feed it. The thinking that follows passes through several pathways, some of which cross and cross again, and almost all of its pathways can be counted as ways of asking a single question in different inflections: “What is wonder?” and again: “Why does wonder matter?” In following these pathways, this meditation will have speed enough to make for breathlessness. So it is worth pausing at its beginning to briefly place in view what lies ahead; and this means saying something more about how this meditation took its own beginnings and its present shape. For every reflection needs a foothold—even reflection demanded by experience—and every quest needs a beginning—even a quest for the 1

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Wonder

wonder that supplies beginnings to reflective quests—which opens up the space for pursuing it in structured ways. Like all other trains of reflection, this one owes many debts to those who have already opened up its specific space in both the recent and more distant past, foregrounding the salient themes and orienting questions through which wonder may be thought. But one of the most important debts it owes, both for its initial foothold and the structure of its reflective space, is to a recent articulation of wonder whose appeal is matched by its ability to galvanize thought; and whose galvanizing power is that of all aphoristic assertions, which offer crisp claims about what “is” in ways that invite one to plough up the earth around them. It is a spirit of aphorism to which our mode of questioning would often seem to commit us from the very first breath. “What is wonder?” we ask; and we expect to be answered with unified claims about what wonder is or isn’t. Rising to meet this question in a work that addresses the complex status of wonder as both stimulus of reflection and aesthetic reaction, Philip Fisher recently offered us a crisp formulation by way of response. Wonder: “a sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight.”1 It is a view—Fisher calls it an “essential definition”— whose appeal is linked to the way it speaks to many of our strongest intuitions, to those immediate intuitions that first assemble themselves when we reach for the physiognomy of wonder. “What is wonder?” we ask, and we reach for images of the face that children present to the world when confronting something seen for the first time, for the wide-­ eyed looks of pleasure and gasps that are suddenly torn from their lips. Reaching for images closer to our own present, we may recognize this wonder in the sudden exclamation of pleasure that escapes us before an aurora borealis or our excitement as we turn the shining fossil of a marine animal in our hands, thousands of years streaming through our fingers; in the wide-­eyed look of the scientist as she watches the courtship dance of birds of paradise from her makeshift hideout or the dance of celestial bodies behind the telescope’s lens. Suddenness, novelty, pleasure: terms that put together a “grammar” of wonder and, having opened the experience of wonder to thought, hold it to a structure that would normatively answer for all of its instances. And yet—leaning now closer to the flowing surface of this statement to look—is this the only way in which we know wonder to be parsed? For peering closer, we may allow the joints of this statement to stand out one by one to interrogate them in ways that begin to break up the fluency of its aphoristic “is” and brake its speed.

Introduction

3

For with SUDDEN we might ask: And does wonder always strike or might not wonder also need to be hunted or stoked? With EXTRAORDINARY we might ask: And is the extraordinary something that reveals itself or something that may also need to be discovered? And if we twice converge on the notion of a hunt, or a quest, aren’t we also querying whether wonder PRODUCES or whether it may not also itself demand to be produced? That, in the same breath, is to consider: What would be the OBJECT—not only in the sense of content but the more valorized notion of objective or intent—of such wonder? And is DELIGHT the self-­sufficient answer? And what, finally, probing deeper into the unobtrusiveness of grammar, is the meaning of that present tense which relates delight to wonder as its cause (producES) with all the stability of the eternal that grammar places at its disposal? And having carved these joints open, we may begin to reach beyond our immediate intuitions and the physiognomy of wonder they assemble to attune ourselves to a broader range of intuitions, which offer the material for a rather different grammatical portrayal. For if wonder is the gasp torn from us as children when we are confronted with something hitherto unseen, there is also another kind of gasp that is torn from us as adults when we study more closely—as scientists, as philosophers, as students of spiritual techniques—what has already been a thousand times seen and see it again. If wonder sends us looking, there is also a kind of wonder for which we may later seek—seeking out starlit skies and mountain tops, bending closer to lines of poetry, leaning closer to drops of water or snowflakes or the wings of flies to look. If wonder is the exclamation of delight faced with the aurora borealis or the wide-­eyed look of the scientist as she watches the dance of fabulous animals or the dance of objects in the sky, this pleasured response often shades dangerously into others—to a look of pained confusion, or frozen anxiety, or awed terror, before a spectacle that disturbs our expectations or overwhelms our ordinary frames of thought, pulling us too far away from the zone in which the extraordinary can be contemplated without disturbance; to something darker, bearing the texture of fear, as we confront the grandeur and enormity of the world that surrounds us. These interpenetrating borders of feeling, of course, raise a question about how the linguistic boundaries may be drawn around “wonder” as against its conceptual siblings within the larger emotional field it inhabits. In doing so, they call attention to the fact that the question “What is wonder?” must be anchored in a consideration of our linguistic practices in the first instance, and may need to be heard as a question linguistic in

4

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kind. To attend to wonder’s status as a phenomenon of language, however, is simultaneously to attend to its exposure to historical change. And it is thus to confront the fact that questions about what wonder is cannot be answered judiciously without considering what wonder has been, and without opening ourselves to the thought that wonder has sometimes been another kind of thing, in which its borders and the feeling tones that track them have been differently configured. At the same time, to the extent that these different feeling tones—darkness and delight, fear and joy—form part of wonder’s larger emotive field, sometimes even entering its linguistic identity, this also suggests that not only our “What (is wonder)?” but our “Why (wonder)?” may likewise take a more complex response, one in which we should be prepared to listen for the reasons that may make us, not only desire wonder, but strive to escape it. And attuned to these reasons, we may be also prepared for the entailment that wonder will sometimes appear within our lives, not as a natural event, but as the object of a quest with the higher pitch of a conquest—one that, in pitting us against our own will, will provoke finer-­grained questions about the nature of our will to wonder, or about its unnaturalness. Studied more closely, and unsettled from their fixity, the joints of this definition of wonder thus swing open to angles of questioning that hold the key to a deeper understanding of how wonder should be parsed, and to a more inclusive view of its grammar—of its characteristic objects, feeling tones, means of provocation, and reasons for being desired. And this will be a view that, in holding wonder to the light against the broken glass of history, and against the broken glass of our language with the jagged divisions it marks between concepts, may ultimately discourage us from asking the question we are drawn to—“What is wonder?”—with expectations of a unified answer, and may make it easier for us to acknowledge that wonder is and has been many things. In doing so, it will share in the type of insight we have inherited from Wittgenstein, whose philosophical perspective provides this meditation on wonder with its scaffolding at several junctures, and who taught us to look for the answers to large essentializing questions—“What is knowledge?” “What is time?” and so to “What is love?” or “What is wonder?”—by attending to the life such words lead in our language. Focused by the loosened elements of this initial definition and the angles of questioning they open out to, the book that took shape can be read as an exercise at map reading: as a venture to map some of the core aspects of wonder’s grammar, or in the more living metaphor with which we began, to plot some of the highlights of its character, sketching the

Introduction

5

passion of wonder from different angles—linguistic, historical, evaluative—in ways that bring into view the rich tracks it has carved in our intellectual history and continues to drive through our present. Not a comprehensive documentation but a heuristic starting point, not a reflection that exhausts its object but a reflection that opens it up more fully, the aim of this book is to bring wonder nearer to us as a reflective object and to provide new frameworks through which to approach it, in the hope that by thinking about wonder we may also discover why we might wish to dwell in it, and may find new ways of doing so. The grammatical statement that provided this meditation with its initial foothold—wonder: “a sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight”—has been retained as an influence on its structure throughout, as reflected most visibly in its chapter divisions, which take up the joints of this statement to interpret them in particular terms and develop them in more specific directions. The discussion opens (Chapter 1: “WONDER”) with a question about the reasons for the singular neglect of wonder among contemporary philosophers and researchers of the emotions, surveying a number of factors that appear to position wonder as an anomaly within taxonomies of the emotions and make it recalcitrant to the analytical frameworks through which the emotions are often approached. Wonder’s adaptive significance seems harder to parse than that of many of the other emotions; its physical expression seems harder to read than the physical expression of fear or anger or grief; its invitation to action, and its constitutive judgments, seem similarly elusive compared with the other emotions we study. It is an outlook that brings an emphasis on what wonder is not—on what makes wonder an object of ignorance or doubt. Yet in the next moment, this outlook demands to be recalibrated by an emphasis on what we do know about wonder, and the access we in fact have to its identity as an emotion. It is an access that stands to be grounded in the simplest facts about our mastery of language, which enables us to speak the words of wonder and ascribe wonder to others when we see it expressed. As for all other concepts, the conceptual boundaries of wonder may be fluid and it may resist rigid definitions; yet there are still elements that can be identified as its special (if singularly thin) logic, and above all, the judgment of positive value it pronounces on its object. A first grasp on “what wonder is”—yet this is a grasp that the next tract of the discussion (Chapter 2: “DELIGHT”) takes upon itself to interrogate and extend, refining this present-­tense is with a more strongly

6

Wonder

historical sensitisation to what wonder has been. Focusing the discussion is a question about what wonder “feels like” which looks past the contemporary association between wonder and pleasure, seemingly constitutive of its identity, to track the experiential tone of wonder across a longer historical past. The first stage of the discussion engages the sweeping history of wonder as a passion of inquiry offered by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park in their Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998), which makes a claim about the changing tone of wonder from pleasure to discomfort that is central to their broader view of wonder’s historicity and the openness of its identity to change. The pleasurable wonder marking the “Age of the Marvelous” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (so Daston and Park) is succeeded by a wonder that carries more negative affective valence, exemplified in the writings of the eighteenth-­century philosopher Adam Smith, and heralding the historical displacement of wonder from elite culture. Having placed a broad-­brushstroke sketch of wonder’s larger history in view, this particular claim is interrogated through a closer examination of the notion of wonder expressed by Adam Smith and an alternative reading of its significance. Yet pleasure and pain, in fact, have been locked in complex patterns of interdigitation throughout wonder’s history; wonder has often been linked, not to delight, but to the darker elements of terror or fear. And while there are certainly important historical ways in which these patterns could be narrated, this is a story that can also be told in different terms—as a story of competing possibilities or conflicting approaches to wonder that cut across historical divides. The next part of the discussion follows this different mode of storytelling by drawing on another key study of wonder, Mary-­Jane Rubenstein’s Strange Wonder (2008), and on the typology of Platonic and Aristotelian wonder it articulates. Aristotle’s wonder delights; Plato’s bears a darker tincture—a phenomenological distinction in turn linked to the governing aspirations of each: to swiftly dissipate wonder through explanation, thereby reestablishing the mastery of reason (Aristotle); to maintain the openness of wonder in the face of fearful uncertainty and vulnerability (Plato). Approached critically, this typology suggests a way of telling the story that may be parsed as, not historical, but ethical in kind, demanding a better navigation of temptations to which intellectual activity is inherently exposed. Wonder’s darkness must often be endured; just as wonder’s pleasure may often require conquest. In this light, Daston and Park’s view of wonder’s demise can also be read again; and so can the question—Is wonder still open to us?—that underpins it.

Introduction

7

Turning away from wonder’s feeling tone, the next chapter (“SUDDEN”) turns to wonder’s objects and its mode of striking or descent, using Philip Fisher’s account in Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (1998) to first delineate the understanding of wonder’s objects and mode of striking that comes most naturally to us, so as to then begin to question it. Wonder suddenly strikes, wonder breaks upon us unwilled when we are confronted with what is unfamiliar or unexpected, to then fade as novelty fades and the extraordinary is assimilated into the ordinary background of our lives. It is an account of wonder that brings its own sense of tragedy; and more importantly, one that overlooks the different senses in which the notion of the “extraordinary” may be understood, and in doing so overlooks the character of wonder as a judgment, and the ways this character lays it open to willful cultivation. Wonder’s vision can constitute, not merely an involuntary event, but a voluntary act and practised achievement; and not an unwilled beginning, but a cultivated end. It is a cultivated achievement, in fact, that has been central to the discipline of many of our highest intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual practices—among scientists and artists, philosophers and religious thinkers. In such practices, it has often been precisely what is most ordinary (in the sense of what is regular or familiar) to which the attention has been deliberately reoriented, inviting us to see it as worthy of wondering remark. Wonder as an act—as an act to be willed and produced; as an experience to be quested and hunted. The next move (Chapter 4: “PRODUCES”) is to take this notion of activity forward by first articulating or rearticulating it in its most rudimentary sense, that which is constituted by the practice of language. For with a richer notion of wonder’s grammar now partly in view, the linguistic anchoring of wonder already articulated demands to be revisited and reinforced through a finer-­ grained attention to our application of the language of wonder and to the conditions that support it. And this means attending more closely to the connection between our linguistic practices and the thicker cultural practices identified as habitats for a different kind of wonder, and to the role of the latter in conditioning the intelligibility of wonder’s linguistic expression. With this linguistic anchor more firmly in place, wonder’s relationship to the notion of practice or activity can then be elicited more sharply by focusing on a strain of wonder with special significance for the history of the concept. For an aspect of wonder’s physiognomy that has often been picked out as one of its most distinctive features is its opposition

8

Wonder

to self-­interest and utility. This opposition has figured especially prominently where wonder has been articulated in its status, not as a passion of inquiry, but an aesthetic response. And it has been elicited nowhere more brilliantly than in the particular strain of wonder—that potent mixture of terror and joy, of darkness and delight—represented by the aesthetic experience of the sublime. For the sublime, as Kant and Schopenhauer notably recount it, involves a transformation of vision that demands a conquest—a conquest of interest that is also an overcoming of the lower aspect of one’s being and that places one in contact with one’s higher and truer identity. In doing so, it displaces the direction of wonder and reverses our judgments about what is extraordinary or great, turning the wondering gaze away from the world in all its grandeur and inward to the subject in its higher capacity; and this is a capacity in which it is no longer mastered by, but rather masters, the world. A moment of aesthetic vision that involves a conquest; yet we can locate this wonder against an even thicker notion of activity—one that indeed also brings out the ethical character this conquest may carry—by turning to another philosophical episode that lies embedded in the lineage of the Romantic sublime and its characteristic wonder. For shadowing the later sublime is a notion of human sublimity or greatness that achieved its highest ethical expression among ancient philosophers in the ideal of “greatness of soul,” where it was linked to a similar capacity for reversing our judgments of value and transcending the lower for the higher, and a similar displacement of wonder to the human subject in its higher capacities. This sense of wonder was in turn enshrined in a series of philosophical practices that included the imaginary of “cosmic flight” or “cosmic consciousness,” which manifested but also nurtured the human capacity for moral and intellectual transcendence through an imaginative cultivation of vision that we may call more thickly (following Pierre Hadot) a spiritual exercise and a disciplined askesis. Having brought this richer grammar of wonder more fully into view, the discussion finally turns to address one of its remaining critical joints, parsing this as a broader question (Chapter 5: “OBJECT”) about the reasons why wonder might itself form an object of will and aspiration. It is a question we may seek to answer by appropriating a framework of interrogation often applied to the emotions, considering (or reconsidering more attentively) what wonder feels like; what wonder leads us to do; what wonder tells us, or how it makes us judge. Addressing wonder’s forward-­looking value as a stimulus for inquiry, however, now demands a more sensitive effort to locate this value in the larger

Introduction

9

ethical space in which it may be judged. And this means attending more openly to the connection in which wonder may stand to our modes of self-­evaluation, and finally foregrounding a notion of mastery—linked with a more problematized notion of pride—that recurred in our foregoing discussion, to reflect on its status and proper role within intellectual quests. Yet if wonder can find clear justification in the service it offers to such quests—in its ability to lead us toward the goods that structure them—wonder’s ability to “tell” yields a more complex understanding of its value. For it returns us to the basic “logic” of wonder as a judgment of positive value to make us question whether wonder could ever be demanded by its objects—a demand with the force of entitlement, a response we owe—and if not, whether there is a different way of articulating the demand at stake. From one perspective, our spades would seem to hit against bedrock, and an argument for the value of wonder would seem to demand an argument for something as basic as the value of a consciously lived life. Yet there is, for all the brittleness of the ground we tread here, something more to be said about the value of wonder that stands to be grounded on what wonder “tells.” This can be brought out by finally returning to the wonder of the sublime—in both its Romantic embodiment and ancient antecedents—for a finer, and this time more critical, consideration of its significance and enduring relevance. For even those who do not share the substantive philosophical commitments of the sublime’s later articulators, and who may frown on the ethical spirit that breathes through their encounter with the world’s grandeur, may be able to recognize that basic encounter and its characteristic wonder, and see in it the kernel of a kind of truth-­telling sufficient to make us treasure this wonder and seek it out, will it and aspire to it. This is a wonder that—sometimes; maybe on extraordinary occasions; occasions that represent the climactic product of individual journeys of formation and histories of passionate education in which the disciplining of our attention will play a crucial role—can tell us who we are. Questioning wonder’s pleasure, questioning wonder’s suddenness, looking beyond the extraordinary that strikes us to the extraordinary that our judgment must seek out, holding up our habit of asking “what is?” to fracture it with the pluralism of “what has been?” and the contingency of “what we say,” and even so fractured, to look for answers to “why wonder?” that remain sensitive to the many “why not?”s—already this betokens enough of the ground to be covered, offering a dense map

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of the map reading ahead, and sweeping over the joints of wonder’s grammar with leaps steep enough to call for bridges. So let us peer closer to these joints to consider, beginning by putting our ear to the sources from which the EXPERIENCE of wonder first promises to be known—or to elude our knowing.

WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

Doubting Wonder

It has been hailed as the beginning of philosophy and as the thrill that makes it chase after the stars; as the end philosophy tends to, and as a state philosophy aims to expunge by explanation; as the essence of art, as the aim of art, and as the means that art uses to accomplish its aims; as the origin of scientific quests; as the result of scientific quests; as the religious experience par excellence, the only proper response to a created world, and the only possible response of those whose eyes have been opened to see the glory of God in a blade of grass and every created being. It has been acclaimed as a form of redemption, and identified with consciousness itself. Inflected as awe; cadenced as bewitchment; transfigured as the sublime—a sense of wonder has claimed a key presence in a variety of practices of knowledge, activities, and pursuits. Yet for an emotion fêted so widely across a broad range of human practices, wonder appears to register as a rather elusive presence to those who would seek to understand it. This elusiveness, Mary-­Jane Rubenstein suggests to us, may possess a special kind of inevitability—the elusiveness of an investigation whose subject is the very ground that sets it into motion, or, otherwise put, the special difficulty attaching to the self-­defeating project of “thinking the condition of thinking’s own possibility.” For to ask, “What is wonder?” is only possible once wonder has already set up the question as an object of (wondering) reflection. So how, she asks, “is philosophy to go about seeking the very wonder that sets it into motion?”1 Mutatis mutandis, we might say the same about any inquiry that claims wonder as the origin of its motion. 11

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WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

This deeper difficulty may lie in the shadows; but in the daylight lies something simpler to remark, yet no less surprising for that, and that is the widespread neglect of wonder in contemporary research on the emotions. It is a neglect that appears to unite psychologists and philosophers of the emotions otherwise divided by important methodological and philosophical differences on questions such as what the emotions are, how the respective roles of cognition and physiology should be understood, what the respective roles of culture and biology consist in, or what to name as the basic or primary emotions (and on what grounds). And it is one that extends, not only to wonder, but also to related members of the emotion family to which it belongs, such as awe.2 Why might that be? The answer to this question can be put briefly before expanding: in taxonomies of the emotions, wonder often presents itself as an exception or anomalous instance—as an emotion unlike others. Remarking the neglect of wonder in his pioneering book-­length account, Robert Fuller named one reason for it by pointing to an important feature of contemporary theories of emotion: their preoccupation with an evolutionary paradigm for the study of emotion and with the adaptive significance of emotions considered as biological phenomena. Evolutionary psychologists, it is true, have warned that this preoccupation should not be understood too narrowly—in terms, for example, of a concern with immediate physical survival.3 Yet it is clear that some emotions lend themselves to rewarding analysis more readily within this frame than others, and it is not surprising that, within the terms of this paradigm, biologists and psychologists have tended “to emphasize those emotions that lead to the performance of adaptive behaviors such as withdrawal, avoidance, mating, or aggression.”4 More generally, Fuller argues, the focus cultivated by this framework has fallen on emotions that are short-­ lived; that orient people to concrete aspects of the immediate physical environment; and that are associated with specific facial expressions or gestures. Emotions such as fear and anger—which can easily be tied to behaviors with strategic adaptive importance—are perhaps the strongest exemplars of the analytical promise of such a scheme. By contrast, wonder presents itself as a more awkward fit. The problem of fit, as one of the elements of Fuller’s argument intimates, begins from the moment wonder is sought in the body. It is significant, in this connection, that those working from within an evolutionary or biological paradigm who have joined in the neglect of wonder

Doubting Wonder

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have included the heirs of the particular evolutionary perspective on emotions developed in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). This work, which proposed to study the regularities of human expressive behavior and their biological roots, has become the starting point in recent decades for an investigation of the universality of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions. Notwithstanding the promise held out by Darwin’s remarks on the related notion of admiration in his work, wonder has failed to figure among the emotions which this tradition has concerned itself with. It is excluded, for example, from the list of basic emotions produced by Paul Ekman—one of the best-­k nown exponents of this view—which includes sadness, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise.5 This exclusion must be taken in part as an avowal of the difficulty of pinning an unambiguous expressive profile to wonder, which might help restate the difficulty with wonder as one that concerns the elusiveness of its embodiment—a suggestion made explicitly in recent work with regard to one of wonder’s conceptual siblings, awe, putting down its scientific neglect to its lack of a distinctive facial expression.6 Among emotion researchers, in fact, those who have included wonder among primary or basic emotions have represented a quaint minority. And even those that have accorded it a place in their taxonomies, such as the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda (whose work was clearly located in the Darwinian tradition) and the early British psychologist William McDougall, have not always done so in a way that seems sufficiently respectful of the differences—subtle yet not to be dismissed in advance—between related emotional concepts (such as surprise and wonder, or wonder and curiosity) in ordinary language.7 (A point, of course, that already suggests that the question raised here could not be tackled without addressing the fractious topic of our ability to identify and individuate emotions.) These two aspects—the relative obscurity of the adaptive value of wonder and the relative indeterminacy of its expression—are not unconnected, and together they point on to a further reason—linked with other methodological tendencies of current emotion research—for this programmatic neglect of wonder. For both difficulties in turn reveal an underlying embarrassment in producing distinct statements about what, falling in line with recent terminology, we would call the action tendencies of wonder, the inbuilt motion of this emotion—or, put more simply still, what wonder makes us do. For if fear makes us freeze or fight or flee, if anger makes us rear for confrontation, if envy prepares us for a

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WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

bitter revenge, if love makes us seek out, and contempt eschew—action tendencies that can be used to build theories about their adaptive value in human history, and that are directly related to the repertory of expressive behavior associated with them—what might one say of wonder that would hold with equal force?8 For wonder, it seems, can make us do everything or nothing. Even our doing, as this has often been understood (in the history of philosophy, certainly, but not only) has been a species of non-­doing, or whatever else we might understand by contemplation. It is striking, for example, and of direct relevance to this point, that some of the emotion researchers who have given their attention to wonder and committed themselves to incorporating it within their taxonomies have presented a picture of wonder whose most remarkable feature is its passivity. In Frijda’s account, this passivity is manifested both on the level of physiology— marked by suspension of breathing and general loss of muscle tone, which “causes the mouth to fall open, and may make the subject stagger or force him to sit down”—and of expressive behavior more narrowly defined—open eyes, raised eyebrows, open mouth, a forgetful relaxation of the body. This passivity, to which Frijda relates the functional significance or meaning of the family of emotions comprising amazement, surprise, and wonder—a significance that would appear to consist in the enhancement of contact—is reflected in “the arrest of locomotion and instrumental action.”9 And it is precisely this accent on instrumentality, or its lack—one that will reverberate more than once through our discussion—that we need in order to give an even deeper account of the occlusion of wonder we have been trying to track, and perhaps the most accurate diagnosis yet of the difficulty that has made of wonder such a conspicuous absentee from contemporary taxonomies of the emotions. For not evolutionary rationale; not universality of distinct facial expression; nor yet only action-­ tendencies—it has rather been judgment or cognition that has come to figure most prominently in recent views of emotion in both psychology (most markedly since its methodological comeback from behaviorism) and in philosophy. An account of emotion whose natural adversaries have ranged broadly from behaviorists, proponents of a physiological James-­Lange theory of emotion, to empiricists of Hume’s ilk, this is a view that comes in different forms and with different construals of its constituent elements. (What is cognition? Is cognition or judgment identical with the emotion, its cause, or a constituent part? Is it necessary or sufficient for

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emotion?). But whether in psychology or philosophy, such theories share a stress on the role of what, varying with the idiom, we may call the person’s (organism’s) goals or values, interests or projects, or more broadly, the elements entering a person’s well-­being. My fear as I walk down a dark road registers my safety and integrity as an object of value presupposed by anything else I might desire; my grief traces out a halo of value around the person I have lost; my joy at news of an unlooked-­for success registers my attachment to a certain kind of achievement; my guilt registers a breach between an ideal I had treasured and now feel I have let down. In its philosophical guise, in which it has emerged out of a combat with dismissive views of emotions as dangerous or irrational or physiologically brute, the cognitive view of emotions has sometimes been parsed as a claim that emotions tell us something about the world; they tell us “how things are” or let us “see things as they really are”—a knowledge of the world that is fundamentally evaluative, and so a knowledge of our world.10 One of the most suggestive views of this kind is the one recently articulated by Martha Nussbaum in her Upheavals of Thought, where she presents a “neo-­Stoic” account that stresses four aspects of emotions: their aboutness (emotions have objects); their intentionality (emotions have intentional objects that embody ways of seeing); their basis in beliefs (emotions embody sets of beliefs about objects); and most crucially for the “eudaimonistic” view Nussbaum wants to defend, their connection with value (emotions see objects as invested with an importance that makes reference to an agent’s own flourishing). Emotions, on this view, are judgments about external things to which we attach value and which we see as intimately involved in our flourishing; which are vulnerable and beyond our control; and which thus involve an acknowledgment of passivity before the world.11 Nussbaum is at pains to stress that to describe emotions as eudaimonistic is not to describe them as egoistic, and that we may value things intrinsically and for their own sake (if not impersonally) even though we will always value them as part of our life and projects, and thus from an inalienably self-­referential perspective. Yet even this broader understanding of value seems to encounter difficulty in accommodating wonder, which Nussbaum herself describes as the emotion most strikingly subversive to this scheme. “[A]s non-­eudaimonistic as an emotion can be,” wonder is an emotion, according to Nussbaum, which “responds to the pull of the object, and one might say that in it the subject is maximally aware of the value of the object, and only minimally aware, if at all, of its relationship to her own plans. That is why it is likely

16

WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

to issue in contemplation rather than in any other sort of action toward the object.”12 Weakly connected to action; unconnected to self-­referential goals and plans; thus breaching every category that emotion theorists bring to bear when approaching individual emotions. And it is Nussbaum once more who affords us the leverage for yet another addition to this enumeration of wonder’s unlikenesses, and for making contact with one of our starting points or rallying points (the SUDDEN-­ness of emotions, which we may here parse as their ability to strike). For a feature of emotions that has often recurred in theoretical analyses—and that cognitive theories such as Nussbaum’s have been thought challenged to accommodate—is the sense of passivity that shapes the way we typically experience them. Speaking with her own experience of grief as exemplar, she writes of the “feeling of terrible tumultuousness, of being at the mercy of currents that swept over me without my consent or complete understanding . . . the feeling that very powerful forces were pulling the self apart, or tearing it limb from limb,” which is an instance of “the terrible power or urgency of the emotions . . . the sense one has that one is passive or powerless before them.”13 This fact—that we experience emotions as uncontrollable, and ourselves as passive with regard to them; the fact that emotions strike—lies at the root of much traditional hostility toward the emotions, and it is one that, it has recently been suggested, we can read off the very grammatical evidence of our language. That emotions are “passions”—in the literal sense of “states produced by one’s being acted on in certain ways”— is suggested, Robert Gordon writes, “by the fact that the great majority of adjectives designating emotions are derived from [passive] participles: for example, ‘amused’, ‘annoyed’, ‘astonished’, ‘delighted’, ‘depressed’, ‘embarrassed’, ‘frightened’ . . . ‘overjoyed’, ‘pleased.’”14 It may seem remarkable, then, that in this respect wonder once again presents itself as an anomaly, and only conveys passivity when encountered in compound (“wonderstruck”). It is an anomaly that our own experience of frequent struggles with paroxysms of anger, fear, and grief, and rare encounters with a wonder that overpowers and we seek to repulse, may appear to confirm, and that once again bespeaks a weaker anchor in the body and a more ambiguous (thus less overpowering) kind of embodiment.15 And this, in the light of Nussbaum’s analysis, should not surprise us, if the intensity of emotion is commensurate to the degree of importance with which its object is invested among our goals or projects,16 so that an emotion weakly connected to one’s interests would be one that strikes

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weakly—and one too weakly connected to patterns of vital human interests to have been written into the body by the evolutionary process as a striking one cannot repulse. With our attention to the linguistic idiosyncrasies of wonder sharpened, we are now well prepared to remark another, which unseats wonder from among the passions in a different though closely related way. For with many of the emotions, the emotion terms are often employed in the expression of the emotion itself as first-­person attributions (“I’m angry with you,” “I’m feeling sad” or “I’m so scared”). With wonder, by contrast, that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. “How remarkable,” “How extraordinary,” or just “Wow”—the expression of wonder often appears as an attribution to the object rather than an emotional state ascribed in the first person to oneself (“I wonder” and “it fills me with wonder” are relative rarities in our speech). Writers on the emotions have pointed out that in responding emotionally to an object, we typically find ourselves ascribing a quality to the object or perceiving it “as having the emotion-­proper property.”17 To be disgusted at something is to perceive it as disgusting, to hate a person is to see him as hateful or despicable—a fact that Peter Goldie suggests is closely bound up with our experience of emotions as being justified or reasonable. Yet what seems remarkable about wonder is that, in the language games we play with it, such an explicitly attributive mode constitutes the dominant form of our expression. What this shares with the grammatical point marked just before (concerning the element of passivity ordinarily enshrined in our language) is a tendency to draw emphasis away from the emotion as an experience, and to channel it toward the object that excites it. Yet even to those convinced of the depth of grammar, this peculiarity may not seem sufficiently significant or striking until it is joined to another observation, which develops Goldie’s emphasis on rationality and justification— and with which we can finally bring to a close the long list of credentials establishing wonder’s uneasy membership in traditional taxonomies. For in focusing on judgment or cognition, cognitivist theories of emotions have taken themselves to be concerned with an element that plays a cardinal role on two different levels of our thinking about emotions: in our ability to identify and distinguish emotions, and in our ability to justify and explain them. The judgment, implicit in my fit of anger, that someone has inflicted undue injury on something I care about, or the judgment, implicit in my access of grief, that something or someone I loved is now lost to me, are central to what identifies these emotions as anger or

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WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

as grief. And it is again these kinds of judgments—judgments in which factual beliefs and evaluative assumptions stand closely partnered—that would figure prominently in any effort to justify our emotional reactions and defend them as rational or fitting. With wonder, however, we may find ourselves stumped for words when we reach out to identify the tissue of judgments and beliefs that form its rational core. “How remarkable!” What more can we immediately say of wonder’s judgments and wonder’s justice than that it responds to a perception of an object as remarkable, extraordinary, beyond expectation? And this observation may well leave us feeling that, while emotions may be judgments of value, this “judgment” is too naked a postulation of value to merit the name—more an exclamation than a judgment, and too much feeling to be even dignified with words.18 It is, perhaps, this sense of wonder’s nudity—its deficient or fluid rational core—that is expressed in the well-­k nown psychologist Richard Lazarus’s reluctant retreat before “states like awe, wonder, and faith-­trust,” which “can be used in more than one sense,” rendering their meaning one about which it is “difficult to know what to say.”19 This point—like several others in our list—is one we are scheduled to revisit in later stages of our thinking. But for now, we can draw this list of wonder’s eccentricities to a close and merely turn the page over to remark that this singular position of wonder among the emotions, far from being the preserve of contemporary theories, has been mirrored in the position wonder has occupied in other phases of its history, particularly in its philosophical trajectory. In his landmark work on the emotions, The Passions of the Soul (1649), Descartes would give a prominent place to the passion of wonder, yet in doing so he would make its exceptional status clear in ways that loudly echo the reasons for wonder’s occlusion in modern taxonomies. For Descartes, the passions “dispose our soul to want the things which nature deems useful for us”—useful, that is, qua embodied beings. Yet wonder is a passion we experience “before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us,” which is the ground for Descartes’s naming it as the first of the passions.20 This disconnection from interest is in turn related to a diminished mode of embodiment; for given that the sole object of wonder is knowledge, wonder is “not accompanied by any change in the heart or the blood, such as occurs in the case of the other passions,” but is only related to the brain.21 And while, notwithstanding these two forms of elevation, Descartes himself would still treat wonder as a passion requiring criticism and correction, 22 it is in fact wonder’s exceptional position in a philosophical

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history that since its earliest days has treated the passions as objects of suspicion—to be critiqued, disciplined, and corrected—that provides the most illuminating insight into its unusual credentials. Emotion, as Robert Solomon notes, “has almost always played an inferior role in philosophy, often as antagonist to logic and reason.”23 Yet wonder has repeatedly emerged among philosophers as a codicil to this blanket distrust. This is certainly the case with the Stoics, well known for their jaundiced view of the passions as false judgments of value, and for whom (as for many of the ancient schools) philosophy served as a therapy for the passions. The negative view of wonder often associated with the Stoics and encapsulated in the familiar maxim nil admirari—which links wonder to the problematic emotional attachments subjected by the Stoics to scathing ethical critique—should not here mislead us. For it takes its place next to a positive appreciation of wonder as a response to the natural world in the context of theoretical inquiry which reveals that the spirit that had made wonder the philosophical passion par excellence for both Aristotle and Plato, a passion to be prized and not repulsed, continues to breathe through Stoic writings.24 Leaping ahead to a more recent philosophical episode—in what is meant to be an indicative and not an exhaustive enumeration—we may say the same of Kant, who shares many affinities with the ancient philosophers and many of their sources of distrust, and whose ethical viewpoint has often been construed (though not always justly, it has been argued) in terms of a sharp rejection of the role of emotion in morality and a strident emphasis on reason. Yet it is Kant who, closing the Critique of Practical Reason, left us with one of the most eloquent expressions of wonder when he wrote: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration (Bewunderung) and awe (Ehrfurcht), the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”—thus tying wonder to the heartland of his ethical theory.25 And it is Kant likewise who, as we will see more fully later, makes of that species of wonder that forms the flagship of Romantic sensibility, the sublime, one of the most telling moments of his aesthetics, a moment that is notable for its separation from selfish interest, and that drives deep nerves into Kant’s ethical outlook as a whole. Knowing Wonder

Wonder, then, emerges as an emotion unlike others in every way, and one calculated to fall through the cracks in taxonomies of emotion—hence,

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WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

we may conclude, its programmatic neglect in contemporary theories, which have shrugged it off as too slippery to be responsibly handled. An apophatic view of wonder if there ever was one—and not a view with which we could allow ourselves to rest. For on the one hand, if wonder falls through the cracks of our taxonomies, this could also be read as a token of the limitations of such taxonomies or indeed of rigid taxonomies in general, which may demand of phenomena a greater unity than they inherently possess. An insistence on analyzing emotions too narrowly in terms of their characteristic action-­tendencies, for example, would be resisted by several central emotions, such as hope or regret. Our habitual inclination to seek the emotions in the face, it has been similarly suggested, betrays a limiting focus on emotions as paroxysms or “episodic perturbations” that is liable to obscure the importance of longer-­standing emotions such as love or anger or jealousy on our lives. Such emotions express themselves over time in complex ways, registering—as Peter Hacker observes—“in the reasons that weigh with one in one’s deliberations,” in “the desires one harbours” and “the thoughts that cross one’s mind in connection with the objects of one’s feelings,” as much as in a disposition to episodes of occurrent passion that imprint themselves visibly on our physical frame.26 Loosening the tenacity of these taxonomic grids, mollifying the steely unity they try to impose on phenomena, we may find ourselves less at a loss faced with the psychological phenomena we attempt to chart. And in this case, such mollification may leave us more open to acknowledging that, if we even consider positioning wonder within taxonomies of the emotions despite the challenges it poses to them, this is not merely a contingent residue of our intellectual history and of the decisions of earlier inquirers to classify wonder as a maverick yet central member of their psychological schemes, but also a reflection of a basic recognition of what wonder has in common with those other experiences we class as “emotions” within our passionate life—and as such, already a pointer to the positive hold we have on wonder rather than the hold we lack. For wonder may not tear the soul limb from limb like anger or like love; wonder may not often leave us passive or helpless in the power of its grip. Yet if we think of reaching for the language of “passion” to talk of wonder despite our limited experience of wonder’s passivity, like Plato before us who spoke of wonder as a pathos in introducing philosophy to its origin (Theaetetus 155d), it is to the extent that we can after all recognize that, on those rare occasions on which it strikes, wonder can momentarily make our chest expand and our breath deepen, can leave

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us uplifted and moved, as the passions often move, changing the way we see the world and impelling us to act in response to our changed vision, as the passions often impel us. It is an impulse whose bidding may often appear to take the thinnest of forms, as its characterization by observers such as Frijda suggests, at its thinnest simply bidding us to stand before objects with still attention or to lean closer to dwell on them more intently. Yet this already constitutes a pattern of acting or characteristic motion sufficiently distinct to enter our account of wonder’s status as an emotion, and one that writes itself in our opening face and widening eyes in ways that anchor wonder visibly in the body’s script. 27 These multiple recognitions of wonder’s status as an emotion, in turn, are ones that are embedded in the most basic forms of our language, as when we speak of wonder as something we “experience” and “feel.”28 While wonder thus challenges the analytical categories habitually applied to the emotions, it is only a steely reading of these categories that would leave wonder entirely defeated by them, in ways that would exclude it from the framework of the passions altogether and expel it beyond our epistemic reach. And how, after all, could such an expulsion be even envisaged? For bracketing the analytical frameworks of those claiming a more-­than-­ordinary expertise on familiar phenomena, what—it might be asked—could be closer to us than wonder? What— to grasp at one of the joints of the Ur-­text imparting structure to our present thought—could be closer to us than that emotional experience that, it has been suggestively claimed, is identical to nothing less than EXPERIENCE itself? For if the ordinary, as Wittgenstein suggested, is not experienced as such, and we only notice something insofar as it is unexpected or unfamiliar, then surprise, and mutatis mutandis wonder, would seem (Philip Fisher glosses) to “become the very heart of what it means to ‘have an experience’ at all.”29 And if wonder forms the heart of experience in the present, this point could also be transposed to the past as an insight about the historical progression through which our very world has been formed. The texture of ice cream, the look of snow, the sound of a waterfall, the pleasure of holding a book in one’s hand, of standing up unsteadily on one’s skates and gliding, of the first look of love one sees returned—everything that was once unfamiliar would have been filtered through wonder into one’s world. This is also the implication one could draw out of Descartes’s view as we have outlined it and which Deborah Brown does us the service of bringing out more distinctly when she remarks that, for Descartes, to the extent that all “other passions

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WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

presuppose some knowledge of the object,” all “presuppose the prior effects of wonder.”30 To take that reflection seriously would be to be surprised into the view that wonder must lie at the historical root of every object that has entered our experience. Seen in this light, wonder would constitute not only the heart of experience but its gatekeeper. And don’t we imply as much when we keep coming back to children as the paradigm in which wonder must be thought? That might be going too fast, forming certainties about the proper objects of wonder that are too quick to be trusted, and that it will be the task of another chapter (“SUDDEN”) to more attentively explore. More to the point, it may be questioned, if wonder is identical to experience, how often we really experience the world in the way Wittgenstein can be heard as pointing to. The wonder we experience as children, after all, is one to which we would seem developmentally fated to forfeit our access. Any attempt to place wonder in sharper view, in fact, must take its starting point from the acknowledgment that wonder is an experience that does not often strike or often take us in the power of its grip, and that typically enters our passionate lives as an isolated incursion, for reasons that the connection between wonder and the unfamiliar forged above, joined to Nussbaum’s earlier statement of wonder’s “non-­eudaimonistic” character, already illuminate from different directions. For if wonder emerges in the first instance as a response to that which stands out from what is ordinary and familiar, and if everyday life presupposes multiple unnoticed backgrounds of this kind for its very constitution, wonder is an experience to which we have every reason to think we would not be routinely exposed. And given the push and pull of practical concerns that govern our lives and the self-­referential passionate responses they set in motion, we may also see why a passionate response ungrounded in such concerns is one to which we would rarely stand open, and when we do, one which might lack a more enduring anchor in our lives that would make it readily accessible for reflective examination.31 In light of wonder’s unsteady relation to our ordinary lives, wonder’s elusiveness when we seek to place it within our epistemic reach should not surprise us. Wonder’s nearness, yet wonder’s remoteness—a pair of conflicting characterizations of wonder’s relation to our lives that we do not encounter for the last time, and that would here offer opposing estimations of the epistemic grip we might hope for: wonder eludes us—yet wonder is something we know inside out and as intimately as anything we experience before we can scarcely walk or talk. Yet to bring these competing

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claims into balance and place a sharper story about our knowledge of wonder into view that calibrates more judiciously what we know with confidence and what we hold in doubt, we now need to lean more deeply inward toward the roots of a confidence which will seem rudimentary, yet which forms the foundation of anything we can know or doubt. To turn inward for discoveries such as these is a move that philosophers have learned to distrust in many of its philosophical forms, and here we must side with Wittgenstein and his interpreters in appropriating the insight that one of the few yet also most illuminating inward turns that is open to us is linguistic in kind. For however much psychological phenomena may reflectively puzzle us, and however we might distinguish between their different degrees of experiential nearness or remoteness, our first temptation, when approaching them philosophically, has often been to picture them as lying as close to us as anything that takes place within our own breast or inside our own minds. Yet the grasp we seek over such phenomena, on the view articulated by Wittgenstein, stands to be achieved not by turning inward to observe what takes place within us, but by a different kind of inward turn, to our ordinary linguistic usage. To know what an emotion such as anger or joy or wonder “is,” put tersely, is simply to know how to engage in the language games we play with those words, using them to express our own anger or our wonder, or to describe the reactions of others. And that is a turn inward to the resources of our own language that is simultaneously a turn outward in at least two separate ways. First, because it is a turn to an “I” that participates in the “we” of the linguistic community one belongs to as a competent speaker of one’s language with authority to judge what can and cannot be said. Second, because the first person plural is additionally a turn outward to the body, through which language must ordinarily pass in order to reach us. For without the expression of the body, the competent speakers of language who formed my authority as a child could never have taught me to speak, even as it is bodily expression that later on, as an accomplished master of language, continues to provide me with criteria for ascribing psychological concepts to others. This was the viewpoint expressed pithily in Wittgenstein’s rich if not immediately penetrable aphorism that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul” (PPF, 25), which encapsulated a more wide-­ranging venture to call attention to the natural expressions and reactions that language builds upon, grafts itself upon, and replaces. Aphoristically again and in medias res, yet suggestively enough: “The verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it” (PI, 244).32

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WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

And so, mutatis mutandis, with the verbal expression of anger, or fear, or surprise. Our ability to use expressions such as “I am in pain” or “I am angry” or “It fills me with wonder” and “How wonderful!” will be then be genealogically connected to the fact that we had once been offered the words of pain or anger or wonder to replace our wince or our flushed face, our exclamation or dropped jaw, by those with a mastered relationship to language. Our mastery of this language will be a mastery that has first passed through the body. In this narrative, the child will figure as hero twice over, not only in constituting the archetype or paradigm in which wonder must be thought, but in forming the historical root of anything we can say about wonder—or about any other psychological concepts— as speakers of our language. To remark this is to return to one of the points mentioned above in our enumeration of wonder’s (“apophatic”) unlikenesses—its enigmatic relationship to the body, and the ambiguous expression in which it finds embodiment, which seemed to shut it out of the universalizing perspective of modern-­day Darwinians—to directly qualify its force. For if we have ever learned to (speak of) wonder, it would seem that wonder—like pain, or like anger—is something we must be able to see (recognize) expressed. Yet this qualification will have limited relevance unless nuanced further. Because even on Wittgenstein’s terms, the relationship between language and our natural reactions is not a simple one, and the form of “seeing” just invoked not one in which the biological provides the only system of signs. To the bodily or biological, Wittgenstein’s interpreters have added two other contexts that must be taken into account in tracing the course of our linguistic learning, as also the operation of our linguistic practices once mastered. One of these is the cultural context that conditions our expressive possibilities—for it is social conventions, as Peter Hacker notes, “that partly determine within a social group what may count as an expression of love or hatred, gratitude or resentment, affection or contempt”—while the other is the narrative context that conditions our interpretation of behavior.33 The latter context is what is cryptically alluded to in Wittgenstein’s question: “Why does it sound odd to say: ‘For a second he felt deep grief ’?” (PPF, 3), to which Stanley Cavell’s words come as interpretation: “What I call something, what I count as something, is a function of how I recount it, tell it.” How I tell it: how I connect it to what came before and what came after; how I trace its pathway across time— a pathway that counts grief by its causes and counts its depth by its

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more-­than-­momentary effects. Elsewhere, Cavell uses the term “logical history” to refer to these kinds of recounting (“a passion, one might say, has a history, as an action has; a logical history”). 34 And “logic,” here, refers us to the notions of intelligibility that are deeply enmeshed in the ways we apply psychological concepts to ourselves and others. For to identify a given bodily manifestation as a particular emotion, as Stephen Mulhall points out, directly depends on our ability to regard it as an “intelligible human response to the circumstances embodied in the relevant background.”35 It is to such background that you would need to refer in order to understand my outburst of weeping as one of rage, or grief, or pain, or relief, and the words you teach me would be the words in terms of which you can understand and make sense of my natural expression. And it is likewise in this context—where another’s capacity to make sense of my reactions comes up as a stage and condition for my capacity to be taught—that notions of normality and abnormality enter our view, as an indispensable adjunct of intelligibility. It is Cavell, again, who spells out the hold of such notions most compellingly, illuminating the extent to which our ability to (learn to) communicate with each other in language depends on the sheer contingent fact that as human beings we tend to react to certain things in certain ways we take to be normal. To imagine a person who reacts differently—who, for example, expresses suffering by laughing, who could be comforted by whipping, who “laughs at rejection or physical pain the way we laugh at a joke,” who screams in pain when touched with affection, who is “bored by an earthquake or by the death of his child or the declaration of martial law” or who gets “angry at a pin or a cloud or a fish”—is to imagine a kind of person of which we may have to say: “Such people do not live in our world,” and to whom whether we can still respond as persons comes into question.36 If one experiences the force of these counterfactual imaginings, one may see in them the seed of an insight that attaches itself to our own case with similar force. For is the language of wonder one that could be taught to a child that reacted to rainbows or kites or its first vision of the world under snow or the modern-­day Disneyland designed for enchantment (or any of the other everyday sources of wonder to which children are exposed) with tears of rage or boredom or distress, or of any other emotion under which we might dare to interpret his tears? Such a child, we might say, does not form part of our shared world. If we began by talk of a look inward, however, the line we have just drawn out exposes us to the strongest outward-­moving thrust. Because to speak of intelligibility and its constraints (including constraints

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of normality) is to begin to trace a ring around wonder that would set boundaries around what “can” or “cannot” be (called) wonder and what we can and cannot wonder at, finally bringing us up sharply against our starting question to demand a firmer response. For the question, “What is wonder?” could be parsed again by asking: Just how tightly can this ring be drawn? To restate it in terms we have only freshly employed: If passions have a logical history, what logic belongs to wonder? To know what wonder “is” will be a knowledge of how to use its characteristic language and engage in its language games, we tersely said moments ago. It is a knowledge of what to call wonder and when to speak of it which means that we know wonder as intimately as any other emotion we have learnt to recognize in others and been taught to express, and as intimately and as confidently as any word we have mastered the ability to use, a mastery we exhibit when we spot looks of wonder on another’s face (“there was such wonder in her eyes as she suddenly walked in and saw—”) or when we describe ourselves as having being filled with wonder at a sight or a thought (“it fills one with such wonder to think—”). This mastery of the phenomena would seem robust enough to allow us to respond to the intellectual defeat expressed by some theoretical inquirers—wonder is a state about which it is “difficult to know what to say” (Lazarus)—with the simple counterclaim that in a real sense, in ordinary circumstances, and as ordinary speakers of our language if not as theoretical investigators claiming a more-­than-­ordinary expertise, we do know what to say and when to say it. Yet the story of this mastery, it must now be observed, cannot be entirely told in such simple terms. For that, on the one hand, would be to overlook the variety of factors that influence our use of psychological language, and that may indeed differentiate between the linguistic habits of individuals nominally belonging to a unified linguistic community. The ways we employ such language, after all—the emotions we experience and express and reflectively ascribe to ourselves, as much as the emotions we succeed in recognizing in others—reflect capacities of feeling and sensitivities of judgment that vary across individuals and depend on the particular journeys of personal formation and types of passionate education to which they have been exposed. And to the extent that this education places us in relations of dependency to the linguistic communities we inhabit and to the attitudes to the emotions that shape their outlook, the ease with which we reach for a particular emotive vocabulary to speak of ourselves and speak for others will also reflect the broader attitudes and evaluative stances of our

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community to the emotion in question. If wonder thus presents itself to its students as an elusive phenomenon—to resume our running theme yet again—the reasons for this may go beyond the “constitutive” disposition to rarity that was pinned above to its paradigmatic connection to the unfamiliar and paradigmatic disconnection from self-­concern. For it may signal a linguistic distance from the vocabulary of wonder that reveals something important about its uncertain status within our cultural life, and is already a testament to what Mary Baine Campbell describes as our deeply ambivalent stance on its value.37 But putting this more complex point aside, to tell this story so simply would also be to overlook, and more basically, the multiple moments of uncertainty or doubt that typically shadow our ordinary linguistic transactions. For: I see a child wake up on a winter morning to a world glittering under snow for the first time and run up to the window to stare out with shining eyes, and (encouraging, recognizing) I say: “Isn’t it wonderful?” I see a child watching fish turn and shimmer in the aquarium, a child looking at iridescent seashells or shiny stones in the natural history museum—eyes wide, hands stretching out to touch the glass— and I later say: “You should have seen the look of wonder on her face.” The expression is there; and so is the narrative context—a context even more perspicuous to me for my having constructed it myself (leading her to the window, taking her for a weekend visit to the museum) with the very intention to provoke a wondering response. Yet: I see a member of my walking group stop in his tracks as we make our way through the darkened landscape of a remote island and raise his eyes to the densely starred sky, and I hear him say, “Wow.” Later recounting this scene, do I speak of “wonder” or “awe,” of “amazement” or simply “surprise” in describing his response? With nothing but his exclamation and wide-­eyed look to guide me, any of these words would find a foothold in this scene, though some of them will seem thicker and some thinner than others. “Surprise” may seem too thin for the grandeur I see (and could I imagine him seeing it differently?), too quickly jolting and as quickly passing (it is my sense of what the scene “demands” that again speaks), too suggestive of a rudimentary ignorance (as if he had not expected to find the very sky there; as if nothing whatsoever, in this era of mass information, had prepared him for the possibility that the stars could appear in such density in the absence of artificial light). “Awe” may seem too thick in the depth of feeling it attributes, suggestive of a grandeur that touches deeply enough to humble; though if my fellow-­walker remains rooted to the spot while everyone walks on and I

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later find him looking grave and quiet where he had previously been the life of the party, I may be more disposed to reach for it. “Wonder” itself would seem to carry a commitment, a shade of deeper, more positive feeling and indeed a more enduring effect, that “astonishment” and even “amazement”—while lacking the brevity of “surprise”—do not involve, though its freight would seem lighter than the one carried by “awe.” I would in fact need a broader view of the narrative history of this moment—not only of what my fellow-­walker went on to do, but also of what had gone before it, in an open-­ended sense that would include his larger individual history and his habits of emotional response—and I might indeed need to hear him recount this scene in his own words, in order to interpret this exclamation with a vocabulary that would commit to one emotive concept as against another. Even if emotion is anchored in our body’s script—to resume our earlier phrase and to solidify our insight about the complexity of the signs at stake—the way it writes itself is rarely enough to allow us to read its identity without a number of interpretive aids. Even where interpretive aids are in rich supply, in fact, it must often be accepted—assimilating an insight that Wittgenstein developed forcefully in his work—that such concepts are not hermetically sealed from each other, and are not separated by hard and fast boundaries that would allow us to regiment their meaning into crisp definitions and to issue categorical judgments as to whether certain phenomena speak to one concept to the exclusion of another. (PI, 68–69: The use of a word is “not everywhere bounded by rules,” though “we can draw a boundary—for a special purpose.”) Approaching the question of wonder’s “logic” with the sensitivities Wittgenstein sought to encourage in us, we might want to programmatically abjure the expectation that an emotion (or any concept simpliciter) should respond to a single logic that we could identify and spell out in crystalline terms applicable to every one of its instances, in doing so imagining we have a stronger intellectual mastery over the phenomena than we can possess. Ronald Hepburn’s landmark essay on wonder, in which the relation of wonder to elements of cognition or rationality forms a running theme, could be read as supporting evidence for this view, carefully outlining the different varieties of wonder in a way that suggests that it would be an aggression on the phenomena to treat wonder as a single thing.38 Our knowledge of wonder is thus tied to a mastery of language that is inherently pluralistic, and that while confident in central cases—where expression and actions can be confidently fitted into a confidently known

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narrative—can be more exposed to ambiguity or doubt in others. And this ambiguity, to qualify it further, reflects not only the permeability of emotions’ boundaries qua concepts, but also their permeability qua experiences. As Hume once remarked, it takes only a “different turn of thought”—a slight shift in what we may call the ideation that conceptually constitutes an emotion—to change the nature of the passion we feel. Hope often alternates with fear when faced with an uncertain outcome; grief often alternates with anger when faced with an injury or a loss.39 Even if we could clearly mark the boundaries, thus, between the different concepts that compete for the first-­person or third-­person characterization of a given experience like the one just sketched out— “awe” and “wonder,” “astonishment” and “amazement”—we might need to recognize that these different emotions may all shade into each other and stand combined in the experience, militating against its unification under a single conceptual commitment. Focusing on the first type of boundary, some of the distinctive features of wonder outlined earlier, in fact, already suggested why wonder might be exposed to greater ambiguity than other emotions and offer stronger resistance to proposed regimentations of its logic. For the expression of wonder, we said, is rarely couched in the vocabulary of wonder and its cognates, and rarely in ways that ascribe this vocabulary to the first person. Not “I am filled with wonder” or “I wonder”—an expression that, where it stands independently, often conveys questioning and often appears in conjunction (“I wonder whether, or why, or how”) to specify its objects of interrogation40 —but “Wow” or “How extraordinary!” and occasionally “How wonderful!” The linguistic habits that determine how we express our responses, how others describe them or we ourselves later recount them, thus fail to call upon the vocabulary of wonder in terms that would give it a firmer place in our linguistic lives, and make it more accessible to reflection when we try to map these linguistic phenomena. No less importantly, wonder seems to lack the strong rational core that characterizes most other emotions, and that ordinarily lends itself to articulations of their specific logic. To say this, of course, is not to suggest that there are no judgments or beliefs we could ever adduce to explain or justify our wondering response. The person wondering at the existence of life, or the birth of a child, or the ability of the human mind to grasp scientific truths—to mention a few of the most striking instances—or the person standing in wonder before the night sky—to take one of the best-­k nown philosophical topoi—might well be able to formulate the thoughts or beliefs that feed into this emotional response.41 Yet any such

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thoughts would seem to be expressions of wonder in a way that applies more strongly to wonder than to other emotions when their justifying context is expressed (“It was possible that life should never have arisen!” “A whole new human being!”). Hepburn makes a telling remark when he points out that wonder “can indeed be challenged and deflated”—can always be challenged, we may add—“by the question, ‘What else would you expect?’”42 In echoing the tones of a jaded cynicism and the refrains of reductivism (“it’s just  .  .  .”), what this deflationary question (or its permanent possibility) would seem to reveal is the extent to which what is at stake is a reduction of value, and to which a judgment—all too naked—of value is involved. This observation—which thematizes the relationship of wonder to explanation, and the necessity of its liquidation—points ahead to questions we will be meeting again in the following chapter (“DELIGHT”). And yet having posed the question of wonder’s logic, and having calibrated more finely the degree of confidence and the degree of doubt that should enter our response, it would seem that here we would in fact have the outline—thinner than other types of emotional logic yet substantive enough—of the ring we had been seeking to draw. For within this logic, the ascription of value to the object of one’s wonder could at the very least be identified as a central component. This is an assumption explicitly expressed by Nussbaum, who, as we saw earlier, described wonder as an emotion responding to “the pull of the object” in which “the subject is maximally aware of the value of the object.”43 It is a view whose image we may recognize in many of the experiences of wonder we are familiar with in our different capacities, as laypeople, as scientists, as philosophers—the prototypical case of wonder before a rainbow seen for the first time, the stunned beholding of a glistening underground cave, the wonder at the miracle of birth, the scientific wonder at the capacities of the mind. The astonishment we experience at such events, thoughts, or discoveries is one that seems inseparable from the experience of beauty or positive significance that accompanies them.44 On such a view, it is this positive element that would help to distinguish wonder from other emotions such as astonishment or amazement, which appear more neutral to the value of the objects that provoke it.45 To return to the kinds of concrete cases we considered above: I see a child’s eyes widen before snow, before shimmering fish, its jaw dropping and its hand moving to touch and I say: “Just look at her wonder.” But I see a child’s eyes widen, its jaw dropping, before the gruesome spectacle of an animal lying dead on the road, before the morning-­after

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spectacle of streets reduced to rubble by a storm, and I hesitate. Call it surprise, call it astonishment, but the language of “wonder” would here be repulsed by the repulsion of the scene, the “no” we utter to it. Wonder’s evaluative “yes,” equally, would tie in both with what we recognize as wonder’s expression in the central cases to which our confidence is anchored, and with what we think of as the responsive motion it sets in train—manifesting itself in our widening eyes and opening face, in our readiness to “stagger down to a seat” (Frijda) in passive submission to its effect, and in the beginning of a smile that scholars have found imprinted in the very etymology of wonder’s semantic field, no less than in the movements of leaning and looking, of nearness and approach, that objects of wonder draw from us, making us move toward them rather than move away.46 This analysis of the logic of wonder might not hold with watertight stability; and with a Wittgensteinian sensitivity to the rough and tumble nature of our linguistic practices and the blurred edges of our concepts, we should probably not expect it to. We should accept, that is, that concepts such as surprise, astonishment, amazement, wonder, and awe belong to a family of terms that cannot always be sharply distinguished. And the difficulty of picking out the boundaries between related concepts would explain why wonder has often been allowed to shade into its conceptual siblings in the discussion of the handful of contemporary writers who have shown a concern with the emotion. But if we were to agree that this account answers for many of the phenomena, here we would be fixing—even if hesitantly and in a less than watertight way— the boundaries of what we “can” and “cannot” wonder at.47 Less than watertight perhaps; yet to some, it must now be granted, and even with these caveats and concessions, this may still seem a notch too tight for comfort. For talk of logic, of the “can”s and “must”s our concepts must conform to—with a necessity endued with all the eternity of logic—may seem talk condemned to remain brashly ignorant of its history, which often provides the quickest solvent to such necessities. And although a view such as Wittgenstein’s—which replaced talk of logic with talk of grammar, and sought to undercut the eternal necessities of logic with more finely tuned attention to ordinary language as a “temporal phenomenon” (PI, 108)—may be inherently less disposed to this kind of neglect, this is an attention that always needs to be cultivated afresh and case by case. This attention, in our case, would be directly invited once we agree to draw a connection between two things that after all appear to form

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natural cohorts: the value ascribed to an object in an emotional response, and what (with Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park) we might call the “felt experience” or (with Derek Matravers) the “hedonic tone” of that emotional response—or more simply put, the tone of pleasure or displeasure an emotion involves. Ordinarily, these two aspects seem to go together, so that the pleasurableness of the swell of joy I experience at good news is inseparable from my thinking the news good; the unbearableness of the indignation that makes me squirm with discomfort is inseparable from the fact that something I consider deeply wrong and unwanted has occurred.48 Similarly, it would seem, a wonder directed to things of value would be a wonder that is experienced with pleasure. And this, indeed, is an assumption that is embraced by many writers on the topic. It is one explicitly spelled out by Robert Fuller, for example, for whom the intrinsic delight of wonder (its “immediate luminousness”) provides a Jamesian argument for granting it a crucial place in the architecture of our spiritual lives.49 And it is, of course, this assumption we found enshrined in the Ur-­text or “essential definition” of wonder from which we began, in which wonder was claimed as an experience that “produces delight,” prompting a question about the present tense codified in this remark (“with all the stability of the eternal”).50 Yet if this view is correct—or correct for the most part, allowing for the jagged boundaries of the phenomena—it would seem that we should be on our guard against assuming ourselves to have discerned wonder’s timeless essence. Or this, at least, would be one of the key lessons that Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s unsurpassed narrative of the history of wonder is designed to teach us. The question or doubt of eternity has thus finally caught up with us, offering an obstacle that is truly a blessing in disguise, braking our thinking just when it was going too quickly and delivering a new joint to move it forward. And going forward here means going backward, though we will find that these may not quite be the right terms to characterize the movement required of us. Having considered why wonder cannot easily be known, having discovered what we intimately know about wonder, we are again ready to doubt ourselves. Braking on the “IS” of our logic, let us turn to wonder’s history.

DELIGHT: Histories of Wonder between the Rainbow and the Harpies

Telling Wonder (I): Consequence

It opened the history of thought, with Plato’s oft-­cited words in the Theaetetus: the “sense of wonder,” Socrates would say to the young Theaetetus, is philosophy’s foundation or beginning. It was claimed again as the beginning of thought by Aristotle, who would open his Metaphysics with an avowal of our natural desire to know, and would ground the unfolding of this desire to our capacity for wonder: “For it is owing to their wonder (dia . . . to thaumazein) that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (982b10–15).1 Having opened the history of our thought, it then traveled widely among thinkers continuing to labor in the shadow of Aristotle, in the shadow of Plato. In the early modern period, Descartes would famously claim wonder as an intellectual opening in terms that echoed this long tradition, when describing wonder as “a sudden surprise of the soul” which “makes us disposed to acquire scientific knowledge.”2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers studying the natural world would celebrate it widely as a passion of thought. Forging ahead in search of echoes and resumptions, it would seem that wonder has never been far from the lips of the scientific thinkers and philosophers of both the distant and more recent past—from Descartes to Adam Smith, from Kant and Schopenhauer to Wittgenstein or Heidegger. And this history of wonder’s enduring intellectual presence in turn appears to have been closely twinned to an enduring acknowledgment of wonder’s delights. For if all men desire to know, as Aristotle affirmed,

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then all men could be expected to desire the wonder that leads to knowledge. It is indeed the connection of wonder with knowledge that was in the background of Aristotle’s influential remarks on the delights of wonder, when he would declare in the Rhetoric that “to admire (thaumazein)” is “pleasurable” (1.11.21), resuming this no less expressly in the Poetics to state: “wonder (to thaumaston) is pleasant” (1460a15–20).3 Statements such as these were among several textual stimuli that would pollinate a historical period which constitutes our own not-­so-­distant past and which we have come to know for its intensive cultural fascination with wonder—that long period extending from the late Middle Ages to the late Renaissance, in which this preoccupation found its most copiously catalogued apogee. The period of the Renaissance was an age of boundary stretching of every kind: of travel and exploration that culminated in the discovery of the New World, bringing seismic shifts in the understanding of terrestrial geography, and leaving Europe flush with exotic objects from far-­flung topographies and tales of unheard-­of peoples and landscapes; of scientific discoveries stimulated by technologies that yielded new possibilities of telescopic and microscopic vision and brought dizzying transformations to the understanding of the cosmos and the place of human terra firma within it. The sense of wonder provoked by these boundary-­stretching moments would indelibly shape the cultural discourse of the period, and would be reflected in the newly central role accorded to wonder in philosophical and artistic activity as their boundaries in turn expanded. Drawing on the rediscovered classical tradition, wonder would be acclaimed afresh by Renaissance poets and literary theorists who would seek to reconceive poetic practice along new lines, embracing the use of complex stylistic artifices as a means for achieving a response of wonder now openly envisaged as art’s proper end. “The end of the poet,” the Italian poet Giambattista Marino would characteristically declare, “is to arouse wonder,” and “let him who does not know how to astonish go work in the stables.”4 In doing so, they would allocate to wonder in the aesthetic process a role inverse to the one that had been long assigned to it in the philosophical process by Aristotle and Plato, developing the aesthetics of the marvelous that form a hallmark of this period and that indeed contribute to its oft-­cited name, the “Age of the Marvelous.” In this new aesthetics, the link between wonder and pleasure would stand loudly proclaimed—it was pleasure, after all, as time-­honored literary tradition had established, at which poetic activity partly aimed.5 And

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both in this aesthetic vision and in the larger cultural epoch with which it shared its name—a period suffused with marvels and the marvelous, its discourse laced with a wonder directed to nature and human artistry alike—similarly proclaimed would seem to be the thread of continuity with a longer history in which wonder’s delight had been central to the conception of what wonder “is” and what wonder “does.” Wonder “is” pleasant; wonder causes pleasure—a timeless affirmation that would propose to join the philosophers to the poets and the present with the past, to tell us how that “sudden surprise of the soul” has always been textured in our experience. Yet here, in fact, there is a more complex story to be told—a story that will lead us to interrogate the unity read into the historical script we have just swiftly mustered, and make us question not only the unity between poets and philosophers, but the intellectual unison soldering the philosophers among themselves. And in doing so, it will raise a question concerning the different ways in which wonder can serve as an opening for thought, and a pointed question as to whether wonder is still open for us as heirs to this long history. The answers to these questions turn out to pivot on a close engagement with two seminal recent narratives of wonder’s history, each of which offers different tools for refining our notion of what wonder “is” and “can” be—or indeed, as our first narrative would suggest, for problematizing more broadly what it is for us to say of any passion that it is or isn’t. The passions have a history: this thesis is among the cardinal messages that Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park’s magisterial narrative of wonder’s history, Wonders and The Order of Nature, is designed to press and substantiate. It is a historical narrative that brings into its sweep both the antecedents of the “Age of the Marvelous” and its descendants, tackling a period ranging from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (roughly 1150–1750) to track the changing histories of two topics that its authors take to be indissolubly linked: wonders as objects of natural inquiry and wonder as a passion of inquiry, or what they call “the two sides of knowledge, objective order and subjective sensibility.” In following its subject, it catches in its searchlights a sumptuous landscape that includes courts and cloisters, nobles and philosophers, and brings into view changing patterns of wealth and power—patterns affected by moments of seismic significance such as the discovery of the New World—as well as changing patterns of the scientific and philosophical ethos and shifting views of the natural order. To follow this narrative is to place on display a thumbnail sketch of a rich and checkered history.

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But this narrative will here engage us with special immediacy taken as a history of wonder that thematizes the enduring identity of this passion, and does so by attending to the affective tone with which it has been historically stamped. It is a history marked by several reversals of fortune and near-­cyclical vicissitudes; and on Daston and Park’s telling, one that crucially both opens and closes on a moment of philosophical distrust. The first of these takes place on a cultural stage marked by the gradual proliferation of wonders and the wonder that tracks them. In noble courts across Europe, collections of wonders have become a widespread presence, serving as symbols of wealth and power, and an appetite for mirabilia, which existing traditions of Greek and Roman paradoxography had already fuelled and provided material for, has begun to be reflected in a growing body of writings that includes encyclopedias, travel narratives, and the literature of romance. The wonder answering to these wonders—the response these extraordinary particulars are calculated to provoke—is a wonder tinged with pleasure and delight. It is a delight tangible in the exclamations with which a thirteenth-­century encyclopedic writer such as the Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais greets the comparison of animals (the elephant next to the gnat, the tiger to the turtle) in his Speculum Naturale, as in the ones with which Marco Polo, in his Travels, effuses about the natural wonders of far-­flung countries (“everything there is different from what it is with us and excels in size and beauty”).6 On this stage, natural philosophers stand apart and aloof, by treating wonder with ambivalence and suspicion. This ambivalence looks backward and forward, and betokens a passion that has changed, and is set to change again. Backward: to Aristotle, from whom philosophers take their vision of philosophical inquiry and ideals of rational explanation. Knowledge, on this philosophical ideal, takes the form of universal and necessary truths that can be known with absolute certainty, and the syllogism provides the stock in trade. Experience, and the study of contingent particulars—particulars like the ones forming the objects of delectating wonder for the philosophers’ contemporaries—have little place here. Backward, too: to Augustine, this time not as a hero but as a supposed opponent of rational ideals, as the advocate of a wonder in which Latin philosophers, emerging in the twelfth century from a prolonged intellectual slump, saw philosophical inquiry opposed, insofar as it “elevated wonder at the mighty works of God above the causal explanation of natural phenomena.” Wonder, for many of the philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, comes to be associated with

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ignorance—and in turn often associated, not with pleasure, but with fear—and is dismissed as a passion unfitting to philosophers. It becomes taboo, “the mark of the ignorant, the non-­philosopher, the old woman.”7 And yet these backward looks simultaneously yield tokens of important changes. For Aristotle, as Daston and Park point out, had spoken praisingly of wonder as the passion of philosophical inquiry in his Metaphysics, and significantly, had presented a view of wonder and its proper objects that was at odds with the one assumed by medieval philosophers when shrinking back from wonder in distrust. “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize,” Aristotle had written (982b10–15), and only a few lines down had appeared to offer by way of clarification: “For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are, as they do about self-­moving marionettes, or about the solstices or the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side” (983a10–20). That certain things move in given quasi-­mechanical patterns, that celestial bodies behave in regular and familiar ways, that certain mathematical truths hold: not the unusual, the atypical, the strange—the extraordinary particulars represented by medieval mirabilia—but in fact the beauty of natural regularities, and thus the usual and the regular, was for Aristotle the proper object of wonder. Similarly, while Augustine had indeed claimed wonder as a “highly salutary passion” and as “the proper expression of humility before the omnipotence of God,” considering it a religious duty to wonder at creation and its Creator, his had been a wonder in which the medieval delight over mirabilia would not have recognized its image.8 For Augustine had refused to concede any special distinction between the usual and the unusual, or the commonplace and the extraordinary as proper objects of wonder, deeming all things created by God equally wondrous. And far from connecting wonder exclusively with pleasure, he had framed his remarks on wonder by a discussion of God’s power to subject the unfaithful to eternal torture, thus bequeathing to his readers an image of wonder tinged with fear. In marking these changes (or divergences), this brief fragment of Daston and Park’s larger narrative already brings into view elements that will play a crucial role in their account of wonder’s history. For their claim that the passions in general, and wonder in particular, have a history, is a claim about changes that can be marked on several levels, which include, on the one hand, the objects of the emotion, and on the other, what they refer to as its “affective content” or “felt experience.” In considering the

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contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary, we have already seen some of the changes to which wonder is open on the former level. Daston and Park’s narrative, indeed, here provides us with rich material to which we will later be returning to spin the fabric of our thinking, when the contrast between the ordinary and extraordinary as proper objects of wonder takes the foreground as a central woof (see “SUDDEN”). But with the second element, we have found the beginning of a thread that will guide us through the present stage of our discussion. Because it is indeed, as it turns out, partly as a vicissitude in delight that the history of wonder as a passion of inquiry, on Daston and Park’s account, needs to be written. In charting this sequence, we will need to leap quickly over many of the developments that prepare the ground for the reversal of wonder’s fortunes among the philosophers, from opprobrium to approbation— past the moment in the fourteenth century when Italian medical writers serving at princely courts begin to explore the therapeutic powers of particular marvels, instigating the slow entry of wonders into natural philosophy, past the accomplished ascendancy of wonders in natural philosophy from the mid-­sixteenth and especially in the seventeenth century, when “marvels, described in words and displayed as things, saturated early modern European culture, thrusting themselves into the consciousness of nearly everyone, from prince to pauper to philosopher,” and in the form of “strange facts” come to preoccupy philosophers, creating a new community of inquirers (the “curious” or “ingenious” of Europe) and a new category of scientific experience (the fact), and establish themselves at the vanguard of a changing scientific ethos, embodied by Francis Bacon, in which Aristotelian philosophy, with its taste for universal certainties and distaste for particulars, are abandoned for a concern with the anomalous and the particular that heralds the empiricist ethos of modernity.9 Leaving all this somewhat breathlessly behind, we may leap ahead to the moment when, the infiltration of wonders into philosophy complete, the passion of wonder—the subjective face of this development— similarly comes into its own in the sensibility of inquiry, and thereby embarks on one of the most interesting phases of its history—one of the most interesting, and one of the most rapid, leading to a downfall as fast as a coup after its meteoric rise, and one that, if correct, would put us in the mind of cycles and the cyclical as the best description of the history it has been fated to follow.

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As the mid-­seventeenth century comes into view, it is here, Daston and Park argue, that we can observe a crucial transformation in the passion of wonder, exemplified in Newton’s writings but recurrent in the writings of the generation before him. A “minuet” of emotions comes to constitute the sensibility of inquiry as natural philosophers understand it, one that is fashioned as a passage between “musing admiration, startled wonder, then bustling curiosity.” Wonder, long-­time pariah of the intellectual passions, now appears as the staple of inquisitive sensibility. What has happened here? A change, it is argued, so radical that Daston and Park contest whether the passion that emerges from it retains its identity, and whether we preserve our entitlement to speak of it as a single thing. “Although there is a kinship of descent,” they write, “and, no doubt, some resemblance of feeling between the wonder praised by Augustine and blamed by David Hume, or between the curiosity castigated by Bernard of Clairvaux and that celebrated by Hobbes, they are not of the same emotional species.” A large claim; and one that, fresh from a discussion about what wonder is or can be, will have a captivating hold on us. What are its grounds? At the most basic, they consist in “a premise that the felt substance of an emotion depends to a significant extent on the company it keeps.” And it was the relocation of wonder and curiosity relative to each other, and their relocation individually on the map of the “vices and virtues, passions and interests,” that therefore changed their substance and “emotionally restructured both.”10 Long considered separate from wonder and either ignored in this connection—as by Aristotle and his Latin commentators—or disparaged —as by Augustine, who associated it with pride and lust—curiosity, in this period, comes to be reinterpreted and relocated among the passions. At the hands of Hobbes, the foremost artisan of its new meaning in the seventeenth century, curiosity rises to become the quality that separates human beings from animals, and within his desire-­centered psychology, acquires the status of the archetypal desire—an insatiable desire fated never to be at rest, whose objects are the obverse of the useful and range over the novel, the extravagant, the rare, and as such, a passion understood as a “refined form of consumerism” and associated with greed in the map of the virtues and vices.11 It is with this newly interpreted curiosity that wonder enters into alliance, and, overturning the Aristotelian view of wonder in which wonder was directed to the regular, follows the bent of this “refined consumerism” and finally succumbs to the fascination with the rare and the unusual with which the world

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outside philosophy had for a long time been awash, to make of the rare and the extraordinary wonder’s proper object. In this process, the medieval philosophers’ view of wonder as an “uncomfortable (and therefore ideally short-­lived) realization of ignorance” cedes to an appreciation of the intrinsic pleasures of wonder, which the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche was not alone in seeing as “seductively sweet to the soul,” or in acknowledging the possibility of “wonder for wonder’s sake” to which they opened out.12 Yet it is important here to follow this story through before grappling with the grain of its detail. So what happens, then, that, after this brief efflorescence, sees wonder again banished from the passions of inquiry only a few decades later, at the end of the seventeenth century, in a process that the middle of the eighteenth century sees through to its conclusion? On this account, it would appear to be in part, and precisely, the feeling tone of wonder—its delightful character, or intrinsic “sweetness”—that brooked the grounds for the unstable relationship between wonder and inquiry, threatening to drive the two asunder. This sweetness seemed to be exhibited in a tendency of wonder, often picked up by philosophical writers on the passions in this period, to reduce to mere gawk, to arrest rather than to move—and thus to freeze inquiry rather than to motivate it, in a passivity indicative of willing abandonment to its charms. Descartes described this as a tendency to leave the “whole body . . . immobile as a statue,” his words later echoed by Spinoza when he spoke of wonder’s habit of leaving the mind “without motion” and “transfixed.”13 Talk of wonder’s sweetness, to be sure, would not fall on Descartes with unselfconscious comfort, given Descartes’s stipulation that wonder precedes judgments of value, striking “before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us”—a stroke that, in being empty of value, would seem calculated to also be affectively empty. Yet Descartes’s wary documentation of the tendency to “seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them” may be read as picking up an affective appeal linked, not so much (or so narrowly) to the value of the object, as to the posture of passive abandonment it offers, engrossing the attention in the object seen.14 It is a picture of wonder’s inbuilt possibility of abandonment that may well remind us of the profile of wonder as this has been drawn up by students of the passions working closer to our time. For it was this peculiar passivity that Nico Frijda singled out, as we earlier saw, when describing wonder’s embodied manifestation: the muscle tone drops, making the mouth fall open and the subject stagger

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to a seat, the body in a state of arrest presenting as “relaxed sensuality” or “forgetful relaxation.”15 And if the subject drops to a seat, is there no danger that the pleasures of receptive relaxation and self-­forgetfulness may prevent her from rising too soon to dispel the spell of wonder, even by initiating that weakest of all movements—toward inquiry—to which philosophers have often taken wonder to be bound? In Descartes’s case, it may additionally be said, this characterization of wonder’s inbuilt possibilities was not wholly free from paradox. For in the denunciation of wonder’s gorgonizing effects quoted above—wonder leaves the body “immobile as a statue”—Descartes was in fact speaking directly, not of wonder (admiration), but of astonishment (étonnement); but astonishment, in turn, was to be understood as an excess, and thus as a modification, of wonder. Wonder thus moves to inquiry; yet wonder also stalls. Yet how—it might be queried—could both claims be simultaneously affirmed? And how could a dispute over their truth—a dispute dividing near-­contemporaries and indeed a single writer against himself, and thus pointing away from divergences that might be written as contingent shifts revealing the passions’ historicity—be settled? Descartes’s own solution to this difficulty would here seem to take the form of conceptual gerrymandering, resolving the problem by definitional fiat: it is wonder that moves; it is astonishment that freezes.16 If we put this apparent paradox aside for the moment, however, we may see the seed of the denouement that Daston and Park have in mind, and which Mary Campbell can then be taken as glossing when she remarks: “This was an age of discovery, invention, venture capital, conquest; the active, not the contemplative virtues were in the ascendance.” With its persistent association with “speechlessness and a kind of paralysis” during this period, wonder could only come to appear suspect.17 Yet the severance of wonder from inquiry, when it happens, has a more complex foundation. Part of it reflects a worry of which the seventeenth-­century natural philosopher Robert Boyle became an important mouthpiece, in suggesting that wonder directed to nature was wonder drawn away from God. This is a worry that leads, not so much to the eclipse of wonder, as to its displacement and rechanneling into a theological passion, so that wonder acquires a strongly theological orientation in seventeenth and eighteenth-­century natural philosophy, one that is accompanied by a displacement of its focus from extraordinary particulars to the ordinary and to the natural order. This is the period when so-­ called physico-­ theology—“the project,” as Catherine Wilson sums it up, “of reading in the features of the world the existence,

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presence, and characteristics of a supernatural being”—comes to dominate the practice of natural science.18 It is the period when naturalists across Europe can be heard raising their voices in a chorus of wondering exclamations at the hidden magnificence of lice and flies, which contain “miracles heaped on miracles” waiting to be uncovered; when naturalists dwell with devotional ardor on the power of “every animal, flower, fruit and insect,” even the meanest—indeed of “every particle of matter”—to reveal the world as a “magazine of wonders” (Henry Baker’s words), pointing onward to the higher wonder and glory of God.19 Yet this development, Daston and Park argue, had an important result: for “wonder proved intractable to such a dramatic orientation and ceased to be a philosophical passion.”20 At the same time, the trend that led to the marginalization of wonder among European intellectuals in the eighteenth century—the rejection of the marvelous that came to typify “the new, secular meaning of the enlightenment as a state of mind”—had its roots in two even broader transformations—transformations of both “metaphysics and sensibility.” One of these, it is suggested, was a distrust of wonder that was the product of the grueling civil strife of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the extent that wonder was associated with enthusiasm (Schwärmerei in German) and superstition and its destructive effects in religion and politics. The other centered on a new understanding of the natural order, in which nature was reconceived as governed by immutable laws expressed in the rigid uniformity and regularity of natural phenomena everywhere. Nature, on this revised understanding, behaves with a cool, measured dignity in which marvels and the marvelous can have no place. It, too, obeys a kind of decorum—a term familiar to us from the tradition of literary criticism where it denotes the relation of fitness between subject and style—which thus reveals an emphasis on the regular, the uniform, and the proportionate, and a distaste for the marvelous, to be shared by both views of nature and aesthetic ideals of the period. This account of wonder’s demise, it should be noted, involves a rejection of the simple narrative of the “disenchantment” of the world associated with Max Weber, according to which it was the development of science and of an increasingly rational stance toward nature (combined with the processes of secularization) that vacated nature of its mystique. 21 But vacant, certainly, is how Daston and Park suggest we find it by the end of this process. By the time this transformation is complete, wonder and curiosity have been decoupled, curiosity has been bequeathed to the next generations of naturalists as the principal motor of inquiry—an

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impulse of sober industriousness free from wonder’s sentimentalities— and wonder, reaffirmed in its opprobrious connection with ignorance, has been relegated to mere gawk and to a vulgar, “bumptious form of pleasure” scorned by the intellectuals and reserved for the “unlettered masses.” Thus, we may add, returning it to the origins from which it had descended, so that the curtain of this long history of wonder falls on a distrust bearing a more than passing resemblance to the suspicion on which our stage had opened. A “grand narrative” indeed—the kind of narrative that offers us an important road map for finding our bearings in this fractious history, and one that illuminates our topic from every angle. A narrative, too, that is grainy with overturnings and reversals; and one of the questions to be raised in what follows will be whether these shifts should be read entirely as “reversals,” or whether a different and more instructive way of reading them stands open. Yet our very next step must be to return to the opening claim that had given us direction, planting itself into the ground below our feet as a first spade to unsettle it when it seemed too steady and stodgy with unquestioned “is”s and “ought”s linking wonder with delight. Daston and Park’s most relevant focusing claim, we will recall, had been framed as a suggestion about changes in the “affective content” or “felt experience” of wonder resulting from the relocations of the passions, virtues, and vices relative to each other and establishing wonder’s historicity. Where do we stand with this claim? Part of the evidence for it already came into view in describing the transition from the discomfited wonder of the medieval philosophers to the intrinsic sweetness of their seventeenth-­century counterparts’. Yet this evidence finds its complement in an affective sequel which marks the reversal of this feeling tone yet again, and in which it is the philosopher Adam Smith that appears to serve as a linchpin witness. He is a witness, certainly, that cuts a lonely figure on the stand, for with the relegation of wonder to mere gawk by the mid-­eighteenth century among the learned, Adam Smith is one of few to retain wonder as a philosophical passion. Opening his long essay “The History of Astronomy,” Smith makes wonder—alongside surprise and admiration—a key passion in his account of the historical succession of cosmological systems, and of the process of inquiry driving these scientific evolutions. Yet the retention of wonder in this position—one that would seem to recall the familiar position in which Aristotle’s Metaphysics had long enshrined it—should not, Daston and Park suggest, blind us to the deeper discontinuities at work; for it testifies to the demotion of wonder from its

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earlier status as a source of delight, to a passion now experienced with a very different affective tone. They write: Smith composed a history of astronomy in which one cosmological system succeeded another by allaying or exciting philosophical wonder, so that wonder became the engine of progress in that science. Yet he found the passion an uncomfortable one, inducing “confusion and giddiness” in small doses and “lunacy and distraction” in large. The naturalist confronted with a “singular plant, or a singular fossil” must somehow classify it “before he can get rid of that Wonder, that uncertainty and anxious curiosity excited by its singular appearance . . .” Gone was Male­ branche’s sentiment de douceur . . . Smith’s wonder resembled not so much fear, as it had for the scholastic philosophers, as a nasty hybrid of seasickness and toothache.22 This passage appears to bear the onus of Daston and Park’s argument concerning the experiential shift of wonder from pleasure to distress toward the end of the historical period they survey after its brief transactions with sweetness. And this is a shift that, like the shift toward sweetness before it, Daston and Park would seem to link with the changing (and newly negative) judgments on wonder outlined above and with wonder’s changing evaluative neighborhood. It is a reading, certainly, that affords us critical insights into the historical transformations of wonder and the evaluative contexts that have framed them. And engaging its central thesis, it is important to acknowledge the role played by what Daston and Park call the “neighborhood” of emotions in determining their identity and the mode in which we experience them. This is a suggestion that, articulated in a general form, has commanded assent by several other writers on the emotions. It is a claim defended by Nussbaum, albeit in a different language, when she remarks the way in which the value judgments we place on emotions affect the way we experience them, a claim she illustrates with the case of anger. In societies in which anger figures as an object of moral disapproval, its experience will often be inflected with shame; contrast this with the experience of anger in Roman society, where its connection to honor meant that anger was “hooked up to a feeling of manly pride, and to a quasi-­erotic excitement.” In Greek and Roman taxonomies, as a result, anger—we may thus be surprised to find—was described as a “pleasant emotion directed at the future, because of the pleasure of contemplating revenge.”23

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Here, however, and while welcoming the other insights of this reading, it is important to turn a sharper light on the reversal of feeling tone that provides it with its last transition, and to question whether the burden placed on it by Daston and Park is one it is wholly equipped to bear. To follow this question through, as we will see, is to seize the beginning of a thread that leads to a finer-­grained understanding of Smith’s wonder, and that also reaches past Smith’s specific construal to yield a more nuanced picture about what it means to look for wonder’s affective texture. Yet in doing so, it will take some care to articulate one’s misgivings in a judicious way. “A wonder that feels like giddiness and anxious confusion, like distress?” If the account of the last chapter was sound, then faced with this claim, we might be immediately tempted to respond in the way we would to the person who turned to us glowingly to exclaim, “I feel such envy—every time I see my wife engrossed in conversation with her dashing new colleague, I want to run up to him and embrace him with open arms,” or to the person who turns to say to us while furiously scratching his feet: “I’m dying from curiosity—the soles of my feet are burning with tingling sensations all over.” You have it wrong, we might like to say here: what you’re feeling simply isn’t what we call “envy” or “curiosity”; and as for your tingling feet, whatever the physical experiences that might contingently accompany your use of particular words, this isn’t how the meaning of words is established. To Smith’s toothached apprehension of the singular appearance, one would similarly like to respond by saying: you have it wrong; whatever it is you’re feeling, this isn’t wonder. For wonder is not anxious, is not distressed. Its evaluative and thus phenomenological charge is not a “no” but a definite “yes.” Reaching back to the language-­learning perspective we set out earlier in accounting for our knowledge of wonder, we might say: a Smith-­like child that responded to the first (“singular”) sight of rainbows, of waterfalls, of snow, or of an aurora borealis, with all the symptoms of nausea or with groans of discomfort is one that would never be given the language of wonder to replace its natural reactions. It would be a child that would not “live in our world” (Cavell). And conversely: we would be unable to understand why a child greeting singular appearances with all the signs of distress would then seek out such experiences instead of shunning them as one shuns toothaches, hunger, and the cold. (For what, if not these, are our criteria for saying that a person has toothache or experiences distress?). Ascending from the child to the philosopher we might continue by questioning whether, if wonder still

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counts as philosophy’s beginning, we could ever desire anything other than to bring philosophy to the swiftest end. But to put it this way, with an unabashed appeal to a linguistic “we,” would be to express ourselves in the very terms that Daston and Park’s argument is designed to interrogate, calling into question whether there is a single linguistic community in place—a single “we” and a single shared “world”—whose intuitions could be expected to coincide. And while the notion of “world” invoked by Cavell to speak of the “normal” reactions that support our linguistic practices indeed refers us to a notion of community that is not local or historical but human—the “our” of “our world” the first person plural of human beings—this is of course compatible with a Wittgensteinian recognition of the character of language as a “temporal phenomenon” (PI, 108) and of the possibility that cultural conditions may set particular linguistic communities apart. The present argument, in fact, can be made compellingly by acknowledging the possibility of a distinction between linguistic communities, yet by then raising a question concerning Adam Smith’s relationship to his own. This is a question Smith himself brings to the fore in setting out the meanings of the terms “wonder,” “admiration,” and “surprise” at the opening of “The History of Astronomy,” when, in true philosophical fashion, he dismisses the issue of his account’s fidelity to common linguistic usage as one of “little importance” and, waving away the imprecisions of language, insists on the distinctness of the experiences aroused by different objects even if “the words made use of to express them may sometimes be confounded.”24 This programmatic remark, and the cavalier attitude toward the facts of language it betrays, will remind us of a broader philosophical view of the relationship between mind and language that we have learned to think of as the legacy of Descartes, with its peculiar understanding of the mind’s transparency and the introspective access to its contents we enjoy. Descartes himself had openly called attention to this view in the remarks with which he had prefaced his discussion in the Passions of the Soul: “This topic,” he had written there, “does not seem to be one of the more difficult to investigate since everyone feels passions in himself and so has no need to look elsewhere for observations to establish their nature.”25 This type of attitude seems crucial to take into account in—as it seems to genuinely complicate—any effort to write the history of particular emotions. In the present case, it signals that that one may need to exercise serious caution in reading Smith’s remarks on wonder and using them to draw conclusions about wonder’s historical vicissitudes.

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With Smith’s relationship to his linguistic community already in question, we may then observe that the picture of wonder that emerges from the body of his discussion is a far from unified one. For while, certainly, wonder is associated with anxiety and vertiginous unease in the passage cited by Daston and Park, in other passages it is explicitly associated with pleasurable emotion, as when Smith speaks of “the pleasing wonder of ignorance” or, discussing sculpture and painting, of “that pleasure  .  .  . founded altogether upon our wonder.”26 This, of course, should not be surprising in the wake of the narrative Daston and Park have presented to us, for we have heard that wonder is never purged of its delights and is at most ostracized outside the study doors of the learned (a distinction to which the first of our quotes implicitly refers us). Study doors, as Hume once famously remarked, are such that one is always fated to eventually reopen them. Yet what is more relevant here is the question whether there are certain doors—such as those in the face of one’s linguistic community—that one may never entirely close behind one. Even if such a possibility of separating what lies inside and outside the study doors remained open, however, and the wonder of the learned could be allowed to part ways with the wonder of the ignorant, it would be important here to note that Smith’s study doors turned on rather more particular hinges, and swung open to a rather special interior. For if philosophers have often shown a greater than average preoccupation with rule and exception, order and anomaly, the normal and the abnormal, and the known and the unexplained, Smith’s philosophical interior was one marked by an even higher concern with such notions, for which he owed to Hume’s influence a more than passing debt. Smith’s debt to Hume, indeed, was already expressed in the very way in which his investigation in the “Astronomy” was framed—as an account of historical processes of reasoning in which the sentiments or passions were given the actuating role, and in which both the beginning and the progress of inquiry were presented in terms of successive appeasements of psychological need.27 Yet this debt was even more pronounced in the underlying picture of the mind that organized Smith’s outlook. It was a picture in which the notion of order or regularity, under the name of “custom,” occupied a critical place—one calculated to have a powerful impact on the way certain types of passions and their experiential tone might be approached. For it was custom, in Hume’s picture, that explained how the different elements of our mental life—ideas and impressions—organized

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themselves within the theatre of the mind, and that more specifically accounted for the regular movements constituting the life of the mind and for the passages or transitions between its contents. The best-­k nown movement of the mind addressed by Hume in this connection was the passage between cause and effect, which Hume famously declared to be “deriv’d from nothing but custom” (T, 183).28 Hume’s proudly proclaimed “new science of the mind” has often been said to have been guided by a Newtonian ideal, aiming to transfer to the realm of the mind Newton’s explanations regarding the physical realm, and in doing so transposing the physical notions of “attraction” and “gravitation” to the relationship between our ideas. Yet for our purposes it is important to notice something even more basic, namely, the physical connotations imported by the very notion of “movement” employed ubiquitously by Hume to talk about our mental workings. The imagination is “conveyed” from one object to the next, we hear, thought “passes” from one to another, it is “carried” to a third; the fancy comes and goes, it “arrives” and “departs” and “returns,” in a series of quasi-­physical transitions which import the notion of quasi-­physical ground to be covered, and involve differing degrees of ease and difficulty, facility or fatigue as the mind moves along longer or shorter, and—crucially—more or less familiar tracks that present different degrees of resistance.29 It is against this background that we might read Hume’s own remarks about our experience of the unfamiliar or unexpected in his Treatise of Human Nature. “The mind,” he remarks in one place, “finds a satisfaction and ease in the view of objects, to which it is accustom’d, and naturally prefers them to others, which, tho’, perhaps, in themselves more valuable, are less known to it” (T, 355). Custom and repetition, he states more programmatically when discussing the influence of custom on the passions, have the effect of “bestowing a facility in the performance of any action or the conception of any object; and afterwards a tendency or inclination toward it.” The facility produced by repetition forms “an infallible source of pleasure” which is linked to the “orderly motion” of the spirits. By contrast, when “the soul applies itself to the performance of any action, or the conception of any object, to which it is not accustom’d, there is a certain unpliableness in the faculties, and a difficulty of the spirit’s moving in their new direction.” And closing in on the objects of our specific concern: “As this difficulty excites the spirits, ‘tis the source of wonder, surprize, and of all the emotions, which arise from novelty” (T, 422–23).

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The spirits strain as they are pressed into new grooves; they flow supply along familiar orbits with the easy pleasure of one who has mastered the route.30 A few pages down, Hume revisits the unaccustomed to assign the darker name of “fear” to the emotive hue of our response to it—“every thing that is unexpected affrights us”—referring this to the “commotion” produced in the mind by the unexpected object, which ignites a “violent” curiosity due to the “strong and sudden impulse of the object” that resembles fear in its “fluctuation and uncertainty” (T, 446).31 The notions of commotion or fluctuation invoked to explain the affective consequences of the unexpected, like the notion of objects as imparting impulse and movement, it will now be clear, take their place in a larger picture of the mind. And this is a picture that would seem to heavily determine the way our response to the unfamiliar and the new could be represented, and that would seem calculated to color this response with highly specific affective pigments. The picture of the mind we find expressed in Smith shares many of its features with the one just drawn. The primary tendency of the mind as it confronts the world is that of establishing patterned order out of disjointed phenomena, grouping and classifying objects into unified schemes on the basis of their resemblances and connecting events according to accustomed chains of succession. The mind, remarks Smith, “takes pleasure in observing the resemblances that are discoverable betwixt different objects”; as it takes pleasure in being able to “float” and “glide” with effortless facility along customary chains of events which answer to the imagination’s “natural career.”32 In this picture, the state of rest and equilibrium would seem to serve as a baseline against which change and disturbance register as disruptions, and as threats to be repulsed so that order may be restored. It is in this larger context that Smith’s remarks about wonder should in turn be understood. For wonder, when it arises, presents itself as a problem of classification and as a disruption of the smooth customary cause-­and-­effect grooves followed by our thoughts, which brings us to a screeching halt at the brink of unbridgeable gashes in our understanding. Confronted with the new and the singular, [t]he imagination and memory exert themselves to no purpose, and in vain look around all their classes of ideas in order to find one under which it may be arranged. They fluctuate to no purpose from thought to thought, and we remain still uncertain and

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undetermined where to place it, or what to think of it. It is this fluctuation and vain recollection, together with the emotion or movement of the spirits that they excite, which constitute the sentiment properly called Wonder. . . . What sort of a thing can that be? What is that like? are the questions which, upon such an occasion, we are all naturally disposed to ask.33 “Wonder,” then, exhibits all the painfulness of disorientation. If the mind loves stability, and “wonder” marks its fault lines, little wonder that “wonder” should be experienced as a burden to the soul. Indeed, for a passion that belongs to the free—philosophy, itself cast as a wonder-­driven attempt to remove “seeming incoherences” and “render the whole course of the universe consistent and of a piece,” arises once material necessities have been satisfied and is explicitly opposed to practical need—wonder appears as a distinctly unfree passion, and one that shares with suffering more than a superficial grammar.34 Textured by his philosophical conception of the mind’s operations, Smith’s wonder becomes reminiscent of the suffering anxiety with which an obsessive-­compulsive might survey their room upon finding it in a state altered from the way they last recall leaving it. This suffering tone is amply revealed in some of the examples Smith appeals to in describing the dangers of lunacy and distraction that wonder may harbor, when he invites us to imagine “a person of the soundest judgment, who had grown up to maturity, and whose imagination had acquired those habits, and that mold, which the constitution of things in this world necessarily impress upon it, to be all at once transported alive to some other planet, where nature was governed by laws quite different from those which take place here” and who “would be continually obliged to attend to events, which must to him appear in the highest degree jarring, irregular, and discordant.” Or again, on terra firma this time, one may consider what it is like to “look over even a game of cards, and to attend particularly to every single stroke, and if he is unacquainted with the nature and rules of the game; that is, with the laws which regulate the succession of the cards; he will soon feel the same confusion and giddiness begin to come upon him.”35 Alighting on another planet and being bombarded with confusing phenomena; looking on while others play a game answering to unfamiliar rules—images of a struggle with incomprehensible phenomena that falls back in frustration, claimed by Smith as images of wonder. “But is it

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wonder?” This doubt is one that, standing outside his philosophical study doors, Smith’s contemporaries may also have recognized as their own. What I have been suggesting is that it is a particular philosophical view of the mind that underpins the negative terms in which wonder is characterized by Smith. If the above argument is correct, we should be cautious about reading Smith’s specific characterization as a reflection of wonder’s changing experiential tone during this historical period and as unambiguous support for a broader historical claim about its shifting identity. Where are we, then, with the thread of our larger argument? For our thread began from a willingness to interrogate the complacent certainties of an “is” that would tie wonder to delight as its eternal essence, projecting our own linguistic intuitions about wonder’s positive freight as outlined in the last chapter (“WONDER”) into a sweeping transhistorical claim about wonder’s experiential character. Having suggested that Daston and Park’s reading of wonder’s historical transformation into something more saturnine be revised, this conclusion might now seem to leave us free to embrace, with more rightful complacence this time, the certainties of our own grammar. Yet this, once again, would be moving too quickly. For if this particular reversal of feeling tone and value sign, from delight to something more tenebrous, falls into question—explained away partly as an abstention from linguistic community and as an insulation behind the doors of an especially well-­ordered philosophical universe—one thing seems clear: this is by no means wonder’s first brush with darkness, nor the first time that the thread of delight has been pulled in the length of wonder’s history. To peer closer to this weave where it coheres and unravels is to consider on new terms how these threads stand to be related, raising a question we already posed but passed over without pausing: should these different feeling tones of wonder in fact be read as reversals—reversals taking their place in a forward-­moving historical narrative governed by “before” and “after,” beginnings and ends—or is there a different way of reading the relationship between these possibilities? Answering this question, as we will see, will also give us fresh tools for revisiting the episode of Smith’s vertiginous wonder with a different insight into its significance. For we may recall that the curtain rose on Daston and Park’s history of wonder from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment with a moment in which wonder was linked, not with pleasure, but with fear,

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by those among the scholastic philosophers who approached it with distrust, even as a wonder of pleasure was taking root in cultural milieux all around them. If darkness was thus present as the curtain fell upon wonder’s later vicissitudes, darkness had also been coloring the scenes as the stage first opened. And yet what must now be noted is that the element of fear had in turn stood far from unambiguously at the center of the stage in this curtain-­raising moment, and had been far from forming its sole dramatic constituent. True, Albert the Great, touching upon wonder in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics to rehearse Aristotle’s position—“everyone who has philosophized, now or in the past, has been motivated only by wonder”—would compare wonder to fear in its effects. “Wonder,” he would write, “is defined as a constriction and suspension of the heart caused by amazement at the sensible appearance of something so portentous, great, and unusual, that the heart suffers a systole. Hence wonder is something like fear in its effect on the heart.”36 A suspension; a contraction; the wonderer shrinks back—we seem to be far from Frijda’s and Darwin’s open countenance and all-­eyes encounter with the seen, the face almost literally expanding to maximize its contact. And while Albert the Great would confine himself to declaring the relation of wonder and fear a matter of general kinship (it is “something like fear in its effect”), Aquinas would go farther in his Summa Theologiae when, adding his weight to that of another theological giant, he would endorse John the Damascene’s claim that wonder (admiratio) should be subsumed within fear as one of its species, along with sluggishness, shame, amazement (stupor), and agony.37 Wonder is like fear; wonder is fear—and in both cases, tinged with darkness. Yet this simple story of affective affinity must cope with the fact that Aquinas himself had contributed additional material for its narration elsewhere in the Summa when he had broached the topic of pleasure and its causes and had declared his advocacy for the view that “wonder is a cause of pleasure.” In doing so, he was joining his weight this time to that of a giant no less than Aristotle, who in the Rhetoric had delivered a set of statements to this precise effect. It was these very statements, coupled with others in the Poetics which connected wonder to the ends of poetic art, that would later serve as stones of foundation for Renaissance poets and literary theorists reconceiving poetic practice to place wonder at its heart—an aesthetic embrace of wonder, as we saw at the outset of this chapter, that would seem to twin wonder strongly to pleasure and delight.38

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The thread of pleasure winds itself around Aquinas’s thread of fear; the thread of pleasure gleams out more boldly in wonder’s later aesthetic appearances—in both cases, drawing on an older intellectual spool that later artists and medieval scholastics partly shared. Yet even these bolder gleams, probed more closely, turn out to be far from the exclusive ingredient of their affective setting, and step out only to be instantly recoupled to a more negative set of elements. In Aristotle’s work, after all, where wonder had been notably discussed in connection with tragic and epic poetry, wonder had taken its place in a more tenebrous vicinity shaped by the emotions of pity and fear. These elements, in turn, had been preserved by some of the most prominent Renaissance poets, including Shakespeare, whose work has been investigated with an explicit focus on the place of wonder within their literary practice. A closer investigation of the notion of wonder within their work, crucially, brings into view linguistic evidence that lends itself to a more composite picture of wonder’s significance and affective freight. “A notable passion of wonder appeared in them,” states the First Gentleman in The Winter’s Tale, describing the scene where Perdita is discovered as the king Leontes’s long-­lost daughter; “but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if th’ importance were joy or sorrow” (V.ii.15–18). It is on evidence such as this that J. V. Cunningham, in a landmark essay (studying Shakespeare, studying wonder) would draw in proposing to qualify wonder as “an extremity of feeling” that “may be either joy or sorrow, fear or rapture.”39 A century later, James Biester suggests, the notion of wonder or “admiration” retained the same openness to light and darkness, pleasure and displeasure, as exhibited in the arch remark with which Samuel Johnson (a contemporary, let us note, of Adam Smith’s) would greet the supposed accomplishments of the English “metaphysical poets” notably represented by John Donne (whose poetic practice has sometimes been linked to that of the Italian poet of the marvelous Giambattista Marino and those sharing his ideals). The reader “sometimes admires” their poems, Johnson would state, but “is rarely pleased” by them. Biester glosses: the “accusation that the ‘metaphysical’ poets produce occasional wonder but precious little delight should put us on alert,” for “we usually admire with pleasure whatever we think deserves to be approved or imitated.” And if the “admirable” was not wedded to pleasure, neither was the “wonderful,” which has semantically contracted to denote “that which is strongly agreeable or pleasant” in our times, but in the seventeenth century was still capable of being deployed to speak of “a wonderfull massacre.” Such

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semantic diminutions, he argues, make it harder for us to read correctly the affective hue of the wonder central to the poetic practice of sixteenth and seventeenth-­century English poets—with their systematic cultivation of roughness, metaphorical obscurity, and suggestive brevity—and also to connect this wonder to the notions of wonder at work in the longer literary tradition from which they drew. For the Latin admirabilis and the Greek deinos that figured in this pollinating tradition were ones in which the terrible and the fearful formed a strong component, with both terms registering “the sense of a response to something that is powerfully affective either positively or negatively, something that so repulses or attracts, or repulses and attracts.”40 Such interdigitations of wonder with darkness are suggestive. And while they do not amount to a history, they may be taken as notes to a history or to a method for one. For it may well be that the kind of history that would be best equipped to attend to these complex affective relations would take the form, less of a grand inclusive narrative, than of what Neil Kenny, plotting the history of curiosity in early modern Europe, has described as a series of “micro-­narratives,” which would shun the temptations of tidy single stories and single concepts in favor of messier studies of the ordinary uses of words in different cultural settings and practices.41 Such an approach, remaining attuned to ordinary language and sensitive to transitions from one seemingly cognate term (such as “wonder” and “admiration”) to another, would be better equipped to allow for the possibility that “wonder” may not be a monological notion, and that there may be more local stories to tell about its meaning—as well as important stories about the transitions from one local setting to another, including the insides and the outsides of study doors as they swing open and shut—which add up to a richer and possibly less unified image of the linguistic community at stake, and also a finer-­grained picture of the affective tone of wonder within it. And it may indeed guard us against excessive simplification to be prepared to interrogate the premise that the affective tone of the emotions should always be accessible to a unitary description in which pain or pleasure, the positive and the negative, are related through an exclusive disjunction of either/or. For “impressions and passions,” as Hume would suggest more inclusively in his Treatise—pursuing his own project of a finer-­grained understanding of the hedonic constitution of the emotions—are “like colours,” which “may be blended so perfectly together, that each of them may lose itself, and contribute only to vary that uniform impression, which arises from the whole” (T, 366). If we are to “save

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the phenomena” we study, both as matters of history and as matters of our living present, it is a complexity that our accounts must strive to remain attuned to.42 Telling Wonder (II): Concomitance

“Wonder is”—yet wonder has been many things, and our views of its changing identity through time must seek to reflect that. And yet leaving this kind of history to the historians, it may now be questioned whether history offers the only way in which these affective interdigitations within wonder’s weave—pleasure and fear, delight and distress—might be meaningfully approached. For there is, in fact, something more instructive to be said about these affective possibilities than by roll-­calling them as the tones with which wonder’s “is” has been contingently dyed and which it has admitted as narrative reversals to be partly tracked as reversals of language. A more instructive, a more dynamic telling, and one that brings these possibilities into more organic relation to offer a new way of writing the “is” that wonder inhabits. No better opening to this telling can be found than Mary-­Jane Rubenstein’s recent work, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, which we now turn to as a focal narrative offering us a fresh set of critical resources for the question we have been pursuing. For not consequents and antecedents, but contemporaries of a special kind—this would be one of several ways of redrafting the relation that Rubenstein proposes, in an account that at certain points competes with, but at many others reinterprets in new terms, the historical narrative we have followed so far. Competes: the transformations of wonder are cast in terms of the triumph of one kind of wonder over another which certainly involves a progression of before and after, including a late “after” that Daston and Park had written as one of decline. Reinterprets: this involves a new typology of wonder in which different kinds of wonder come to appear as immanent possibilities. It is a narrative in which the experience of seasickness Smith had complained of provides a key joint—but in terms that we will find very different from those in which Smith had understood it. For seasickness, or a species of it, is the moment on which Rubenstein’s eye-­opening story of philosophical wonder opens and ends, though with this, we find ourselves already in medias res in a dialogue that has been in progress for some time. Socrates, having met the precocious youth Theaetetus, has been conducting a dialogue about the nature

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of knowledge, when the youth’s head begins to spin with a vertigo that Socrates instantly recognizes as the “sense of wonder” that is “perfectly proper to the philosopher,” and that is philosophy’s sole foundation (Theaetetus 155c). Preceding this sense of vertigo has been an episode of philosophical thinking in which Socrates, responding to the first hypothesis identifying knowledge with perception, has paraded before Theaetetus’s wondering eyes a stream of examples—a set of six dice is more in relation to a group of four, and less in relation to a group of twelve; Socrates now is bigger than Theaetetus but smaller in a year despite having undergone no change—that would seem to leave a basic and seemingly self-­evident premise shaken: that nothing can be anything other than what it is. It is this vertiginous loss of certainty, in which “an everyday assumption has suddenly become untenable” and “the understanding cannot master that which lies closest to it—when, surrounded by utterly ordinary concepts and things, the philosopher . . . finds himself surrounded on all sides by aporia” that Rubenstein identifies as the heart of Socratic/Platonic wonder, tracing out what will become the first term of her typology.43 It is clear already that the feeling tone of wonder and the objects of wonder are drawn into strong connection; for if this wonder is “a profoundly unsettling pathos,” as Rubenstein suggests, it is because of the way in which it directs itself to what is most ordinary and familiar, and renders “uncanny the very ground on which the philosopher stands.” And it is this, again, that creates its instability, because faced with the “open sea of endless questioning, strangeness, and impossibility” and the “frightful indeterminacy” of wonder, the experience of seasickness makes one pine for firm ground.44 Wonder thus contains the seed of its own undoing, stimulating an urge for closure and quick resolution which would lift the sense of being at loss and the vulnerability of uncertainty, and which one must struggle against as a temptation. Restated in the terms of a familiar Socratic ideal: what must be fended off is the anxious desire to see the maieutic stance transcended through the birth of firm philosophical positions and conclusions, the critical stance shed and replaced by positive theses. Wonder is a passion to be endured. It is this image of wonder that next becomes, in Rubenstein’s narrative, the term for a dichotomy that is given more than one name. It becomes, on the one hand, and crucially, a dichotomy between Platonic and Aristotelian wonder. “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize,” wrote Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and “they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance” (982b10–25), forging a connection that would recur throughout much

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of philosophical history, between wonder and ignorance, and wonder and the desire for explanation. A wonder directed to what we do not understand, and paradigmatically to the unfamiliar, it presents itself as a temporary irritant to be cured by explanation, and only valuable for its instrumental role in stimulating inquiry. For if “all men begin,” Aristotle continued, “by wondering that things are as they are,” they “must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case . . . when men learn the cause” (983a10–20). And the better state is one in which “that things are as they are” seems self-­evident, such that we would be rather surprised if things were otherwise. Wonder thus offers a bridge that is to be burned behind one, and generates an inquiry whose aim is to liquidate its beginning or, in the earlier words of Daston and Park, “to make wonders cease.” For, bringing the two narratives together, this is the juncture where Rubenstein offers a new set of terms for recapitulating wonder’s history, which she reads as one in which Aristotle’s wonder largely comes to displace Socrates’s in Western philosophical and theological understanding. It is Aristotelian wonder we find among the medieval scholastics; it is similarly, and more recently, what we find in one of the best-­k nown spokesmen for early modern wonder, Descartes. And it is likewise this kind of wonder, we can now say, that we find mirrored in Smith, for whom wonder was a passing frustration provoked by the “new and singular” to be quickly overcome. Even in the literary context, which Aristotle pollinated with a different set of orienting statements and textual topoi—with the remarks on wonder in the Poetics and the Rhetoric that seeded the Renaissance preoccupation with the marvelous—wonder, it has been observed, is such that reason fundamentally contains it; the disorder produced by the unexpected must be absorbable into a rationally ordered frame. If tragedy thus provokes wonder through surprising events, Aristotle would characteristically write in the Poetics, these events must be such as to “seem to have happened as if by design” (1452a5–10). Though in fact unexpected, they must be probable, and in hindsight precisely what “we should have expected.”45 Wonder must readily answer to the decorum of intelligibility; the wondrous must be reasonable. And it is here that we may fruitfully return to Smith to reread his wonder in a new light, and to thereby obtain additional terms for characterizing more precisely the wonder tracked by Rubenstein under Aristotle’s name. For in making wonder mark the fault lines of an orderly universe, in which order is the default state and incoherence a contingent

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temporary entropy to be quickly cleaned up and compulsively cleared away, Smith displayed a feature of Aristotle’s wonder that becomes a crucial conceptual woof in Rubenstein’s narrative—and that is its relationship to the pleasures of mastery and control. It is not incidental that Smith, discussing the wonder of the philosophers as they are confronted by “seeming incoherences,” describes them as “stopped and embarrassed ” by these incoherences.46 A wonder that blushes abashed—in what new preternatural direction would Smith now wish to bend our concepts, having first invited us to think of a wonder that feels like toothache and quakes with giddy confusion? The notion of “embarrassment,” to be sure, has followed its own far from univocal history. “To embarrass,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, might span a variety of meanings that include: “to encumber, hamper, impede (movements, actions, persons moving or acting)”; “to perplex, throw into doubt or difficulty”; and moving closer to the implication that just surprised us: “to make (a person) feel awkward or ashamed.” The OED in fact leaves some doubt open as to whether the more distinctly psychological last definition can be chronologically brought all the way up to Smith’s feet. And it might after all seem that it is to the semantic field traced out by the first two definitions—to embarrass the movements of the mind: to impede them, to throw up difficulty for their flow—that Hume’s picture of the mind’s movements and their varying degrees of difficulty or facility would most naturally commend us.47 Yet the distance between these meanings rolls up once we consider that our mind’s difficulty is our own; that what we call a difficulty, or what we experience as a limitation, often finds its ground in what we are invested in achieving; and that our investment in achieving is closely if not inescapably bound up with our sense of self and self-­esteem. Smith’s surprising inflection thus proves (once again) highly diagnostic: for what it reveals is the connection in which reflective activity—and the wonder that is understood to stimulate it—stands to pride and to a sense of achievement bound viscerally to the needs of the self, such that the unfamiliar or incoherent are experienced as limitations of the power one wields, and more specifically, of one’s power to explain.48 It is a preoccupation with mastery that Rubenstein sees widely expressed in the cultural fascination with wonders throughout the period Daston and Park examine, in which wonders are obsessively collected, catalogued, and possessed, acting as emblems of power. And in this, she is certainly not alone, as the “expropriative and appropriative” aspect of wonder—its aspect as a “projection of self or construction of ‘other’ as

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self ”—has been registered by several other readers as a key feature of its character during this period, and indeed stands tersely betokened in the very titles of scholarly works (one thinks of Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions, or Paula Findlen’s Possessing Nature) addressing this historical period.49 With their infiltration of natural philosophy, Rubenstein continues, the wondrous becomes an object of scientific comprehension, to be understood and mastered—a mastery at the same time denoting a form of self-­mastery, and one that takes on the meaning, she adds, even of self-­divinization, pointing onward to the aggrandization of the transcendental subject with which later philosophy comes to be marked, when the wonder of the external world is finally drained into the representing subject to instigate an era in which the marveling gaze turns inward to find its basic ground. Not vulnerable, then, or at a loss, but in command and control, assimilating all strangeness, and one’s wonder the knee-­jerk reaction of one obsessed with order and intent on establishing it—a confident posture which Rubenstein counts as a refusal of the vulnerable uncertainty that Socrates’s wonder invites us to remain open to, despite the vertigo of anxiety with which it makes our head swim. Aristotle’s wonder seeks resolution where Plato’s wonder avoids it as temptation—a contrast that signals that this account of the triumphal procession of Aristotle’s wonder through philosophical history would ultimately be disfigured by being read as a mere matter of forward-­moving historical contingency; for this forward movement would simultaneously have to count as an evasion of wonder’s immanent possibility. The notion of “evasion” recurs equally strongly in the second dichotomy Rubenstein maps on to the one just outlined, now in terms that we will recognize as our own: a dichotomy precisely in terms of a more lighthearted wonder, a wonder of pleasure and delight; and a wonder that falls under a longer shadow. Her starting assumption is that it is the former wonder in which we will have least difficulty recognizing ourselves—a “sugarcoated” wonder of sweetness and light, or the wonder of “white bread, lunchbox superheroes, and fifties sitcoms.” But dig a little deeper into the history of wonder packed geologically within it, and something different comes to the surface. Scratch beneath the connection of wonder with “smiling” in the Latin admiratio and the connection with “seeing” in the Greek thauma and you find a connection with “fear” in the very same Greek root. Follow the knots up the obscure genealogy of “wonder” and you should be prepared to entertain the German Wunde or “wound” as one of its possible ancestors.

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Even in the English history of the word, its descent is overlaid with darker overtones, and in rising to its modern usage it passes through the evil, the horrible, the terrible. And the “terrible” is what we need in order to begin bringing into view another strand in that family of concepts in which wonder finds kinship—awe in its different inflections: from the dread of yir’ah in the Hebrew Bible, which is also Augustine’s wonder, to the sublime of the Romantic poets and philosophers, to Pascal’s awe before the twin abysses of minuscule and majuscule, to Kierkegaard’s horror religiosus. It is indeed Edmund Burke, one of the master craftsmen of the philosophical sublime, whose admonition to revive the memory of wonder’s darkness we may most vividly recall, when, having named astonishment as the effect of the sublime, he notes that several languages—including Greek and Latin—“frequently use the same word, to signify indifferently the modes of astonishment or admiration and those of terror.”50 That wonder should have lost these meanings, Rubenstein argues, leaving them “forgotten and repressed,” is symptomatic of our difficulty in holding our nerve before the terrible element of wonder. The wonder of delight thus constitutes an evasion of its darker other.51 Sugarcoated wonder versus awe; or: the wonder of the rainbow versus the wonder of the Harpies. Because, in another genealogy, this time a mythological one, the sea god Thaumas (wonder) gave birth to Iris, the rainbow—enduring symbol of delighting wonder to our times—but he also fathered the Harpies—symbol of the monstrous and the awesome. If indeed if we were looking for a vivid image of the dulcet wonder Rubenstein has in mind, we could hardly do worse than follow the rainbow to its end to consider the recent work by Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, undertaken in the spirit of an apologia for science and as an argument for science’s contribution to making a “life worth living.” In this argument, wonder serves as a cornerstone, cast as a “deep aesthetic passion” with the rainbow as its paradigm object, and imparting its glow to the promise of a life in which human beings explore the world around them like children at play with grass high and sunlight streaming to giggles of wondering delight.52 Parts of the book read like a latter-­day Wunderkammer, a gallimaufry of wonders held up for display under the scientific gaze—we are invited to dwell on the outlandishness of octopuses, the wonders of our own bodily constitution, the mind-­ bending marvels of five-­ hundred-­ million-­ year-­ old trilobites and the mind-­boggling attempt to think vast time—adding up to a panegyric to science and to the aesthetic feast of wonders it affords us. Missing from this festival of wonders is the element of mystery (though its vocabulary

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makes occasional appearances), or a sense of human vulnerability confronted with the world, or any of the darker elements of a wonder that is at loss rather than in command. For Dawkins’s, like Smith’s, is an “orderly universe” in which “everything has an explanation” and if one has not yet been uncovered, then “we’re working on it.”53 “We’re working on it”: a posture of expectant mastery that would now appear as wonder’s evasion. And it is the same theme, to complete this alternative reading of wonder’s history, that also forms the key motif for one of the critical philosophical episodes that impart to this history its closing seams. For it is this preoccupation with representing and calculating, with treating beings as objects of (scientific) explanation and technological manipulation, that Heidegger distances himself from in calling for a different way of attunement that would return us to Being— and this is to say: to that which is closest and most familiar to us, the that of beings which is everywhere occluded by being presupposed. Articulating that mode of attunement takes the form of a concerted study of the different senses of wonder or thaumazein that is pursued almost sub rosa, in unpublished work and deleted passages—inconclusively in Heidegger’s 1937–38 Freiburg lectures, more informatively yet still gnomically in his unpublished Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)—and when it is named, it emerges as a blend of wonder in which the element of the terrible sounds out as a dominant chord. Provisionally named Verhaltenheit (“restraint,” “reservedness”), it contains as “equiprimordial comportments” shock or terror (Schrecken/Erschrecken) before the fact that things cannot be—because Being has withdrawn from beings, because “beings can be while the truth of being remains forgotten”—and awe (Scheu) at the fact that nevertheless they are.54 A terrible wonder before the fact “that things are”—we have certainly come a long way from Wunderkammern and medieval mirabilia following this darker thread of wonder, and it may be farther than we can assimilate without new joints to brake our thinking (see “SUDDEN”). What we should here observe, however, is that it is then a wonder in the shadows that opens and closes this history—if indeed we can speak of closure (as against its temptations). In picking out this darker thread and emphasizing its presence and significance within wonder’s weave, Rubenstein’s history joins itself to an emphasis on wonder’s frequent brushes and interdigitations with darkness that we had already registered above. Yet the language of “frequency,” this narrative suggests, just like the historical language of “before” and “after,” may not do justice to

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the way in which these lighter and darker elements of wonder stand to be related. For the relationship between the lighter and darker elements within wonder’s being, to be adequately captured, needs to be written not merely as a historical concatenation, but as a relationship between immanent possibilities and potential contemporaries. Contemporaries? The exact significance of this coeval status, in fact, demands to be probed with closer attention. Yet it is important to begin by a clearer articulation of certain misgivings, and by observing that this reading is one whose individual moments do not everywhere command equal allegiance, and at times invite questions that would open wonder’s organizing types to important rewritings. Readers who have followed the story so far might be rather surprised, for one, to find pinned to Aristotle’s name a wonder that addresses itself predominantly to what is unfamiliar and new. For wonder may be a sign of ignorance, as Aristotle had claimed. Yet we may be ignorant of the nature and causes of things that form part of our daily experience; the unexplained, thus, is not coextensive with the unfamiliar and the new. And it was precisely the regular and familiar, as we saw above, that Aristotle had focused on when describing the primordial dawn of inquiry at the opening of the Metaphysics. At the same time, it must be conceded that in other works, and notably when writing in an aesthetic context, Aristotle had foregrounded more starkly the link between wonder and the unusual, as when advising orators in the Rhetoric (3.2.3) to “give everyday speech an unfamiliar air,” clarifying that “wonder is a characteristic of things off the beaten track, and the wonderful is pleasant.”55 Hence, after all, the ability of Aristotle’s works to seed the later poetics of the marvelous, with its celebration of novelty that strikes. And whatever Aristotle’s own admixture of emphasis, an emphasis on the unusual and the unfamiliar certainly figures prominently in the accounts of several of those later thinkers—medieval scholastics such as Albert the Great and Aquinas or early modern philosophers like Descartes—working more or less recognizably within Aristotle’s shadow. A second surprise may have a firmer grip. For readers of Plato’s work may find it paradoxical that the philosopher most strongly associated with (and most sharply reproached for) the intolerance of vulnerability and the ordinary human world in all its messiness and fragility—with what Martha Nussbaum refers to as the “anxiety to control and grasp the uncontrolled by techne” and with a yearning for transcendence to a more-­ than-­human moral and intellectual order—should here be associated

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with the valorization of tolerance for vertiginous uncertainty and unease.56 The Plato we know is one who also expounded the doctrine of the Forms, which exist on a higher ontological plane that philosophers aspire to rejoin, making contact with a higher reality that truly is, in order to truly know. “The Plato we know,” of course, is a figure that has often seemed to lack perfect unity, spawning complex scholarly efforts to articulate chronologies and typologies of his different works, and generating fractious debates about how the emphasis on discursive argument or dialectic in some dialogues relates to the emphasis on contemplative vision elsewhere, about how Plato relates to his dramatic masks, or about how the dramatic Socrates of some dialogues relates to the Socrates of others, such as those “middle” dialogues in which dialogue recedes, the exposition of positive metaphysical doctrines prevails, and the ideal of contemplative vision steps to the fore in sharper brilliance. In this respect, Rubenstein’s narrative would seem to reflect a decision to lean more closely toward, or heavily on, one image of Plato and his dramatis personae over another, and one type of dialogue as against others—the “earlier,” aporetic kind, in which Socrates lives up more fully to his claim not to know, and in which questions are raised (“What is piety?” or “What is courage?” or, as in the Theaetetus, “What is knowledge?”) only to be left without clear resolution, the dialectical process having run its course without Socrates’s maieutic method having resulted in certifiable births.57 Writing about Plato’s wonder in her Spectacles of Truth in Ancient Philosophy, Andrea Nightingale has in fact suggested that a consideration of the dialogues that deal with theoria allows us to distinguish two strains of wonder within Plato’s thought, one in which wonder is identified with aporia (as in the Theaetetus) and another in which wonder is linked, not to puzzlement or perplexity, but rather to a sense of awe or reverence with strong religious undertones. And this latter wonder, as Nightingale shows, forms part of the powerful affective response provoked in the philosopher by the vision of the Forms. Like the wonder-­as-­aporia that Rubenstein focuses on, wonder-­as-­ reverence is a wonder that does not stand to be dispelled: it accompanies philosophical activity, and is not to be purged by it; and it shares, too, with Plato’s aporetic wonder as Rubenstein qualifies it, an important element of darkness. Yet it also contains, it will be clear, a set of critical positive elements which Rubenstein’s account excludes from view. For this is not a wonder that seeks, but a wonder that has found (however imperfectly such “finding” can occur in the human realm). Equally important, what it has found is a positive knowledge that is also a form

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of self-­k nowledge, and one whose overwhelming tendency is to affirm rather than dispossess. For the encounter with the superhuman Forms involves the recognition that this “other”—looming “distant, awesome, and divine”—is not wholly foreign but also connected to the “self ” by bonds of kinship—a discovery of the “self ” in the “other” without which the philosopher would be left “debased or annihilated by his encounter with divine reality.”58 The terrible in wonder is thus metabolized into the joyful as one discovers one’s kinship to the gods. Similarly, even the wonder of those philosophers offering seemingly recognizable reprises of Aristotle’s approach, probed more closely, yields more granular pictures less accessible to simple categorizations. Descartes is a case in point, for his oft-­remarked identification of the “new” as the object of wonder coexists with a different identification of its object as the “great”—an identification with a longer presence in the philosophical tradition, and one reflecting the dual role of wonder throughout its history as a passion of inquiry and as an evaluative reaction and indeed an aesthetic response. Hence the connection drawn by Descartes between wonder and the twin passions of esteem and contempt, which Descartes describes as “species of wonder,” taking esteem to involve a representation of an object’s greatness, and contempt a representation of its smallness or insignificance.59 The relationship between these two specifications of wonder’s objects is admittedly not signposted as clearly as one may have wished. And it is also a relationship fraught with tension, as Susan James suggests, given Descartes’s description of wonder as a passion that precedes and is thus free from evaluative judgments—a claim with which this second specification is hard to reconcile.60 Yet if we bracket these tensions, it would appear that this second characterization of wonder opens out to the very shades of more difficult feeling that Rubenstein views Aristotelian wonder as interring, linking to a sense of humility and awe rather than a stance of proud mastery, and to the fearful rather than the triumphant. Setting out to depict the expressive exterior of the passions with Descartes’s account of their interior workings as his point of departure, the French seventeenth-­century painter Charles Le Brun would thus describe a progression of passions leading out from “esteem” to “veneration” for a lofty object, and farther on to “rapture” when the object of wonder is “far above the comprehension of the soul, such as the power and greatness of God.” The facial and bodily expressions for these forms of wonder reflect their newly negative, subdued tincture: in rapture the head is bowed in a way that “seems to show the humility

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and powerlessness of the soul.”61 A wonder such as this, moreover, is not a wonder that passes but one which, in attaching itself to an enduring object, can be expected to endure. And returning to Smith, we may also note that a similar understanding of wonder paying tribute, not to the new, but to the great, had been present within his account in the “History of Astronomy,” though once again signposted in less than transparent ways. Opening the essay with an enumeration of the passions implicated in inquiry, Smith had in fact offered a threefold scheme which included not only wonder and surprise, but also admiration, whose object Smith had parsed—in terms significantly carrying, not only evaluative, but indeed aesthetic undertones— as “what is great or beautiful.”62 In the ensuing discussion, admiration would not receive the kind of systematic attention that would position it clearly within Smith’s understanding of the process of inquiry, yet it would surface at moments that, taken together, would seem to allocate it an important role at several stages of this process. At its opening: for it is the “greatness and beauty” of celestial phenomena, Smith’s remarks suggest, that incites us to dwell on them and thereby brings to our notice irregularities that provoke the distressed wonder we then seek to dispel. Within its body: as an aesthetic response that forms an important criterion of truth. At its end: for that is the moment when distress finally gives way to a new vision of the coherence of nature which renders it a “more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise it would have appeared to be.”63 In the case of Smith, it must be said, this culminating moment of admiration is a moment tinged, despite its orientation to grandeur, less with darkness than with pleasure—a pleasured perception of order that supervenes on the pained perception of disorder and that seems to thematize the selfsame notion of mastery, previously threatened and now restored.64 Yet what this already suggests is that this typology, like any other, needs to be taken as a heuristic guide rather than an iron grid, allowing us to insightfully plot different notions of wonder while keeping us attuned to the complexity of their convergences and divergences, and indeed to the complex structures and competing ingredients at work within the schemes of individual philosophers. With our understanding of this typology thus enriched, we may now return to the notion of contemporaneity Rubenstein had offered for tying wonder to its lighter and darker elements to consider it with more judicious attention. Wonder “is inherently ambivalent,” she writes, using an “is”—what wonder is, what wonder does, as in the remark that “wonder wonders at the strangeness of the most familiar”—that returns

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us to the language of our starting point, when we first put an ear to the ground of our eternalizing grammar.65 And yet the “is,” which here appears to refer us to factualities of our own present, should not make us overlook the fact that the tenebrous elements of wonder are ones that, after all, and on Rubenstein’s own telling, need to be exhumed from the geological substrata of our language in which they are now hidden. The gradual disappearance of the tincture of the terrible from wonder’s meanings is amply charted by the OED, and the dulcet wonder Rubenstein identifies as its evasion has established itself firmly in contemporary usage to become the pitch we most readily find on our tuning forks—the kind of tuning forks we sounded in the last chapter, to summon an understanding of wonder specified in overwhelmingly positive terms. Wonder widens the eyes, wonder makes us lean closer to look, it moves us toward, not away—multiple tokens of the evaluative “yes” wonder carries which distinguish it from other emotions that belong to the same part of the dictionary and the same larger conceptual family, such as astonishment (which lacks a clear “yes”) or awe (which mitigates it with a “no” that shrinks before what frightens or humbles). These emotions may be divided by conceptual boundaries that are not hermetically sealed; and they may shade into each other within our experience in ways that often make us call them up in a single breath. Yet they are distinct enough to make the retrieval of the terrible either an act of linguistic revisionism or simply a demand for the redirection of focus to a type of response we may no longer be disposed to call by wonder’s name, thereby marking out the “is” just employed as one in the power of a potentiality. But having registered this point, it becomes possible to approach the character of this “is” more insightfully in order to articulate how the “power” of this potentiality may rather stand to be conceived. For if the frontier of the “wonderful,” as Biester remarks, has contracted to the “strongly agreeable and pleasant,” if the “wonder” our tuning forks are disposed to pick up is one that puts us in the mind of rainbows rather than grotesquely clawed apparitions and makes Frijda’s images of the wide-­eyed wondering face quiver with the beginnings of a smile, this type of linguistic constraint should not be confused for another, and the question of wonder’s linguistic identity should not be mistaken for a question of a different kind, which Rubenstein’s account may be more fittingly taken as broaching.66 And this question concerns, not what wonder is at present and in fact called, but how we ought to behave toward the experience which (to put it cumbersomely but with sufficient

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care) some of the objects that have sometimes been linked to may provoke, and which (to put it more plainly and more relevantly) even the pleasurable experience we now call by wonder’s name may cede to or be succeeded by. About the objects of wonder—including the familiar and unfamiliar, ordinary and extraordinary, as competing ways of specifying these— there will be far more to say later on. Yet disregarding their other modes of competition, it is important here to say something about what may unite rather than divide them. For if we could allow ourselves to recognize in Smith, with his swooning response to the unfamiliar, an exemplar of the seasickness that Rubenstein calls us to attend to, despite her association of seasickness with the interrogation of the familiar, and despite Smith’s alignment with an Aristotelian wonder that in this typology attracts pleasure as its customary hue, this suggests that Plato’s “newly uncanny familiar” and Aristotle’s “new and unfamiliar”—and our responses to each of these—may not stand worlds apart. For indeed, our encounter with the unfamiliar or unusual, as Aristotle had been among the first to point out, need not always carry pleasure as its concomitant hue. The unexpected and the unusual can please; hence, after all, its role in the aesthetic sphere. Yet the habitual is also pleasurable, Aristotle had noted in another context—thus asserting a truth about human nature that Hume and Smith were far from the first in stating.67 “The unusual can please”—“yet the usual rather pleases.” Rubenstein’s story has already given us the ingredients, however, for seeing how the air of paradox adhering to these seemingly contradictory assertions might most readily (if not exhaustively or exclusively) stand to be dispelled. For one may draw on the linchpin notion of mastery to suggest that whether we respond to the unfamiliar with pleasure or discomfort may depend on whether its occurrence registers as a threat to mastery of some kind. In this respect, the picture of natural investigation offered by Aristotle at the opening of his Metaphysics­—prompted by wonder and detached from any “utilitarian end,” people turn their minds to the regularities of nature in a free pursuit of understanding for its own sake—might make it harder to imagine what Seneca, lifting his pen to the same subject in his Natural Questions, would bring out clearly when addressing nature’s ir­regularities, including phenomena such as comets, earthquakes, lightning, and thunder.68 For if such phenomena mandate understanding, that is because of our need to counter the terror they provoke. “For what,” asks Seneca, opening his discussion of earthquakes, “can anyone

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regard as sufficiently secure, if the world itself is shaken, and its firmest parts crumble; if the one thing in it that is immovable and fixed, so that it supports everything that converges on it, starts to waver; if the earth has lost its characteristic property of standing still?” (6.1.4). The basic order of the world—what we thought most unshakeable, what was literally and not metaphorically the ground below our feet—is shaken, and in shaking exposes our immediate and physical well-­being to visceral danger. That we should respond to this unfamiliar phenomenon with fear should not surprise us given how immediately our interests are affected and how fundamentally our mastery of the basic conditions of living is called into threat.69 Yet this sense of threat, as Rubenstein’s account suggests, can be taken more broadly if we extend the notion of “interests” and “security” to encompass not only our basic or physical needs but also our cognitive interests, and the cognitive structures in whose stability our sense of mastery is often vested. Not always, of course, and not immediately—not as children, whose understanding of the world is in a continual process of expansion; not perhaps as students, who still self-­consciously think of themselves as undertaking journeys of intellectual change and formation that require them to watch for the unexpected or for the questioning of the self-­evident; yet all too often once our picture of the world has stabilized into fixed structures, which we inescapably lean on for support even when we open ourselves to more circumscribed possibilities of intellectual expansion. The distance between Plato’s “newly uncanny familiar” and Aristotle’s “new and unfamiliar” would here seem to disappear: for to the extent that the unfamiliar can also serve to disturb what had hitherto been held unquestioningly true, both of them may register as occasions in which our intellectual order suffers disturbance or subversion, and in which this subversion can be experienced as a threat. And what then comes up for question is how that experience of disruption should be handled, whether it should be endured or transcended, or how long endured and how quickly transcended. What the notion of “evasion” as a critical term in Rubenstein’s narrative and that of “endurance” as its positive counterpart had already signaled, however, and what can now be more clearly spelled out, is that this question is essentially normative or ethical in kind. That it needs to be raised, of course, involves the recognition that the disruption of order and intellectual structure can produce an anxiety that tempts us to clean up entropy too quickly and throw off vulnerability

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too soon, disenchanting as swiftly as possible what—if we were to call this anxiety “wonder”—had stood apart from the structures of our understanding in the freedom of a temporary bewitchment. In this respect, Smith’s swooning “wonder” becomes significant taken as the image of an anxious response to intellectual disorder which, while it might be intensified by specific philosophical commitments, we can nevertheless recognize as a possibility to which we are all exposed to the extent that our intellectual universe has stabilized into “customs” of expectations with which our sense of security is intimately bound up. The notions of “commotion,” “fluctuation,” and “uncertainty” produced in our spirits by the unaccustomed—to thus return to our earlier discussion of Smith and Hume—might owe part of their negative valence to the particular philosophical picture of the mind in which they find their place, one calculated to give these notions an unusually vivid and visceral embodiment. Yet when Hume, pinning the negative hue of the unaccustomed to the “fluctuation and uncertainty” it produces, declared that “uncertainty alone is uneasy” (T, 447), he was stating a psychological truth transcending his narrower commitments that we can all acknowledge as our own. It is this deep matrix of connections that Nietzsche, on his side, was giving voice to even more sweepingly when, in the Gay Science, he described knowledge as the drive to reduce the strange to the familiar—and “what is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it”—and went on incisively to ask: “Isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?” 70 The response of anxiety and fear produced by the disruption of intellectual order is one we may no longer be comfortable describing with the language of wonder. Yet it is one that even what we now acknowledge as “wonder”—the pleasurable wonder that makes us look and look again, that moves us closer to dwell more intently—may be tightly twinned to and often lead to, to the extent that our more passive way of standing before the phenomena yields to a more active desire for understanding which often brings us up against our limitations and tempts us to swiftly clear these away. It is a temptation we will then need to carefully negotiate, opening ourselves to a normative claim that belongs to what we may call the ethical demands of inquiry, or the ethics of understanding: for it is a type of demand we must answer to, and a type of temptation we

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must successfully confront, if the intellectual good that chiefly orients us is, not the stability of our cognitive order at any price, but the soundness and progression of our understanding. The “is” relating pleasure and distress as contemporary possibilities in wonder’s weave thus turns out to be an “is” in the power of an ethical potentiality, allowing us to read wonder’s darkness and wonder’s delight as different possibilities which open out from the confrontation with what disrupts, and which we are called to negotiate and place in balance. Short Tales from Wonder’s Ethical Past

Not a history, then, with its characteristic ways of concatenating what is “forward” and “backward,” “after and “before,” but a space for concurrent ethical response. Yet having located the conjunction of these affective threads within a normative space, we have gained hold of a filter that may also allow us to return to wonder’s forward-­and-­backward-­moving history to revisit some of its more significant episodes and interdigitations of light and darkness, and to find the beginnings of more instructive stories waiting to be told. For, turning back to some of the ground we only recently covered, we might here recall ourselves to at least one half-­told story we had left behind when documenting the mottled pattern of pleasure and discomfort with which wonder’s history has been stamped—as we can call our attention anew to mottled patterns that had been belied by smoother-­ textured facades. For even Seneca, whom we just heard giving voice to the fear provoked by irregular or unfamiliar natural phenomena, in fact had a rather more composite picture to give of our affective responses to such phenomena. “We never marvel at (miramur) these things without fear,” writes Seneca in his Natural Questions; and it is accordingly as a therapeutic of passionate fear that the value of inquiry initially appears to find its ground. “Since the cause of the fear is ignorance, is it not worth acquiring knowledge in order to remove your fear?” (6.3.4). Yet this wonder-­as-­fear is juxtaposed, within Seneca’s remarks, to a wonder attesting a rather different texture, which emerges clearly when Seneca raises the question “Why inquire?” yet again a few lines down, to pithily respond: for “the greatest possible benefit, the knowledge of nature,” which “captivates people with its own magnificence,” so that “their motives for studying it are not gain but wonder (miraculo)” and inquiry is experienced as intrinsically “enjoyable” (6.4.2).

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The unusual provokes fear; yet the unusual can provoke pleasured wonder. And while these different responses would partly depend on the circumstances of individual inquirers—nobody could take a pleasured scientific interest in earthquakes when the roof was crashing down on one’s head—they can also crucially be read as reflecting a difference in achievement. For if our knee-­jerk reaction to the unusual is fear, what this suggests is that the contemplation of unusual events with pleasured wonder will need to be achieved, supervening once the initial passion that moves us away from these events, rather than toward them, has been conquered, and once the self-­concern of fear has been transcended by a concern with the intrinsic magnificence of the objects that allows us to dwell on them for their own sake. And its character as an ethical achievement is here brought out more sharply by the fact that, for the Stoics as for many ancient philosophers—including Plato, whose compound view of wonder we recently heard—this act of contemplation stands to be conceptualized more programmatically as a moment of transcendence, which raises us from the lower aspect of our nature, with its narrower modes of self-­concern, to the divine aspect embodied in our reason. The pursuit of inquiry thus allows us to “transcend [our] mortality and be re-­registered with a higher status” (1.1.17), and offers the mind a “proof of its own divinity” and a “delight in the divine,” which it enjoys “not as someone else’s possession but as its own” (1.1.12).71 Pleasured wonder as an act of self-­transcendence, pitting what repulses against what attracts: the deployment of these elements might differ, yet it is a similar set of elements that we encounter if we now turn back to the notion of wonder we had found in Aquinas, and to the mottled pattern of pleasure and pain he had raised to view. “Wonder is a species of fear,” Aquinas had written—yet “wonder is a cause of pleasure.” The question will have already wedged itself within the space between assertions and may now be thrust more fully open: how indeed could such apparent contraries be simultaneously held down? To this, one answer to tempt us might be: as easily or as awkwardly as any other intellectual heirlooms received from different pathways of revered tradition which must be wedded into a single body of thought willy-­nilly and perforce. And in this case, it was not merely a matter of reconciling one luminary to another—what Aristotle had said, what John the Damascene had added—but also one set of remarks of a given luminary against another. For if Aristotle had claimed that wonder causes pleasure, as we have seen, he had also tied pleasure to knowledge; yet

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wonder, he had said in the Metaphysics, was a sign of ignorance. If Aristotle had described our response to the unusual or unfamiliar as one of pleasured wonder, he had also elsewhere suggested that we take pleasure in what is habitual and smoothed by custom. Several of these elements would be rehearsed by Aquinas in his own positioning, complicating the skein out of which his own view of wonder would emerge, dispersed under different headings within his Summa that do not loudly advertise their means of unification. And while this skein, and Aquinas’s unified solution, would take deeper probing to be untangled in full, it would seem to be a notion closely linked to the notion of mastery foregrounded above yet incorporating an important ethical refinement of it that governs his understanding of wonder and the relation of pleasure and discomfort within its core—and that is hope. For if wonder causes pleasure despite being grounded in ignorance, if wonder is pleasurable despite serving as a sign of privation—of what we do not know or possess—this, Aquinas suggests, is because of the way in which wonder is already connected to the presence of the absent through hope. “Wonder is a certain sort of desire to know”; and as such “wonder is a cause of pleasure insofar as there is adjoined to it the hope of acquiring cognition of what one desires to know.” Desire on its own would be suffering, but desire conjoined to hope of its attainment already partakes of the joy of possession.72 Yet talk of “attainment” or “possession” here should not obscure the fact that the relationship of hope to mastery is rather more complex. For on the one hand, the notion of mastery would seem to be present in hope as its historical past and its genetic basis: when we hope for a future good that must be achieved and not received, we hope for it as something that we can envisage as the product of our own capacities as established and documented by our past achievements. This is the insight that Philip Fisher was picking up on when he remarked that the fact that “the unusual leads to pleasure rather than fear” must be “based on our general success with explanation . . . that we do not find ourselves for the most part defeated by the unusual, left baffled in an unresolvable way so that we ‘give up’ and think of something else, provides the experiential base for pleasure in the sudden, the unexpected and the extraordinary.”73 But if mastery lies in hope’s past, it does not wholly secure the future (hope, in this sense, can never be fully justified); hope is in fact required precisely when the absent has not been mastered or secured, and when uncertainty reigns. Hope is thus a form, not of mastery, but vulnerability, though a vulnerability that constitutes an achievement, asserted in

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the face of a possible despair. If we greet the unusual—what disturbs our structures of understanding and exposes us to the demand that our understanding be extended—with pleasure rather than fear, this is an achievement that may be called ethical in kind.74 And having discovered the notion of hope within the backbone of Aquinas’s claim concerning wonder as a cause of pleasure, it becomes easier to link it more organically to his claim concerning wonder as a form of fear. It is a claim, significantly, that opens with a recognition of dissonance: for wonder, as we know from Aristotle, moves us toward inquiry (as desire, as pleasure, usually move); yet fear does not move us toward, but away—how then could our understanding of fear stretch to include it? Having first offered a reply based on finer conceptual distinctions—wonder is directed to what is “great”; fear to what is a “great evil”; there are forms of wonder, this already entails, that may not be forms of fear—Aquinas turns to offer an “alternative reply” that links wonder to fear in two different ways.75 By way of a fear of the sheer magnitude of the task: for “just as sluggishness [or ‘laziness’] shies away from the work of an exterior operation, so wonder and amazement shy away from the difficulty of thinking about great and unfamiliar things.” By way of the fear of failing it: “Someone who has wonder shies away at present from passing judgment about the thing he wonders about, fearing a mistake; but he will inquire into it in the future. The one who is amazed fears both to judge in the present and to inquire in the future.”76 The fear of the grandeur of the task, the fear of one’s falling short of it (one’s fear of oneself); yet what Aquinas’s “he will inquire” obscures and what his peculiarly stipulative-­sounding yet telling distinction between “wonder” and “amazement” reveals, is that the act of inquiry will thus be an achievement that involves surmounting this twofold fear in order to pursue an inquiry whose status as a good—along with the exacting standards required for its realization, and thus its status as a difficult good—is implicit in one’s overawed initial reaction. “Wonder” will be the passion that successfully overcomes this despairing fear through a hopeful zeal, surmounting what moves us away from inquiry so that what moves us toward prevails. But this prevailing, it is clear—of hope over despair, of pleasure over fear, within the core of wonder—and the notion of “achievement” and “success” involved, are fundamentally ethical in kind. If wonder is pleasurable, that must be seen as an ethical attainment: it is the result of conquering the fear that wonder also harbors through the hope that understanding is nevertheless, despite these obstacles, possible.

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It will allow us to read the ethical character of this sequence more clearly, indeed, to note that Aquinas’s remarks have here invoked a particular psychology that led a long life in the philosophical tradition—the spirited or irascible part of the soul concerned with conquest or glory (thumos)—and a particular ethical trait with an equally long philosophical retinue—greatness of soul or magnanimity (megalopsychia). For in Aquinas’s articulation, greatness of soul is the character trait we might call the virtue of aspiration—it denotes the “stretching forth of the mind to great things”—which orders what is lower to what is higher, the lower pain to the higher pleasure, enabling us to overcome the resistance we meet in pursuing great things through a leap of pleasured hope: the hope, which conquers despair, that the great good—for all its arduous difficulty—can be attained.77 It is not the last time this virtue would cross paths with the passions of inquiry and with the negotiation of their provoking objects in the course of its history. And if in fact we were looking for a telling further example that affords us yet another rereading of the complex relationship of pain and pleasure these objects provoke, we could locate it by returning to Hume, whose view of wonder and surprise had shadowed Smith’s in our earlier discussion. The accustomed involves a facility that is an “infallible source of pleasure,” we had heard (T, 423), whereas the unaccustomed makes the spirits skid; everything unexpected “affrights us,” and uncertainty distresses (T, 446, 447)—it was these statements and the view of the mind they were built on, we said above, that stood behind Smith’s own darkened wonder. And yet Hume himself would elsewhere make these statements skid by openly declaring surprise to be “nothing but a pleasure arising from novelty” (T, 301); as he would do so again when, having recorded the difficulty attending the passions of the unexpected, such as surprise and wonder, he would go on to call this difficulty “in itself very agreeable”—as agreeable as “every thing, which inlivens the mind to a moderate degree” (T, 423). Facility pleases, yet the difficult can also please; the usual pleases, yet the unusual also causes pleasure—a collocation of contraries that mirrors Aristotle’s, and a recognition of the pleasure of novelty, of course, that once again reflects the enduring reign of wonder “outside the study doors.”78 Yet the appearance of contrariety falls away once we acknowledge that there can be different sources of pleasure, of which the “orderly motion” of the spirits may be one, but their “ferment” may be another (T, 423). For the mind, Hume elsewhere insists, is far from self-­sufficient, and cannot support itself without external stimuli to “agitate” the spirits

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and produce a “lively sensation,” and to prevent us from imploding into a state of languor or indeed “melancholy and despair” (T, 352–53).79 Stability may be an emotional good; yet too much security can stultify us. The unaccustomed is thus something we need in order to fully come to life, so long as it does not exceed a certain degree—or, recasting Hume’s accent on “degree” to unearth its possibly deeper premise, so long as it does not disrupt the customary movements of our thoughts too threateningly and does not concuss the structures supporting our sense of epistemic or nonepistemic security too gravely.80 If agitation pleases, however, it does so not so much by its ease but by its difficulty, and not by its passivity but by the active response it provokes, which Hume in another passage reaches for the pregnant language of magnanimity to describe. For “any opposition, which does not entirely discourage and intimidate us . . . inspires us with a more than ordinary grandeur and magnanimity” and invigorates our soul by inciting us to “overcome the opposition” (T, 433).81 It is thus the resistance presented by the unexpected that drives us to conquer it in pursuit of understanding—a pleasured act of conquest that we may read as an instance of greatness of soul or magnanimity and in doing so recognize in its character as an ethical achievement. It is not an accident that in discussing the pursuit of truth—whose driving motor Hume characteristically parses as “curiosity” rather than “wonder”—and accounting for its proper pleasure, Hume links its pleasure to the action of the mind and to the difficulty and indeed uncertainty of its striving, even as he insists (reminding us of Aquinas’s emphasis on hope without replicating it) that a degree of successful attainment grounds our continued motivation to surmount the difficulties of the pursuit.82 There will be more to say about this virtue in its connection with wonder later on (“PRODUCES”). Yet with the above in view and with Aquinas’s more specific scheme before us, it may also be possible to return to yet another half-­told story left behind when earlier surveying the causes of wonder’s historical displacement and remarking Descartes’s distinction between astonishment and wonder, to offer a more fruitful way of construing this seemingly questionable maneuver. Wonder moves, yet wonder also stalls: Was Descartes, we asked, seeking to gerrymander this apparent conflict away by definitional fiat, calling one “wonder” and the other “astonishment,” even as he signaled the fragility of this distinction by taking astonishment to be a form of wonder, only wonder in excess? For we may now recognize in Aquinas’s distinction between “wonder” and “amazement” a direct counterpart of Descartes’s,

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accompanied by a similar appearance of engaging in prestidigitations of a conceptually legislative kind. Just after the last lines of the Summa quoted (“the one who is amazed fears both to judge in the present and to inquire in the future”), Aquinas continues: “Hence, wonder is a source of philosophizing, whereas amazement is an impediment to philosophical thinking.” It is wonder that moves; it is amazement that stalls. Such parallels may remind us of the far-­reaching influence exercised by Aquinas’s writings on the passions in the intellectual milieu of early modern philosophers addressing similar themes.83 Yet if the above proposal is allowed to stand, these legislative airs should not distract us from remarking the point that carries the greater significance: and this is that whether wonder moves or whether wonder stalls may be a matter of our own ethical responses, and the ways in which we choose to handle the passion that strikes us—it may be a matter of whether we handle it well or badly. Descartes’s talk of “excess,” thus, may be heard more fruitfully by connecting this language to the concern with balance typifying Aristotelian ethics, and to the ethical space which it carves out. To pick out this strong ethical thread, to be sure, is not to say that it has been used to stitch the selfsame pattern across the cloth of wonder’s history—or that there aren’t different patterns that it could potentially trace out. Aquinas’s specific way of inhabiting the ethical field as plotted above, for example, might be said to diverge significantly from the way of inhabiting it suggested by Rubenstein. The temptations are located in different places: Rubenstein’s subject, faced with disrupted order, is disposed to close up the space of inquiry too quickly and mop up disorder too soon; Aquinas’s inquirer fears his own disposition to close up inquiry so gravely that it can cripple his will to even embark on it. And this differing distribution of temptation—so that one stops too quickly where the other never starts—is linked with a more important difference in emphasis, which can be put as a question whether the virtue to be encouraged is understood as a virtue of moving toward or moving away, of negative restraint or active advance, and whether the right attitude toward the terrible in wonder should be “endurance” or “overcoming.” Put differently, this is a question about the role that the positive possibility of fulfillment—of the realization of good, notably the good of understanding—should play in the structure of one’s motivations, which, in Rubenstein’s narrative, unlike Aquinas’s—for whom the notion of a possible attainment of the good gives wonder, via hope, its pleasure and light—would seem to have, taken as a prospect of “mastery,” a problematic status.84

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These kinds of differences would appear to involve different ways of configuring the relationship between the affective filaments of pleasure and discomfort, the positive and the negative, within wonder’s weave. At the same time, the differences between these specific cases may cut less deeply if we grant that both kinds of temptations outlined—to despairingly shirk the pursuit of difficult understanding, and to seal the space of uncertainty too quickly—are ones to which we are equally exposed, so that correctives are needed in both directions, requiring what Aristotle would not have been surprised to hear us call a golden mean, and indeed pointing to the need for a more thorough cataloguing of the temptations of inquiry and the virtues by which they must be met. And they may cut shallower still if we think that, while the notion of fulfillment must be retained to give the virtue of “endurance” its meaning and point, the good of understanding, especially in greater matters, is such that it can never be secured in a way that would count as a “possession” that masters its object.85 Whether or not these differences cut sufficiently deeply to mark out separate ways of inhabiting the normative space at stake could thus be questioned, and it would require more detailed stories about these individual episodes (as well as the others schematized above) to establish their characteristics and the relations between their distinctive weaves more clearly. There will be more to say about this normative space, and a more concerted attempt to inhabit it, in later stages of our discussion (“OBJECT”). Yet what is important, to regain our present thread, is to see these different configurations of wonder’s light and wonder’s darkness in their normative character, one that offers an important storytelling filter by which the forward-­moving trajectory of wonder’s history might be approached to offer rich yields. Given the deep psychological reasons that tie the disruption of intellectual order to the possibility of a darker type of passionate response, the frequent interdigitations and mutual displacements of pleasure and fear in this trajectory should seem unsurprising. The End of Wonder?

It will not be the last time that some of the themes visited above—such as wonder’s tense relation to the attractions of mastery—have come into view; nor the last time the normative note has been sounded within their earshot. Yet having sketched out this alternative proposal for how the different affective elements within wonder stand to be related—through

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the “is” of a contemporaneous inclusion constituting an ethical “may be”—we may now turn back to the two narratives through which we have worked to place them in a final, and this time more openly historical, relation. For in closing her story with a wonder deeply steeped in shadow, we should now remark that Rubenstein supplies the seed of yet another rereading of the grand narrative offered by Daston and Park, which is crucial for the understanding of wonder’s history we have been seeking to track. In bringing into view a lineage of wonder whose latest philosophical episodes are still unfolding in our own times—Heidegger’s Verhaltenheit becomes the first thread in a weave that continues through to Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-­Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida—Rubenstein offers her voice to what should become a polyphony of appeals against telling the later fortunes of wonder as a straightforward story of decline.86 This story, we may recall, was intended to characterize the attitudes of the philosophers and intellectual elites in the first instance. Yet Heidegger, in articulating his own version of a wonder in whose clearing the encounter with Being can take place, looked back to a philosophical genealogy in which Plato’s wonder was certainly not the only member and which encompassed his own immediate philosophical past, including, most significantly, those of his predecessors sharing the sensibilities of Romanticism. Perhaps the best evidence for this is the one found in his winnowing critique of the competing varieties of wonder, which passes through Verwunderung, Bewunderung, Staunen, and Bestaunen to reject them as inadequate interpretations of thaumazein. For it was Bewunderung that had figured in Kant’s well-­k nown expression, in the Critique of Practical Reason, of a kind of wonder—at the moral law within and the starry sky above—that would later play a central role in his account of the sublime in the Critique of the Power of Judgement. Heidegger himself might have distanced himself from this particular strain of wonder; yet he shares with Kant—as with Schopenhauer, that maverick heir of Kantian thought—several features of his understanding of wonder. Certainly the broad notion of an opposition between the stance of wonder and the stance of interest or utility (“mastery”); and equally an understanding of wonder as the mode or location of one’s contact with a higher Being or truer reality—for Kant and Schopenhauer, a higher reality that is simultaneously a higher aspect of one’s own being, as we will see below. But equally, and more relevantly for our direct purposes, what he shares is a gravitation toward the darker strains of wonder.

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And it is to these darker strains, and more specifically, to that somber-­yet-­exulting, humbling-­yet-­exalting alloy of awe and wonder— that tense amalgam of “delightful horror” and “terrible joy”—coming together in the Romantic sublime, that one might do well to look in order to locate one of wonder’s worthiest heirs and one of the most potent continuants of its later history. Emerging in the eighteenth century with an intellectual pedigree that reaches back to ancient rhetoric and philosophy, the sublime begins life among European intellectuals with the revival of Longinus’s On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous) as translated and interpreted by the French critic Nicolas Boileau (1674) as a development in the rhetorical tradition.87 In a movement that gathers pace with the contributions of literary critics and philosophers such as John Dennis, Joseph Addison, the Earl of Shaftesbury, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and others, it spreads outward to become the foundation of a new mode of experiencing nature, responding, in a way that marks a radical breach with previous attitudes, “to the mighty, the majestic, the mysterious aspects of Nature, to a sense of vastness and spaciousness never expressed—and apparently never felt—before the closing years of the seventeenth century.”88 In this discovery of the sublime in nature, as Marjorie Nicolson argued in a work that shares with Daston and Park’s account a central concern with the historicity of our passions, the changing experience of mountains—transformed from repulsive objects seen as expressive of divine wrath, to objects experienced with a thrill of joyfulness whose religious ancestry is betrayed in the surviving element of terror to which it is linked—formed a linchpin. Importantly for our story, this discovery—which went hand in hand with the emergence of “aesthetic experience” as a new experiential category—involved a subversion that would seem to be key for stitching the earlier and later fortunes of wonder together at the point where their relationship comes into question. For if it is a new conception of nature that is implicated, on Daston and Park’s account, in the declining fortunes of wonder—a conception of nature as conforming to a sober decorum of regularity and uniformity which the literary criticism of the time also embraced as an aesthetic ideal—it is precisely as an opposition to and revision of these aesthetic standards that the sublime takes shape. Not the well-­formed, the proportionate, the regular of neoclassicist ideals—not symmetry and order—but rather the disordered, the formless, the vast (a term of dispraise in the neoclassic canon) suggestive of infinity are the proper objects or occasions of sublime experience, paradigmatically embodied in the terrible spectacle of high mountains

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through which eighteenth-­century European travelers had their first brushes with the sublime. If the sublime emerges as wonder’s heir, it is thus precisely as a reaction to the kind of standards that, on our earlier account, lead to wonder’s demise, weeding out the marvelous from the upper strata of intellectual culture. The story of the sublime’s emergence, as indeed Alexander Rueger argues, can be written as a bid for the investiture of a more legitimate successor to the Baroque marvelous with its gaudy artifices and extravagant ingenuities, enthroning the sublime as a “respectable” marvelous with a distinguished pedigree more palatable to neoclassic tastes.89 But this, it will be clear, is a wonder with altered tone and object: not the delighted response to marvelous novel particulars (if we here grant this to have been a delight wholly unsinged by darkness), but the more somber response to grandeur—to what commands attention in its capacity, not as novel, but as great. As a reaction, and perhaps even, on another telling, as a direct descendant: for on Nicolson’s view, it was precisely the new science of astronomy with its novel instruments of observation that, furnishing evidence that shook the old picture of the static geocentric universe, burst the dams of what had formerly appeared to be a well-­ordered cosmos turning in its eternal orbits to the music of the spheres, and in doing so unleashed cosmic vistas of infinite and possible worlds into the imagination that were partly responsible for the subversion of older ideals of beauty and order. In a development in which Cambridge Platonists such as Henry More and his circle—fervently embracing the imaginary of infinite space—are allotted a crucial role, the awe once reserved for God, passed over in the seventeenth century first to an expanded cosmos, then from the macrocosm to the greatest objects in the geocosm—mountains, ocean, desert. . . . Scientifically minded Platonists, reading their ideas of infinity into a God of Plenitude, then reading them out again, transferred from God to Space to Nature conceptions of majesty, grandeur, vastness in which both admiration and awe were combined. The seventeenth century discovered “The Aesthetics of the Infinite.” On this account, the taste for the infinite and the new aesthetic of the sublime emerge from the very heart of the new science that has the decorum of proportion and regularity as its other face.90

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But with or without this particular inflection of the story, what is striking is that this notable inheritor of wonder’s history would offer a double reversion to Daston and Park’s account of wonder’s decline. For while the growing intellectual repugnance to wonder may indeed have been linked to a distaste for the religious enthusiasm that had proved so destructive in its social and political consequences, it is important to note that the notion of enthusiasm was brought into relationship with the sublime at several key junctures of its history. It was a notion that had already been present, after all, at that strategic moment within Longinus’s On the Sublime where Longinus had proposed to name the sources of sublime style, and included “strong and inspired emotion” (sphodron kai enthousiastikon pathos) among its most significant origins.91 Soon after Longinus’s influence begins to percolate in the eighteenth century, it appears in one of the first critical attempts to articulate the sublime, in John Dennis’s distinction between ordinary emotion and enthusiasm— construed by Samuel Monk as an attempt to demarcate aesthetic emotion—in which the latter becomes the foundation for the sublime. It reappears in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s acclaim of enthusiasm in a context that directly links it with the nascent sublime, describing it as an exalted state of mind faced with majestic beauty which raises above ourselves and which, Shaftesbury significantly adds, forms the basis of virtue itself.92 Significantly, because it is this link with virtue that recurs in what is probably the most prominent philosophical pairing of enthusiasm and the sublime, in the account of the sublime given by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgement—an account in which the connection with morality plays a key role. Enthusiasm (Enthusiasm or Enthusiasmus) is a state of mind that Kant characterizes as “aesthetically sublime” and describes as a response to morality; it is “the idea of the good with affect.”93 Kant’s stance, it must be admitted, is not free from ambivalence, not only of the more familiar kind which those attuned to Kant’s suspicion of emotion in matters of morality will already have been prepared to hear expressed, but also of a kind that returns us to the picture presented by Daston and Park by conveying a suspicion of enthusiasm’s dangers—a suspicion reflected in Kant’s terminological distinction between positive and negative variants of enthusiasm (Enthusiasm/us versus Schwärmerei).94 Kant’s ambivalence can thus be taken as support for Henry Hart’s broader observation that “religious enthusiasm . . . has enjoyed an uneasy alliance with the sublime throughout its long history.” Yet even allowing for the elements of unease texturing this alliance, enthusiasm

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would seem to pose itself not exclusively as opponent but also as partner to the preeminence of wonder—and more specifically of that mixture of light and darkness represented by the sublime—in intellectual culture.95 To single out the shadowy strain of the sublime as one of the prime heirs of wonder’s later history—an heir that will step into focus more fully in our own narrative later (“PRODUCES”)—is not, to be sure, to single it out as the sole heir, or even as the sole strain of wonder to figure among the preoccupations of those sharing the sensibilities of Romanticism. For these, as we will likewise see in greater detail later, also included a wonder of more joyful tincture directed to the ordinary as its proper object. It is a kind of wonder that found paradigmatic expression in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who, in a well-­k nown passage of his Biographia Literaria, spoke of the task of “awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.”96 This wonder formed the centerpiece of an aesthetic program with strong spiritual undertones aiming at a reeducation of the gaze that would enable it to discover or recover the “miraculousness of the common” (Emerson) and the sublimity of the lowliest things, revealing the “splendour in the grass” and the “glory in the flower” (Wordsworth). It is a strain of aesthetic wonder posing as the counterpart of the scientific wonder that would dominate natural inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after its theological reorientation away from the extraordinary and toward the ordinary as Daston and Park charted this, in a development which saw “the two-­headed cats, petrifying springs, gold-­toothed infants, and multiple suns that had been the objects of wonder in earlier natural philosophy” displaced by the commonest fly or ant that creeps as the lodestone of the wondering gaze.97 And more than its scientific counterpart, this is a wonder that would lead a long cultural life, as M. H. Abrams has shown, becoming a pervasive leitmotif among the English and German Romantics, leaving its stamp on the writings of the American Transcendentalists, and leaving a paper trail through the work of many of the philosophers (such as Merleau-­Ponty, Bergson, and others), and many of the artists and literary writers, who constitute our immediate past.98 What the above already suggests is that the tracks of wonder have reached rather more closely up to our present than Daston and Park’s narrative allows. And they have done so, indeed, in ways that have continued to provide material for important stories about wonder’s bivalent hedonic possibilities of pleasure and pain, and about the complex

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configurations into which these may be drawn. The pleasured wonder at “loveliness” Coleridge speaks of is, after all, one whose spiritual meanings weigh down with graver tones, just as the terrible wonder Kant describes is modified by several gleams of the joyful.99 To say this, of course, is compatible with acknowledging the deeper ambivalence in which wonder has come to be held—an ambivalence reflected, as suggested earlier (“WONDER”), in our sense of wonder’s elusiveness and our linguistic distance from its vocabulary. Similarly, to bring the historical tracks of wonder closer to our feet is not to speak unequivocally about its continued availability. For if there is any insight we have gained from following the thread of this discussion, it is that the question whether wonder is “available” or “open” to us is not one that could be answered in merely historical terms, and wonder’s proximity could not simply be reduced to the material presence of its literary remains. Similarly, even where the survival of some of its forms is richly documented, there may still be a question to ask—a question that Heidegger asked of the sublime, as we later will see, and that Rubenstein herself raises of the Heideggerian philosophers she examines—as to whether, within these forms of wonder and their specific affective configurations, the ethical possibilities at stake, including the temptations of closure, have been handled well or badly. Having looked back at wonder’s checkered affective history and the tensions that shape its weave, we have gained more than a first inkling as to why wonder may lie close yet why it may also lie far, and why its closeness and its openness may depend on how we handle the drive to open it and the countervailing drive to close it. These are conflicting drives about which there will be more to say in what follows. For the tracks that “wonder” has carved in our language may have left the darkness largely behind; yet the connection of wonder with shadow and struggle, as we have seen and will see again, has not been wholly severed. “Wonder”: we have come far enough with our grammar to be wary of the claim of unity this expression offers. Picking our way through competing narratives of wonder’s history, we have carved deep tracks into the Ur-­text that provided us with our initial bearings: wonder: “a sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight.” An emotional EXPERIENCE—yet one that differs from other emotions in significant ways and appears to elude our epistemic grip. What kind of knowledge do we have of an emotion so unlike others? The simplest knowledge (albeit one in which confidence often borders on doubt) made

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manifest every time we use the language of wonder, ascribing wondering looks to others and expressing wonder ourselves. And that is partly a knowledge of DELIGHT, we said, at an object perceived to be of value and positive significance—yet is that the only tone of feeling with which wonder has historically been tensed, and the only one it has carried as its possibility? Not the only one, we saw, given the darker tinges with which wonder has been dyed throughout its history, though one of the most illuminating ways of telling the relationship between these lighter and darker possibilities is not through a forward-­moving history of before and after but through a normative story concerning competing possibilities of ethical response. Yet with these tentative conquests of vision behind us, which have placed the dichotomous horrors and delights of wonder more clearly in view, we can now return more resolutely to certain other distinctions which we earlier passed over without pausing to linger, intent on keeping the joints of our thinking assimilable to our slow progress—even though, on any argument, they were ones that could only with difficulty be prised apart. “The Harpies” versus “the rainbow,” we heard, or: Plato versus Aristotle. And this we heard again rephrased: a wonder that unseats what we take for granted, versus a wonder produced by what we do not know or understand. Or as we might rephrase this yet again, in an opposition that comes naturally even though it is not, strictly speaking, entailed: a wonder directed to the familiar (what we take for granted), versus a wonder directed to the new (of whose nature and causes we are more likely to be ignorant). Dichotomies of feeling tone linked to dichotomies of objects; and while, as pointed out earlier, these dichotomies do not wholly coincide, their courses run parallel for a large part of the way. If wonder unsettles, as Rubenstein suggests, this can be most readily linked to its role in unseating what is most intimately familiar to us and seemingly most immune to questioning (though the unfamiliar may be one of the means by which the familiar comes into view and into question). If wonder delights, this can be connected to the pleasure we take at what is new and without precedent in our experience so long as it does not expose us to threat. The familiar versus the unfamiliar; the ordinary versus the extraordinary; the ordinary as extraordinary—these are distinctions that, with our last rephrasing of them, return us to the Ur-­text from which we began to demand a new scrutiny of the semantic interstices between its terms. Because if wonder unsettles by unseating the familiar, then

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here we have discovered a question, not only about what wonder PRODUCES, but about how wonder is in turn produced, one that delivers us to a new concern with the SUDDEN-­ness of wonder’s descent. For can a wonder directed to the familiar suddenly strike, or might it not rather require one to willfully put oneself in its way? Is wonder always such that extraordinary objects (“naturally” or “suddenly”) produce it, or might it not also require participation from us as producers? And if wonder must be sought, or hunted, or form the object of a conquest or quest, the query just stated could be restated as a query about its objects. For is the EXTRAORDINARY always already available, or might it not need to be sought and dis-­covered (“unseated”) before it can strike? Pressing forward, and adding burden to an already weighty list: If a will to wonder must be a precondition for the active pursuit of wonder, and if a wonder that unseats the familiar unsettles us, where might such a will find its militating grounds? Why is the order of the ordinary something one might wish to dislodge? Yet already the joints of our thinking are shuddering under the weight; so let us turn to the objects of wonder’s extraordinary vision.

SUDDEN: On Seeing the Extraordinary; or: On the Different Ways of Being Struck

Wonder Striking

It is not an accident that, studied sufficiently closely, the question of wonder should at some point transform itself into a question about what it is to truly see. Our passionate responses, of course, can always be said to find their inalienable ultimate anchor in our perceptual encounters with the world, including more narrowly our visual confrontations with it. Yet wonder has often seemed to be locked in especially close relations with the act of sight—a close conjunction, indeed, that would appear to be enshrined in the very history of our language. The connection between wonder and seeing is one we find ingrained in the ancient Greek, in which the term thaumazein (to wonder) is etymologically and semantically related to the verb “to see” (theaomai), a connection redoubled in the stock expression thauma idesthai (a wonder to behold), and found again in the Latin admiratio that forms its counterpart, whose root mir is linked to sight.1 It is a linguistic association, in turn, that has found its intellectual reflection in some of the earliest philosophical texts laying claim to wonder as a philosophical passion. In the Metaphysics, it is in a wondering gaze directed upward and outward to the cosmic spectacle—to “the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars”—that Aristotle located the beginning of philosophy, preserving a preoccupation with vision that had already been present in Plato, and that Plato had likewise twinned to wonder, if on rather different terms.2 Uniting both thinkers was after all an ideal of philosophical contemplation as a form of spectatorship or theoria tied linguistically, through its visual root, to 86

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the thaumazein to which as an activity it owes its genetic beginning. Little wonder there, in a tradition that prized vision as the noblest and least sensuous of the senses and the one least connected to interests and desires, other than the desire to know. It is an indication of this desire, Aristotle would state in the first lines of the Metaphysics, that we above all “prefer seeing . . . to everything else,” even when no practical utility is involved, for “this, most of all the senses, makes us know” (980a20–30). If wonder makes us desire to know, and seeing is our surest means of knowing, the recurrent conjunction between wonder and the act of sight should not surprise us. To look at the moon and the stars and to marvel; to stand before the seen and let our gaze rest upon it in wonder. There is much that we will recognize in this picture of outward-­looking wonder, reflecting a broader fact about the crucial role that pictures play in our knowledge of others’ emotions and about our instinctive reliance on images that concretize the passions and make them accessible to the gaze. “The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (PPF, 25), as Wittgenstein earlier expressed it. Spelling out this intuition further: “we see emotion”; it “belongs to the concept of emotion” that it is “personified in the face” (Z, 255).3 If the first location in which we seek the emotions is the face, it is in the image of a face turned outward and upward to the seen that we could see this particular emotion best personified. It is a picture sharing the contours of this one that the seventeenth-­century French painter Charles le Brun had famously offered when, building on Descartes’s account of the internal workings of the passions, he had sought to bring the passions to the surface of the body and delivered his famous depictions of the passions expressed, capturing wonder’s eyes-­w ide, lips-­ajar confrontation of the seen.4 And so too with his modern successors among students of emotions of a Darwinian bent whom we already encountered above, and among whom we may recall Nico Frijda’s documentation of wonder’s passivity, of its open-­mouthed, wide-­eyed abandonment, in which the direction of the gaze—“not fixed but, instead, set for peripheral stimuli wherever these may come from”—formed a key defining feature. It is a fascination with pictures that comes to us naturally given the crucial place that pictures of the body occupy in the pathways through which we learn to speak, as we earlier saw (“WONDER”). And this picture of wonder, significantly, would seem to lend itself most readily to a particular yet not too unnatural understanding of wonder’s broader character, one punctuated itself by notions of the “natural” at several

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bends of the road. For this image of an outward-­looking wonder, on the one hand, would appear to present the most hospitable home for that characterization of wonder that Descartes—who had formed, let us note, Le Brun’s immediate and Frijda’s mediate inspiration—had offered when calling wonder a “sudden surprise of the soul,” ascribing to wonder all the “naturalness” of a spontaneous reflex and reaction to something new, unusual, or unexpected that has suddenly stepped into our visual field. We suddenly look and marvel: we will recognize this characterization of wonder in the wonder torn from us by our first sight of a rainbow or of the world under snow, by our first vision of the solemnly silent crystalline interior of a long-­undiscovered cave, of the pummelling descent of a magnificent waterfall or the underwater splendor of the sea seen through a diver’s goggles, of the earth seen from an airplane window. And lest lists mislead us with their pretences of exhaustiveness, let us add: by every spectacle experienced in its historical “first.” And the historicity of this “first” now points on to a second notion of “naturalness” with which this characterization of wonder is linked. For it is not an accident that the picture in which we first recognize the passion of wonder—the posture of open passivity before the seen which Frijda most limpidly limned—should also offer itself as a representation of artless vulnerability that puts us in the mind of the humility of a child. Our picture of wonder as a spontaneous response to visual objects without precedent in our experience is thus doubly natural in constituting a picture of the archetypal wonder of the child, whose experience we think of precisely as a concatenation of first encounters and successive exposures to historical “firsts.” And it is not insignificant, in this connection, that it is this archetypal natural wonder, as we saw when probing our knowledge of wonder and its linguistic basis (“WONDER”), in which our judgments about what “is” wonder and what “isn’t” find their most unequivocal anchor and our linguistic intuitions register most clearly. To the meanings outlined above, we could add a third sense of the “natural” which we may recall from another early stage of our inquiry, when we had raised a question concerning the place or displacement of wonder within evolutionary accounts of the emotions. For if wonder can be assimilated within such naturalistic accounts at all, it is to the extent that it addresses itself to the sudden, the new, the unfamiliar, these being the types of events that are most likely to be of relevance to our pressing biological interests and to galvanize our organism to a response, one we might then find hardwired into us as descendants of our evolutionary past. A biological perspective, as Robert Fuller suggests, privileges a

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view of emotions as “originat[ing] in response to unexpected or anomalous sensory information” and of our brains as having been “wired to respond to unanticipated events by mobilizing particular kinds of cognitive modules and emotional programs.” He cites Dawkins’s remark that “it is as if the nervous system is tuned at successive hierarchical levels to respond strongly to the unexpected, weakly or not at all to the expected.”5 It is not a coincidence in this respect that Fuller’s account of wonder, self-­consciously attuned to emotions as biological phenomena, presents a conception of wonder that privileges the “novel, unexpected, or inexplicable” as its provocation. It is the wonder we find on our tuning forks, the wonder we find in children, the wonder we would expect to find wired into ourselves as embodied beings shaped by a long history of interactions with the natural world. Having identified this type of wonder as “Aristotle’s” in the dichotomies we surveyed above—the wonder we heard on Descartes’s lips, the one we heard on Hume’s and Smith’s—then we have just thickened our reasons for seeing why an outward-­looking wonder such as this one, provoked by the sudden sight of the new and unfamiliar, should exercise such irresistible force and possess such powerful initial appeal. What more natural than this outward-­looking wonder—and what indeed could possibly be the alternative? There can be no better way of bringing that alternative within view than by first allowing ourselves to enter more deeply into the natural wonder that exercises such a strong initial appeal. And for this we can find our best foothold by turning to Philip Fisher’s recent meditation on the topic in Wonder, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, in which the experience of wonder figures as the central organizing concern. It is an account that holds out a vivid picture of this natural wonder—yet whose richness, as we will see, partly lies in the way it points beyond it. Lamenting wonder’s status as “the most neglected of primary aesthetic experiences within modernity,” Fisher’s aim in this work is to attune us to the boundary between “an aesthetics of wonder and what we might call a poetics of thought,” illuminating the double character of wonder as aesthetic event and event in scientific inquiry. “A wonder of rare experiences”—for it is expressly qua confrontation with the new that Fisher approaches wonder, as the title of the work already suggests. “The experience of wonder no less than that of the sublime,” writes Fisher, opening the book, “makes up part of the aesthetics of rare experiences. Each depends on moments in which we find ourselves struck by effects

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within nature whose power over us depends on their not being common or everyday. Both wonder and the sublime are also categories within the aesthetics of surprise and the sudden.”6 The language of striking and being struck that appears in this passage reappears heavily throughout the ensuing discussion. The objects of wonder “strike us” (“as the stars do,” Fisher adds), “trapping” us and “holding” our attention. “The ‘Ah!’ of wonder is reflective and immediate. It comes from us almost fast enough to say that it, too, surprises us. We learn a second later that we are already in the state of wonder” —helpless before it as before other emotions. And the spontaneity of this unwilled response matches the suddenness of the appearance of its extraordinary objects, which “call attention to themselves against a background of things that do not spontaneously, on their own, call attention to themselves.”7 Of such extraordinary self-­proclaiming objects, it is the rainbow that acts as archetype, its sudden epiphany drawing from us a gasp of pleasurable wonder directed in the first instance to its beauty—an aesthetic response, however, which, riveting our attention to the unusual sight, is succeeded in the next moment by a desire for understanding that already points to wonder’s double (aesthetic-­scientific, aesthetic-­intellectual) character. A sudden wonder provoked by the unfamiliar, providing the mill of scientific inquiry with its grist, and holding up the rainbow as its paradigm case: we may recognize several of the terms of Rubenstein’s earlier typology in this description. But for our immediate purposes, more relevant is to notice how Fisher’s account of wonder situates itself in the particular perspective from which we here began. To look, to marvel: a wonder confronting the seen, we said, and a recurring connection between wonder and seeing—it is this connection that is foregrounded in Fisher’s account as the master element, one with which every other element (wonder’s suddenness, spontaneity, and concern with novelty) is organically related. Wonder, Fisher writes, “is the outcome of the fact that we see the world.” And while this remark might seem too dense in its self-­evidence for the space for a “why” to be found in it, Fisher’s next remark carries the air of an explanation: “Only the visual is instantaneous, the entire object and all its details present at once.” This is a remark, in turn, further interpreted by the one that follows, which brings instantaneity together with its intimate semantic confrère in wonder’s grammar: “The object must be unexpectedly, instantaneously seen for the first time.”8 To spell this out more clearly: it is the visibility of wonder’s object— its status as an object of vision—that is tied to one of its most seminal

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characteristics, what appears in the book’s title as its rarity, reappears as novelty, and makes its most significant appearance in the vocabulary of the extraordinary—literally speaking: what “stands outside” (ec-­ statically) the order of things we are familiar with, an order that (if the ordinary is the unexperienced, as we earlier heard Fisher suggest) is coextensive with the invisible and the unseen. For it is its character as a visible object that permits it to, as it were, perform the leap out of the fabric of the ordinary ex nihilo right before our eyes in a single saltatory movement containing every ounce of dramatic intensity made possible by its completeness. The object leaps before us, the exclamation of wonder leaps to our lips—a double movement of surprise (the object, the wonder) marking a break with the ordinary, whose immediacy is upheld by an event of vision of which we may say: it, too, comes as a surprise. Yet a surprise, now, about which we may add: one that we have every reason to yearn for, as Fisher’s focus on seeing once again makes plain. For it is the status of wonder’s provocations as visual objects that illuminates the character of wonder as an aesthetic experience, literally putting the “senses” into the “sensory” of “aesthetic.” Wonder dwells, wonder dotes, on the details of the object that provokes it, wonder lingers over it in a bid to “prolong its pleasurable contact” (adumbrating, indeed, why the aesthetic should yield to the scientific, in line with Fisher’s central analysis).9 Wonder consumes the object with its gaze, reveling in the pleasure of aesthetic contact. If wonder is something we experience with delight, it is in terms of the sensuousness of a visual feast that we can initially understand this relish. “A sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight”: with this, we return most decisively to the grammatical text that has been providing us with our impetus and shaping the contours of our investigation. We have come far enough with our map reading to be able to simply remark the wide berth given in this grammar of delight to wonder’s shadow. This is a shadow that Fisher explicitly sequesters by drawing a sharp distinction between wonder and the sublime and describing this as a distinction between two different aesthetics, one of delight and one of fear. And yet the question to now consider is: Even within the terms of this account, can this distinction—and the side of the fence on which the shadow falls—be entirely cleanly drawn? Or again: Is there no trace of a shadow, in this delighting wonder of high noon and post-­pluvial rainbow-­lit landscapes, to be detected? A shadow; or shall we call it: wonder’s tragic flaw? And yet “tragedy” might seem too impassioned a word to let fall on what otherwise appears

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as a shuffling denouement into a lackluster anticlimax. For the career of wonder, in Fisher’s account—an account, let us recall, that charts the wonder we most naturally recognize as our own—is one that begins with a bang and ends with the routine sound of the evening news. The new, by definition, cannot remain new for long, and is doomed to senescence. Wonder makes up “the youth of experience or thought”—youth of course being condemned to age. “The rapid wearing out of the new,” Fisher writes, “is also part of the aesthetics of wonder.” This is a weariness that, in the following remark of the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, quoted by Fisher, registers with the heaviness of an infinite sadness: every enlightening progress made in science is accompanied with a certain feeling of disillusionment. We discover that that which appeared wonderful to us is no more wonderful than other things which we know instinctively and regard as self-­ evident. . . . Our puzzle turns out then to be a puzzle no more; it vanishes into nothingness, and takes its place among the shadows of history.10 There would seem to be nothing sadder than this dwindling etiolation of the wondrous into the shadows of self-­evidence—even if nothing should be more natural, after all, for a wonder that, armed with Rubenstein’s typology, we can relate to Aristotelian wonder as the type with which it is most intimately aligned, a wonder associated with ignorance and destined to be extinguished by explanation, a wonder intended to “make wonders cease.” In Fisher’s own words (which here self-­consciously track Descartes’s): “Wonder, curiosity, and successful explanation notice the world and then renormalize that world, by fitting the exceptional back into the fabric of the ordinary.”11 And to fit the extraordinary into the ordinary is, in Fisher’s engaging idiom, to return the suddenly visible into the sea of invisibility that surrounds us. Wonder thus sees the ecstatic only to unsee it, enchants only to disenchant. Wonder “decays.” If this aspect of wonder’s natural career seems to cast a shadow, troubling us with the brevity of visibility’s blaze, this might at first seem to be a shadow no shorter and no longer than the one cast by the truism that all delight is destined to wane, and no experience, a fortiori of pleasure, lasts forever. That youth should age, that the novel should wear, are indeed truisms with the status of conceptual truths given the dependence of each notion on its contrary for intelligibility. Such truths, analytic or

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synthetic, may simply stand to be accepted as part of the condition that is our own as human beings. And in response to this more specific chagrin, it might be said that the delightful wonder of the unknown, once liquidated in the clarity of understanding, cedes its ground to another delight that has already come into view and that is calculated to be more enduring. For as we saw earlier (“DELIGHT”), it is the past experience of mastery—“our general success with explanation, our mastery of experience that lets us renormalize most situations,” the fact that we are not generally “defeated by the unusual, left baffled in an unresolvable way”— that, on Fisher’s recommendation, can be called upon to account for the fact that the unusual serves as a source of pleasure rather than fear. And while Fisher’s focus in this remark is on wonder’s beginnings—on the delight we experience at the unusual when it first appears, its “firstness” taking its place in a history of other firsts—this proposal may be applied with equal pertinence to its ends. Once the delighting aesthetic wonder at the unfamiliar which provides thought with its beginnings has been purged, it is this more stable delight—at a mastery accomplished by explanation—that we might see as enduring as the product of thought’s successful career. The delight of triumph against the delight of sudden visibility—how to take sides on this calculation of wonder’s ends and beginnings, and the relative weights of its light against its shadow? It is a question that we will need to run through several more laps of our inquiry before we have the resources to confront more fully.12 For our immediate purposes, however, we need to attend more closely to the shadows at work, and to note a shadow that falls rather more darkly on this delighting wonder. For if wonder constitutes the “youth” of experience or thought—a youth of thought that would coincide with our physical youth—it is nevertheless uncertain whether, on this account, we can even be wholly vouchsafed the happy enchantment of childhood before the adulthood of our inevitable disillusionment. Wonder, we echoed Fisher’s words earlier, becomes coextensive with experience if we only “notice something in so far as it is unexpected” or out of the ordinary and the ordinary is tantamount to the unexperienced: surprise then “become[s] the very heart of what it means to ‘have an experience’ at all.”13 Yet as Fisher brings out, this means that the response of wonder presupposes a background understanding of what is familiar and strange, expected and unexpected, ordinary and extraordinary; for the object of wonder to leap out of the fabric of our experience, there must be a fabric in place capable of being ruptured. And such a fabric is one that, as very young children, we lack.

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What this entails is that many of the objects that would have been most worthy of our wonder are ones we fail to respond to when we encounter them in our experience for the very first time: our first sight of the sun, of snow, of fire, of the stars at night, are no more remarkable than “a new red mitten or someone who knew how to whistle” (if indeed as remarkable as that). This yields what Fisher calls an “aesthetic paradox”: “that wonder depends on first sight and first experience and yet by the time we are old enough to have the experience of wonder we may have already used up and dulled by repetition all of the most significant potential experiences of the truly wonderful.”14 Wonder, then, not only decays, but in a paradox linked to the twofold fact that wonder depends on experience (to know the ordinary from the extraordinary) but also constitutes experience, never even succeeds in breaking into full bloom. We meet the potentially wondrous as children with the jaded sensibility of old people inured to vision, our world already full of invisibilities no less luminous than the sun, the moon, and the stars. Fisher calls this a paradox; many of us might have called it a tragedy. But let us take clearer stock of where we have been brought: a surprise, we said, that we have every reason to yearn for and aspire to—and it is at this point that the shadows began to fall. Wonder strikes and then departs; wonder never properly arrives where we might wish it—two forms of discontent that we can articulate more clearly by picking up the language of “wishing” from the last phrase, and pitting it against the language of “striking” in the previous one, to suggest that what we have begun to discover here is a will to wonder that may not coincide with the wonder that comes most naturally to us, which strikes when it wills and surprises us with its leaps. (The object leaps, wonder leaps unwilled, and seeing has once again surprised us.) “Unwilled wonder” and “a seeing that surprises”: these are elements that constituted a grammar stressing the sudden and the involuntary in wonder’s career, and which we now need to consider more directly. And we may begin by asking more narrowly: Is this a grammar by which Fisher’s own discussion of wonder can be throughout faithfully described? It was the rainbow we met as the archetype of this natural wonder that strikes us unforeseen; yet “the rainbow,” Fisher writes, “stands alongside many other candidates for wonder, for example, the night sky filled with stars.”15 The objects of wonder, we heard earlier, “strike us, as the stars do.” Yet it is clear that the striking of the stars, which “return night after night, the same in their slow dance of variation,” presents us with an example very different in kind—an example, certainly, that exposes to

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question the central distinction drawn by Fisher between the aesthetic of wonder and the aesthetic of the sublime, redubbed as a distinction between an aesthetic of delight and one of fear. For it was the night-­ filled sky, indeed, that numerous writers had embraced as a paradigm for sublime experience in the heyday of the Romantic movement. Kant’s words in the Critique of Practical Reason were epitomic: “two things fill the mind” with wondering awe (Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht) the more often and steadily we reflect on them, “the starry heaven above” and the moral law within. But this distinction gives way at the same stroke as it begins to suggest another, which is already intimated in Kant’s remarks about the “steadiness of our reflection” in the Critique of Practical Reason and is brought out more openly in the Critique of the Power of Judgement, where Kant distinguishes between two related yet distinct forms of astonishment: one (Verwunderung) aroused by “novelty that exceeds expectation,” the other (Bewunderung), related to the sublime, an astonishment “that does not cease when the novelty is lost.”16 For if the stars can strike us with wonder despite the fact that they appear before us daily in their slow regular dance—whose aspect of novelty, even if (which Fisher casts in doubt) it had ever struck us, would long ago have been lost to us—this suggests that the notion of striking, like that of seeing, may stand in need of serious revision to enable it to bring such sharply differing cases under a single wing. And with this, we are brought up against a question for which the beginning of our discussion had already cleared the space. For if wonder and the act of seeing have often been tightly paired, is “seeing” a notion there is only a single way of understanding, which requires no further qualification or remark? This is a question that Fisher himself does not raise directly in connection to wonder’s vision, but at two strategic points provokes indirectly when, having limned the grammar of wonder, he turns to consider what it excludes. In a claim that flows seamlessly from this grammar, Fisher suggests that it is to the visual arts—and more specifically, to architecture and painting in the modern post-­Impressionist era—that wonder stands specially related. Specially, or indeed—more stringently formulated—exclusively: “Wonder is almost uniquely possible within architecture, sculpture, painting.”17 The reasons for this view can easily be traced back to Fisher’s initial account of wonder, and have to do, on the one hand, with the possibilities of novelty open to these arts. Fisher invites us to think of that modern architectural wonder, the skyscraper, defying gravity and our sense of

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the possible to push upward with its never-­before-­used mass of glass and metal into hitherto uninhabited parts of the earth’s surface, or to think of the hectic experimentations with the fresh look in painting that have taken us from Monet’s choppy strokes to Pollock’s string-­like paintings and beyond. These are possibilities of technical novelty, Fisher suggests, which other arts, paradigmatically narrative arts such as poetry and literature, do not enjoy: “Where painting and architecture find ever new continents of technique and materials to explore, language remains the only given material of poetry and narration.” But what these arts cannot provide for, similarly, is the suddenness with which the objects of wonder must constitutionally strike, leaping before us in a single saltatory performance that breaches the fabric of experience. For it is only in the arts of seeing that “a sudden experience of the whole is possible.” By contrast, the “arts of time—narration, dance, and music—are never present as a whole in an instant of time. They also depend on controlled expectation followed by surprise against the background of what we have been led to think will happen next.” Wonder, however, “does not depend on awakening and then surprising expectation, but on the complete absence of expectation.” Distilled into an aphorism: “Memory and narrative are antagonistic to an aesthetics of wonder.”18 This, it can be gleaned, is an aphorism that will follow with the inexorability of a logical deduction if wonder depends on an ex nihilo appearance and the arts of time, by definition, wheel out objects and events in a temporal sequence to which we relate backward and forward with remembrance and anticipation. The force of this exclusion, however, and its relationship to an understanding of seeing, emerges more fully once we consider a second exclusion this account imports. This comes into view when Fisher turns to address a form of wonder we may recall already having met once before (“DELIGHT”), where we had found it lined up next to other exemplars of wonder’s darker other—Pascal’s abysmal awe before the “twin abysses” of the infinite cosmos around us and the infinite cosmos within us. “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” writes Pascal of the cosmos without, in words that echo Kant’s awed wonder before the same starry heaven, and align it unmistakably with what we named wonder’s darker strain and what Fisher names an aesthetic of fear. “Let man . . . contemplate the whole of nature in her full and lofty majesty,” Pascal invites his reader, in a famous passage of the Pensées that we do well to place before us at length, as it is pregnant with themes that will be occupying us in the coming stages of our inquiry:

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[L]et him turn his gaze away from the lowly objects around him; let him behold the dazzling light set like an eternal lamp to light up the universe, let him see the earth as a mere speck compared to the vast orbit described by this star, and let him marvel [qu’il s’étonne] at finding this vast orbit itself to be no more than the tiniest point compared to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament. But if our eyes stop there, let our imagination proceed further; it will grow weary of conceiving things before nature tires of producing them. . . . Nature is an infinite sphere . . . Returning to oneself, one will find oneself dwarfed into nothingness against this infinite spectacle. Having brought this into view, let one then look into the tiniest things he knows. Let a mite show him in its minute body incomparably more minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in the veins, humours in the blood, drops in the humours, vapours in the drops: let him divide these things still further until he has exhausted his powers of imagination, and let the last thing he comes down to now be the subject of our discourse. . . . I want [now] to show him a new abyss. I want to depict to him not only the visible universe, but all the conceivable immensity of nature enclosed in this miniature atom. Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with its own firmament, its planets, its earth . . . and on that earth animals, and finally mites, in which he will find again the same results as in the first; and finding the same thing yet again in the others without end or respite, he will be lost in such wonders [merveilles], as astounding [étonnant] in their minuteness as the others in their amplitude. For who will not marvel [admirera] that our body, a moment ago imperceptible in a universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the whole, should now be a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, compared to the nothingness beyond our reach? Anyone who considers himself in this way will be seized with terror at himself—terror at what is closest—and experience the vertigo of one hanging between two abysses, of infinity and nothingness.19

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In this passage, writes Fisher, the language of wonder as we might have found it on Descartes’s lips—admiration, merveilles, étonnement— appears with its colors washing into those of terror and fear. The same objects that would have inspired in Descartes a wonder of delight, are transposed in Pascal’s thought into an aesthetic of fear. How might this anomalous reaction, Fisher asks—this infiltration of the fearful into delight—be explained? His response to this question comes in different parts, but for our purposes, what is most interesting is the proposal that concerns the crucial role of the imagination in the above exercise: Within Pascal’s thought we pass subtly from the seen to the imagined, from the visual to the imaginary extended by simple extrapolation. The mite’s leg, bloodstream, and humors are all potentially visible, but what follows is only imagined, and it is the imagination rather than sight—that locus of wonder for Descartes—that swamps the world of the visible . . . Wonder, he reiterates, “is a response to the visible world.” And “if we insist that the main locus of thought”—that is, the scientific thought that develops from wonder on this Cartesian understanding—“is the visible world, the part played by the projective imagination disappears.”20 The malady of Pascal’s mixture of wonder and fear is thus diagnosed on the basis of a crucial distinction between the act of seeing taken in itself and the extraneous content that might be implanted in it by an exercise or faculty here named as the imagination—a distinction that would naturally seem to be premised on the possibility of purifying the act of seeing from its nonindigenous content. “Wonder is a response to the visible world.” Wonder “is”—yet what, other than a certain presupposition about what wonder must be, could uphold the force of this claim and this distinction? More than that: given that the language of seeing appears with obstinate repetition in Pascal’s passage, wouldn’t this arbitration of the nature of wonder at the same time have to constitute an arbitration of what it means to see? For, bringing together these two junctures of Fisher’s account— these two exclusions: of narrative, of imagination—we may now read them simultaneously as exclusions of an alternative construal of what the act of seeing might involve, an alternative of which Pascal himself provides us with a brilliant instance. “Let man contemplate,” “let him look,” “let him see,” “let him turn his gaze,” Pascal writes. “Let him see the earth as a mere speck,” “let him see an infinity of universes” within the

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smallest atom. Yet how does one accomplish such acts of vision, might one ask, expanding one’s gaze to embrace the cosmos without and the cosmos within, if not by responding to these visual imperatives in the very act of reading? And is it not Pascal himself that guides us to these objects of seeing by a narrative that not merely exhorts us but performatively provides us with the means for fulfilling its exhortation in the very utterance? And, to turn a first spotlight on another one of this episode’s conceptual joints, if we need a narrative in the first place to rouse us to wonder (or to one of its darker confrères), is that not because, far from being directed to the very same objects as Cartesian wonder and responding to them anomalously with terror, as suggested by Fisher, the object of Pascal’s astonished attention is one that lies too close to us to normally be—truly, fully, in the strictest sense—seen? What could be closer, what more familiar, than our own self, our self now seen under the aspect of our humanity and in light of the grand infinite vistas that Pascal has conjured? If we must go this far, if we must make our imagination work so hard, we might say, it is because what we are ultimately attempting to get within our sights is so near. Already here we have felt out the joints that point forward to a rather different anatomy of wonder, or to the anatomy of a different kind of wonder from the one that comes most naturally to our ears. But this is an anatomy we must approach stepwise and with care; and our steps first need to pass through the specific track that had given us direction. A seeing that strikes, we had said, and one we have reasons to yearn for, yet whose hour and place of striking we cannot determine. Yet what emerges from the above episode is that seeing may not always be an unaided act; and that it can be aided in ways that suggest it may not simply be understood as a confrontation with an object that is entirely given, as against one that we may contribute in—how to put it sufficiently broadly to give ourselves the space we will need to inhabit?—constructing, or conceiving. This last turn of phrase may evoke more than an echo of a view expressed aphoristically in Kant’s formulation that “perception without conception is blind,” which recalls us to the fact that we meet sensations never brute but always already conceptually organized in our experience. But for us, the more instructive echo to look for instead would be the one articulated by philosophers of the emotions, which we might present as its counterpart by parsing: “Emotion without conception is sightless.” For as we saw earlier, on an intuitive view of the emotions

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that has prevailed among theorists of the emotions in both philosophical and psychological circles in recent times, emotions take intentional objects that embody ways of seeing. One’s grief, as Nussbaum writes, sees a person as valuable yet now lost, one’s hope sees an outcome as an uncertain but not impossible good, one’s love sees a person as invested with radiance.21 What is crucial about emotions is not simply that they see their objects, but what they see them as. As for grief, as for love, so for wonder: if wonder is provoked by the objects it sees, it only wonders at them by virtue of what it sees them as. And what is that mode of seeing—of seeing as—that wonder embodies? The answer to this question is one we already heard above (“WONDER”) when looking for wonder’s rational core, that core of judgments which normally helps identify and justify the emotions, and which in the case of wonder, appears to single it out as a special instance among the emotions by its austerity, almost amounting to a naked exclamation of value: “How remarkable!” “How extraordinary!” or just, “Wow!” Wonder’s judgments and wonder’s justice, we said, would seem to be most immediately expressed in terms no more complex and no thicker than these: the perception of an object as remarkable or extraordinary. Bare and austere, almost so much as to fall on our ears like a naked exclamation; and yet a judgment importing a sense of its own justice nonetheless. “How remarkable!”—this, of course, is an exclamation we will recognize from Fisher, who likewise makes the notion of the extraordinary a centerpiece in his scheme. Yet it is the status of this exclamation as a judgment that Fisher’s account would now seem to occlude, focusing on the immediacy of wonder’s sudden confrontation with a visual object in a way that appears to place wonder against its object skin-­on-­skin, as it were, too close to be separated from it by an act of judgment, and with no space for a distinction between seeing and seeing-­as.22 And to focus on this space is to simultaneously focus on a note just struck when saying that seeing may potentially be an aided act—and that is to say: potentially an act; and to assert this in yet a further cadence: that neither seeing, nor wonder, nor the arrival of its object, may be an event. For to pick up again on one of Fisher’s suggestive remarks concerning the suddenness with which the “ah!” of wonder leaps to our lips: wonder befalls us unannounced, he writes, “like the other central passions—anger, fear, and grief.”23 Yet if we take the passions as our paradigm, and if we take a form of judgment to constitute their heart, then it could be queried whether the passions always befall us with the suddenness of an externally provoked event. For while to place judgment at

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the heart of emotions is not, as Robert Solomon points out, to press an excessively intellectualized view of the emotions—judgments “are not necessarily (or usually) conscious or deliberative or even articulate”— a cognitive view of the emotions makes room for the possibility that sometimes they may be all of these things, and that it is possible for us to “think our way into” or “work ourselves up to” the emotions we feel.24 Indignation does not always strike, and one might sometimes need to stoke it—as when one lends a sharper listening ear to the facts of an injustice one is ordinarily content to ignore. Compassion does not always occur, but one might need to court it—as by pausing for a conversational moment longer over the familiar figure of the roadside beggar we normally look at once and look away. The love of difficult people is sometimes an acquired taste. And the fear of death, or the fear of the corrosion of one’s character, does not always assail us without being reflectively sought out. In all these cases, the passions do not come, but have to be invited; and far from provoking us immediately, their objects are such that it takes the effort of a cultivated seeing to see them as angering, as loveable, as terrifying, or a cause for aggrieved pity. “The object leaps, wonder leaps,” we said—yet to draw wonder into the paradigm of the other passions is to begin to envisage the possibility that its object may not always leap out of the invisible fabric of the ordinary and blaze into visibility by its own light, but may rather need to be needled out of the fabric, or indeed that the fabric itself may show up as the object of surprised vision; that the objects of wonder may not proclaim themselves but need to be claimed; and this means that attention may not only be caught but directed, and that notice is not only “elicited” but can also be taken—and thus: that an exclamation can have a conceptual history that one can tell not only backward ex post facto but also as a story whose ending one knows in advance and one pursues as the object of a forward-­looking quest. And to dig up this ground beneath wonder’s seeing is to finally begin unsettling the ground around the meaning of the “extraordinary” which figures in its grammar as a central pivot. In Fisher’s grammar, the extraordinary was a word that acted out its root by a leap out of the ordinary that derived its meaning, and its strength, from its rarity. It is the rarity of the rainbow, of the skyscraper of American cities seen for the first time by the dazzled visitor, of the unknown woman of ravishing beauty that, as an ancient topos has it, one turns into a forest clearing to suddenly glimpse, that constitutes these as extraordinary objects. The ordinary and the extraordinary, here, would seem to stand in a sense we might call “statistical” or “numerical”—a sense we illustrate when we

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say, “The council called an extraordinary meeting,” or, “The diameter of such fruit ordinarily does not exceed five centimeters.” But to this meaning we might juxtapose another, one that often stands in close relations to the first but in which the evaluative note is more strongly sounded: “But it’s so ordinary!” or, “He’s nothing extraordinary after all.” This distinction will recall us to a composite understanding of wonder’s objects that has often surfaced in wonder’s historical career, and that came into our view at several moments of our foregoing narrative. For the wonder provoked by the new, as we saw, has often coexisted with another notion of wonder provoked by the great, and indeed several of the philosophers we considered—such as Aquinas, Descartes, and Adam Smith, to which list we recently included Kant’s name—extended simultaneous recognition to both notions of wonder within their schemes. The latter, crucially, was a notion of wonder carrying stronger connotations of value and indeed aesthetic value—a sense of aesthetic value that would register clearly in the notion of the sublime as articulated by Kant, in which the “wonder at the great” would achieve its most brilliant if tenebrous embodiment.25 The vocabulary of wonder, in our own times, may have left the darker tinges behind; yet as suggested by the grammar of wonder explored in the first chapter (“WONDER”)—where we singled out a judgment of positive value as constitutive of wonder in its central cases—the note of value has continued to be inscribed within it.26 With this in sight, the possibility we may allow ourselves to envisage then is that wonder, freed from the logic of the rare and the new by the deliberative possibilities of the judgment that forms its heart, may not be consigned to striking when the statistically extraordinary comes into view; that wonder might instead be something we can “work ourselves up to” by a cultivated attention in which the “ordinary” in the first sense—that with which we are already familiar and whose first-­time entry in our experience lies in the past—can come to be seen as “extraordinary” in the second. Or again, rephrasing: that we can bring ourselves to see as worth remarking what naturally fails to elicit our remark. It was the space between these two responses that Seneca was pointing to when, in the course of a discussion devoted to the investigation of irregular and unfamiliar natural events, he remarked with some wistfulness our natural tendency to be exclusively struck by such events. For, “We are so constituted that everyday things, even if they deserve admiration (admiratione digna), pass us by,” he would write in Natural Questions. “So the host of stars that enhance the beauty of this immense body

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does not draw a crowd; but when something is different from normal, everyone’s gaze is fixed on the sky. The sun has no spectators unless it is being eclipsed; no one observes the moon unless it is struggling. . . . So natural is it to be amazed at novelty rather than greatness” (7.1.1–2). We are so constituted as to respond to the new; yet if Seneca’s words can reach us, this reveals that our possibilities are not exhausted by our natural perspective, and that we have a notion of what is worthy of wonder or note—what is “great” or deserving of admiration—which is not coextensive with what naturally attracts our notice. And it was of course the availability of this notion that already registered above when we sought to name the shadows that beset our natural wonder and we noted the tragedy of wonder’s eventual decay and stunted efflorescence. We meet the potentially wondrous objects of our world, we said, before a sufficient sediment of experience could allow them to stand out for remark. If we can mourn the fact that what we meet daily in our experience—the moon and the sun, snow and fire—could never have provoked us to wonder, this must be because we possess a different notion of wonder’s objects which the phrase “potentially wondrous” does not go far enough in unmasking. For what is embedded here is a notion, not of possibility, but more strongly, of obligation, which Seneca’s language of “desert” only just signaled—a notion of objects as worthy of wonder, to which wonder ought with justice to respond. Stoking Wonder

About this notion of justice, and the will to wonder betrayed in it, there will be more to say at a later juncture (“OBJECT”). Yet having begun from the natural wonder provoked by the new, here, at last, we have pieced together joint by joint a kind of wonder that answers to a different grammar: not spontaneous but deliberately provoked; elicited not by the extraordinary as it assails us but as it is unmasked by judgment; and produced not by a passive event of seeing but by an aided act—a wonder that, far from striking, may itself need to be stoked. Wonder PRODUCES, we had said: yet doesn’t it also demand to be produced? It is this spoke of our grammatical wheel that we have seized hold of more decisively for the first time. It will be some time before the momentum of its spin exhausts itself; yet here, our most immediate task—and the most immediate way of harnessing this momentum—must be to turn backward to those earlier parts of our narrative that had already prepared a space for this grammar and provided the material for giving

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the notion of wonder just traced out as a mere grammatical possibility a fuller body and substance. And for this, there can be no better leverage than to attend more closely to an insight that was implicit in the reflective train we just followed. “Let man contemplate,” we heard Pascal exhort his readers, “let him look,” “let him turn his gaze” (away from the lowly objects around him and toward the dazzling light of the sun), “let him see” (the earth as a speck, the infinity of universes in a tiny mite). It is through such narrative invitations to the gaze, we said, that Pascal provides us with the resources for extending our gaze and provokes us to a wonder at what lies nearest. In his use of narrative for the provocation of the passions, we may now say, Pascal was on the one hand doing little more than reminding us of the longer historical enmeshment of the narrative arts—rhetoric and poetry—with the task of persuading or instructing the audience, a task to which the provocation of the passions served as a crucial means. “Nothing is more capable,” as Hume would later put the point with more recognizable breadth, “of infusing any passion into the mind, than eloquence,” and even more specifically eloquence that appeals to the imagination: “We may of ourselves acknowledge, that such an object is valuable, and such another odious; but ‘till an orator excites the imagination, and gives force to these ideas, they may have but a feeble influence either on the will or the affections” (T, 426–27). In momentous episodes of this long literary history, as we saw in the last chapter, the passion of wonder to which the narrative arts were twinned answered to the narrower grammar of the natural wonder aroused by the unusual or the new.27 Yet Pascal’s words here also offer a springboard to a broader insight, one that points to a series of settings in which wonder has often been limned in very different terms. For accomplished uses of narrative to the side, the observation that our wondering regard might need to be invited, and that it might need to be invited through another’s bid to guide our gaze, might recall us to something more basic—and this is our profound dependence on others to educate our attention and to orient it to what is worthy of remark. As children, our eyes consume the faces of those who care for us, and learn to follow their gaze to the objects it seizes upon with intense interest or passionate concern. Even as adults, this inborn disposition is never outgrown, rendering us permanently permeable to the passionate life of others, as Hume insightfully remarked in his Treatise, so that “the bare opinion of another, especially when inforc’d with passion, will cause an idea of good or evil to have an influence upon us, which wou’d otherwise

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have been entirely neglected” (T, 427). You look up with the flashing eyes of anger or the shining eyes of joy, you speak with the racing pulse of anger or of joy, and my own pulse begins to race, preparing me to look at the world through your eyes. You look up wide-­eyed, and my own look naturally follows yours with an openness to see what you see and to find your wonder’s actuating grounds. It is this openness to following another’s gaze and the sense of value it imparts that would seem to underpin our capacity to learn as children, allowing us to pick up the saliences of vision of those who educate us and to learn to love what is loved by those we love and admire what is admired by those we admire, thereby laying the foundations for deepened initiations into the practices of cultural accomplishment we prize.28 Education as an instruction of the gaze: yet what is crucial for our present woof is to note the central role this instruction has occupied in many of the higher practices we prize; and to observe that this instruction has often been understood as a programmatic direction of the attention to the ordinary in the first sense outlined above—the regular, the expected, the familiar—as what is most worthy of our wondering gaze. It is an orientation around the ordinary that the earlier stages of our inquiry had left out of focus but not entirely occluded; and we may now simply turn back to exhume it from the margins and foreground its significance more fully. For in ranging over wonder’s historical vicissitudes and debating the finer points of its grammar, on the one hand, we left it unremarked that, where we encountered wonder, it was mostly in contexts that can be carved out as specific (even if often interpenetrating) cultural practices. We met wonder among the philosophers, where it was hailed as philosophy’s “foundation” or arche (Plato), owing to which people “both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (Aristotle). We met wonder among the scientists, at an age in which science and philosophy had not yet come apart, where it was hailed as the impulse that “makes us disposed to acquire scientific knowledge” (Descartes). We met it as a claim about the essence of visual art (Fisher) and the essence of poetic art (among Renaissance poets), and as a claim about the heart of a religious response to the world (Augustine). Wonder, it is clear, is an experience that has been acclaimed as occupying a key position in many of our central cultural practices. Yet more crucially for our context, this broad appraisal of wonder’s importance, as we have already reason to suspect, may mask subtler differentiations regarding wonder’s nature and role. For: “a key position”—yet what kind of position is this? The position of a “first,” Aristotle’s phrasing suggests,

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or of a “beginning” (so Plato’s), in terms that appear to echo the ones we met in dissecting Fisher’s account just above. Yet a closer consideration of the objects of Aristotle’s remarks—it is cosmic spectacles such as “the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars,” we heard, to which wonder was “first” drawn—suggests that this beginning could not be understood in the simplest of terms implicit in talk of “firsts” and “beginnings,” and indeed that our description of Aristotle’s wonder as “outward-­looking” at the opening of this chapter may itself stand to be hedged more finely. For a few lines down, Aristotle had offered a number of more concrete illustrations of the phenomena that might constitute the starting point of one’s wonder: “all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are, as they do about self-­moving marionettes, or about the solstices or the incommensurability of the diagonal of a square with the side” (983a10–20). That things are as they are; that the sun follows its regular and familiar course, that certain mathematical truths hold— these regular and familiar facts would seem to be the starting point of reflection. Yet this, it will be plain, is no ordinary starting point. For just who wonders, and just when do they wonder, at the kind of phenomena that Aristotle remarks? Ordinary people in the ordinary course of their lives do not gasp in wonder at the sun’s familiar career across the sky over a single day or over a single year, or at the alternating patterns of day and night and their changing length across the year; they do not stop and wonder at the steadily shifting shape of the moon in the sky across a single month. Ordinarily, we do not wonder at the fact that the apple falls when we release our grip; that water boils when placed on fire, or that the water level rises when an object is thrown in; that a small magnet passing over a paper clip effortlessly lifts it up. Or again, from a different perspective: we do not wonder that our hands do not go through the table when we rest them upon it, that our body does not fall through the chair when we sit down, or that our bodies are not crushed into the earth by the immense forces of its gravity. We no more wonder at such negative facts and positive phenomena than—to extend these examples to others of more recent vintage—we wonder at the fact that the sound of human voices can be relayed over vast geographical tracts; that exact reproductions of visual objects are possible at the press of a button; that metal objects weighing tons can continue to move for several hours through the air at several kilometers above the earth’s surface.

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Such familiar facts about the workings of the world we live in are ones we take for granted as we go about the circuits of our everyday life: taking our cue from Fisher, we might describe them as invisibilities that often come to constitute the fabric of our ordinary world before they ever have the chance to strike us in their extraordinariness. If the primordial inquirers Aristotle has in mind could thus remark such facts—if their look “outward” to the phenomena should be a look that truly sees— theirs, it is clear, is a wonder for which antecedents and special provocations would need to be sought. About these provocations, there are, no doubt, many kinds of stories—local and less local—that could be told. Seneca was sketching the beginning of one such story when, having wistfully remarked our natural propensity to wonder at the unusual (at the sun only when eclipsed, at the moon only when “struggling”) and to overlook what is usual yet more deserving of wonder in a passage of the Natural Questions we have already seen, he continued: “But how much more significant it is that the sun has as many steps, so to speak, as it has days, and that it defines the year by its orbit; that after the summer solstice it turns so as to make the  days shorter; that after the equinox it at once sinks and makes the nights longer; that it hides the stars; that, though it is so much larger than the earth, it does not burn it, but warms it. . . . But we take no notice of all this as long as regularity is maintained. If anything is disturbed, or something unaccustomed shines forth, we look, we question, we point” (7.1.3–4). Taking up Aristotle’s reference to the solstice to clarify and expand it, Seneca’s remarks invite themselves to be read as a genealogy of natural investigation as Aristotle had described it. It is the unfamiliar, Seneca here suggests—the disruption of established order—that may often first call attention to the familiar and make us notice the order that prevails, which, once remarked, may strike us more reflectively as “significant” or “great.” Whatever these specific pathways, however, the ability to see the ordinary in its extraordinariness would then seem to form an intellectual habit crucial to the activity of scientific inquiry itself, stabilized as a reflective practice—a habit of seeing afresh, of overturning epistemic inertia to see phenomena normally taken for granted as worthy of questioning and remark, that will need to be acquired anew by every participant initiated into this practice to the extent that inquiry begins after the sedimentation of an experiential fabric which renders many of the workings of the world too familiar to be visible. To see the ordinary as

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extraordinary—in the Aristotelian tradition which has provided us with our immediate stimulus here: to see it as unexplained, the quest for explanation a confident march toward wonder’s dissolution. Yet even those scientific thinkers who have inscribed themselves within this tradition or its typological character—those thinkers who do not, with Albert Einstein, see the wonder that drives science as a sense of “the mysterious” tied to a humbler perception of that which “we cannot penetrate”— have often sought to emphasize the ways in which this habit of seeing can deepen our experience and appreciation of the world that surrounds us, despite the fact that phenomena have met their clarification or indeed because of it.29 For the fact that we do not fall through chairs seems more surprising when we know something about the discontinuity of matter; the fact that a magnet should spirit up a paper clip from the earth more remarkable when we grasp that what has taken place in this encounter is an ordinary magnet’s defeat of the gravity of trillions of tons of matter. Or to take another example: every single movement of our body comes to appear in its extraordinariness once the infinite structural complexity of our bodily constitution has been summoned to view. This last, in fact, is one of several examples discussed by Richard Dawkins (whom we earlier inscribed within Aristotle’s framework) in his Unweaving the Rainbow, a work organized by the central claim that science provides us with a source of inexhaustible wonder. Pressing this central claim demands addressing the relationship between wonder and scientific explanation, and countering an oft-­repeated charge about the effect of science in “disenchanting” the world, which Dawkins engages through Keats’s poem “Lamia” that furnishes him with his book’s title. “Do not all charms fly /At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” Philosophy “will clip an Angel’s wings . . . unweave a rainbow . . .” Central to Dawkins’s argument is the view that science, far from despoiling wonder, creates new sources of wonder, and it does so precisely because of the ways in which it comes to reveal ordinary things as extraordinary or remarkable. “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity,” Dawkins writes, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. . . . What is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can’t fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.

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And it is science, in Dawkins’s view, that is specially equipped to play this role of making the ordinary extraordinary—a defamiliarizing role the book is designed not only to abstractly claim but to concretely illustrate and perform, shaking us out of this “anaesthetic” by rendering visible to us some of the fundamental facts we normally allow to stand before us unremarked: not only such facts as the unimaginable complexity enfolded within our own body and called into play by the merest movement of our hand, which the microscope reveals, or the unimaginable immensity of the space that surrounds us, which a telescope exposes, but also, paradigmatically, the sheer surprise of the fact that, against all odds of probability, we have entered existence.30 It is a claim that, in Dawkins’s hands, carries a characteristically apologetic tenor, which those less sympathetic to his brand of sunshine wonder and confident aspirations to explanatory mastery may be particularly inclined to pick up. Yet putting the specific concomitants of Dawkins’s position to the side, we may here allow ourselves to hear his view as a paradigmatic expression of an important understanding of the scientific task which even those who reject these concomitants can share. The position of wonder within scientific inquiry thus has to be seen—to resume our terms—not only as its beginning, but equally as its cultivated end. And while Dawkins is intent on drawing sharp boundaries between science and other practices whose relationship to wonder he censures, particularly what he dismisses as the gratuitous mysticism of poets who prefer to revel in mystery instead of being galvanized by wonder to inquire, from our perspective it is more interesting to remark what unites rather than divides. For the ordinary facts Dawkins considers—the wonders of our own body, the extraordinary fact that we have come to exist and are here to question—are ones that recall the kinds of facts that several other practices place at the center of their preoccupations; and here, the first affinity to suggest itself is the very one Dawkins himself would be keenest to repel. For it is with a religious perspective that such facts—cadenced as “lucky” and provoking a wonder that shades into gratitude—might be most readily associated, an association that Dawkins’s own narrative often powerfully evokes. “We live on a planet,” he writes, “that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet.” This formulation—calling attention to the inconceivable fortune to which we owe the conditions of our very existence: we are “blessed,” we are “privileged,” Dawkins writes, to be alive

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and capable of understanding our own existence—paradoxically shares its spirit with many of the theological arguments from design we are familiar with, which often focus on the infinitesimal probability of the existence of life, and thus on the wondrousness of a basic fact we ordinarily take all too much for granted.31 In doing so, it also calls attention to the important continuities joining Dawkins’s view of science to the practice of science in other phases of its history, notably in the early modern period, where, as we briefly saw earlier (“DELIGHT”), scientific inquiry exhibited a strongly theological orientation that set up the most ordinary natural phenomena as objects of a devotional wonder.32 This practice, in turn, was continuous with an enduring religious preoccupation with the ways in which the divine Workman allows himself to be read out of his works, pointing on to the crucial relationship in which wonder has often stood to practices of a spiritual kind. Across a long tradition that extends from Augustine to Rudolf Otto, wonder —especially in its darker inflection as awe—has frequently been understood as the quintessential religious emotion. Discussing the connection between wonder and spirituality and distantly echoing this tradition, Robert Fuller has argued that the spontaneous wonder provoked by unusual or extraordinary (in the first sense) encounters with what is “intensely powerful, real, or beautiful” may provoke an awakening that develops into a more distinctly spiritual or religious orientation toward the world.33 Yet at the same time, if such encounters with the extraordinary may play a role, it is the readiness to be struck by the most ordinary aspects of the world—to experience what is most familiar as pregnant, as mysterious, as contingent, as demanding a deeper ground—that often marks the making of a distinctively spiritual sensibility. And however this sensibility might be made or awakened, it is in turn paradigmatically expressed in a more deliberate attention to the wondrousness of the everyday, embraced with the seriousness of a devotional task. For a sense of wonder, as the Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, is on the one hand one of the “premises and prerequisites of faith”—a premise that in the modern era, with its infatuation with human scientific and technological achievement, is particularly prone to evading us. It is the awareness of the mysteriousness and grandeur of the world—a mode of wonder that addresses itself, not to one-­off miracles or startling phenomena, but to the very order of nature itself—that “calls upon us to look beyond it.”34 Yet this basic wonder can be identified not merely descriptively as a foundation of faith,

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but also prescriptively as the content of a duty we must respond to: we are “called upon to be sensitive to the grandeur of God’s creation” in the same way as “we are commanded to love man.” A similar sense of wonder, in turn, shapes that devotional act that forms the beating heart of the religious life, prayer. Prayer finds its true source in “the insight into the mystery of reality”; it passes through “acts of wonder and radical amazement”—a sense of amazement, as Heschel’s remarks suggest, that is closely linked with a sense of gratitude. For “if the rise of the sun is but a daily routine of nature, there is no reason to say, In mercy Thou givest light to the earth and to those who dwell in it . . . every day constantly.” To trace a hachure of wonder around this fact is to trace it out with a hachure of grateful appreciation.35 The rise of the sun cannot be taken for granted; our own presence before the sun’s rising and setting as beholders of these movements cannot be taken as a matter of routine. The simplest everyday facts which we greet with an unthinking sense of self-­evidence need to be unsettled to be seen in their aspect as gifts and contingent givens perpetually shadowed, in religious practices structured around the notion of a creative divinity, by the possibility of relating them to their ultimate source. Belief in the unity of God, as the eminent medieval Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali would say, is only truly realized once we have learned to read everything—“the sun and the moon and the stars, the rain, the clouds, the earth, and every animate and inanimate thing”—as contingent expressions of God’s power that ultimately lack independent reality, shaking off the spiritual stupidity of those who, having sailed smoothly to their journey’s end, turn their thanks to the wind, or of those who, reprieved from death by a last-­minute royal decree, turn their gratitude to the pen and the ink used to write it.36 It is the cultivation of this kind of vision that is accomplished by scriptural passages of different religious traditions, such as the one we hear in the chapter of the Qur’an titled “al-­Naba’” (“The Good News”): Have We not made the earth as a wide expanse And the mountains as pegs? And (have We not) created you in pairs, And made your sleep for rest, And made the night as a covering, And made the day as a means of subsistence? And (have We not) built over you the seven firmaments,

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And place (therein) a light of splendour? And do we not send down from the clouds water in abundance That We may produce corn and vegetables And gardens of luxurious growth?           (Q 78:6–16, trans. Yusuf Ali) That living beings exist as male and female; that living beings sleep; that the earth extends below our feet and the sun stands above us— foundations of the human condition that, ritually rehearsed and ascribed to God as creative acts, are called into view and can suddenly stand out as remarkable facts. For many of the religious practices affianced to the Abrahamic heritage, this understanding of contingency has been historically reflected in philosophical conceptions that present the world as a whole as the product of a creative act that might not have taken place, inflaming the imagination with the sharp dichotomy of a “nothing” which preceded this act and a “something”—an “everything”—which immediately succeeded it, in a way that not only departs from a wondering grasp of this contingency, but also produces and ritually rehearses it for the spiritual imagination. It is no coincidence perhaps that when this kind of wonder (what Ronald Hepburn calls “existential wonder”) has been expressed, it has often been couched in language steeped with religious overtones and associations. In his 1929 “Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein includes this form of wonder—the experience expressed by saying, “I wonder at the existence of the world,” which Wittgenstein had earlier expressed in his Notebooks as “the miracle . . . that the world exists,” that “there is what there is”—among a small number of experiences invested with “absolute or ethical value,” and goes on to suggest that this is “exactly what people have referred to when they have said that God had created the world.”37 It is a similar language, though with a deeper and far more significant presence, that we find among some of the most eminent artists associated with the Romantic movement, calibrating the articulation of wonder now as an aesthetic and artistic ideal. This, crucially, is an ideal in which wonder is again positioned, not as a beginning, but as an end to aspire to, and in which it is once more the ordinary and the everyday that is identified as wonder’s proper, practiced object. It is indeed much of the language of Romanticism, relieved of its religious gravity and yielding a lighter-­weight notion of “aesthetic,” that Dawkins directly evoked in writing of familiarity as an “anaesthetic” and “sedative” dulling the

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senses and barring us from “the wonder of existence”—a wonder he described as a “deep aesthetic passion” and “one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.” Expressions such as these echo the poetic manifesto implemented by Wordsworth in his Lyrical Ballads and spelled out by Coleridge in a well-­k nown passage of his Biographia Literaria in which he spoke of a programmatic concern to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.38 The preoccupation with wonder as the headline of a new aesthetic ideal, and with habit or custom as its stultifying opponent, finds its counterpart among many of Coleridge’s English-­speaking contemporaries, for whom the act of perception becomes the object of a heightened aesthetic concern, and the poetic task comes to be to see objects anew; to remark the ordinary; to “make familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (P. B. Shelley). This ideal, importantly, looks to the child as the paradigm for a renewed vision, in a period that witnesses a surging interest in childhood and the child’s mode of experience, an interest organically linked to the religious meanings that suffuse the work of both English and German Romantics. Central Christian idioms, images, and themes, as expressed in the Bible and re-­expressed in the work of John Milton—the “violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning on the extremes of destruction and creation, heaven and hell,” of “paradise lost and paradise regained”—are heavily appropriated and reconstituted into a newly secularized devotional experience for which the encounter between the human mind and nature (the “speaking face” of liber naturae), and thus the act of perception, becomes the most significant stage. In this context, “to restore the fresh and wondering vision of the child,” in the words of M. H. Abrams, “is to recover the pristine experience of paradise” available to Adam in Eden when the world had been freshly created, a recovery that marks the creation of a new earth and a new heaven, and carries the redemptive significance of a spiritual conversion.39

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To undergo this apocalyptic revolution in vision, prising everyday objects loose from the fabric of accrued invisibilities by the power of the imagination, is to come to see the sheer existence of an object as a miracle, to see the “splendour in the grass” and the “glory in the flower” (Wordsworth). It is a glory that, grounded in religious terms, redounds to God, so that one comes to “recognize God in all the creatures” (Jacob Boehme) and in “evry Spire of Grass” (Thomas Traherne), contemplating the world “with feelings as fresh, as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat” (Coleridge—with a mind that “feels the riddle of the world,” Coleridge continues). And it is poetry that holds the power to effect this transformation of vision, which “creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration” (Shelley). The theological and spiritual idiom that runs through this poetic program may be one we are disposed to pick up especially strongly; yet its presence should not be so distracting that we fail to recognize in it the grain of an aesthetic ideal that has exercised a profound and enduring appeal over successive generations of artists and art theorists. On Abrams’s account, it is precisely as a legacy of the Romantic preoccupation with vision and its rejuvenation, with the child as a paradigm of fresh perception, and with related topoi such as the notion of the “moment” in which objects blaze into revelation, that we should read the continued concern with the seeing eye that we find among European and American writers. The legacy of this preoccupation can be clearly traced among the American Transcendentalists, who likewise made the “miraculousness of the common” (Emerson) a subject of intense focus, and who displayed the same prevailing interest in “admiration (wondering at) rather than judging,” which Tony Tanner, studying the place of wonder in American literature, identifies as “one of the crucial romantic preferences.”40 But the same legacy can be traced through countless later artists and writers, including Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust, Henry James and James Joyce, to mention but a few.41 It is the grain of this same ideal, likewise, that we may discern in the account of art offered by a literary theorist whose views continue to send out influential ripples through literary circles, and whose understanding of the threat to which art comes as antidote—now entirely shorn of religious commitment—we may be able to recognize as the closest image of an anxiety that is also our own. “If we examine the general laws of perception,” the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovksy writes in his Theory of Prose (1925),

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we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously—automatically. If someone were to compare the sensation of holding a pen in his hand . . . for the very first time with the sensation of performing this same operation for the ten thousandth time, then he would no doubt agree with us. . . . And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war. And in a deeper voice: “If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been.”42 “As if this life had never been”: in these words we may recognize a sense of the tragic to which we ourselves only recently gave voice. We meet the potentially wondrous as children with the jaded sensibility of old people inured to vision, we said, our world already full of invisibilities no less luminous than the sun, the moon, and the stars. It is an immunity to vision, Shklovsky now reminds us, that is fated to deepen in the course of our lives, throwing shrouds of invisibility over the world that surrounds us, and plunging much of it in the realm of the unseen. On Shklovsky’s view, we do not see the objects that surround us—we “merely recognize” them. The “object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged”; and prepackaged is all we need for the practical purposes of our daily living. The purpose of art is to reverse this unseeing sight and restore to us our full capacities of perception, “to restore sensation to our limbs,” “to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony.”43 The key device for doing so is one that Shklovksy named “estrangement” (or “enstrangement”), by which art complicates form, makes perception laborious, and compels us to pause over objects, thereby passing from mere recognition to seeing. And while the inflection of this device is not explicitly one of wonder, it is still a concern with remarking the ordinary, in which a surprise stands at the end of artistic practice and not the beginning, that we may recognize as the backbone of this aesthetic ideal. It is not as a beginning, then, but as a cultivated end, that wonder and its confrères have often (if not exclusively) been understood to take their place in many of our key cultural practices—in scientific inquiry; in religious practices; in the practice and ideals of art, if indeed we can permit ourselves to entertain firm distinctions between disciplines that have historically shared fluid and interpenetrating boundaries.44 Yet this

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position has been nowhere starker, and nowhere more insistently expressed, than in the traditions of philosophical inquiry. That wonder could not simply be cast in the uncontested role of philosophy’s temporal beginning is a claim implicit, despite Plato’s use of the term arche to signify it, in the staging of Theaetetus’s wonderment within the dialogue that bears his name. For when wonder strikes, it is in the middle of philosophical labors already commenced, and thus not as the preface but as the immediate product of inquiry, which has dismantled what looked self-­evident and called ordinary assumptions into doubt. And if this wonder, in its first occurrence within Theaetetus’s experience in the dialogue, is spontaneously provoked through an inquiry directed by his more adept interlocutor, its vertiginous texture, as we earlier saw (“DELIGHT”), entails that its retention within inquiry will then have to constitute an achievement—an achievement in which the refusal to count wonder as a mere temporary means, if not as an inherently valuable end, must play a central role. Yet the status of wonder as a valued end is itself one we find openly reflected elsewhere in Plato’s work. For the wonder-­as-­aporia at stake in the Theaetetus, as we have seen, finds its complement in a different type of wonder aligned not with perplexity but with awe or reverence—Plato’s analogue of the “wonder at the great” that would follow a longer and jagged course through the philosophical tradition—and foregrounded in those Platonic dialogues more intensely concerned with the ideal of contemplative vision and with the human affective response to the higher reality of the Forms. This is a form of wonder, Sylvana Chrysakopoulou suggests, whose pursuit as an end or telos evokes initiatory associations, reflecting the deep religious undertones this philosophical experience carries.45 Having come into contact with higher metaphysical reality— having gone over to it in what we may call, again in a calculated religious register, an act of contemplative pilgrimage—we can only be sent away transformed, so that when we return from this extraordinary reality to the ordinary human realm, we find ourselves beholding it with the detached eyes of a stranger, or indeed a god. The religious undertones of Plato’s understanding of this awe-­full moment, like Plato’s aspiration to a pure contemplation of (extraordinary) reality as it is in itself, may have lost their resonance in later philosophy. And it may indeed be, as Rubenstein suggests, that Plato’s vertiginous wonder at the ordinary found itself, in the course of philosophical history, occluded. Yet the notion of a philosophical wonder turned toward the ordinary is certainly one whose voice, as Rubenstein’s

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own account after all indicates, has been heard several times in the history of the subject. This was the wonder Schopenhauer was acclaiming when, addressing the root of our need for metaphysics in The World as Will and Representation, he asserted that “the philosophical disposition properly speaking consists especially in our being capable of wondering (verwundern) at the commonplace thing of daily occurrence,” contrasting the philosopher with the scientist, who only “marvel[s] at selected and rare phenomena,” and with the ordinary person for whom “everything, how it is and that it is, seems . . . a matter of course.” And this is a wonder whose ultimate ground Schopenhauer located in the encounter with death, thereby linking it with wonder’s more tenebrous strains.46 It is similarly, we have already seen, this form of wonder—once again appearing in its darker tones—that Heidegger appealed to in articulating a wonder attuned to a fact so ordinary it must remain invisible, constituting the foundation which every moment of our everyday existence presupposes and therefore never explicitly records: the fact that things are. If this voice has been heard more than once in philosophical history, indeed, this is connected to an understanding of philosophy’s task that has traced a long pathway of descent, and whose kernel Plato himself has already placed in view. For whatever the other differences between the strains of wonder competing for attention within Plato’s work, they are both united, it may be suggested, in commending to philosophy the significance of an estranging act of stepping back from the ordinary to relate oneself to it anew. It is this understanding of the philosophical act, in its basic form, that Rousseau was rehearsing when he later described philosophy as that which “man needs in order to be able to observe once what he has seen every day,” and that was more recently expressed by Thomas Nagel when locating the “essence of philosophy” in the reflective steppings back that enable us to “find the familiar unfamiliar.”47 Nagel’s remarks in fact offer us more than a pointer as to the deeper reasons binding philosophy inextricably—and despite this other wonder’s manifold historical vicissitudes—to the wonder directed to the everyday. Philosophy, Nagel writes, constitutes “the most systematic form of self-­consciousness,” whose task is to bring “to consciousness for analysis and evaluation everything that in ordinary life is invisible because it underlies and pervades what we are consciously doing.”48 Not to accept the invisibilities that line our world but to strive to remark them; not to stand on our ground but to unsettle it, even to the point where (as the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper pregnantly puts it) “the things ‘before [our] eyes’ become, all at once, transparent” and “lose their density and

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solidity and apparent finality”: it is in this view of philosophy’s basic yet profound investment in a struggle to call to notice what we take for granted and question what we think we know, incorporating these acts of detachment into its internal standards of excellence, that philosophy’s special relationship with a wonder directed to the familiar could be most broadly understood.49 For “what, in truth,” asks Pieper, “is to be taken for granted? Are we to take our very existence for granted? Is the existence of ‘sight’ or ‘perception’ to be taken for granted?” Not to grant, but to let ourselves be astonished by the commonest facts and to question what we take to be self-­evident facts: that we succeed in meaning things by our words, that we succeed in knowing other people’s minds, that we alone know what goes on in our own minds, that we know that the earth was not created yesterday or that the sun will rise tomorrow or that our own hand is before us when we see it, that we know where our limbs are positioned, that we know what it is to know, that we are the same individuals at eight and eighty; that we are, that we might not have been, that soon we will not be; that things are, that something is: what Pieper, shadowing Heidegger, calls the age-­old philosophical cry of wonder and profoundest metaphysical question, what Schopenhauer had earlier called the “riddle of existence” and the prime object of astonished wonder—“Why, after all, should there be such a thing as being? Why not just nothing?”—and one that is still central to philosophy’s encounter with what is nearest and thus farthest, with the most basic foundations of our everyday existence, which run too deep to be explicitly recorded.50 In all these practices, wonder emerges as a cultivated response that demands an education of the gaze and a reorientation of the attention to what is ordinary to see it as worthy of question or remark, overcoming the magnetism of the new—to resume one of our distinctions— through the magnetism of what, seen more closely, can be seen again as significant or “great.” It is an education of vision in which the more accomplished practitioners of such practices will be invested in more programmatic ways; yet an education to which all of us are exposed in varying degrees at different points of our lives, not only when first introduced to these practices as children and students, but also throughout our lives on those occasions when our experience is punctuated by moments of contact with the sources and resources of wonder they afford. One thinks of the popular science book we leaf through on a sunny Sunday afternoon (a science book not unlike Dawkins’s perhaps, if in a

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different spirit), which takes us on a journey of the imagination through our body that trains our gaze on the individual cell and bores deeper into the structures and chemical life within it, a world within a world, and a megalopolis within a metropolis, so that when we finally clap the book shut, that next act of our hand has acquired the character of a grandiose production orchestrated from within with an infinitely layered complexity that makes the merest movement appear like a miraculous event. One thinks of the philosophy podcast we listen to on the way to work, which delivers its historical reportage on a centuries-­old “I think, therefore I am” and surprises us into the uncanny thought that our existence might be doubted and then need to be deduced, and in holding us to this thought strikes us with a sudden realization of our own self-­aware presence; of the Saturday feature in the newspaper which, tracking the theme of death among twentieth-­century philosophers, turns an abrupt spotlight on the fact that here we are, clutching our shopping bags in the London underground on an October morning of the year 2013, and one day the city will still be standing and our consciousness will be no longer. One thinks of the radio program on medieval thought that brings up the question of ex nihilo creation for debate, and as we listen in, all of a sudden the room around us has become more real than before, and the walls are bearing their burden with the startling matter-­of-­factness of an extraordinary fact. One thinks of the book of poems we turn over in our hands, which makes a fig crack scarlet and a pomegranate crack pink before our minds in a way that figs and pomegranates had never done before, or lets us meet the impenetrable eye of a tortoise and feel the living weight of a rabbit in our hand with an unknown new thrill. One thinks of the novel we curl up with of an evening, which makes time strangely stand still by a mere handful of lines that seem to do no more than describe, in the barest of sentences, a most ordinary scene in which blackbird flies down to single pear hanging from tree and pear rocks on branch; or in which man pours himself cup of coffee, man cuts slice of bread, man butters its side.51 Uniting such episodes is a moment in which something familiar or ordinary is suddenly seen as extraordinary, whether in its inflection as the wondrous, the awe-­full, or the uncanny (a difference over which it is important not to gloss). Yet this is a suddenness that has all the antecedents of a twice-­over mediated event: for the unnatural act of seeing that dislocates our own by collocation and helps us unsee the familiar and see it anew is itself not effortless, but rather the product of an effort

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of cultivation that has often occupied a critical place within the different practices to which belongs. Having begun from the grammar of the natural wonder that responds will-­lessly to the new—the wonder that seems embedded in our paradigm images of the passion personified, the wonder that sounds out on our linguistic tuning forks and appears hardwired into the bodies our evolutionary history has bequeathed us—our trajectory to this other form of wonder has been a long one, taking us from seeing as sudden event to seeing as aided act, from seeing to seeing as, through different senses of the extraordinary, to the multiple embodiments this other wonder has programmatically found in practices to which the present still lays claim. Wonder: not a SUDDEN response to the unforeseen but also a decision to re-­see the unseen and foreground it through an act of judgment. Wonder: a product—the product of an active effort finding its place in a practice to which one must be wilfully and systematically trained. Wonder: an act. In laying hold of these terms, we have already laid a first grip on one of the central spokes of wonder’s grammatical wheels: wonder not only PRODUCES, but also demands to be produced. This is a grip we must now tighten, moving closer to the notion of activity we have just discovered as a not-­so-­natural possibility within wonder’s grammar in order to follow its spoor more intently. It is a pursuit, as we will see, that will lead us back to the rougher regions of wonder’s terrain in which the shadows once again begin to fall. For in counterposing this other wonder to the wonder that comes more naturally to us, we have already gleaned more than a hint as to why this wonder is one we might need, not only to act for, but indeed to strive to attain. Putting ourselves in the way of these shadows, we will need to ask: Why might wonder stand in need of conquest? And this will pave the way for finally openly posing a question with whose rumble the ground has long been mined: Why is wonder something we might will with such force, and aspire to attain even in the teeth of the strongest resistance? Once again, we are asking: How near or far does wonder lie? It is time for a harder look at the interpenetrating tracks of wonder’s present and past to locate wonder’s EXTRA-­ORDINARY acts of leap, and to find the grain that grates against its leap, and the grain that goads it.

PRODUCES: Practices of Wonder

Wonder as Doing, as Practice of Speech

Wonder may be separated from us by a saltation: it is a sense of wonder’s distance which several stages of our discussion should have helped prepare for, including our earliest venture to place wonder within our epistemic and linguistic grip. Wonder lies far, we said—yet wonder lies near (“WONDER”). Wonder eludes us—yet wonder is something we know inside out and as intimately as anything we experience before we can scarcely walk or talk. Subjecting these conflicting characterizations to adjudication, we suggested that wonder is something we know as confidently as any other emotion we have learned to recognize in others and been taught to express, and any word we have mastered the ability to use, though our linguistic grasp on it will often be shadowed by moments of ambiguity or doubt, reflecting wonder’s unstable presence among the phenomena of our emotional lives. To ask about wonder’s status as an achievement is to raise a question about wonder’s distance that now returns us to these counterbalancing statements to demand yet a finer calibration. In order to map wonder’s distance from us, in fact, we will need to begin by returning to the linguistic perspective we set out earlier in order to place it in richer contact with the ground we have since covered, and with a notion of activity that emerged clearly in the most recent stage of our investigation. For a first notion of “activity” and indeed intensified activity already entered our ken in the last chapter when plotting the different ways in which our wondering gaze has been cultivated programmatically in many of the practices we prize, embedding itself in the very terms in which our 121

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discussion had been framed. “Practice”: going to its etymological root, we find prattein: “to act.” Practice: an acting, a doing. Coming up from the roots to the topsoil closer to our own usage: an iterated, organized acting, a doing disciplined by reflection. Climbing up to the sunlight: a doing that constitutes a discipline, with a history, a tradition, internal standards of excellence as to how it should be performed. Standing in this broad daylight, the characterization of practice we have just invoked will echo the thicker terms used by Alasdair Mac­ Intyre to expound the notion of “practice” in the context of his larger ethical project in After Virtue, where he defined it as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.”1 It is a composite definition whose elements would invite deeper probing to be brought into fuller view; yet what is important for our purposes is simply to note that it includes in its scope many of the domains of achievement—science and art, philosophy and religion—we passed over in the last chapter. And it does so in order to simultaneously offer a stronger and more self-­conscious vocabulary for characterizing the place of wonder within them. The habit of wondering at the ordinary and seeing the familiar anew, the last chapter suggested, has often figured prominently among the excellences constitutive of our intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual practices; and we may add: among the excellences that are critical to the achievement of the goods—such as the pursuit of understanding, within practices of inquiry—around which these activities are oriented.2 A habit of remarking; an excellence disciplined by reflection and nourished by the traditions of the practice to which it belongs. And might it now be possible, smoothing over the particularities of different practices and the habit of seeing they specifically invite, to redescribe in simpler terms the basic performance they unite in exacting? Reordering and recapitulating, we could call it an act of remarking or questioning what we take for granted; unseeing to then “truly” see; taking a step back from what stands before our eyes, or beneath our feet as their ground; or again—to reach for contiguous regions of our language that lie only a prefix away yet elide the element of iteration embedded in the very morphology of “re-­marking”—de-­taching our dis-­sociating ourselves from the familiar to see it afresh.

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The act of wonder, read in this light, will lie as near or as far from us as any action whose disciplining principles we need to master—and that is to say that it must lie farther away than by a mere arm’s length. The scientific habit of unseeing the ordinary to wonder at it will need be acquired afresh, we suggested earlier, by every participant initiated into this reflective practice; mutatis mutandis, for all other practices in which this habit finds a place. The apple’s falling suddenly strikes us as extraordinary; the stone’s stoniness suddenly comes alive or the blade of grass becomes visible; our own presence, or the presence of the world around us, suddenly shocks—having situated this moment of surprised remarking within specific practices and disciplines of reflection, we would have to say that embedded in this “step back” from the ordinary must lie every ounce of activity demanded by its developmental progression. For this step back will be the climactic product of a double history that includes not only an individual’s embrace of an intellectual or spiritual discipline but also of the longer history, tradition, and collective life in which that discipline has its roots. To re-­mark, to step back, to de-­tach oneself: an act of separation separated from our being by the entire span of our individual history and the collective history of the practices we enter. It is a sense of distance we now need to deepen by laying a clearer set of bridges between this notion of practice and that more rudimentary notion of practice—the practice of language—that we met at the opening of our inquiry. And the best way of doing so will be by first allowing ourselves to consider what it would mean to call the notion of “activity” at this juncture into doubt. For the above are not, it may be suggested, the only terms in which the moment of seeing or “separation” at stake could be approached. Reaching for one of the other joints of our grammatical text, we had earlier asked (“WONDER”): What could be closer to us than an emotional experience identified by some with nothing less than EXPERIENCE itself? For if the ordinary is not experienced (as Wittgenstein had suggested), then wonder (as Fisher glossed) would seem to “become the very heart of what it means to ‘have an experience’ at all.” We have moved on from Fisher’s circumscription of wonder’s objects; yet this type of claim may not be one we have entirely left behind. Our own discussion, indeed, may seem to have given new fuel to its terms, suggesting that the basic act of mind that constitutes the experience of wonder may be so intimately bound up with our mind as to demand to be considered, less its act, than its constitutive identity.

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Plotting Shklovsky’s view of the connection between art and a moment of estrangement that we appropriated as one of wonder’s affiliates, we heard Shklovsky tie estrangement to a reversal of automatized perception and its characteristic reduction of our “complex life” to “the level of the unconscious.” Schematizing the special connection between philosophy and a wonder at the ordinary, we tied this to philosophy’s consciousness” central quest for the “most systematic form of self-­ (Nagel), which allows one to “observe once what he has seen every day” (Rousseau). To wonder (such examples suggest): to see, to remark, to attend; to pick out with conscious awareness. To wonder: to be conscious. It is a semantic cascade that would seem to have stalked our account of wonder’s programmatic cultivation at several junctures. Yet its suggestiveness in this context emerges more strongly once its terms are joined to a thicker account of the nature of consciousness with an influential retinue in our recent philosophical past. For talk of “stepping back” or of “detaching oneself from the seen” may be innocent of technical freight; yet if our ears are prepared to pick up the echoes, it may recall us to that substantive account of consciousness spelled out by Sartre in Being and Nothingness, an account in which the notions of detaching, or separating, or—in its special idiom—“nihilating,” provide the stone of foundation. To be conscious, on this account, is to be possessed of an inherent capacity (both blessing and curse) to effect a separation from being. All consciousness is consciousness of something, and to be conscious “of,” put crudely, is to be automatically separated from whatever follows. In the very act of representing, we divide ourselves from what we represent; the vocabulary of “detachment” and “disengagement,” indeed, forms a recurrent woof in Sartre’s treatment of his subject. In one of his best-­k nown ethical developments of his view, Sartre invites us to watch the waiter who flounces about theatrically in the café—the perfect illustration of a waiter, and for Sartre’s purposes, the perfect illustration of what he terms “bad faith.” What such theatrics reveal is a waiter divided from himself by his self-­representation—a representation of the waiter that forever separates him from the being of the waiter. For, “If I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him.”3 And this applies, mutatis mutandis, to any of the representations we form of our own identity, as it applies to our relationship with the world around us and the representations we form of it, which reveal us to be perpetually exiled from being by the infinitesimal “not” by which consciousness hives itself off from anything it alights on.

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To be able to step back or away—de-­taching ourselves to re-­mark— are as deeply natural to us, on this view, as anything we are still entitled to call human nature, given the ways in which the very idea of “nature”—as a mode of being with determinate density that could survive the liquidating effect of our re-­presentation—is fundamentally undercut within this scheme. Sartre himself does not relate the notion of wonder to this basic structure of human “being”; yet other philosophers working in his shadow have put the notion forward more explicitly at this juncture. Writing about wonder in a line of reflection bearing important debts to Sartre, Homer Hogan thus connects wonder to what he calls “the pure expression of intentionality”—the exercise of intentionality or consciousness for its own sake, taking the fundamental tendency of consciousness to be its “orientation toward what it is not, i.e. toward objects”—and he indicates that this connection is to be understood as a bond of identity when he states that this exercise of consciousness constitutes “an activity whose characteristics are indicated in common uses of the word ‘wonder.’”4 And if it is the thick terms of substantive philosophical theory that here provide this claim of identity with its readiest home, it is worth noting that this same claim has been articulated by thinkers operating outside such framing intellectual commitments. “It belongs to the very essence of the soul to disentangle itself immediately from any content,” writes Michel Hulin, apostrophizing the view of wonder taken within classical Indian aesthetics. To the extent that “it can’t help perpetually dissociating itself from its own representations, the soul is basically Wondering.” Wonder “should be, and in a way it is, the natural state of the soul.”5 The “act” of separation we call wonder has here been brought close enough to our being to seem inseparable from it. Wonder and consciousness have been drawn together so firmly as to hardly allow themselves to be prised apart; and in being thus fused, they have closed up the space in which a notion of “acting” might have been sought. Every time I see a flower, every time I see an apple fall, every time I raise my eyes to the world, I am taking a step back from my representation that comes with the step of representation itself. Every time I am aware of a blade of grass, a blade of detachment has already been driven between the object of my vision and me. Any strong distinctions we might wish to draw, indeed, between the way we naturally confront the familiar and the way we naturally confront the unfamiliar, and between different ways of confronting the familiar, would melt away with the same stroke:

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the poet bringing the glory of the flower into resplendent focus and the person glancing past the flowerpot to look at the clock would be divided by far less than may seem. Such intellectual imbrications between wonder and something as distinctively our own as our status as conscious beings are telling, and do much to illuminate the deeper roots of our will to wonder (an insight to which we will be returning later in our discussion: “OBJECT”).6 Yet as the eloquent equivocation of Hulin’s phrasing will have signaled— wonder “is” the state of the soul, yet wonder “should be”—these imbrications may not allow themselves to be drawn as tightly as might at first appear. Wonder is—yet wonder should be: there are, no doubt, many ways of reflectively mining the gap just carved open. Yet for our purposes, the most fruitful way of mining it is one that hears the above proposals about wonder’s identity as a cue for returning to the linguistic vantage point in which we anchored our inquiry earlier, and as an opportunity for reinhabiting it in order to bring our linguistic intuitions into closer contact with the grammar of wonder we have articulated since, including the notion of “activity” to which we have already linked it. What wonder (and related notions such as “consciousness”) is, once again, can only be meaningfully decided by considering what we say about it. For what accounts of consciousness like Sartre’s are in danger of overlooking, in proposing broad analyses of consciousness and deploying notions such as “detachment” and “dissociation” in larger structural ways, is the crucial fact that the words we use in talking about the topic belong to ordinary language and as such are subject to its criteria of use. And as for other words, there must be pragmatic occasions that govern the application of these concepts. The deleterious philosophical consequences of severing concepts from their ordinary use and treating them in isolation from the pragmatic circumstances that condition the latter formed a recurring target in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations­. For we have a stubborn philosophical habit, Wittgenstein suggests, of thinking that certain words must always be applicable, either true or false—as when we think that an action must always be describable as either voluntary or involuntary. Yet for all such terms, there must be a pragmatic occasion that makes it intelligible not only to predicate them but to even raise the question of their predication at all; in the case of “voluntary” or “involuntary,” for example, there must be something unusual or extraordinary or out of joint about the action at issue. Countering this stubborn habit, we should strive to summon this context to view by asking ourselves about a given word: “In what situations do we say it?” (PI, 417).7

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It was likewise the philosophical use of words run amok once their ties to ordinary usage had been broken that Wittgenstein called attention to in several of his own philosophical skirmishes with the notion of consciousness, such as the one beginning on §412 of the Philosophical Investigations. Whom do I really inform if I say “I have consciousness”? What is the purpose of saying this to myself, and how can another person understand me?—Now, sentences like “I see,” “I hear,” “I am conscious” really have their uses. I tell a doctor “Now I can hear with this ear again,” or I tell someone who believes I am in a faint “I am conscious again,” and so on. (PI, 416) It might seem compellingly obvious to us that “I am conscious” is an expression we could ordinarily utter at any moment and it would be at each and every moment true. Yet “consciousness” is not in fact a concept that can be legitimately applied to people, or the question of its application raised, at all times. To say of a person that she is conscious of a certain thing; that she has detached herself from something or taken a step away from it; or again, that she has come to see something familiar as strange and something ordinary as extraordinary—these are statements for which sufficient pragmatic occasions would be needed in order to provide them with even an initial foothold. The flouncing theatricality of Sartre’s waiter, in this light, is precisely the occasion that might make us reach for such concepts and lead us to attribute to him a representation of his role. To take another of the examples Sartre considers in the same context: the attentive student who “wishes to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide” and who “so exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that he ends up by no longer hearing anything”—the reason why we might here be led to speak of playing, or of a representation that can be a role, are the signs, such as the glazed look of an excessive zeal, that attention has become an explicit aim.8 To say of the person holding a pen for the thousandth time, on the other hand—to return to one of Shklovksy’s examples—that they are conscious of a pen in their hand, or of the person thumping the box of cereal into a bowl moments after waking up or the one briskly following the road to work as she does every morning that they see the road they walk on or the box as they thump it out, only seems to us correct because we presume that, if asked, they would not deny it. In that case, however, it would be the question itself that would supply the pragmatic

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context in which such statements make sense. Similarly, that a person is conscious of himself is a statement we would not indiscriminately make of every single person we see walking past us on the street or picking out vegetables in the grocery aisle. It is something we might perhaps say, though, of the boy uncomfortably shifting from foot to foot or blushing as he talks to a teacher or a pretty young girl, or of the person looking themselves in the eye before the mirror; of the person praying alone in a church pew; of the Zen monk in a moment of meditation; moving closer to some of our most suggestive examples: of the reader of Pascal’s imperative addresses to the imagination who closes the book with a new look on his face. And so to some of our other examples: that a person has stepped back from a blade of grass or grain of sand and remarked it is something you might say of a poet who expressed it in her lines; of the botanist who peers and studies; of the person you see leaning close with a look of intense concentration—a look you might be prepared to count or recount as wonder. To bypass these circumstances would be, as suggested moments ago, to collapse the space in which distinctions could be drawn between the way we naturally confront the familiar and the unfamiliar, and between the different ways in which we may more electively confront the familiar, flattening the distance between the poet standing before the flower and the ordinary person whose eyes dart past it on the way elsewhere. Yet these, of course, are not distinctions that could be flattened without semantic loss. Asked, “Did you see the flowers on the ledge?” (“Did you see the road you walked on this morning, the cereal box as you thumped it out?”), I might of course answer, with some hesitation perhaps, in the affirmative (I knew the flowers were there; I might even persuade myself I remember a dab of color in the righthand corner of the ledge if I try to reconstruct the scene). But the notion of “seeing” as deployed here would stand worlds apart from the notion of seeing or “really seeing” linked with wonder to which a poet could lay claim. To spell it out more clearly: “an act of separation that would be separated from our being by the entire span of our individual history and the collective history of the practices we enter,” we said, an act as unnatural as any action whose disciplining principles we need to master; and we then went on to question whether the space between our being and our action—between being and acting—might after all be dammed up if we embrace the view that this “action” constitutes the very “fiber” of our “being,” or the nonbeing that consciousness “consists in.” What the above suggests is that this space cannot be closed up to the extent that

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even to speak of “being”—of the consciousness that gives our being— requires a pragmatic occasion which by definition must stand out against its background. It is the fact that wonder must be an event in language that necessitates that wonder should be an event.9 And this is to say, rearticulating an earlier insight, that wonder will be far from or unnatural to us at least to this extent, that we reach it through (and are thus separated from it by) language, and we reach language through the community in which we learn to speak, mastering the words of wonder to then use them in expressing our own wonder and ascribing wonder to others. We reach it through language: not in a sense that would deny that language is itself grounded in certain natural ways of reacting and expressing these reactions, but in the sense that our access to these reactions and experiences, as inescapably linguistic beings that can only reflect on psychological phenomena in their capacity as speakers of language, is always already conditioned by language. We are always already speaking of wonder. Wonder may require an act, we opened by saying; and then we took a step sideways to meet a view of wonder’s remarking that proposed to smooth away the salience that acting involves. In reclaiming this salience, the above train of reflection has taken what may seem like a simple step backward to the most minimal or rudimentary sense adumbrated at an earlier stage of our inquiry (“WONDER”), suggesting that the status of wonder as an act is sealed through its status as a practice of language we come to master. A “rudimentary” sense—yet to appreciate its reach, and the thicker significance which this recursion to wonder’s linguistic physiognomy carries, we need to turn to one of our last formulations to consider it more closely. A look we might be prepared to count as “wonder,” we said, when we see another lean close to something mundane—a blade of grass, a stone, a tree, one’s own hand raised in the sunlight—with a look of intense concentration. “Might be prepared,” “to count”—but what kind of space for a decision is implied here? What kind of doubt? The space for doubt or decision emerges rather more clearly, however, once we take stock of how far such examples have brought us from the kind of wonder that gave us our initial bearings. Driving a wedge into wonder’s different grammatical possibilities in the last chapter (“SUDDEN”), it was the wonder directed to the new and unfamiliar that we picked out as the wonder that comes most naturally to us on several levels: it is paradigmatically the wonder of children faced with an unfamiliar world; the wonder most likely to be wired into our bodies as an inherited

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response; and crucially, the wonder we find most readily on our tuning forks when we try to articulate our linguistic intuitions. Seeking to pin what wonder is (called), it is the wide-­eyed look of a child faced with new experiences—the first sight of a snow-­capped world, of shimmering fish in an aquarium or shining minerals in a natural science museum, of the orchestrated enchantments of Disneyland—that presents us with the surest criteria for speaking of wonder and that offers our intuitions the firmest foothold. Moving away from the wonder that forms our paradigm and the grammar that answers to it, we should not be surprised to find that our linguistic intuitions begin to lose their confident grip. And the space for doubt here, crucially, would partly seem to be wedged open by the normative elements these intuitions carry. For our hold on the emotions in general and the emotion of wonder in particular, as we saw early in our discussion (“WONDER”), is tightly bound up with a notion of “intelligibility” that has strong normative dimensions. Central to the way we identify emotions is our ability to locate them within a narrative context (Cavell: “What I count as something, is a function of how I recount it”), and to identify them as intelligible responses to this context—a normative dimension in turn openly resumed in the more programmatic understanding of emotions as judgments of value. The normal expression of a child faced with the orchestrations of Disneyland answers to an intelligibility that leaves me in little doubt about how to identify it, and there is little I need to recount of its narrative context before I can count it as a look of wonder. Yet the person who peers close to a blade of grass or a stone with a similar expression provokes me to a doubt that is in part the uncertainty: What is it that renders an object as “ordinary” or “mundane” as a blade of grass or stone worthy of a response whose expressive look invites me to call “wonder” but whose grounds I cannot fully see? And while there are different ways in which one might envisage this doubt yielding, one of the most important—to finally lay a clearer bridge with the thicker notion of activity that opened this chapter—would involve a fuller recounting of the narrative context in which the meaning of “poetry” and “botany” and their cultivated evaluative biases as reflective practices would occupy a central place, and at the end of which I might be in a better position to recognize this wonder as an intelligible or merited response. It is again Wittgenstein who, at several junctures within his philosophical work, illustrates the possibilities of uncertainty that open up when we move away from our main linguistic paradigm, and the strain

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to which our language is exposed when wonder or astonishment attempts to take what is most ordinary and deeply familiar as its object. In his “Lecture on Ethics,” Wittgenstein’s concern was to call our attention to what, in the later language of the Philosophical Investigations, he might have called the “bumps” we incur by running our head “against the limits of language” (PI, 119) when it comes to expressing experiences of absolute value. These experiences, as we saw above, included the wonderment expressed by saying: “I wonder at the existence of the world”—an expression Wittgenstein dismissed as a misuse of language. For on his view, “to say ‘I wonder at such and such being the case’ has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. . . . But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.”10 And if Wittgenstein here problematized the expression of wonder at that most fundamental of facts which every single event, decision, or experience in our lives constantly presupposes—that there is a world, that something is—it is a fact no less fundamental, and indeed in the view of the early Wittgenstein its very counterpart (“the world is my world”)11—that I am: the fact of my own existence, or more exactly, my existence as a conscious being, the fact of consciousness—that several years and philosophical changes of mind later, the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations would problematize in a not unrelated way, in a series of passages we already picked up on and must now revisit for a closer look. For as we encountered one of these passages above, it registered as an invitation to sensitize ourselves to the pragmatic context of words in a way that enabled us to locate the expression of wonder-­ at-­the-­ordinary as an event within language. Some of the remarks to which it was paired, on the other hand, might seem calculated to expel such expressions of wonder outside the domain of language, ruling out our capacity to remark and be astonished by the fact of our consciousness on linguistic grounds. It is an impulse of exclusion, as we will see, that reveals the stress fractures to which such extraordinary forms of astonishment subject our language, yet that at the same time points to the means—and above all the richer understandings of pragmatic or narrative context—by which they can ultimately be understood to find their home within it. Taking his point of departure from the philosophical feeling of “an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain process,” Wittgenstein turns to ask why we should fail to encounter such a feeling in “the considerations of our ordinary life” and why it should arise.

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When does this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and, astonished, say to myself: “THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain!” Wittgenstein objects: But what can it mean to speak of “turning my attention on to my own consciousness?” There is surely nothing more extraordinary than that there should be any such thing! What I described with these words (which are not used in this way in ordinary life) was an act of gazing. I gazed fixedly in front of me—but not at any particular point or object. My eyes were wide open, the brows not contracted (as they mostly are when I am interested in a particular object). No such interest preceded this gazing. My glance was vacant . . . (PI, 412) This passage, appearing shortly before the one we visited above (PI, 416), shadows it as its context, and is in turn shadowed by the larger context of the philosophical motifs and critical targets shaping Wittgenstein’s work. For standing in the background of Wittgenstein’s criticism of the unrestricted application of “consciousness” in that earlier passage— and of its underlying assumption that consciousness can be attributed to human beings at all times without regard for the circumstances in which verbal expressions such as “I am conscious” ordinarily find their use—had been a broader understanding of the philosophical malady at stake, which here steps more sharply into the light. This “feeling of an unbridgeable gulf ” is an expression of a problematic tendency, recurring in Wittgenstein’s later work as a key target, to carve a steep gap between the inner and the outer, the mental and the physical, or what is available to oneself and what is available to others. Hived off from the physical, the mind is seen as a private realm to which the subject has direct introspective access (“THIS is supposed to be produced by a process in the brain”), yet which nevertheless mysteriously succeeds in becoming the referential anchor for psychological terms and which others equally mysteriously succeed in conjecturing on the flimsy basis of what is outwardly observed. It is a picture of the mind whose appeal lies in the deep mystique with which it vests the mind, surrounding its workings with a “halo” and an aura of the “unique” (PI, 95, 97) that strike powerful

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psychological roots—psychological roots about which there will be more to say (“OBJECT”). Yet even with this larger context shadowing them, Wittgenstein’s remarks can be heard more directly as a concern with the difficulties that attach to remarking (to the meaningfulness of one’s words in remarking) one’s consciousness, and thereby setting it up as an object of a wonder or surprise that might be stated or exclaimed in the words: “I have consciousness!” or “I am conscious!” Bracketing more insightful misgivings about the deficiencies of the pragmatic context, in fact, Wittgenstein’s response suggests that it is already the outward signs or bodily expression of this presumed act of attending inwardly to one’s own awareness that arouse our suspicion and make us feel that there is something out of order or “queer.” When, turning our attention away from this supposed act of inner pointing, we consider the outer expression that accompanies it and is accessible from a third-­person point of view, we see the look of someone who seems to be struggling but failing to look, like an effort to induce a trance-­like state that is condemned to be self-­defeating. (Compare this with the paradigm look of the child suddenly confronted with an extraordinary visual object for the first time, and the contrast stands plain.) What this reflects, once again, is the crucial role that natural expression plays in the criteria we use for attributing psychological states—for predicating concepts such as “attending” or “remarking” and therefore of “wonder” or “surprise”— to others. Commenting on this passage of the Investigations, Peter Hacker was picking up on some of these implications when he wrote: Part of what is awry about this thought is the very notion of “turning one’s attention upon one’s own consciousness.” One is said to be conscious of something, e.g. the ticking of a clock or a pain in one’s back, when one’s attention is caught and held by that thing. But there is no such thing as being conscious of one’s consciousness . . . consciousness itself (unlike one’s states of consciousness) is not an object of attention or experience.12 And yet: “there is no such thing”—it is this remark, with its apophthegmatic flavor, that offers us the leverage we need for seeing why the same considerations that appear to cast our utterances in doubt, also, considered more closely, restore their foothold, in a way that not only retains but deepens the notion of a “practice” of wonder in the linguistic sense, and at the same time enables us to tie this notion more clearly to

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the thicker notion of “practice” we have seen. This, crucially, involves broadening our understanding of our linguistic usage using the resources Wittgenstein himself has placed at our disposal, and extending Wittgenstein’s own quest for the pragmatic context that supports our words.13 For what Hacker’s comment, and the apophthegmatic-­sounding “is”s in which it is couched, betrays, is a focus on one particular use of the concept of “attending,” and a particular kind of grammar that governs its application—a grammar in which the concept of “attention” is indissolubly tied to that of “catching” and being “held”; and that is of course the grammar of an involuntary event. Yet attention, we have said, may not only be caught but also directed; notice is not something that is only elicited but can also be deliberately taken; and neither seeing nor attending is governed solely by the grammar of involuntary events. The natural expression of spontaneous astonishment at something suddenly seen for the first time, similarly, is not the only paradigm, though it may be the most compelling one, in which astonishment can be thought. And it is many of the practices we outlined above—in which seeing or remarking is an organized doing that forms an intellectual, spiritual, or aesthetic discipline—that provide such acts (and less paradigmatic expressions) of cultivated attention with a home that is crucially also a linguistic one, supplying talk of “remarking” and “wonder” with its narrative surroundings and grounds of intelligibility, and spelling out a grammar in which these concepts can appear as voluntary acts. Led along a journey of scientific understanding that brings into my view the process of natural evolution and the emergence of organic life, carving into my imagination the long tracts of time in which conscious life did not exist, I am suddenly struck: “How remarkable—here I am. I am conscious.” In the quiet of contemplation, I leaf through the writings of Epicurean philosophers and try to dwell on the counsel (whose echoes sound out in many spiritual traditions) to greet each moment as though it were an “an incredible stroke of luck,” one’s first and one’s last, and to practice saying: “Today will be the last day of my life”—and suddenly it dawns on me: “I am conscious!” Meditating on the thought articulated by Lucretius as a question but masking an exercise of the imagination with a likewise long train of echo: “If the whole world were to appear to mortals now, for the first time . . . what could one think of more marvelous than these things?” suddenly I have remarked something so obvious that, fumbling for words, I can only express by exclaiming: “Here I am!”14 At other times, under a different philosophical or spiritual discipline in which remarking what is a given and a gift is embraced as an

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aspiration, it is these very words that I place at the center of my meditation and struggle to make my own. “I am conscious!”; or: “Here I am!” A passion, we said earlier, has a logical history; what I count as something is a function of how I recount it. And here, it is circumstances like these—circumstances that, without excessively simplifying or abridging the complex routes this kind of exclamation might take in emerging, can be identified as episodes in the lifestream of larger intellectual or spiritual practices—that would enter the history we recount and let us count it as the remarking of a fact as ordinary as one’s conscious awareness with wonder or surprise (“and it was then that I suddenly remarked . . .”). Yet what these examples also suggest, in eliciting the vocabulary of “struggling” and “trying” and of meditations I must exert myself to inhabit, is that the act of remarking may often be one that bears the grammar, not so much of an act in the past tense of completion, but in the future tense or imperative mood of an act still to be achieved. Not so much “I have remarked,” as “Remark!”; not “I have imagined the whole world as it might have appeared for the first time,” but “Imagine!”15 And catching hold of this linguistic hunch, we may also find a handle for returning to Wittgenstein’s other example of a wonder whose linguistic ground appears to collapse beneath it, in which it is our ability to (speak of our) wonder at the world’s existence that is undercut. To wonder at what is, Wittgenstein had said, is to imagine the opposite of what is, and yet “we cannot imagine the world not existing.” What the “can” and “cannot” in this statement now betray is that “imagining” has been assigned the grammar of a fact capable of being asserted or denied. (“I have imagined!” comes the statement; and the doubt follows: “Have you really succeeded?”). Yet this is an imagining that, recast in the imperative mood, may find its logical history, and linguistic home, in several practices in which the remarking of the world in its extraordinariness has a valued place, as instantiated densely by Lucretius’s counterfactual above (“if the whole world were to appear”) or by Coleridge’s earlier words (“as if all had then sprang forth”)—statements whose imperative mood stands out plainly once we connect them to the spiritual and aesthetic programs that frame them—but also, and more openly, by the religious practices which lend Wittgenstein his own idiom when he redescribes this wonder as the experience of believers speaking of a created world. Imagine the world not existing: read Genesis, chapter 1. Imagine the world not existing: read any version of the cosmological argument. Imagine the world not existing: keep trying.

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Wonder: an act, we said; a practice; an organized doing, a disciplined performance. A performance? A step away from something that stands before us, to remark; an act of separation that we queried how near or far it lies to us, how natural or unnatural it is to the grain of our being, and whether it may not give us our very grain. In doing so we stumbled over a set of telling seams—wonder “is” our natural state, yet wonder “should” be—that opened out to the revival and reappropriation of an earlier insight, suggesting that a finer-­grained meditation on wonder as an act or a practice must take into account the status of wonder as an event in language and as a practice of speech. And it is some of the richer cultural practices we outlined above, in which remarking forms a disciplined doing, that provide the wonder directed to the ordinary not only with its causal grounds but also its linguistic context. Yet having spelled out these links, and having elicited this first salience of “acting” within the woof of wonder, it is time to take another step forward to consider a more intensified form of this salience that has been in the offing for some time. It is an intensification that will lead us to yet another reading of the term “practice” and a closer encounter with the term “nature” to which we found it opposed. And it will do so by finally seizing hold of a theme that has recurred several times already in our narrative as a running thread, inviting us to ask why wonder’s EXTRAORDINARY seeing might sometimes constitute not merely a salience, but a saltation, and a leap whose difficulty renders it nothing short of heroic. Wonder as Doing, as Self-­Undoing, as Aesthetic Conquest

A running thread: we might also call it one of the rallying patterns to which our cloth has been cut from the very beginning of our quest for wonder’s grammar. And it is a pattern that once again leads us to the notion of “acting” or “doing” only by first raising a doubt about its relevance. For, looking back over the terrain we have covered, we may now observe that the notion of wonder and the notion of doing have frequently been placed in distinctly paradoxical relations. Emotions make us move, we said earlier (“WONDER”); the passions make us do. Yet wonder’s doing, we saw, has often been thought of as a kind of undoing—a paralysis that fixes the gaze as it drops the jaw, freezes the feet, and can make the knees buckle (Frijda: it “may make the subject stagger or force him to sit down”). It is an undoing that has sometimes made for tension, as Daston and Park suggested, in intellectuals’ relationship to

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this particular passion, for even that undoing-­like doing that premodern thinkers called “contemplation” and we would call more prosaically yet also more assiduously “inquiry” may require a movement that wonder has been suspected of forestalling. This looser relation to doing has been connected in turn to an aspect of wonder that once again signals its unusual status among the passions. Frijda’s association of the family of emotions to which wonder belongs with “the arrest of locomotion and instrumental action” was here exemplary, betokening and rehearsing the atypical relationship in which wonder has often been taken to stand to the self-­referential goals or values, interests or projects, that ordinarily condition our emotional responses.16 My anger, my fear, my grief, my love, my jealousy or humiliation, register my attachment to persons or objects or states of affairs that are powerfully enmeshed with my well-­being; the eyes that my emotions give me are ones that pick out saliences of value in the world that surrounds me. Yet if, as suggested earlier, wonder also gives us eyes of value, the evaluative saliences it picks out are not ones that discernibly redound to the usual domain of our projects or goals. The wonder I feel as I walk through a landscape that nature has carved out in extraordinary ways, or the wonder I feel as I hold a fossil dating hundreds of thousands of years between my hands, thrusts these objects into a blaze of passionate visibility which floats free, as it were, from the tissue of my ordinary passionate reactions about things that directly impinge on my interests and from the anxious clutch I seek to retain on these. This was the point Nussbaum was likewise articulating when she referred to the “non-­eudaimonistic” character that sets wonder apart from other emotions. For taking emotions as judgments about external things that we value and that are closely involved in our flourishing, wonder stands out as an exception: “as non-­eudaimonistic as an emotion can be,” in wonder we are maximally aware of the value of the object and minimally aware of its relationship to our own plans.17 If wonder doesn’t make us do, that is because only the values most intimately linked with our narrower interests normally possess such power to compel. It is a view of wonder’s singular immunity to duress that has been echoed throughout wonder’s history, and that has indeed been tightly bound up with the prized position wonder has been allocated within intellectual inquiry. For it is “owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize,” Aristotle had written in the Metaphysics, and they did so “in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.” Adam Smith would later echo this view when opposing wonder

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to need and severing wonder from “any expectation of advantage,” and when presenting the evolution of inquiry as the product of a natural progression away from the domain of practical necessity and toward the wonder-­filled domain of leisure. It is then that those of “liberal fortunes, whose attention is not much occupied either with business or with pleasure, can fill up the void of their imagination, which is thus disengaged from the ordinary affairs of life, no other way than by attending to that train of events which passes around them”—an attending in which wonder is given a primary role.18 When Descartes himself—one of wonder’s warier philosophical subscribers, as we have seen—had tied wonder to the quest for scientific knowledge, this had been directly related to wonder’s unusual status as a passion unconnected to interest, given that we experience wonder “before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us.”19 Wonder (so Smith) arrives after interest has departed; wonder (so Descartes) arrives on the scene before interest has even had the chance to get started—and in both cases, it signals a freedom from doing that frees us for the undoing-­like movement of thought. Yet while this may be the view of wonder that has frequently figured in our intellectual accounts, it is a view that delivers only a partial understanding of the complex relation in which wonder may stand to the notion of doing and to that of interest. For this pacific image of temporal succession and courteous turn-­taking—wonder strikes after interest departs or before it arrives—should not obscure the fact that wonder and interest may sometimes appear as concomitants and may in fact compete for occupation of the same scene; and that the departure of interest may thus not be an event but an act, and require to be willfully wrested. Bringing this possibility—and thus the fuller story about wonder’s transactions with the notions of doing and self-­interest—into view, however, once again demands a turn of our attention away from the natural wonder at the new which Descartes and Smith had in mind, and toward the type of wonder that we recently unveiled as a separate possibility of its grammar. For wonder, we saw, may not only strike, but require willful provocation—a provocation that invites us to see the ordinary as EXTRAORDINARY and in doing so to reeducate our ordinary judgments about what is worthy of interest or remark. Leaning closer to some of the embodiments this wonder has found in our practices for a more judicious look, we may be able to envisage more clearly why such judgments of value might resist disengagement and why they may be too intimately tied up with our interests to be reversed without a conquest of self. The

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language of “conquest” has finally caught up with us more decisively; and so, as will see, has the notion of “mastery” to which it had already once been bound, and will now be bound afresh. And here, the most critical wedge can be found by turning back to reconsider some of our earlier remarks when introducing the cultural embodiments this other wonder has received (“SUDDEN”). Can wonder simply constitute the effortless beginning of scientific inquiry, we asked, or might it not also need to constitute the end of willful effort? For, left to our own devices, everyday natural phenomena that rest on deep foundations—that objects fall to the ground when we release our grip, that magnets attract metals, that chairs hold our weight, that our feet don’t buckle beneath us—fail to strike us, and remain all but invisible in the transactions of our daily life. This invisibility, we may now observe, is less than contingently related to the fact that these ordinary phenomena are ones with which we enter into practical relationship daily—that we sit on chairs before we even know what chairs are called or that we stand up on our two feet even before we know the world is any larger than a few disjointed spaces. And so on with our other examples of phenomena involving the technological manipulation of natural laws—the miracle of gravity-­defying objects, of teletransported human voices or exact visual reproductions—where what is potentially wondrous is eclipsed by the relationship of everyday use in which we encounter it, and in which, in this case, it is indeed designed to be encountered. The order of nature is one whose uses we begin to master even before we learn to speak, and one that our simplest actions continue to invoke throughout our lives at every moment, silently leaning upon this background every time we throw a ball or pull up a chair or post a magnet on a fridge or flex a finger, and every time we pick up the receiver or flick a switch. If the familiar can be disengaged from its background to be remarked with wonder, this will require surmounting an inertia whose deeper roots, the above suggests, will at least partly lie in the relationship we just called “use” which we contract with it. It is an understanding of wonder’s antagonist that can be transposed outside the scientific context to speak for many of the other forms of intellectual inquiry in which wonder is programmatically turned to the familiar and expected. When Hume, in the Treatise of Human Nature, gave voice to his sense of unease at the fact that “I [morally] approve of one object and disapprove of another; call one thing beautiful, and another deform’d; decide concerning truth and falsehood, reason and folly, without knowing upon what principles I proceed” (T, 271), he was laying bare not only

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what might motivate the desire for a deeper philosophical understanding of such ordinary practices but also what might prevent this desire from arising. It is the fact that philosophical inquiry always finds me already “proceeding”—the fact that I already use certain principles to judge things right, find things beautiful, determine things to be true; or to include some of our earlier foci into our scope: the fact that I already use language, already use my faculties of thinking and feeling, already use the existent world with everything it contains—that creates the inertia against which philosophical inquiry must grate in order to disengage these facts and phenomena as reflective objects. Our understanding of this inertia, as we saw earlier (“DELIGHT”), and of the sense of mastery challenged by the questioning of familiar facts, may also need to be anchored in thicker terms which give an important place to the needs of the self that resist the disturbance of a settled intellectual order. Yet bracketing this thicker characterization here, we may say (rehearsing and now foregrounding more fully) that it is this inertia that explains why the capacity for such a reflective disengagement should need to be acquired through a laborious discipline of thought—through the intensified “doing” of a long initiation into the cognitive excellences of the practice that situates it.20 Yet among the practices surveyed earlier, it is within the aesthetic context—in that context where wonder presents itself, not as a passion of inquiry, but as a passion of aesthetic response, not as a remarking that quests for explanation but as a remarking that contains its own ends— that this relationship of use has been thematized most explicitly in its opposition to the wondering gaze, and that it has indeed been articulated most expressly as an aspect of our natural being to be actively overcome. It was this anxious reflective concern, we may now recall, that Shklovsky had given voice to when setting out a notion of aesthetic estrangement which we allowed ourselves to read as one of wonder’s siblings. If the “object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged,” the reason for this has to do with the way our vision of the world is indelibly conditioned by our practical transactions with it. For in the practical domain of our lives, “economy of effort” is the order of the day; attention is a good that we economize, and what was once seen or done with conscious attentiveness cedes with time to mindless automation.21 We see with the eyes our habits give us; and this, in Shklovsky’s view, is no seeing at all. Habits act out their etymological root (habeo,­to have) by possessing us rather than being possessed, by mastering us once they have been mastered. And that, it turns out, is because they carry the full weight of

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our will for mastering the world: if they master us, it is in order that we may master what lies outside us. That the world which environs us grows dense with areas of invisibility would seem to be integrally connected to the fact that its everyday role is merely that of the theatrical stage for our practical action. To the eyes that our actions demand of us, it their ends and the means that achieve them that stand out (extra-­ordinary) from this theatrical background, and the character of the world we are disposed to attend to is the one demanded by the script of our goal-­directed action. Any aspect of objects other than their character as means to our ends is, on this dramatic script, occluded, receding to the background to assimilate itself to the “order” of the “ordinary” world. Shklovksy’s lament about the corrosiveness of habit, sounding out in the early twentieth century, was not being heard in the poetic and literary critical tradition for the first time. Preceding him, as we saw in the previous chapter, was a longer history of preoccupation with the dangers of habit or “custom” and its opposition to wonder, to which the poets of Romanticism had made important contributions. Articulating this preoccupation and urging a recovery of “the charm” of “things of every day,” Coleridge had notably linked our normal immunity to this charm to the film of “selfish solicitude” that clouds our view.22 The custom that encrusts our gaze and blinds it to the wonders of the world is engendered by our self-­focused practical orientation to this world. Yet it has been the philosophers of art and aesthetic experience who have spelled out the opposition just outlined—between the stance of wonder and the stance of use—most forcefully against a more programmatic understanding of aesthetic experience in which the distinction between the practical and aesthetic points of view, or between interested and disinterested perception, has formed a centerpiece. And in doing so, they have called into brilliant focus an experience of wonder in which this opposition achieves its shrillest form and the promise of violence already brooked in the above finds its highest manifestation. For if what determines our habits of seeing is the most natural drive in our being— our nature as purposeful agents who act in pursuit of their interests and practical ends—we have already been given grounds for anticipating why a disengagement of the ordinary or a disturbance of habitual order should run into strong opposition, and might indeed exact an act of violence—an act that tears against our very own skin—to be attained. It is an understanding of aesthetic experience which has led a long life within the philosophical tradition, and whose best-­k nown systematic articulation is to be found in the work of Kant.23 Aesthetic judgments, in

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Kant’s view, involve a pleasure whose defining feature is its disinterestedness. To experience an object as beautiful does not depend on desiring it, and does not evoke desire for it in ways that would incorporate the object into the envisaged horizon of a possible course of action. When we respond to something aesthetically, nothing is “at stake” for us in that object: all that matters is how “we judge it in mere contemplation.”24 As Malcolm Budd has recently formulated the point—in an account of the aesthetic experience of nature that looks to Kant for several of its insights—an aesthetic response “involves a positive or negative reaction to the item not as satisfying a desire for the existence or non-­existence of some state of affairs in which the item figures, but considered ‘in itself ’ (in abstraction from any personal relation that might obtain between subject and object).”25 In experiencing an object aesthetically, we respond to it as though it were a “mere representation” that floats free from the web of any personal relations we might have to it; and by the same token, we respond with a pleasure that floats free of our ordinary passionate striving to attain or retain objects on which our welfare or well-­being depends. A pleasure that floats free: it is an image that recaptures a vision of pacific succession and courteous turn-­taking that only recently came before us. Yet on Kant’s terms, this image in fact stands for only a segment of the possibilities of aesthetic experience for which philosophical reflection must provide an account. For this pleasurable response most readily maps on to a type of aesthetic judgment we would express using the language of “beauty”: the kind of response we might have to a sunset or the warm spectacle of green rolling fields or to their artistic representations, to a person or a finely crafted vase. This response, however, finds its complement in a different form of aesthetic reaction which now openly registers as a form of wonder, and which forces us to reach past the irenic language of “floating” and toward the more violent language of “tearing”—a tearing away from interest that tears against the very grain of our natural being—to describe. These indeed are the terms we find starkly resumed in that darker strain of wonder—the experience of the sublime—which finds its preeminent philosophical expression in the writings of Kant and his philosophical successors. The proximate roots of this wonder both as a mode of experience and a reflective object, as we already saw (“DELIGHT”), lay in a movement of aesthetic and literary reflection stimulated from the eighteenth century onward by Longinus’s newly translated rhetorical

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treatise On the Sublime. This was a work in turn anchored in a larger background of ethical and philosophical reflection; and the special significance of this form of wonder, as we will see, is bound up both with the reach and richness of its historical roots, and with the richness and enduring appeal of the intellectual elements that shape it as a distinctive experience. A distinctive experience of wonder: and one whose distinctive relation to our interests, and to the notion of doing or activity we have been seeking to track, is coded in the very affective tone that constitutes it. For if aesthetic experience involves pleasure, the location of pleasure within the architecture of the sublime differs dramatically from its location in the experience of beauty. We earlier roll-­called it among wonder’s darker siblings; yet this wonder’s status as an aesthetic experience already signals that its affective texture requires to be more finely limned. Its darkness in fact constitutes this wonder’s affective overture or beginning, in which the note of pain or displeasure is held down as the dominant key; but this beginning cedes to a pleasure that arrives, not merely as a peaceful successor to the opening tone, but as a successor that actively transcends it, its tone all the more brilliant for having been won in the teeth of a preceding darkness. In doing so, what it transcends is something we just above called the viewpoint of “interest” or what we might call our nature as needy or desirous beings, or what Kant himself would have us think of as our perspective as embodied beings belonging to the domain of nature or the “sensible” world. It is this aspect of our nature that is immediately brought into collision by the typical objects of sublime experience, whose unifying feature is the “grandeur” that characterizes them, and which Kant divides into the “mathematically” and the “dynamically” sublime. In the mathematically sublime, this collision is provoked through a visual confrontation with objects distinguished by the grandeur or immensity of their magnitude, which suggests the notion of the infinite to us, like the starry sky or a vast mountain range.26 Faced with such vast objects, one’s imagination—which forms the “greatest sensible faculty”—thrusts upward in a struggle to encompass the object aesthetically as if it were a single whole, an effort that sees it sink back in frustration and reveals its utter “inadequacy.”27 It is a moment of pained defeat; the contemplator is thrown back subdued. A similar confrontation takes place in the dynamically sublime, this time occasioned by spectacles of nature’s great might or power. Let us see them before us:

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Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-­ destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river.28 Nature here appears to us in the grandeur of its power, a raw vision of might that significantly registers in part as a scene of disorder, in which the order and stability of the natural world as we usually know it stands disrupted. Confronted with nature at its most forceful—though nature at a sufficient remove to pose no real danger to our well-­being, enabling us to respond with an aesthetic rather than a visceral fear that would issue in practical actions of avoidance—the contemplator quails. It is the moment of pain, of darkness falling: our ability to put up physical resistance dwindles to nought in our eyes before this scene. Yet it is not the contemplator as such, we may now discriminate, that quails; it is that aspect of the contemplator that belongs to the domain of nature, whose interests are narrowly determined by his vulnerabilities as an embodied being dependent on nature’s power. In bringing us sharply against the vulnerabilities deriving from our identity as beings belonging to the sensible world of nature, the sublime in fact points us precisely to a realm, and a different derivation of our identity, that lie beyond that—namely, to the domain of the “nonnatural” or “supersensible,” and to our status as rational beings capable of promulgating the moral law and as members of a noumenal realm who are free to submit themselves to that law undetermined by the causal necessity that governs the natural world. In propelling us into that realm, the sublime triggers a powerful moment of joy that marks the transcendence of the domain of nature to a higher domain. For the striving to perceptually encompass the vast, in the mathematically sublime, might end in debacle; yet the air of defeat should clear once the meaning of our own striving dawns on us. If we strive to encompass the object as a whole, this betrays a possibility and indeed a demand—to intuit an object as a whole, to think the idea of the infinite as a whole—that do not derive from anything we perceive with our senses, and are in fact given to us by the faculty of our reason, that “faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”29 Our very striving to fulfill this demand thus not only points to our possession of this faculty, but also recapitulates the true relationship in which the

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sensible and supersensible, nature and reason, are ordered in our being— a relationship in which the former subjects itself, or ought to subject itself, to the latter’s dominion. These same elements are placed in even starker display in the experience of the dynamically sublime. For, faced with nature’s great power, we shrink back in pained awareness of our vulnerability to this power; yet in the very next moment we have discovered in ourselves “a capacity for resistance of quite another kind,” one that “gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-­powerfulness of nature.” The passage that follows is worth quoting at greater length: [T]he irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of it and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-­preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us, whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion. In this way, in our aesthetic judgment nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which we are, to be sure, subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their affirmation or abandonment. Thus nature is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to the point of presenting those cases in which the mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.30 The special richness of this passage lies in the way it presents to the gaze several of the most seminal aspects of the sublime’s anatomy in a series of seamless strokes. For on the one hand, it makes clear that the transition at stake in the sublime is a transition in terms of different ways of considering ourselves—“as natural beings” and as beings that do not fully answer to that description—and in doing so reveals that the experience of the sublime has an experience of self-­discovery at its core. The powerful emotions aroused by spectacles of grandeur, thus processed,

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ultimately point away from their initial visual objects and return the gaze to the subject that holds these objects in his gaze. Kant elsewhere makes the implication explicit when he states that it is never truly external objects that are sublime, but rather the ground for the sublime is “merely one in ourselves” and the object only “serves for the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind.”31 The terrified wonder provoked by the grandeur of external objects turns back to become a joyous wonder at the grandeur at the mind itself. The story of the sublime is that of a displacement of wonder: it is the mind that is EXTRAORDINARY or great. And the description of the human mind to which this wonder is more specifically directed, as Kant’s words make clear, is its capacity—one distinctly ethical in kind— to dismiss the lower goods to which our visceral needs as embodied beings initially draw us, and to disdain these for the higher imperatives of the moral law. This is a capacity that partly registers as an ability to revise and reverse our judgments of value, choosing to “regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial” and to regard our highest principles (and thus our own status as rational beings) as “great”—a reversal of judgment that enters the very fabric of our felt experience as we confront the spectacle of nature and our initial displeasure gives way to pleasured joy. Yet this, by the same stroke, brings more clearly into view the particular character of the affective element of joy in which this movement terminates, displacing the pain in which this movement finds its beginning. For what the notion of “disdain” just deployed makes plain, and the ubiquitous language of “superiority” and “dominion,” “submission” and “demeaning” in this passage makes doubly evident, is that the pain at stake, and the pleasure that succeeds it, are emotive responses that revolve around a dynamic of power or mastery closely bound up with one’s self-­esteem. The humbled sense of one’s vulnerability to nature that had caused one pain is replaced by a newfound sense of power over nature and a new conception of one’s dignity that provide the grounds for one’s triumphant joy. The ensuing pleasure thus bears the character of an exultation and emotive ascent which the very term “sublime”—das Erhabene, from erheben: to lift, to raise—should already have cued us to anticipate.32 The pain at the core of the wonder of the sublime thus cedes to pleasure through an act of mastery or conquest—of the demands of nature by the demands of reason, and of the lower needs deriving from our embodied condition by the higher imperatives deriving from our identity

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as rational beings, which is also a conquest of the judgments of value in which the former set of demands is expressed. It is an understanding that will evoke numerous echoes of our earlier discussion of wonder’s affective weave (“DELIGHT”), where a similar, positively valenced notion of conquest—though one neighboring on a more negatively valenced notion of mastery—had appeared as a recurrent element in our proposal for reading the relationship between pain and pleasure within this weave in ethical terms. And there will certainly be more to say shortly about the positive ethical dimensions of the wonder just outlined.33 It is a moment of exulting ascent that would be replayed among Kant’s followers, even by those who, like Schopenhauer—that critical acolyte of Kant well-­k nown to philosophers and nonphilosophers for his lavish sense of the tragic—would dismiss several of the constitutive elements of Kant’s specific understanding. For having cast aside Kant’s moralization of the sublime as a pious fiction and having rejected de fond the larger ethical viewpoint in which this was moored, it is the same drama, played out in a landscape of starry skies and crashing waves directly inherited from this one, that Schopenhauer would place on display in giving his own account of the experience.34 In this account, Schopenhauer would foreground even more sharply the element of struggle required for the downward movement of the sublime—the humbled contraction before the terrible vision—to be superseded by the upward movement of exulting ascent. For unlike the beautiful forms of nature, which positively “invite us to a pure contemplation of them,” spectacles of nature’s immensity and might have a “hostile relation to the human will in general,” and that is to say, to the interests and needs that derive from human beings’ embodied condition. Such spectacles are “terrible to the will” and demand that one “consciously turn away from it, forcibly tear oneself (losreißt) from his will and its relations” (WWR, 1:201) to be contemplated—a violent conquest that, insofar as one continues to confront the spectacle as an embodied being, can never be final, and must depend on a constant renewal of the “free exaltation” (WWR, 1:202) by which it is accomplished. A conquest; an act of tearing. If this act of tearing should stand out more sharply in Schopenhauer’s scheme, that is because of a distinctive metaphysics calculated to lengthen the distances between the different moments of the sublime—the movement downward, the upward leap—into an almost unbridgeable abyss. For the world in its entirety, on Schopenhauer’s view, is a manifestation of will, and so are we. Our bodies themselves can be seen as a “concretion of a thousand wants and

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needs” (WWR, 1:312); our very consciousness is a fruit of willing and ordinarily subjugated to the will’s peremptory biddings—a dim lamp that lights up our path as we pursue the self-­focused goals that our nature as blindly willing beings dictates. The eyes that our body gives us are eyes only for what our hand must next seize. The movement away from the interested vision of the world rooted in our body to disinterested aesthetic contemplation—a contemplation that offers us temporary reprieve from the bondage of desire, and in doing so connects us to our higher status as subjects of representation—thus demands an act of transcendence which, in the sublime, will have the arduousness of a saltation that uproots us from our very soil, registering as an ecstatic event that partakes of the miraculous. Confronted with nature at its grandest and most disordered—“the storm howls, the sea roars,” nature stands before us “turbulent and tempestuous”—one realizes with shock one’s vulnerability and dependence on nature as an embodied, desirous being: one is “helpless against powerful nature, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in face of stupendous forces” (WWR, 1:204–205). Or again: faced with the “heavens at night,” and impressed with a consciousness of “the immensity of the universe,” one feels oneself “reduced to nothing” (WWR, 1:205). It is the moment of contraction; yet as we hold our nerve before the sight, the tide turns, and the next moment brings an upward swell, with a self-­discovery no less important for arriving as an inarticulate intuition. For having conquered one’s will to calmly hold these terrible spectacles in one’s gaze, one grasps that one is not only the needy individuated phenomenon of the will, but one is also the supra-­individual subject of representation which, on the terms of Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism, creates the very phenomenal appearances that seem to place one’s existence under threat—the “eternal, serene subject of knowing” that is free from “all willing and all needs” (WWR, 1:205). The realization of this higher identity exalts one above the phenomenal world, and marks one’s transcendence of the will’s imperium. It is not the world that is great, but the conscious being that surveys it; the wonder has turned back to the subject; and it has come with a joy that carries the ebullience of a restored sense of mastery and self-­esteem. One is not “nothing,” but rather “everything”—for the entire world depends on our representation.35 Wonder as a spontaneous exclamation of value (“how EXTRAORDINARY!”); yet wonder as a more wilful acclamation of worth—a worth that here redounds to us as our own. The above sequence has

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already revealed why this acclamation might require more than an ordinary act of will to be attained. For this is a moment of aesthetic vision that is not only “without interest” but also “against it” and in “resistance to the interest of the senses,” and as such tears against our very natural grain.36 And while this experiential unfolding takes its beginning from a spontaneous reaction to that which meets our gaze—“We do not consciously choose whether to find an object sublime,” as James Kirwan points out, “but rather we experience a certainty—‘This is sublime!’” and to this extent the sublime is “something that happens to us”—the wondering perception in which it culminates rests on a moment of conquest that speaks directly to the notions of “doing” or “activity” we have been seeking to track.37 Wonder as a conquest, a doing: a holding of the nerve against what terrifies us, a holding out until the affective tide has had the time to turn. Standing unmoved as the wind howls and the sea roars will be an achievement; and so will be seeking out such spectacles unbidden. Yet here, we may lean closer to the notion of “doing” or “activity” at stake to consider what more could be said about its presence and role in the articulations of the sublime just surveyed. For the act of conquest in Kant’s specific account of the sublime— of the demands of nature by the demands of reason—is anchored in a larger moral horizon, which invites us to write it as a conquest ethical in kind. It is an act of conquest, to be sure, whose primary location would appear to be, not within aesthetic experience, but within the moral life, for which aesthetic experience can be said to “prepare us.”38 And one of the ways in which it prepares us is by giving us an experiential intimation of our capacity to be moral—allowing us, as Paul Guyer puts it, to experience “the feeling of our freedom to adhere to our fundamental moral principles no matter what threats, or for that matter blandishments, nature puts in our way”—thus fulfilling one of the conditions on which our ability to act morally depends, namely, that we “believe that we are in fact free to choose to do what [the moral law] requires of us.”39 Yet even if this experience refers us to a moral capacity that will ultimately be expressed in action within the moral life itself, the links between such moral action and the experience of the sublime would seem to be rather tighter. This point emerges in the reply Kant makes to a type of skepticism that will resonate with those of his modern readers to whom the sublime appears as a quaint period piece belonging to a specific cultural past, yet whose immediate mouthpiece in Kant’s context is the “sensible Savoyard peasant” who dismisses with contempt his more

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cultured contemporaries’ faddish quest for the thrill of high mountains. This dismissal falls on Kant’s ears as a doubt of his claim about the universality of aesthetic judgments, and in countering it, he insists on the one hand that the experience of the sublime depends on a development that is not only cognitive, but also, and more importantly, moral in kind. For “without the development of moral ideas, that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime will appear merely repellent to the unrefined person,” though the need for such a development should not be taken to entail that the sublime is “first generated by culture and so to speak introduced into society merely as a matter of convention; rather it has its foundation in human nature,” and more specifically “in the predisposition to the feeling for (practical) ideas, i.e., to that which is moral.”40 Yet this predisposition, another remark indicates, may need to be, not only possessed, but also adequately exercised. Responding to a prevailing earlier view of terrible natural phenomena as tokens of divine wrath, Kant states that such phenomena could awaken the idea of sublimity only in one who is “conscious of his upright, God-­pleasing disposition”—as against one who has offended God through his “contemptible disposition” in a way that makes him fearful (of wrath)—“insofar as he recognizes in himself a sublimity of disposition suitable to God’s will, and is thereby raised above the fear of such effects of nature, which he does not regard as outbursts of God’s wrath.”41 What this suggests is that one must be not merely the kind of being capable of disdaining nature for its higher moral vocation, but a being that has in fact disdained it in ways that constitute it as one’s actualized individual disposition and provide grounds for having this disposition ascribed to one—precisely, it would seem, through occurrent episodes of overcoming the sensible in favor of the supersensible, and natural goods in the service of moral duty, which the mathematically sublime more obliquely, and the dynamically sublime more directly, evoke and recapitulate. An element of doing—of moral doing—would thus appear to be ingrained in the genetic history of the here-­and-­now experience of the sublime, shadowing it as its precondition and determining our differential openness to it as specific individuals. Yet if we wished to locate that element more integrally within the texture of the here-­and-­now experience itself as against its historical antecedents, we could find a more promising—and for the purposes of our overall narrative skein, a more fruitful—insight by considering the transformations undergone by the seeing eye once the contemplator has held her nerve and stood her ground.

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For Kant, this is a transformation that registers as an act of denuding, or a turn away from concepts, particularly concepts of the purposes of objects (associated with the practical or interested stance), to what Malcolm Budd calls the phenomenologically “given.” To respond to the starry sky as sublime, we must not see it on the basis of “concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, taking the bright points with which we see the space above us to be filled as their suns, about which they move in their purposively appointed orbits,” but rather we “must take it, as we see it, merely as a broad, all-­embracing vault.” To respond to the ocean as sublime, we must not take its sight as we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge (which are not, however, contained in the immediate intuition), for example as a wide realm of water creatures, as the great storehouse of water for the evaporation which impregnates the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or as an element that separates parts of the world from one another but at the same time makes possible the greatest community among them, for this would yield merely teleological judgments; rather, one must consider the ocean merely as the poets do, in accordance with what its appearance shows, for instance, when it is considered in periods of calm, as a clear watery mirror bounded only by the heavens, but also when it is turbulent, an abyss threatening to devour everything, and yet still be able to find it sublime.42 To respond aesthetically to nature we need a transformed seeing in which we must peel away thinking—which organizes our vision in terms of concepts, and concepts related to ends—to get to seeing, through a movement that we might describe, paradoxically twice over, by saying that it involves a liberation that is also a confinement, and a confinement that is then again another liberation. For the seeing eye must be liberated by the concepts that enslave it by confining itself to what can sensu stricto be seen, a confinement to what can be seen that in turn places us in contact with those elements in our being that belong to what lies “beyond what can be seen” and partake of its liberty.43 And although the notion of denuding suggests itself less strongly in Schopenhauer’s account, the notion of disembedding that replaces it shares in the same ideal of transformed vision, one that would dislodge the object from the web of relations it bears to our self-­interest and decouple it from “concepts of reason” or “abstract thought” in order to meet it as an “image of

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perception” standing before us as in the clearest mirror (WWR, 1:178– 79). Our vision thus disencumbered, we may behold reality as pure as it can ever present itself to the seeing eye, and ultimately reach to the other side of phenomena where our true being is to be located. Purged of interest, threaded through the eye, and rising again on the other side of phenomena into the open skies of freedom. This is a “rising,” Kant’s vocabulary has suggested, that must be upheld by imperatives that structure the gaze at every stage: we “must” take the starry sky as we see it; we “must” consider the ocean merely as the poets do. Yet what the notion of phenomenological denuding or subtraction that organizes this view—like the central metaphor of a passive mirror-­like reflection that organizes Schopenhauer’s—might threaten to obscure is an element of activity that needs to be thought, less as a matter of removing or subtracting, than of adding or contributing. For indeed, as Budd points out, the notion of a pure phenomenological confrontation proposed by Kant is not entirely convincing, to the extent that our response to certain objects as sublime depends on a conceptual interpretation of the seen. If we respond to the starry sky as sublime, we are responding not to a purely phenomenological canvas made up of specks of light, but to an interpretation of these specks as “extraordinarily distant, massive light-­producing objects,” which goes beyond the “phenomenologically given.”44 It is this insight that is implicit, though it might need an extra impetus to be explicitly brought out, in Schopenhauer’s own account of the gaze as it turns itself to the star-­fi lled sky to return with a shudder of wonder. If we lose ourselves in contemplation (Betrachtung) of the infinite greatness of the universe in space and time, or meditate (nachsinnen) on the past millennia and on those to come; or if the heavens at night actually bring innumerable worlds before our eyes, and so impress on our consciousness the immensity of the universe, we feel ourselves reduced to nothing. (WWR, 1:205) —a reduction reversed in the next breath by the discovery that the source of this entire world lies in our very own head. For while Schopenhauer here might speak of a contemplation in which we “lose ourselves,” of innumerable worlds “brought to us” by the heavens as though such worlds—like the “infinite greatness of the universe”—constitute objects of an effortless seeing, it is evident that this is not entirely the understanding his examples invite. What we behold when we lift our eyes to

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the nighttime sky are not “innumerable worlds,” not a greatness that we could describe as “infinite” on the basis of what we see, and even less a greatness whose infinity is understood in temporal terms (“past millennia”). What we see, at most, are spots of light which require to be read in thicker terms, relying on a richer kind of activity, in order to move us to awe or wonder. It is an activity already signaled in Schopenhauer’s roomier notions of “contemplation” and “meditation” in this passage. And it is signaled even more clearly in the lines preceding it, where Schopenhauer had introduced the mathematically sublime (instanced by the starry sky) by referring us to our “imagining a mere magnitude in space and time” (WWR, 1:205), thus evoking the imaginative contribution presupposed by representations of the magnitude that arouses our emotive response.45 Standing before the nighttime sky, its grandeur and thus its sublimity would be inaccessible to us without a more reflective or imaginative engagement with the seen. It is an active contribution to the phenomenologically “given” that addresses itself directly to the notion of “activity” we have been pursuing, though this notion may certainly register within it with varying degrees of force, according varying degrees of emphasis to the here-­and-­now of this moment as against its genetic roots. Its genetic roots: for this moment of imaginative interpretation will partly form the product of longer histories of intellectual formation that educate the gaze and teach it to see something as something else—histories in which, as Schopenhauer’s own context makes clear, the interpretive narratives generated within scientific practices and in turn rooted in technological extensions of the seeing eye, will play a central role. When, leaning in 1811 into the telescope with which William Herschel made the discovery of Uranus in the eighteenth century, Byron would say: “I .  .  . saw that there were worlds,” he would be illustrating precisely the eye’s dependence on technological extension and scientific narrative, given the far-­reaching impact of Herschel’s discoveries on the scientific understanding of the vastness of the universe and their role in stimulating new imaginative projections about the plurality of worlds.46 These discoveries opened up, in the words of one scientific writer, to visions of “a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.” And it is far from incidental that such projections were in turn coupled, in Herschel’s time, to expressions of a resulting sense of human insignificance—“surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity of being, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean”— that directly evoke the opening mood of the sublime as we have seen it.47

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Such histories of visual education—anchored in active disciplines of seeing and in turn acquired through explicit forms of activity—condition one’s seeing eye with an immediacy that may carve open only a delicate space within the here and now in which a notion of “activity” could be located. Yet they form the backdrop of the richer here-­and-­now activity of “contemplating” and “meditating” to which Schopenhauer points, and the more active play of the imagination over the spatial and temporal expanse of what we see which provokes our passionate response. Wonder as Doing, as Philosophical Ascent, as Askesis

Wonder: a doing; an act of conquest—a willful conquest of one’s will to turn away; a conquest expressed in a redistribution of value and a transformation of the seeing eye; a transformation of seeing by an act of conceptual or imaginative contribution that reaches beyond what is sensu stricto seen. Yet to phrase the point in these terms is now to evoke more than an echo of a philosophical episode we encountered at that earlier moment of our inquiry in which the notion of seeing first came up for closer attention, where Pascal’s hortatory evocation of the two abysses—the infinite cosmos around us and the infinite cosmos within—had given us our leverage for distinguishing between an effortless seeing and an aided seeing that we glossed as a deliberate act. The contemplation of the starry sky as Schopenhauer describes it would correspond to the first of the movements executed within that meditative episode, outward to the infinite world—a movement Fisher had excluded from the domain of wonder on the grounds of the effort of the imagination it exacted. We have come a long way from this exclusion; yet Pascal’s interest for us, at this juncture, lies in the grip he offers us on a rather different and richer narrative skein. It is a skein whose threads have already come into partial view, and which, unraveled fully, promises not only to enrich the setting against which the wonder of the sublime can be grasped, but to thicken the notion of “doing” we have been seeking to track—as well as the ethical meaning with which we have already found it invested. It is a skein in which ethics and aesthetics find themselves tightly intertwined; and one that can be broached as a question about the origins of the sublime as an aesthetic sensibility. It is a historical skein that has been tangled by a certain degree of controversy as regards the role played by the 1674 translation of Longinus’s On the Sublime by Nicolas Boileau—a document whose significance

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certain historians of the sublime, notably Samuel Monk, emphasized and others, such as Marjorie Nicolson, queried. For Nicolson, it was not a case of the rhetorical sublime—the sublime as the “grand style” of the ancient rhetorical tradition, a phenomenon tied to writing and discourse and produced by rhetorical means—leading to the development of the natural sublime—the sublime as an aesthetic response to the grandeur of the natural world—such that the latter could be understood merely as a “degraded form of Longinianism” that had broken loose from the rhetorical framework. In her view, as we already briefly saw (“DELIGHT”), the emergence of the sublime was in fact conditioned by several important developments in the sciences, particular astronomy.48 Copernicus’s heliocentric theories had arrived; Galileo’s telescopic observations had succeeded them by way of confirmation; the old universe in its crystalline stability had begun to shatter, exploding at the seams to bring an inrush of new cosmic vistas, and to throw open the doors of the imagination to the prospect of infinite space and an infinity of worlds—a process that later scientists such as William Herschel would come to deepen and extend. It is in this broad context that Nicolson placed the intellectual activities of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and his circle, detailing the effects of the new science on their poetic and philosophical explorations. “Into the new universe of stars and suns and space,” writes Nicolson, More sent his ecstatic soul to rove and range and be filled with the “astonishment,” “amazement,” “rapture” that are reiterated strains in his poetry and prose whenever he approaches the theme of the vastness of the universe. Attempting to grasp the whole, imagination and spirit grow vast as they feed on vastness. This “roving and ranging” of More’s soul, Nicolson suggests, formed part of a new practice or topos, which she describes as a “cosmic voyage” and names as a product of the new science and as the beginning of the “aesthetics of the infinite” constitutive of the sublime. Pascal’s response to the cosmos newly discovered in its infinite grandeur ranged itself with this development, and in Nicolson’s view, it was not entirely representative in the tinge of terror—as against exulting rapture—with which it was dyed.49 It is not a historical skein into whose tangles we can be deeply drawn; but we must let ourselves be drawn in sufficiently deeply to remark that what Nicolson terms a new topos of the imagination—the

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“cosmic voyage” or flight pursued by More as he attempted to “grasp the whole”—is one whose pedigree could not be written exclusively in such terms, even if we acknowledge (as suggested above) the role played by scientific narratives in conditioning the field of one’s passionate responses. The alternative terms are ones to which Longinus himself makes an important gesture when he turns to consider the quality of mind that enters the creation of the sublime style. Longinus describes this quality of mind as “natural greatness”: for “sublimity is the echo of a noble mind” (megalophrosynes apechema)—or, in another translation: “an image reflected from the inward greatness of the soul.” Sublimity cannot be produced by an orator with “low or ignoble thoughts,” for those “whose thoughts and habits are trivial and servile all their lives cannot possibly produce anything admirable or worthy of eternity.” A yearning for greatness, Longinus later amplifies—a yearning reflected in our admiration for those in whom we see that quality expressed—is already present in us by nature, which implanted in our minds from the start an irresistible desire for anything which is great and, in relation to ourselves, supernatural. The universe therefore is not wide enough for the range of human speculation and intellect. Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings. If anyone wants to know what we were born for, let him look round at life and contemplate the splendour, grandeur and beauty in which it every­ where abounds. “Our thoughts travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings”; or, as another translation would more suggestively have it: human thought “passes the bounds of the material world and launches forth at pleasure into endless space.”50 To readers of ancient philosophical texts, these would be words that raise a heavy trail of resonance. And it is Pierre Hadot who has provided the clearest account of this resonance in the context of his broader reading of ancient philosophy, in discussing a philosophical topos which he proposed to designate in terms that will immediately remind us of a bridge we just crossed: “the view from above”; or “cosmic consciousness”; or more directly: “cosmic flight.” “In addition to their theoretical physics,” Hadot writes, many of the ancient schools—particularly the Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans—discovered “a practical physics, which was conceived of as an exercise in which the imagination speeds through the infinite vastnesses of the universe.”51

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With the eyes to see it, this exercise is one we find exemplified by numerous philosophers in different locations within their writings. Here is Seneca: “Place before your mind’s eye the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-­called human life with infinity” (Epistle, 99.10).52 Here is the Stoic emperor-­philosopher Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations are replete with illustrating examples: “Think of the whole of being, in which you participate to only a tiny degree; think of the whole of eternity, of which a brief, tiny portion has been assigned to you; think about fate, of which you are such an insignificant part” (5.24).53 And again, and more suggestively: You have the power to strip off many superfluities which trouble you and are wholly in your own judgement; and you will make a large room at once for yourself by embracing in your thought the whole Universe, grasping ever-­continuing Time and pondering the rapid change in the parts of each object, how brief the interval from birth to dissolution, and the time before birth a yawning gulf even as the period after dissolution equally boundless. (9.32) To embrace the universe and reach for the eternal: in this heady passage, as in the ones cited just before, we find in microform all the ingredients we need for anchoring this episode within the larger framework that gives it meaning. This meaning, as the above passages make clear, is linked to a notion of “thinking”—“think of the whole of being”— closely tied to a notion of “seeing”—“before your mind’s eye”—which Hadot, forging connections backward and forward, calls an act of the imagination.54 And this thoughtful seeing or thinking-­into-­seeing is in turn directly tied to a movement of “stripping”—whose connotations of willfulness bring out what was already present in calling imagination an act—and from there to “valuing” or more accurately “reevaluating.” A seeing that strips the appearances through thinking and reevaluates them: it is in such terms, following Hadot, that we should read the topos of cosmic flight as many of the ancient philosophers understood it, anchoring it in a series of contexts that point forward to its aims, and backward to its origins. Pointing forward: to an understanding of philosophy as primarily governed by a therapeutic aim, that of delivering us from the thrall of the passions, which form the principal cause of our suffering—an aim shared, not only by Stoic philosophers whose distrust of the passions is perhaps the best-­k nown case, but equally by other

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schools, including the Epicureans. Pointing backward: certainly at least to Plato, who, in the Republic, formulated for the first time a conception that would reverberate in later therapeutics of the passions and restatements of the philosopher’s loftiest ideal. In a passage that evokes more than a faint echo of one we heard moments ago from Longinus in discussing the quality of mind productive of the sublime style, Plato writes (Socrates says), addressing the distinction between a philosophical and a nonphilosophical nature: the philosophical soul must not be at all slavish . . . for pettiness is altogether incompatible with a soul that is always reaching out to grasp everything both divine and human as a whole.  .  .  . And will a thinker high-­minded enough [the word here is megaloprepeia] to study all time and all being consider human life to be something important? . . . will he consider death to be a terrible thing? . . . it seems a cowardly and slavish nature will take no part in true philosophy. (486a)55 It is an image of the philosopher that finds its counterpart in the Theaetetus in a vivid description of the soul-­in-­flight that forms one of Plato’s best-­k nown literary bequests. The philosopher, Socrates remarks there, has little concern for the worldly affairs of the city, to which he is tied solely by his body; his mind, by contrast, “is borne in all directions, as Pindar says, ‘both below the earth’, and measuring the surface of the earth, and ‘above the sky’, studying the stars, and investigating the universal nature of every thing that is, each in its entirety, never lowering itself to anything close at hand” (173e–174a).56 The quality of mind described by Longinus—free from servility and capable of “launching forth into endless space”—is here revealed to coincide with the philosophical disposition par excellence. This is a disposition that Hadot glosses, significantly for our narrative woof, using the language of “rising” and “ascent”: implicit in the above passage of the Republic is a notion of the “elevation of thought, which rises from individual, passionate subjectivity to the universal perspective.”57 It is this intellectual rise—from the passion-­ridden perspective of the individual to the universal perspective of the whole—that is enacted in the imaginative rise over the world. This rise brings with it a change of perspective that is at the same time a change in valuation, for what was seen from up close is transfigured seen from above, and can be beheld with a newfound contempt. Marcus: “If you could be suddenly caught up into the air and could look down upon human life and see all its variety you

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would disdain it” (Meditations, 12.24). The change of perspective thus achieved—a shift from the individual to the universal that Hadot also describes as a shift from a “‘human’ vision of reality, in which our values depend on our passions, to a ‘natural’ vision of things, which replaces each event within the perspective of universal nature”—becomes definitive of the philosophical vantage point.58 And while the “view from above” may provide us with the most scintillating instance of this transformation, it aligns itself with a broader range of examples, including several that may be more familiar to readers of Stoic writings, in which ordinary objects are redescribed in terms that (let us reach for a familiar word) “estrange” them59 in order to disengage them from the values we customarily attach to them, thereby loosening our attachment to them. It is this disengaged or estranging vantage point we find in a well-­k nown passage from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations: Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falerian wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb’s fleece dipped in a shell-­fish’s blood; and in matters of sexual intercourse, that it is attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of mere mucus. (6.13) By methods like these, one seeks to arrive at the “objective representation” of objects (phantasia kataleptike), which involves stripping away the subjective judgments of value that normally adhere to them. Hadot calls this transformation of vision a “conversion”—a “metamorphosis of our inner self.” And it is this aspect of ancient philosophical practice—its concern with the production of a new mode of seeing that is also a new mode of being—that enters Hadot’s decision to call the view from above, and the larger gamut of techniques with which it is ranged, “spiritual” exercises. We will return to this notion of “exercise” more directly in a moment. But here, and moving closer to the thread of our story, what is important to observe is that this transformation of seeing involves a transformation of valuing that to many readers has long been familiar under a narrower name—as part of an ideal we more often call “ethical,” associated, not only with Plato, but indeed more closely with Aristotle as its most articulate mouthpiece: the ideal of the great-­souled man or

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megalopsychos. For it is this ideal that we find explicitly linked (through the vocabulary of megaloprepeia) with the philosophical capacity to rise to a universal perspective in the passage of the Republic we just considered, and thereby with the activity of philosophical contemplation more broadly.60 The great-­souled man as we meet him in the portrait drawn up by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is a picture of otherworldly or supra-­worldly hauteur: a man who is only concerned with honor, and even then not excessively, and who is “disposed in a measured way toward wealth and political power as well as all good and bad fortune,” and who is “neither overjoyed by good fortune nor deeply grieved by bad fortune” (1124a10–20); who like the man of courage, is not afraid to lavish his life for a worthy cause; like the generous man, prefers to give rather than to receive; who is not moved by need and utility and is indeed slow to be moved, displaying the measured gravitas of the self-­sufficient, to whom few things are great.61 A man above the world. This picture of the great-­souled man—a picture we may now read back into the passage of Longinus, noticing his telltale terms, particularly megalophrosyne—would reappear distinctly in later philosophical ideals, including that of the Stoic sage possessed of the supra-­worldly tranquility of one who has conquered the egoistic vantage point of the passions and aligned himself with the objective (“natural,” “physical,” “value-­free”) vantage point of universal reason, wherefrom he can look down upon the human scene with disdain. Faced with this human scene, the familiar Stoic motto nil admirari, echoing the Nicomachean Ethics— the great-­souled man is “not given to wonder, since nothing is great to him” (1125a1–5)—reminds us to wonder at nothing and to steady ourselves in the knowledge that “everything is always the same under the sun.” Yet this disavowal of wonder—this programmatic contempt for the ordinary human world and the passionate attachments and judgments of value that shape it—finds its counterpart, it must be said, in a different avowal of wonder which is already implicit in Aristotle’s account. For greatness of soul belongs to the person “who deems himself worthy of great things and is worthy of them” (1123b1–5)—a sense of self-­worth that is crucially specified in ethical terms, as a possession of “what is great in each virtue” (1123b25–30). The great-­souled man’s wonderless regard for external goods—even that greatest of external goods, honor—is thus the counterpart of a wondering regard for the internal goods of virtue that are found in his own soul. It is not the world that is great or EXTRAORDINARY; what is great is the human soul.62 Or rather—and moving toward the sharper Stoic inflection of

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this thought, which would carve the external and the internal more steeply apart than Aristotle himself had countenanced—what is great, and the true object of wonder, is that higher element of our humanity that makes the disdain of external goods and the aspiration to virtue possible, and enables us to transcend the world and ascend to the higher cosmic perspective of nature or reason; and that is the element of our humanity that shares in the divine. For, “How closely in accord with nature it is”—as Seneca writes, resuming the topos of the soul-­in-­fl ight and in doing so laying this displacement of grandeur open to view—“to let one’s mind reach out into the boundless universe! The human soul is a great and noble thing; it permits of no limits except those which can be shared even by the gods” (Epistle, 102.21). Having ascended to this higher perspective, we bask in the domain of the free; though this, here, is ultimately a freedom to embrace self-­limitation and bow to universal necessity, aspiring to the grandeur of a moral virtue that reflects our consanguinity to the gods. The terms may have shifted, and the names conferred as titles upon the lower and the higher aspects of our being—upon what is transcended and what does the transcending—may have changed. “Nature or reason”—yet “nature versus reason,” we had earlier said. Despite such changes of diction, it will not be difficult to recognize in these terms the shadow of a figure we only recently left behind, and whom we encountered towering above the appearances in an act of freedom that provoked a similar frisson of freedom and a similar thrill of grandeur, displaced from the world to the subject. Place what sign you will over the term “nature,” the fundamental opposition survives with little change: between a domain of slavery to a vantage point described as egoistic, individual, subjective, passionate, physical, and a domain of freedom. The great-­ souled man is a hero we meet again in the wonder of the sublime as Kant specifically parses it. For Kant, the understanding of this ascent as a moment within the moral life, and of the domain of freedom as also the domain of a higher necessity that is moral, unites him with a longer tradition which waters the roots of his thinking. The act of conquest that figures at the heart of Kant’s construction of the sublime—a conquest of the domain of nature by the demands of reason, and of one set of value judgments by another—is one that ancient philosophers might have characterized more thickly as an expression of greatness of soul. And to the extent that this conquest also stands to be narrated in phenomenological terms—as a conquest of displeasure by pleasure—here we have the material for yet another ethical telling of wonder’s history and the

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relationship of pleasure and pain within its weave, and one which, joined to our earlier discussion of Aquinas and Hume (“DELIGHT”), reveals greatness of soul as a recurring protagonist in wonder’s phenomenological transformations at several moments of its history. And if, indeed, we do not write the ancient philosophical ascent too narrowly, and we read the attainment of the universal perspective as a moment, not only in the moral life, but in the intellectual life more broadly, following Plato’s early lead—connecting the practical wisdom of morality to the theoretical wisdom that forms its perfection, and the practical physics to the theoretical physics that forms its counterpart— then we could also relate it to other forms of the later sublime that do not share with Kant his moral bent. For when Lucretius, in a well-­k nown passage of De Rerum Natura (III:14–30), speaks of the “godlike pleasure and . . . thrill of awe” (divina voluptas . . . atque horror) produced by the contemplative comprehension of the world, in words that echo the tense mixture of joy and horror later writers would associate with the sublime, the amazement he voices—that “nature is made so clear and manifest, laid bare to sight on every side”—points to a wonder provoked by the human capacity for a form of transcendence that coincides with the very act of contemplation and with the power of reason to understand the world.63 It is a power that tells us much about ourselves, and about the divine element of our nature. And it is this view of natural inquiry, as we saw earlier (“DELIGHT”)—as an activity that offers the mind a “proof of its own divinity” and a “delight in the divine” which it enjoys “not as someone else’s possession but as its own” (Seneca, Natural Questions, 1.1.12)—that underpins the pleasure and intrinsic value such inquiry carries, and that indeed illuminates the exulting character of this pleasure. The pleasured wonder we experience in contemplating phenomena theoretically, thus, is closely linked to the pleasured wonder attracted by the aspect of our own nature revealed in this process. This reading would reveal the affinities, not only with Kant’s sublime construed in the broader terms suggested by the editor of his Critique of the Power of Judgment—as implicating a “deep feeling of satisfaction at the power of our own reason to create moral order in the world”64 —but also, lifting our finger from “moral” and still holding the key of “order” down, with the moment of the sublime as Schopenhauer understood it. For despite the tensions that adhere to Schopenhauer’s philosophical vision—above all, that tense blend of confidence and despair that has often plagued his philosophy, in its flamboyant claim to have discovered a secret epistemic passageway into the thing-­in-­itself, unknowable by

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definition—and despite Schopenhauer’s replacement of reason with an intuition of experience as the seat of epistemic privilege, the triumphal delight that gives his philosophy the texture of the sublime reflects the conviction that the world has been fathomed and understood in its basic nature, and if only through this comprehension, overcome.65 A moment of overcoming, then, that we can recognize in its different forms. The transformation of vision pursued in the ancient schools, particularly the Stoics, from a “human” to a “physical” vision of reality, is one that might differ in several respects from the kind of transformation discussed as an aesthetic achievement by these philosophers of the sublime—certainly, and to avert merely the most obvious anachronism, in not being explicitly conceived as a moment in aesthetics.66 Yet we may nevertheless recognize in the effort to denude objects from the value-­ laden seeing of our passionate subjectivity more than an echo of Kant’s suggestion that aesthetic experience requires us to strip away thinking in order to get to seeing, and to peel away the concepts of ends that organize our perception to get down to what is immediately seen; as we may recognize, mutatis mutandis, the elements of Schopenhauer’s resumption of this visionary proposal. Similarly, and tuning ourselves back into our story’s flow, it will not be difficult to recognize in these later philosophers the echo of that earlier act of the imagination by which the higher aspect of our being (however the conception of its precise identity might have shifted) roves across the spectacle of the infinite world, triggering a sense of pained vulnerability that only a moment later becomes the sensation of one’s own sublimity. It is an act of imagination that we glossed most directly above, taking our cue from Schopenhauer, in connection with the emotive response to the mathematically sublime, which finds its paradigmatic exemplar in the nighttime sky with its intimations of infinity. Yet the same act is also replayed diffusely within the narrative of Schopenhauer’s philosophical works themselves, in which visionary spectacles of the infinite world—of the world as a sum of “numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space” (WWR, 2:3), as a vista of “endless space and time” (WWR, 1:311) into which individuals are projected—frame the unfolding of inquiry at several junctures, the seeing eye often explicitly exhorted to summon them in pursuit of philosophical insight. (“Let us picture to ourselves the alternation of birth and death as infinitely rapid vibrations,” Schopenhauer invites us in calling for a sounder understanding of our nature and thus the nature of death, “let us cast our glance at the entire scale of beings”).67

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Turning back to the work that gave us our immediate leverage, Hadot himself expressly suggests that we read the ancient exercise of “cosmic flight” or “imaginative” physics as the topos resumed in Pascal’s two infinities, to which Schopenhauer’s remarks on the starry sky had recalled us.68 To place Pascal’s remarks before us again: [L]et him turn his gaze away from the lowly objects around him; let him behold the dazzling light set like an eternal lamp to light up the universe, let him see the earth as a mere speck compared to the vast orbit described by this star, and let him marvel at finding this vast orbit itself to be no more than the tiniest point compared to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament. But if our eyes stop there, let our imagination proceed further; it will grow weary of conceiving things before nature tires of producing them . . . Nature is an infinite sphere . . . Many philosophical transformations later, many scientific developments later—developments that made the “view from above” one that need no longer be merely imagined, but that could also be actually observed through the newly available instruments of science—it would nevertheless be hard not to read in Pascal’s cosmic voyage the topos of a flight that the ancient philosophers had attempted long before him.69 And having joined the ends of our thinking to their beginnings in this manner, it will now be easier to return to a point we had left some way behind, yet which has remained present within our inquiry as its concealed vertebrae. An act of the imagination by which thinking is put into seeing and the evaluative significance of objects transformed: an act; an act which Hadot called an “exercise,” linking it to Christian spiritual exercises like those of Ignatius of Loyola, which he reads as but a continuation of the Greco-­Roman tradition, and connects to the Greek Christian notion of askesis. Philosophy as a spiritual exercise: to many of Hadot’s readers, it is this conception of philosophy—not as a body of theoretical teachings to be taught or reproduced, but rather as a practice and way of life—that it has been his greatest achievement to foreground. For us, this is a cue to return to the notion of “practice” and its root of “doing” that has been tracing out the spine of our thinking. For the cosmic flight, on these terms, turns out to be a “doing” in two related senses: in being an act undertaken in the here and now of the present with all the willfulness of an occurrent action; and in being an iterated act pursued within the context, and with all the willfulness, of a practice

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that we may call moral or (with Hadot) spiritual in kind, which incorporates a clear understanding of its own ends, a disciplined approach to the mastery of its techniques, and a tradition that guides it. As Hadot shows, there was a larger collection of exercises and techniques developed by the ancient schools to promote their transformative aims, which included the memorization and repetition of maxims (repeating them in the morning, examining oneself at night), the preemptive rehearsal of arguments capable of countering the movement of the passions, and the anticipatory representation of possible future evils and the rehearsal of their character as events that do not depend on us and are thus not to be taken as evils.70 It is with this broader gamut of exercises, and sharing both in their psychagogic aims and in their temporal character, that the cosmic flight—an imagined physical ascent relating to the ideal of intellectual ascent as its analogue and as a technique for producing it—would need to be ranged. “Place before your mind’s eye the spread of time,” “think of the whole of being,” “embrace the universe in your thoughts.” Pascal: “Let us turn our gaze,” “let us see.” Schopenhauer: “Let us picture to ourselves the alternation of birth and death as infinitely rapid vibrations,” “let us cast our glance at the entire scale of beings”—imperatives to the imagination to be acted out in the here and now against an understanding of the ends such a disciplined doing is designed to serve. And should one wish to gain a closer view of the act or performance involved, by raising a question (“How do I do that?”) that would simultaneously reinvoke one of the earlier stopping places of our inquiry by echoing its rallying question: “How do I (and how another) know that I have done that? On what criteria?”—one might say: I see the earth from above: I read Aurelius. I see the earth as an infinitesimal point dwarfed by the cosmos: I absorb the opening of the second volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, I dwell on Pascal’s “two abysses.” I imagine the infinite greatness of the universe in space and time: I write out experiments of the imagination like the ones I have learned from the tradition of these philosophical practices; I speak about them and pass them on in the context of such practices. I embrace the universe in my thoughts: I strive to embrace it. I imagine: I strive. (And should one still wish to ask about the criteria that establish whether I have imagined, or striven to imagine, one may want to look at how I live my life afterward and at the sense of what truly matters one sees reflected in what I say and do, keeping in mind that there are few wise men and that most of us are always only practicing, and never fully succeed.)

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Having begun by seeking a notion of doing, here it seems we have met its strongest exemplar. Doing: a struggle against the natural grain of our being. Doing: an askesis—a conquest to be repeated and a conversion “always to be reconquered.” 71 Wonder: a spiritual practice. And if we can speak of a practice of wonder specifically even though the transformation of one’s vision from a “human” to an “objective” or “natural” vision is attended, in both the ancient and modern versions of this moment, not so much by a renewed wonder at the external world—taken at least as an object of practical valuation as against theoretical understanding—as by a disenchantment bearing the character of contempt, it is because this transcending act of the imagination, turning outward to span the world, then turns inward to provoke a wonder that makes the transcending mind its object. In doing so, it rehearses the status of wonder as a judgment of value—a pronouncement on what is great or EXTRAORDINARY—that stands to be willfully conquered or PRODUCED rather than spontaneously exclaimed, redistributing the evaluative saliences that organize our vision, and returning our gaze to what lies nearest so that it can be transformed by a newly wondering regard. It is true that for some of the later philosophical inheritors of the tradition in which the philosopher soared into the heavens to bring the starry sky in all its infinite expanse into his scope, it would not seem entirely correct (or would require argument) to apply the thicker notion of doing just outlined. Yet if the above way of characterizing this thicker practice of the imagination is accepted—I see: I read; I practice by exposing myself to the possibilities of particular narratives, by repeatedly making myself the kind of reader they invite me to be, finding in them the means to nurture a wonder for which they themselves often first reveal to me that I possess the will—then the distance between “thicker” and “thinner” may after all be a small one to cross: as strong, or as brittle, as the will to wonder they presuppose. An unwilled wonder that surprises; a wonder that may be the object of will—the richer grammar of wonder we have been pursuing has slowly stepped into view before us joint by joint. WONDER: an emotion unlike others, yet one that as speakers of the language of wonder we can claim to know. Wonder’s DELIGHT, yet also: its terror. Wonder’s SUDDENness—yet also: its need of a provocation that would PRODUCE it, making the ordinary leap to the foreground to become an EXPERIENCE, and dislodging our judgments of value so that what

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is truly EXTRAORDINARY or great can be thrust into view. A wonder that has to be quested, and often gained by a leap that registers as a willful act or intensified praxis charged with prevailing over our natural will. The time is ripe for reaching more deeply into the interstices just marked, and for mining a question with which our ground has long been rumbling, to ask more openly: Why is wonder something we might look for and desire, sufficiently to make us seek out its OBJECTS and make it the OBJECT of a quest, even where this demands nothing less than a conquest of self?

OBJECT: Why Wonder?

Wonder as Stimulus: The Ethics of Inquiry

It is a question—“Why (wonder)?”—that shadowed our discussion persistently as it tracked the “What (is wonder)?” and “How (wonder)?” that formed its more immediate topics of interrogation. Turning back to the tracks we have covered, it will not be difficult to call this question out of the shadows and to elicit certain ways of responding that were already held out in promissory forms in the foregoing and that can now be fleshed out more fully. Yet to do so, it will help to first take a step back to situate this question—Why wonder?—in a larger canvas, setting it against a question we might ask of the emotions more broadly, and against a series of responses that offer a sharper framework for organizing our approach. For, asked about the value of particular emotions, we might first think of pointing to what we earlier called their “felt experience” or “hedonic tone”—the phenomenological quality of pleasure or pain that provides at least an initial way of distinguishing between the value or disvalue we attach to different emotions, referring us to the contrast between the pleasurable “feel” of passionate reciprocated love, of expansive joy or the exhilarated thrill of adventure, and the suffering feel of virulent hatred or jealousy, which plough up the mind with a distress that we could only wish to lead to the quickest elimination. Throughout philosophical history, we may note, it is the prevailing association of the passions with suffering that has been at the heart of more critical attitudes toward the passions, linking the question “Why?” with a more negative “Why not?” asked, not merely of individual emotions, but of the emotions as a whole. 168

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Yet the felt experience of the emotions, as we saw earlier (“WONDER”), is in turn closely bound to an aspect of emotions that we described as their ability to “tell us something about the world” or to incorporate judgment—not only judgments of fact, but even more importantly, judgments of value, allowing us to link the delighting texture of joy or love to the value we attach to its objects and the suffering texture of jealousy or hatred to their disvalue.1 It is a cognitive character that opens up the passions to a type of rational assessment we may call “backward-­ looking,” which addresses itself on the one hand to the judgments of fact that ground our emotional response—the kind of criticism we might direct to the indignant outburst that is based on a misunderstanding of another’s motivations, or to the jealousy aroused by the friendly relations of a partner whose fidelity no evidence has cast in doubt—and on the other to the judgments of value they reflect, exposing our hatred or anger, our love or joy, to a critical question as to whether the objects that provoke our passions fully justify or “merit” this response. At the same time, the evaluative vision the emotions impart to us—the evaluative aspects of the world they lead us to attend to—is what often accounts for the considered positive value we assign to them, and what drives us to find ways of consecrating them as a central element in our moral lives. Why value love? Why value compassion? It is the eyes they give us that make us prize them and seek them out more permanently as stable habits of seeing. This way of approaching the value of the emotions, it is clear, cannot be isolated from another approach that we may call “forward-­looking” in kind. For often we both question emotions critically, and value them more positively, against an understanding not only of their rational fittingness to the objects they respond to, but of their consequences, or of what they lead us to do. Without the evaluative eyes and pounding heart of fear that makes us stay our ground or flee, our lives would be a helpless prey to danger. Without the goad of anger or indignation, we would fail to rally to what is valuable enough to demand vigorous defense; and even despair finds its utility in its ability to drive us to far-­reaching transformations we would not have otherwise found the courage to carry out. More positively still: if love has been prized within our ethical and spiritual traditions and we have striven to consecrate it as a stable habit of feeling and seeing in our moral lives, if compassion has been urged as an impulse to be nurtured, it is not only because of the eyes they give us, but because of the way they attune us to others and make us tend to their well-­being, and in doing so often enhance our own (in turn pointing to

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a richer conception of our moral life than the notion of “seeing” alone betrays). This, of course, is compatible with a more critical view of the effects of the passions—of the ability of fear to cripple us, especially if dangers are always in attendance, or of anger to outrun its utility if it habitually directs itself to things we cannot influence. And even compassion, when it finds no means of easing another’s suffering, can leave us with a chronic embitterment that can be damaging to our lives. The notions of “fittingness” or “merit” or of “consequences” and “utility” deployed above already indicate that questions about the importance of the emotions inescapably throw us on to larger evaluative horizons and call into play a host of deeper ethical and spiritual ideals. As the work of some of the ancient philosophers suggests, in fact, both our positive appreciation of the value of the passions, as also our more critical concern to appraise and reform them, must ultimately be located within the bedrock of a far-­reaching understanding of the good life and the excellences that structure it. Reaching for a language foregrounded by Aristotle and reprised by recent revivers of his legacy, what we only moments ago called stable “habits of feeling” or “habits of seeing” could be redescribed as “excellences” constitutive of our character, which is expressed not only in our actions and judgments but also in our emotional responses. States of character, in one phrasing, can be seen as “ways of standing well or badly toward the emotions.”2 And the condition of our character—the sum of stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that shape the way we respond to the world—is tightly bound up with the quality of the life we lead. This programmatic framework, even swiftly mustered, now makes it easier to pull our own question about wonder into focus, and to turn back to the earlier stages of our narrative to sift out the patterns of justification entering the evaluative physiognomy of wonder as we have traced it out. It is a physiognomy, it must be said, that had at first sight seemed calculated to discourage any demand that might be parsed in such rational terms (“Why wonder?”). For if the justification of the passions is most significantly sought in the judgments of value they incorporate or the utility of the actions they provoke, wonder’s elusive profile in this regard—its thin cognitive content; its deficient action-­patterns; its obscure biological utility (“WONDER”)—had made it stand out among the passions as a taxonomic anomaly; and transposed to this context, would seem to portend an uncertain grip on its evaluative significance. We have made sufficient progress, however, to be able to go beyond the apophatic view of wonder from which we began and its prima facie

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evaluative entailments. For: “wonder’s delight”—the pleasurable phenomenology of wonder as a felt experience became an axis point for our account from an early moment of our narrative. This pleasurable tone, as we saw, has not formed its exclusive appanage across its history; yet it has formed a running thread strongly implicated in its status as an aesthetic experience throughout this history, and now firmly coded in our own. Our eyes rove and wander, our face almost expanding to maximize its contact with the seen. Wonder absorbs our gaze; wonder roots us to the spot and sometimes makes our knees buckle (Frijda)—a posture of passive and self-­forgetful abandonment that, as was suggested earlier (“DELIGHT”), must be seen as a constitutive element of wonder’s charm. This is a charm that would lend wonder the intrinsic value and evaluative finality we ascribe to all experiences in which we take pleasure, and which we seek out for their own sake. And yet one of the hallmarks of wonder, as we have seen, is that its experience often invites us, not to rest in it, but to push beyond it, our very visual absorption in the seen—as Philip Fisher has suggested in his work—drawing us on to more active efforts to explore what we see and understand it more deeply. And it is indeed this aspect of wonder—its instrumental status as a stimulus of that thinnest of actions we call inquiry or contemplation—with which our conception of wonder’s value has frequently been most intimately bound. It is our spontaneous wondering responses to what strikes us as extraordinary, as children but also as adults, that mark out the stress fractures of our understanding, and call attention to what challenges our cognitive structures in ways that prompt us to enlarge and enrich them. And it is also, we may add, our response to what is extraordinary, not merely in things, but more specifically in persons, that makes it possible for us to enter the range of developed practices in which such extensions of our understanding may be sought more systematically—and in which our natural wonder may then stand to be educated in a host of other ways, as detailed in our earlier discussion (“SUDDEN”). Our admiration for those who embody certain excellences—the archetypal awed response of children to adult masteries: “Oh, how wonderful!” or “Oh, how clever!” or “How did you do it?”—is what partly provides the impetus for mimesis of such masteries and allows us to move into a cultural life shaped by their ideals, directing our attention to what is “greater than ourselves” and what we wish to embody.3 Yet within the context of inquiry, the understanding of wonder’s value as a stimulus has been one in which the question “Why wonder?”

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has been doggedly haunted by its negative counterpart—by a “Why not?” that points not only to the reasons that make for its value, but also to the reasons that call for a more critical appraisal of its mode of operation. It is a “Why not?” that we already came into contact with when considering the ethical terms in which wonder’s phenomenology can be recounted (“DELIGHT”). Having opened that ethical space, we can here return to it more decisively to locate the ingredients for a broader evaluative framework in which wonder’s value within inquiry demands to be articulated. For throughout intellectual history, as noted at the opening of our discussion (“WONDER”), the passions have often been approached with a certain reflective distrust or suspicion, their ability to strike and overpower—to hold us in thrall and cloud our judgment—setting them up as antagonists to reason and as objects to be controlled or resisted, queried or recalibrated, even by those who repudiate sharp divisions between passion and reason and acknowledge the significance of the passions in the ethical and intellectual life. The special significance attracted by wonder as a passion of the intellectual life has seemed to promise it a different kind of treatment; yet wonder, too, has not proved wholly immune to the critical spirit with which the passions have been confronted. And this spirit has often been tied to the recognition of a more complex phenomenology than the monolithic response of pleasure outlined above—a composite phenomenology of pleasure and pain well attested in wonder’s historical past, and that wonder’s linguistic present may have all but eclipsed, without, however, thereby eclipsing the space for ethical response it traced out. It is a critical spirit—an attention to wonder’s possibilities of finding or missing a mark, its need for judicious negotiation—that we heard expressed in several forms earlier (“DELIGHT”). We heard it in Seneca’s ambiguous suggestion that extraordinary events may provoke us to an inquiry carried by wondering fear or to an inquiry carried by pleasured wonder, which we read as the suggestion that our self-­concerned fear may first need to be conquered before we can dwell on the intrinsic magnificence of natural objects for their own sake. We heard it in Aquinas’s peculiarly tense view of wonder’s connection to pleasure (“wonder is a cause of pleasure”) yet also fear (“wonder is a species of fear”), which we unified by reading pleasured wonder as an ethical achievement—an achievement in which the fear of the task of inquiry and the despair of realizing the good of understanding are conquered by a hopeful zeal that overcomes what moves us away from inquiry so that what moves

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us toward prevails. We heard it again—this time more openly expressed as a critical suspicion, though also less openly located against wonder’s complex phenomenology—in Descartes, who linked it to wonder’s pleasurable character and the conflicting invitations it issues: to passively “rest in it” but also to actively “push beyond it,” as we put it moments ago, a double possibility that may sometimes leave us “frozen” or “immobilized” before the seen and prevent the process of inquiry from getting off the ground. To rest or to push beyond: a tension between possible responses that we read as a space for ethical negotiation attracting Aristotelian types of distinctions between occasions when wonder has been “too little” or “too much.” Conquering fear, conquering despair, conquering an excess of pleasure: yet there is another critical preoccupation with wonder’s inbuilt dangers that we called into even sharper view earlier—a preoccupation, indeed, that problematized the notion of conquest or (in its more recognizable idiom) “mastery” itself, and did so by twinning it to a more specific diagnosis of the ethical danger that has haunted wonder as a persistent revenant throughout its history, and that continues to spook its present. In Rubenstein’s formulation of this critical concern, it was one that, crucially, brought up wonder’s very instrumental or forward-­looking status for question, forcing us to interrogate whether wonder could be approached in merely instrumental terms—as a mere bridge that we may burn behind us in a fast-­paced forward-­moving march toward epistemic closure. This question lay at the heart of Rubenstein’s typology, which contrasted Aristotle’s wonder with Plato’s, and wrote the one as a wonder that seeks its own dissolution (a wonder that swiftly consumes itself in its instrumental role) and a wonder that avoids it as a temptation (a wonder that dwells); and again: as a wonder that seeks the restoration of pleasured mastery through explanation, and a wonder that endures the vertigo of epistemic vulnerability as the solid ground shakes under its feet. It was a typology, we said, that we might need to take as a heuristic guide to wonder’s history rather than an iron grid, allowing for the complex grain of the historical views of wonder we considered. And for our purposes, this typology might most fruitfully be seen as broaching an ethical question regarding the way the provocations of wonder ought to be handled—a question that is still alive to us even if our linguistic habits have modified the terms we settle on our passionate responses, and that would reveal the passions of inquiry to be sometimes sustained, not because of their phenomenological quality, but in spite of it; just as

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it would reveal wonder’s passivity to be not self-­forgetful abandonment but self-­conscious achievement. For if wonder has often been tied to a confrontation with the stress fractures of our understanding, this confrontation potentially opens out to a paining uncertainty that for many of us—if not as children, then certainly as adults—betrays the visceral links binding our cognitive order and our intellectual lives more broadly to the needs of the self, and to the ethical dangers that attend these. The negotiation of wonder as a negotiation of the needs of the self; the recalibration of wonder as an ethical recalibration. It is a psychological and ethical print that Rubenstein’s account had thus prepared us to find here, allowing us to hear the “wound” in the “wonder” and to connect it to that wound sustained by our self-­assured understanding, which “embarrasses” our thoughts in the multilayered sense Adam Smith had exemplified. For our pained response to the “embarrassment” or limitation of our thoughts proves deeply revealing about the nature of our investment in the powers of our understanding, and particularly our powers to explain. Yet there were also other elements in our preceding discussion that should have primed us to look for this same print. It is hard to imagine, in this respect, that a response we heard many thinkers inscribe not merely as a judgment of value but even more potently as a response to grandeur, could engage our sense of what is high or low, lowly or great, and leave the way we locate ourselves within this evaluative landscape untouched. The experience of the sublime here serves as the most brilliant illustration of this point—as the starkest exemplification of wonder’s character as an evaluation that profoundly implicates the subject into its web, redistributing the values settled upon objects in ways that return to the subject to transform her sense of self-­worth. About this particular exemplar there will be more to say in this connection in what follows. Yet this character, we may note, was also implicit in several of the episodes within wonder’s history we surveyed when discussing the achievement or conquest that wonder has often demanded both as a passion of inquiry and a passion of aesthetic response (“PRODUCES”), inviting a wilful redirection of our attention to the ordinary and a revision of our sense of what is wondrous or great. In several of these contexts, the conquest under demand has often borne a strongly ethical aspect, and the revision of our sense of what is great has at the same registered as a demand to renegotiate the needs of the self and our own sense of grandeur. It is an ethical signature that we can now turn back to discover, for example, in the poetic program of fresh perception revealing the most

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ordinary as extraordinary and the most lowly as sublime that had been heralded by Wordsworth and Coleridge and echoed by numerous shareholders of Romantic sensibility. This was an aesthetic inversion of high and low whose ethical undertones were already evidenced in the basic sources of its inspiration, to the extent that it was rooted in the “drastic impropriety” of the Bible in taking the most humble and common as its material, fusing the low with the high and making the highest (the divine) reveal itself in the lowest, in a way that subverted all received sense of hierarchy and established views of literary decorum and confounded “man’s pride in his rationality and in his worldly status by inverting all secular hierarchies.”4 These undertones were in turn elicited especially vividly in Wordsworth’s articulation of this aesthetic ideal, which found its context in Wordsworth’s disappointment in the French Revolution and the new understanding of his revolutionary vocation this had prompted, leading him to recast himself as a “poetic radical” who would reform aesthetic sensibilities by an “egalitarian revolution” that raised the beggar and the peasant, the flower and the thorn, to the dignity of extraordinary objects worthy of poetic remark. Yet this was no purely aesthetic reform; for the aesthetic tastes that resisted it, in Wordsworth’s view, were the correlate of concrete social realities and reflected rigid social prejudices and hierarchies: here was “class snobbery operat[ing] in the mode of aesthetic sensibility.”5 Reforming them thus necessitated a revolution that would be, not merely aesthetic, but social, and indeed moral, in nature, demanding a struggle against the “false refinement” and sense of pride that account for the reluctance to see the most ordinary as worthy of wonder. It is an ethical signature, similarly, that figured prominently in another context we have seen which had much to connect it with this one —that renegotiation of wonder’s proper objects that unfolded in scientific practice in the early modern period under the banner of “physico-­ theology.” Orienting itself away from the unusual or unfamiliar as an object of wonder and toward the ordinary or familiar, this was a renegotiation that simultaneously signaled a move away from the object itself as a terminus of wonder and beyond it to a new terminus: the divine Workman revealed in his works. And in doing so, crucially, it brought the demand of a transformation fundamentally ethical in kind. For to see the glory of the ant is not only to see the glory of God in every created being, but also to submit one’s notions of one’s own glory to reappraisal. Enclosed within the humblest creatures are forms of grandeur—laid bare under the microscopic lens to scientific observers of the period—that

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outshine all human works and attest the lavish attention given by God to beings that humans, in their vanity, normally hold in contempt. Staring into the infinite complexity of the minutest beings—worlds upon worlds, what Pascal called us to imagine and what microscopists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries observed with their eyes—the human observer falls back with newly mortified pride.6 It is a conception of science—of science as a practice that aims at the transformation of seeing and thereby of being, making ineliminable reference to the self—that is sharply at odds with the way scientific inquiry has come to be conceived in our own times, leading Claude-­Olivier Doron to align it with the ancient spiritual exercises as described by Pierre Hadot. Any thematization of the passionate aspect of inquiry, to be sure, will thematize our own involvement; yet what the above suggests is that the thematization of wonder—and in particular the thematization of a wonder rerouted toward the ordinary—is one calculated to thematize more specifically our own modes of self-­evaluation or self-­ esteem, demanding an evaluative reappraisal of objects that is twinned to a reappraisal of self. If the cultivation of wonder (to resume and broaden our earlier theme) is arduous, this is because it sometimes demands a conquest of the most pressing needs of the self. This is suggested even more strongly by a rather different episode of wonder’s more recent and this time philosophical history, which brings out the ethical signature we have been tracking with special relevance. Leaning close to consider it, we will be able to bring into view a philosophical critique whose targets are still with us, and whose diagnosis of the pitfalls of philosophical inquiry—and its specific modes of wonder— has lost little of its force. In doing so, we will find new resources for attending to the notion of mastery foregrounded by Rubenstein to consider its role within inquiry more judiciously, and to clarify the ethical framework in which the value of wonder within inquiry stands to be assessed.7 For a spirit of revisionary critique has often been taken to characterize Wittgenstein’s philosophical project; and it has registered as a sense of abrupt descent that can be narrated precisely through the idiom of “wonder” and its different strains—and more specifically, as a move away from that particular strain of wonder that consists in the sublime. It is a move away that already manifests itself in the very topography in which philosophy unfolds. For the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations—past the logical gestures toward the unspeakable and mystical musings about the perspective sub specie aeternitatis that had shaped his earlier work—philosophy takes place not in numinous physical locations,

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before portentous scenery such as the starry night or the stormy seas and towering mountains that the Romantic sublime had celebrated, but rather in the mundaneness of everyday social settings, among builders and shoppers, readers of morning newspapers, and children learning to perform the simplest of mathematical tasks. Yet this implicit dissociation from the sublime is accompanied by a more explicit disavowal of a sense of wonder parsed in the language of the sublime, and this time linked, not to physical nature, but to a different set of objects which have occupied a central place in recent philosophical inquiry in its quest for a deeper understanding of the relationship between the mind, language, and the world. In approaching this relationship, we surround core notions such as “thought” or “language” with what Wittgenstein calls a reverential “halo” (PI, 97), posing grand questions about what language or thought is that prime us for tremendous discoveries of “sublime” essences and profound foundations.8 This sense of awed reverence marks our attitude toward the mind more broadly, which we represent to ourselves as a realm vested with special powers and shrouded in mystique: it is a wholly private sphere transparent to the first person from which the power of animating words flows, an extraordinary medium capable of bridging the abysmal gulfs between “language” and “world.” Yet this mystique, importantly, needs only an ounce of the melancholic to weigh it down in order to pass over to the anxiety that such bridges might be broken, and to uncanny doubts such as the one often referred to as the “problem of other minds.” And it is this more tenebrous side of the sublime—its connection with doubt and the uncanny, with our ability to distrust whether we really know that another is in pain, or in a related mode of skepticism, with our ability to cut ourselves loose from basic certainties like the existence of the external world, unsettling what would seem to be the firmest ground beneath our own feet—that appears to Wittgenstein as the problematic philosophical retinue of this form of wonder and the mode of philosophizing that belongs to it. A high wonder that wears doubt as its darker underbelly; wonder that becomes a doubt—there will be more to say about this open conjoining of two postures that have separately occupied an important place in philosophy’s understanding of the mood or motive force that drives it. Yet that requires first probing more closely some of the deeper reasons for our susceptibility to the philosophical view of the mind just outlined. This is not merely, as one of Wittgenstein’s best-­rehearsed remarks suggests, because of the “bewitchments” wrought upon us by language

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(PI, 109), which everywhere presents traps for the understanding. For these, of course, must be bewitchments to which we are disposed to succumb. And if we do so, as Fergus Kerr lucidly proposes in his reading of Wittgenstein, it is partly because—as in the moment of the sublime in Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s representation of it—this is simultaneously a drama in which our self-­esteem and sense of dignity form crucial stakes.9 The sources of this awe-­f ull “mythology of the mental” can best be seen once the therapeutic interventions for treating it are considered. For Wittgenstein, these interventions incorporate a return unfolding at different levels, some of which we have already adumbrated: a return to the phenomena of ordinary language—to the language of builders and shoppers and children—to remark and describe them; a return to the body as the basis of linguistic learning and the best solvent of the sharp divide between an inner citadel and outer world; and a closely related return to action, or reaction, in linguistic understanding (“in the beginning was the deed”). It is not a magical conscious act of mind that links words to meanings, but the connection is, rather, underwritten by a diachronic history of reactions to signals, embedded in activities, which our linguistic authorities accept as tokens of mastery. And now the springs of this mythology can be laid open to view: for all these returns simultaneously constitute unmistakable forms of humbling. If we find it difficult to accept that action should have such a foundational role in our linguistic practices (“This is simply how I act”), that is partly because in articulating our views of language we look for answers that would be, in Kerr’s words, “respectful of our metaphysical dignity.” To claim that it is not a special act of meaning that establishes the connection between a word and its meaning—not my free consciousness that gives life to the sign—and instead to aver that “I have been trained to react in a particular way to this sign” (PI, 198), seems to present the “I” as a Pavlovian dog trained to slaver at the bell.10 What is at stake here is my dignity or status as a self-­conscious rational being struggling with the recognition of her dependencies and limitations, which bind her to the animal (“Pavlovian training”), but also to the social world. This is a recognition that the Cartesian view of the mind—with its godlike picture of the self—could only experience with the shock of a downfall. Godlike: enjoying self-­ownership and sovereignty in the splendid, uncontested isolation of a controlled mental theatre over which it presides as sole master. Against this: the vulnerability signaled by the acknowledgment that “the thoughts and feelings a person has ‘inside’ depend on the character of the physical and cultural setting which

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he inhabits.”11 (PI, 205, voicing temptation, voicing myth: “But that is just what is remarkable about intention, about the mental process, that the existence of a custom, of a technique, is not necessary to it.”) For my access to the world, even to the vaunted inner sphere whose supposed master I am, depends on my membership in a community that initiates me into its linguistic practices. Whatever self-­mastery I possess must therefore pass through a mastery of practices that I depend on others to enter. The language of mastery has caught up with us again; and so has the ethically problematic notion of pride that shadowed it. It is, then, a subliming of the inner that is at the same time a subliming of our own status as free agents—a myth of the soul that is a myth of self-­mastery—that one may read as Wittgenstein’s target, and as one of the grounds of his subtle yet ubiquitous preoccupation with the notion of wonder throughout his work, which delivers a critique of false forms of wonder that is also a critique of substantive philosophical conceptions. The philosophical drama, it is clear, here terminates not, as in the earlier instances of the sublime, in a moment of transcendence, but of descent, in which we remark our dependencies and take our place in the hurly-­burly of the everyday social world and its linguistic practices. The sense of our own dignity, our yearning for mastery, and our cosmonautic desire to soar above the merely human are reevaluated as forms of “narcissism” that require philosophical healing.12 It is a healing, as these terms suggest, that may also need to be understood as ethical in kind, tying wonder to a field of ethical significance that we had already marked out once before as its specific possibility and that has here been reemerging as a central theme. “False forms of wonder against true ones”—yet this distinction, probed further, returns us to the contrast between wonder and doubt we passed over above for a more direct consideration that holds the promise, not only of a clearer insight into the philosophical revisions coded into this revised wonder, but also of a bridge that reconnects us to the main trunk of our investigation. For what, shorn of the trappings of a false awe, might be the place for a true philosophical wonder, and what might such wonder look like, were we to follow Wittgenstein to the ends of this understanding? No place at all, it might seem, if we take on face value the therapeutic metaphor that governs Wittgenstein’s understanding of philosophy’s task (PI, 255: “The philosopher treats a question; like an illness”). Marie McGinn expresses the conclusions of many of Wittgenstein’s readers when she speaks of the “essential responsiveness of  Wittgenstein’s philosophical method” and the “anti-­systematic

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nature” of his philosophy, a point likewise accentuated by Stanley Cavell in calling Wittgenstein’s philosophy, like Freud’s therapy, “deeply practical and negative.”13 Yet it is again Cavell who, in his Claim of Reason, provides a more intriguing answer to the above question that appears to be specified in more positive terms, in a set of remarks that address themselves precisely to the wonder that drives Wittgenstein to his work, and in doing so provide more than a pointer to the truer wonder which Wittgenstein’s philosophy would seek to cultivate and inspire. “What motivates Wittgenstein to philosophize,” Cavell writes, “what surprises him, is the plain fact that certain creatures have speech at all, that they can say things at all.” And what this surprise amounts to is an astonishment at the “astonishing fact of the astonishing extent to which we . . . agree in judgment . . . that the extent of agreement is so intimate and so pervasive; that we communicate in language as rapidly and completely as we do.”14 This wonder, now, might at first sight appear to be of a rather special sort—a wonder that, in terms of our earlier typology, we might think to align, not with its delight, but with its darkness. For what this attunement in judgments comes down to, in turn, is a fact we had recorded earlier under a different form (“WONDER”): if language is possible, we had said, it is in great part because of the simple fact that we all share a set of normal (or “natural”) modes of reacting to teaching and to the directions of others, one that runs too deep for us to ordinarily remark. And to remark this fact is at the same time to remark the place where reasons begin to falter and the limits of intelligibility are reached; for “the mind cannot be led at every point; teaching (reasons; my control) comes to an end.” (PI, 14: “No matter how you instruct him . . . how can he know how he is to continue  .  .  . by himself?—Well, how do I know?—If that means ‘Have I reasons?’, the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons.”) When the limits of our attunement in natural ways of reacting are reached, “I cannot get below them to firmer ground.” One’s surprise, thus, is directed to the very contingency of that simplest of facts, which suggests that “maybe language  .  .  . rests upon very shaky foundations—a thin net over an abyss” and leaves one with an anxiety that lies “not just in the fact that my understanding has limits, but that I must draw them, on apparently no more ground than my own.”15 The anxious apprehension of the groundlessness of the very ground upon which one stands; the dizzying realization that the understanding cannot master that which is closest and most familiar—such turns

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of phrase bring us back full circle to one of our earlier stopping points and the starting point of Rubenstein’s narrative, which opened with the wonder-­at-­sea of young Theaetetus, and held this up as a more salutary vision of the endurance we need in the face of the powerful impulse to see our mastery reasserted. Yet this appearance of pattern and circularity should not entirely mislead us, and lead us to overlook how long the road traveled from this experience of seasickness has been, and what critical distinctions demand to be marked in the texture of what we just agreed to recount as “wonder.” And these are distinctions that point on to a more nuanced view of how the notion of “mastery” may need to be positioned within our philosophical questioning. For if our reaction to the perceived groundlessness of our practices is a muted anxiety before the spectacle of our vulnerability—no more the spectacle of a mind that wonders at its powers as it steps upward into the open air—this is a response that preserves a continued yearning for a certain kind of rational mastery, for certain possibilities of justification, which typified the philosophical skepticism Wittgenstein was striving to confront in his work. It has indeed been less a moment of wonder, than a moment of doubt, that has often been taken to constitute the dominant philosophical mood ever since the experiment in radical doubt with which Descartes—champion-­apparent of wonder though he might also be—opened modern philosophy in his Meditations. This is a feverish mood that philosophy has not ceased to do battle with since, driving it to what Hume called a sense of “philosophical melancholy and delirium” (T, 265) that mere reason giving fails to assuage. Wittgenstein’s therapeutic response to this doubt involved showing that, to the extent that it arises when ordinary language and human forms of life are left behind, this doubt is not, in fact, “believable,” and skeptical claims (about the existence of other minds, or of the external world) do not have the “stability of conviction” which propositions that form candidates for belief normally possess.16 Language, considered from one perspective, may be a “thin net over an abyss”; yet the anxious apprehension of this as an abyss, like the experience of the uncanny which skeptical doubt produces—“Say to yourself, for example: ‘The children over there are mere automata.  .  .  .’ And you will either find these words becoming quite empty; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort” (PI, 420)—is a sense of abyss representing a need for rational grounding which should be declared an unstable illusion instead of being peered into gratuitously with hungry eyes.

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And it is this last phrase that now gives us a handle for clarifying a crucial distinction between the moment of doubt and the moment of Wittgenstein’s positive wonder—one that points to a broader distinction between doubt and wonder as philosophical moods, and that marks different ways in which the search for grounds may be negotiated or the apprehension of groundlessness received. For as McGinn observes, on a therapeutic understanding of philosophy, among the elements that require healing is what she calls the “theoretical” or “theorizing” attitude philosophers bring to their task, which expresses itself in the quest for essential truths, determinate answers, and comprehensive explanations, and in expectations of discovery that draw philosophy toward an epistemic model at home in the sciences. We ask: “What is thought?” “What is language?” “What is meaning?” “What is time?” Or—to now echo the question of Socrates—“What is knowledge?” Yet, in the very act of framing these questions, we are tempted to adopt an attitude towards these phenomena which . . . makes us approach them in the wrong way, in a way w­hich assumes that we have to uncover or explain something . . . we take up a stance towards these phenomena in which they seem suddenly bewilderingly mysterious, for as soon as we try to catch hold of them in the way that our questions seem to require, we find we cannot do it; we find that we “no longer know.” Instead of looking for subtleties that we may “dig out” like discoveries or occult truths which will reveal the deeper foundations of the phenomena—and in doing so, to resume now-­familiar terms of critique, satisfy our sense of the grandeur or sublimity of our own task—what we really need is to turn our whole enquiry round and concern ourselves, not with explanation or theory construction, but with description. The nature of the phenomena which constitute our world is not something that we discover by “digging,” but is something that is revealed in “the kind of statement we make about phenomena,” by the distinctive forms of linguistic usage which characterise the different regions of our language.17 That is, we need to concern ourselves with simply remarking what lies before our eyes: the concrete, ordinary (all too ordinary, all too humble) details of the ways in which language is used, which collapse our sense

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of philosophical class to bring grand concepts such as “language” and “world” into the same league as mundane words such as “table” or “door” (PI, 97). “Look and see” (PI, 66): for “the aspects of things that are most important for us”—and those that prove most striking when remarked— “are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” (PI, 129). To be struck by the familiar; to remark—yet here, this surprise presents itself, not as a philosophical passion one crosses swiftly to burn behind one once explanation has been achieved, but as a place at which inquiry comes to an end, as Wittgenstein suggests in a telling passage that registers as an open invitation to surprise: “Don’t take it as a matter of course, but as a remarkable fact, that pictures and fictitious narratives give us pleasure, absorb us.” And immediately commenting: “‘Don’t take it as a matter of course’ means: find it surprising, as you do some things which disturb you. Then what is problematic will disappear, by your accepting the one fact as you do the other” (PI, 524). The most ordinary aspects of our linguistic practices are remarked in a moment of surprise which no explanation is to dispel in the next moment; the given is remarked only to be accepted (cf. PI, 654: “this is the language-­game that is being played ”). With this acceptance, the anxious apprehension of contingency has been converted into a wondering regard that philosophy invites and seeks to reproduce.18 Not to explain, but to remark: an opposition, interestingly enough, which seems to have characterized Wittgenstein’s understanding of wonder in its different forms throughout a career otherwise marked by important philosophical tergiversations. It finds a telling echo in the view expressed in his earlier “Lecture on Ethics” regarding a kind of wonder —before the world’s existence—in many respects far removed from the intellectual field of the Investigations. For to experience this sense of wonder, Wittgenstein suggests in this lecture, is to look at the existence of the world as a miracle, and that involves looking at the world in a way explicitly opposed to the perspective of scientific investigation—and that is to say, as an explanandum. To experience wonder at the world is not to strive to explain it; and this appears to be linked in turn to an assumption that the explanatory question most immediately implicated in this wonder (“Why does anything exist?”) is such that “there is no answer” that could be given to it on its terms.19 This assumption may reflect the influence of Schopenhauer, for whom the “riddle of the world” was one incapable of being dispelled by the “why” questions typical of scientific inquiry, and it points onward to Heidegger, who shared the opposition between a stance of wonder before Being and the stance of explanation.

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The opposition between these stances—between remarking and explaining—is not one we could directly map onto a broad distinction between a stance of wonder and a stance of doubt; yet by calling our attention to the different places where the desire for explanation can be directed and come to an end, it serves to illuminate it. For doubt, unlike wonder, cannot rest without seeking its own extinction through answers that would remove it; to this extent, our concepts—however uncertain at the boundaries—would seem to give sufficiently strong testimony. Doubt seeks answers where wonder can—albeit with a struggle against countervailing temptations—merely behold. And this is sufficient to return us to the opening scene of wonder’s beginning in Theaetetus, to whose shocked experience of the groundlessness of the everyday Cavell’s remarks moments ago recalled us, to consider it more judiciously. For the above may have suggested several similarities between the understanding of wonder expressed by Wittgenstein and the one expressed by Plato as Rubenstein had limned it in her typology: a suspicion of certain aspirations for rational mastery and self-­mastery; a suspicion of firm theses and of a philosophical role more positive than that of the critical (maieutic or therapeutic) adjuvant; a suspicion of wonder as a mere temporary means to be liquidated by explanation. Yet whatever the other similarities that might join Plato to Wittgenstein—at some stage of their careers at least, and under some dramatic masks as against others20 —it has also suggested an important difference that sets Wittgenstein’s wonder apart from the wonder of Plato as read by Rubenstein. And this is a difference, indeed, that allows us to read the former as a critique of the latter, locating itself precisely in the normative space Rubenstein’s narrative opened out, only to propose a different way of inhabiting it. For whether certain experiences of the uncanny should be cured or endured, and whether—to echo our earlier phrase—certain abysses should be declared illusions rather than permitted to disturb the ground beneath our feet, is a question that may here have divided rather than united these two philosophers. Wonder: a profoundly unsettling pathos (Rubenstein-­reading-­Plato): for, “rather than setting him on some sure course toward the Forms, the philosopher’s wonder marks his inability to ground himself in the ordinary as he reaches toward the extraordinary . . . the skyward reach has rendered uncanny the very ground on which the philosopher stands.”21 Yet not all ground can be truly shaken, and if shaken, the response to this may simply need to be: “Back to the rough ground!” (PI, 107). The “What is?” question that shapes this particular Socratic dialogue: “What is knowledge?”—leading into the

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heart of an abyss by collapsing the self-­evident assumption that nothing can be other than what it is—is one that Wittgenstein might have heard as an invitation to ground ourselves anew by returning to the ordinary language games we play with that concept to remark them. For divorced from these language games, what counts as a ground—a fortiori as something on which we can reliably stand—threatens to slip from our grasp.22 The notion of a ground cannot thus be entirely relinquished; any more than the notion of mastery—a mastery of language—with which it is bound, and from which we may temporarily absent ourselves in fits of febrile philosophical unease, but to which an enlightened philosophical practice will always recall us. Taken together, this episode of our philosophical history foregrounds an insight that had already come into view in earlier stages of our discussion and that now finds itself even more concretely documented; and this is that the forms of wonder at work in inquiry—forms of wonder that involve particular determinations of its feeling tone, its relationship to explanation, and its direction to the ordinary as against the extraordinary—have often been implicated in the needs of the self and its modes of evaluation. To the extent that these modes of evaluation carry a problematic ethical status, the revision of the form of wonder that drives our intellectual activity will be a passionate reform with important ethical dimensions. And this is a revision that may demand a reconsideration of our ideals of explanation and rational mastery in ways that, significantly for the overlapping threads of our present discussion, open to question purely instrumental or forward-­looking accounts of wonder’s value. At the same time, this episode makes clear that the therapeutic removal of problematic aspirations of intellectual mastery and self-­mastery from inquiry need not entail the expulsion of notions of mastery altogether, and may rather demand a revised view of the type of positive mastery we should aspire to and a firmer instatement of it within our intellectual practice. In doing so, it also illuminates the fact that the ethical revision of wonder and the notions of mastery to which it is paired may often be bound up with substantive revisions of the intellectual practice at stake—with determinate recalibrations of what Alasdair MacIntyre might have called its standards of excellence and conception of its ends. A critical view of the position the notion of mastery should occupy within a given practice may not thus be achievable in abstraction from substantive engagements with its methods and norms. Yet with the above in place, we may nevertheless be able to reach for a more programmatic reflection on the positive role that a broad notion

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of mastery must play in our intellectual pursuits; and this will finally allow us to join this thread more directly to the stage setting of our discussion and the ethical terms it had suggested. The passions have often been treated with a certain reflective distrust or suspicion, we said earlier, their ability to strike and overpower setting them up as objects to be queried and educated, and—for those who recognize their value in our moral and intellectual lives—to be stabilized in patterns of feeling and seeing that we can then count as excellences of character. Patterns of feeling and seeing: to respond to the extraordinary with wonder; to learn to respond with wonder to what is so ordinary it normally fails to provoke it. Moving on to the examples more relevant to our present context: to endure the anxiety produced by the disruption of intellectual order (the disturbance of intellectual mastery), and not to close up the space of inquiry too quickly. Reaching back for that complementary corrective Aquinas had supplied (“DELIGHT”): to muster the nerve to open the space of inquiry in the first place, when our fear of the grandeur of the task and of our own limitations would draw us away. To endure intellectual openness, or to produce it: a movement away and toward, a movement of negative restraint or positive advance, both of which would seem to have a necessary role in inquiry, and on which, having reinvoked the stage setting of our discussion, we could settle a variety of names. We might call our ability to endure anxiety an exercise in patience; in fortitude; in honesty. We might call our ability to overcome anxiety an exercise in courage; in hope—using the idiom that Aquinas himself suggests: in greatness of soul. The boundaries between these kinds of excellences would seem slippery at best—“courage,” for example, is an excellence that could encompass both imperatives—and it would be a mistake to attempt to garden them too neatly.23 Yet what this brings into focus is that one of the most instructive ways in which the ethical space we have opened up invites itself to be inhabited is as a question about the excellences that govern inquiry, or what, aligning ourselves with a distinctive philosophical idiom, we may call the intellectual virtues. The value of the passions, we earlier said, stands to be anchored in larger ideals and evaluative horizons. Yet the value of the virtues, taken as stable “ways of standing well or badly” toward the passions, has often been anchored even more profoundly in such horizons—and in forward-­looking ideals and notions of the good from which such excellences could with difficulty be detached, and which embed a notion of “mastery,” taken in the broadest sense of “success,” with deep structural links within inquiry.

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These are links, on the one hand, that can be understood on a normative level, accounting for the value that a given excellence attracts. For such excellences, on an important account of the virtues articulated by MacIntyre, need to be partly seen in terms of their role within practices, and more specifically, in terms of their value in enabling us “to achieve those goods which are internal to practices”—the kinds of goods (unlike status or money or prestige) that we derive from our very participation in the skilled activities that form the heart of these practices, whether chess or painting, or whether the activity of intellectual inquiry in its different forms.24 The justification of the virtues, this makes clear, has a teleological character, reflecting a longer tradition of philosophical thinking about the virtues; and within this perspective, the notion of “achievement”—of coming to play “chess or football well,” of carrying “through an enquiry in physics or an experimental mode in painting with success”—would seem to occupy a central place.25 Yet this normative connection, crucially, finds its counterpart on the psychological level, given the major role that the notion of the “good” and the related notion of achievement play in our motivation for pursuing skilled activities such as the ones MacIntyre describes, and paradigmatically intellectual inquiry. “Intellectual virtue,” in the words of a recent writer, “is fundamentally rooted in a deep and abiding desire for knowledge and understanding.” It is this desire that makes one willing “to give a fair and honest hearing to ‘the other side,’ to persevere in his search for the truth, to entertain counterevidence to his beliefs in an open and patient way, to refrain from caricaturing or distorting positions he rejects, and so on”; and one might add: to endure the anxiety of uncertainty and cognitive disruption. If the intellectual virtues can be seen as traits “useful for overcoming certain familiar obstacles to successful inquiry,” it is thus our desire for the achievement of understanding that motivates us to overcome these obstacles.26 As Hume observed more broadly, even where our motivation for pursuing an activity is initially the internal enjoyment we derive from the activity itself and not the end it tends to, yet “by the natural course of the affections, we acquire a concern for the end itself,” and thus “a degree of success in the attainment of the end” is required for the activity to remain pleasurable—in the case of intellectual inquiry, “the discovery of that truth we examine” (T, 451). And that is all the more so when the activity involves a surmounting of challenge or difficulty. For in striving for what is difficult, as Aquinas indicated, drawing on the conceptual matrix of greatness of soul—a matrix equally present to Hume’s mind,

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we earlier saw—what sustains us is our hope that the great good we strive for can indeed be attained. There are, of course, more careful distinctions to be drawn here (distinctions implicit in Hume’s cautious accent on the notion of “degree”), as between more and less local successes—between the successful execution of a more circumscribed inquiry in physics and the execution of an ambitious quest for scientific understanding that would supply a “theory of everything” and leave nothing unexplained. At the same time, the notion of “success,” as Wittgenstein suggested, may stand to be modulated according to the practice that situates it, often downgrading our view of the kind of intellectual mastery we can hope to achieve. Similarly, if we follow MacIntyre in his understanding, we will need to recognize that our conceptions of the ends and goods pursued in our practices are infinitely revisable and open to being “systematically extended” as the histories of these practices unfold.27 And this inherent open-­endedness is again reflected in an open-­endedness etched even more deeply into MacIntyre’s larger account. For while the virtues find their local teleological justification in enabling us to attain the goods internal to practices, they find their global justification in equipping us to lead a good life defined as a quest for the good life, “enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter” in the process.28 This, of course, is a quest whose completion lies—and perhaps must always lie—out of sight, to even wage which, given its difficulty, may demand a more-­than-­ordinary exercise of that more-­than-­ordinary virtue of greatness of soul, and to keep which open may require an intellectual humility equally arduous to sustain. The way we regulate our passionate responses—both those, such as the anxiety of uncertainty, that demand to be endured and those, such as the anxiety of failure, that demand to be overcome—is thus anchored in a larger context which invites a keener appreciation of the positive architectonic place the notion of “mastery” or “success” must occupy within the structure of our intellectual pursuits. Yet this is compatible with the recognition that the good of mastery to which our regulative virtues look for their fulfillment may lie indefinitely out of reach, constituting a fragile good to which we make ourselves vulnerable by aspiring to it, without being able to secure it.29 And having schematized the architectonic links that inscribe the notion of mastery more positively within our intellectual activities, we may now also turn to the more specific ethical preoccupation it had been bound to—a preoccupation with the problematic role played by

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the needs of the self—for a broader consideration. Any thematization of the passionate aspect of inquiry, we said, will thematize the subject that undertakes it; yet wonder is a passion in which the subject has often been implicated in unusually heightened ways—ways that speak loudly to the needs of the self and its modes of evaluation. These needs were brought out starkly in some of the recalibrations of wonder described above among Romantic poets, early modern scientists, and modern-­day philosophers. Yet here it is worth returning more directly to the initial appearance these needs had made in our narrative, when first addressing the experiential tone of wonder (“DELIGHT”) and tying its pained texture—a texture that united Smith’s wonder-­at-­the-­new with the wonder-­at-­the-­familiar foregrounded by Plato—to a disruption of intellectual order deeply enmeshed with the needs of the self. There, Smith had offered us a potent diagnostic clue when, in his “History of Astronomy,” he had described early natural inquirers as “stopped and embarrassed” by the incoherencies of natural phenomena, flagging the character of this psychological discomfort as a mortification of pride before newly perceived checks on the powers of understanding. It is a sense of pride, we may now observe, whose saga did not terminate at its initial mortification. For we may recall that on Smith’s picture of intellectual investigation, the pained “wonder” stimulating inquiry had found its complement in a wonder bearing a rather different, and far more positive, affective hue. Introduced by Smith as “admiration,” this was a wonder that appeared not only at the beginning of inquiry, as a response to the “greatness and beauty” of phenomena which incites us to dwell on them, but even more significantly at its end, as the incoherence of natural phenomena cedes to a new perception of order which “render[s] the theatre of nature . . . a more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise it would have appeared to be.”30 It is a form of wonder whose pleasured texture reflects the restoration of intellectual order; and one that, by the same token, signals the reassertion of mastery and restoration of injured pride. “The satisfaction which attends the successful execution of inquiry,” as J. Ralph Lindgren glosses, “appears to be a type of delight in accomplishment, a celebration of . . . independence and a renewal of . . . self-­confidence.”31 Within this frame, the accent will fall on the activity of “rendering” or “creating” by which inquirers impart coherence to the spectacle before them, and ultimately on the glory, not of the magnificent spectacle of nature itself, but of the “great system” of thought that confers magnificence upon it by unifying it, and thus of the mind that achieves this by its constructive activity.32 The wonder at the

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ordered spectacle of nature turns back to become an exulting wonder at the inquirer’s mind and its powers. The history of inquiry, in these terms, can be written as a passionate history of modes of “wonder” inflected with different affective tones that is simultaneously a passionate history of pride.33 That an inquiry that begins from a distress with the character of “I cannot” would find its progress in a pleasure with the character of an “I can” should not, of course, surprise us. It may seem only natural that an inquiry initially rooted in the needs of the self should remain so, and that its self-­referential element should be preserved throughout its passionate course. What might rather be wondered here is whether, if this history is told as a progression of pride, it is a history that can be told in any other way; and whether this is therefore a history we could possibly summon to an ethical space and subject to critique. For it was after all one of Hume’s and Smith’s seminal philosophical contributions to call attention to the deeply socialized nature of our mind, and the far-­reaching relations between our subjectivity and the subjectivities of others. Our sympathetic exposure to the judgments and passionate responses of others renders us always spectators of ourselves, and invests us in others’ reactions of approval and disapproval in ways that pervade our motivation in everything we do. Hume would put the point pithily when remarking that “we can form no wish, which has not a reference to society”; “whatever other passions we may be actuated by . . . the soul or animating principle of them all is sympathy; nor wou’d they have any force, were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others” (T, 363). Hume’s enumeration here, crucially, would include that passion that Hume himself would make central to inquiry, curiosity. And if this other-­directed preoccupation is coded in the beginning of inquiry, it remains encoded throughout its progress to the extent that our activity (in the words of a recent commentator on Smith’s work) “involves reference to the norms of [our] community” and “the impartial spectator within anticipates how [our] (idealised) audience will judge a new theory.”34 And while Hume and Smith would articulate this point in programmatic forms, our profound involvement in the reactions of others is an insight that has received wide acknowledgment in many of our intellectual traditions, and has figured prominently in developmental accounts of how we come to acquire the different types of excellence—ethical, intellectual, and others—which, as human communities, we prize. On a well-­k nown account of ethical development that can be read as

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Aristotle’s, it is precisely the desire for honor or praise that stimulates the impulse to mimesis among children, leading them to emulate their elders and drawing them toward the acts, and then the established habits, of ethical virtue as of other accomplishments.35 Even if, as the opening of the Metaphysics would have it, “all men by nature desire to know,” this is a desire that requires encouragement, cultivation, and refinement through key social relationships—between children and parents, students and teachers—in which we can be taught, among other things, to adjust the natural tendencies of our attention, and to reorient it to those objects that more accomplished practitioners deem worthy of remark, building on our natural disposition to follow the direction of others’ gaze and our natural investment in the gaze they settle upon us. In highlighting our dependence on others for the formation of our most cherished qualities and capacities, this account, significantly, has been taken to offer a salutary emphasis, not on the kind of self-­ containment that might feed our pride, but on the vulnerabilities that would place it in check. The same sobering effect, likewise, has been counted among the concomitants of the socialized picture of the mind presented by Hume and Smith, which pulls the carpet from under the feet of the solipsistic, self-­sufficient Cartesian thinker and embeds the inquirer firmly as a passionate being in the social world. If we try to break free from our healthy concern with the responses of others and pursue inquiry outside the framework they set, we may find our head swimming with the sense of one at sea, for we “need others to [even] get any criterion of truth.”36 Yet within Aristotle’s terms, this passionate beginning of our excellences has often come to haunt us, particularly where the education of character is concerned. For if, as just suggested, it may be only natural that a process set in motion by the needs of the self should preserve that self-­referential element throughout its passionate course, this will seem highly troubling when the cherished product of this course is a kind of excellence that constitutively demands a different structure of motivation—a motivation that looks, not to honor, but to the fine, as the ultimate end of our actions. The process stimulated by the needs of the self must thus somehow succeed in transcending this motivational beginning, transforming our sense of the good and expanding what we count as our chief set of “interests” or “needs.”37 And reaching past the narrower question of ethical excellence, this is a process of expansion or transformation that it is here instructive to relate to the activity of inquiry and its excellences—types of excellence

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which, in the ancient context, were after all closely intertwined at critical moments of their history. For the supreme value that inquiry carried for many of the ancient philosophers, as we have seen, had much to do with its relationship to an inner transformation that had the character of a transcendence, marking the transcendence of one sense of self by another—one’s passionate individual subjectivity by the higher element of one’s nature that united one with the whole of humanity and ultimately with the gods—and of one set of needs or notions of the good by a new one. It was a transformation, as suggested earlier (“DELIGHT”), that expressed itself within inquiry as a passionate progression from fear to delight that was simultaneously a progression from an instrumental understanding of the value of inquiry to an apprehension of its intrinsic worth. Yet with this in view again, it is possible, if not to exhaust the question we have been tracking—an ethical question about the self-­referential aspect of inquiry and the wonder coupled to it—then to offer some critical ingredients for its resolution, by saying: the way we judge the wonder experienced by the natural inquirer invoked by Smith, or by any other type of inquirer, may depend on a number of considerations. For even if agree, with Hume, that “we can form no wish, which has not a reference to society” and that none of our passions would have force “were we to abstract entirely from the thoughts and sentiments of others”—even if we agree that our passions and the activities they stimulate make ineliminable reference to the self, and to the self as a potential object before others—this is not to say that we can mark no distinctions between different ways in which the self may appear within the structure of our motivations. Nor is it to say that we can make no critical—normative— judgments between better and worse ways in which self-­reference may be built into our activity, and between different ways in which, over the course of our activity, this self-­reference may be refined. For our activity may naturally find its impetus in a desire for the admiration and approval of others; yet we would think that a person whose motivations fail to shift with the deepening of practice, to orient themselves more directly to what MacIntyre calls this activity’s internal goods in a way that transcends its conditional status as a means for enhancing one’s individual status—a person who fails to move from “self-­ regarding” to “extra-­regarding” impulses, in another idiom—has failed in some important respect, and refused a crucial opportunity of self-­ enlargement which such activities hold out.38 From such a perspective, Hume’s open inclusion, among the driving forces of his philosophical

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activity, of the “ambition . . . of acquiring a name by my inventions and discoveries” (T, 271), is not one that we would be unanimously and unqualifiedly prepared to endorse as a motivation that ought to power our mature activity throughout as against providing it with its educable beginnings. Similarly, while our intellectual activity may demand constant contact with others’ responses and with the norms of inquiry that form sedimentations of these responses—a contact that displays the character of inquiry as an inalienably collaborative endeavor—the concern to honor these norms needs to be distinguished from the concern with a kind of honor that would reveal one, not merely a worthy participant in this joint endeavor, but a superior contributor with a greater claim than one’s fellow-­seekers on the competitive stakes of esteem. To say this, of course, is to offer a thick ethical judgment as to the proper way of relating to the self and its needs—one that may set many of us against Hume’s own substantive ethical positioning.39 Yet in this context, this is also an ethical judgment that can find its grounds in the imperatives of inquiry, once again allowing us to refer what we specify as an excellence of character to the end to which our intellectual activity is ordained. For the preoccupation with the external honors attracted by intellectual activity is all too liable to bring us into conflict with its internal standards and demands, giving us a more rigid passionate investment in the closure of inquiry and the achievement of definite results and visible “success,” and making it harder for us to acknowledge our present epistemic limitations and maintain ourselves in uncertainty for as long as our inquiry itself demands. And in doing so, it exposes us to the risk that our success will be prematurely declared and our intellectual activity will fall short of its aim. And this point may now be linked to another, which returns us more directly to the moment of inquiry described by Smith and to the wonder experienced by the natural inquirer at that highest moment of his intellectual progression where disorder yields to order, confusion to explanation, and pained wonder to a sense of magnificence that turns back to the inquirer to make him gasp. For when we open pride to criticism, it is often because it marks a failure to recognize not only one’s powers, but also one’s limitations; and not only one’s powers, but the chains of dependency that support these, and their debts to gifts of nature or gifts of social fortune which supplied the preconditions for their formation. The individual inquirer who opens herself to this criticism will be the one whose reflexive wonder fails to be modified by such acknowledgments of debt or limitation; the one who is not prepared to accept the possibility

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that any “great system of thought” may turn out to be fallible, that there may be inherent limits to what she (or other human inquirers) may be able to explain, and that some forms of uncertainty may lie outside our power to scientifically or indeed at all reflectively resolve. It will be the one who sides too easily with Dawkins’s self-­assured “everything has an explanation” and if one has not yet been uncovered, “we’re working on it,” and rejects too quickly Einstein’s receptivity to the “mysterious” and his openness to acknowledging “the existence of something we cannot penetrate”; who finds it hard to admit it as an intellectual possibility that certain types of questions that attract our profoundest wonder— such as the question “Why do these natural laws hold as against others?” or “Why does anything exist?”—may “lie beyond science,” as the cosmologist Martin Rees suggests, beyond the reach of its explanatory aspirations, and perhaps beyond the reach of any reflective form of understanding available to us.40 What we can explain and resolve, despite these limits, may of course seem prodigious, the fitting object of a wonder at the very intelligibility of the world voiced by natural scientists in both the recent and more distant past: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible,” in Einstein’s oft-­quoted words. Yet this, crucially, is a wonder that no longer directs itself to the inquirer as a specific individual—as an individual that attracts admiration from others and competes with others for the stakes of status and esteem—but as a bearer of intellectual capacities that make her answer for human beings as a whole. And even if this is a moment of wonder that we can no longer, as in the ancient context, articulate as a contact with the divine, it has sufficient depth to open out to a question about the sources of these intellectual capacities and their significance, and thus a larger question—a question we may call “spiritual” or, with Thomas Nagel, “religious” in kind—about the relationship between human beings and the world they inhabit, one that enlivens us to what remains mysterious in this relationship, and as such maintains us in a wonder that is unlikely to close.41 Wonder as Judgment: The Ethics of Sight

The value attaching to wonder within inquiry, the above has suggested, cannot be considered in isolation from larger ethical ideals, which place wonder under judgment and often problematize the needs of the self expressed within it, thereby inviting a finer-­grained response to the question of wonder’s value that forms our guiding thread. Wonder: a

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passion we value intrinsically for its experiential tone; a passion we value instrumentally as a stimulus to intellectual quests—yet a passion whose instrumental value stands to be conditioned by other types of evaluative judgment, which indeed lead us to question whether wonder can be approached in purely instrumental terms, and as an ephemeral stepping stone we can expect to leave behind us. About the themes broached above, there will be something more to say in what follows from a different direction. Yet having attended to two of the main sources of our evaluative appraisal of the passions outlined at the start—their felt experience, the actions they incite—we may turn to yet another source of appraisal for a closer examination. And this is an examination, crucially, that will deepen the notion of wonder’s “intrinsic” experiential or aesthetic value we have already invoked, and the normative force we take it to carry. The passions, we said, “tell us something about the world”; the passions are cognitively constituted, and as such allow us to assess them by opening the judgments of fact and judgments of value they incorporate to rational demand. Wonder as a judgment; wonder as a judgment of value. It is a characterization of wonder that has picked itself through several stages of our inquiry; and its longer tail now finally catches up with us in ways calculated to have sweeping effects on our line of questioning. For we may recall that, when we had earlier ventured to look for wonder’s rational core, wonder had stood out among the other emotions by the very austerity of this core: “How remarkable!” “How extraordinary!” or just, “Wow!” It is with this austere exclamation that wonder’s judgments and wonder’s justice would seem to be bound; and to this same exclamation that we would seem compelled to return in seeking to determine how wonder might in turn be judged. A wonder judged just to its objects; whose justice invites it; recommends it—more strongly still: enjoins it. A wonder one could not only invite but enjoin. Yet given the very austerity or nakedness of this cry of value, one cannot, at this juncture, but ask: on what grounds? This is a question that, posed within those practices we have identified as modes of intellectual inquiry, would naturally invite an answer in the forward-­looking terms we have already heard, tying the grounds of our wondering perception of objects to its role in stimulating insight or making us feel its need—our evaluative perception a perception of objects’ “worthiness” of being remarked which would lead past remarking to understanding. It is a perception of what is “worthy” of attention, as we have said, which may sometimes leave attention unrewarded, and

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may sometimes demand of the attention to abandon its questing character and accept the passivity of a quasi-­aesthetic response. Yet here, assuming the boundaries between “intellectual” and “aesthetic” contexts can be (despite their fragility) at least nominally maintained, it is to those contexts in which wonder has figured, not as a passion of inquiry, but as a passion of aesthetic response and thus as a more openly evaluative reaction—and in which this evaluative cry has been more sharply sequestered from its consequences—that we do well to transpose our question in order to place it in the most significant light. And leaving the grander wonder of the sublime to the next stage of our discussion, it is to the aesthetic acclaim of wonder as a response to the ordinary and familiar, where wonder does not merely strike but demands to be wilfully provoked, that we need to return to hear the question “Why wonder?” (“Why will wonder?”) most starkly. The task of art, we heard the Russian art theorist Shklovsky say (“SUDDEN”), is “to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony” and restore to us the vision of things we have a thousand times seen, by complicating their form, making perception laborious, and thereby compelling us to pause. Our aesthetic-­spiritual task is to awaken ourselves, in Coleridge’s terms, from “the lethargy of custom” so as to impart the “charm of novelty to things of every day” and come to see the “splendour in the grass” and the “glory in the flower” (Wordsworth), through a poetic program charged with reversing the entire history of our transactions with the world and reviving us to the wondering vision of the child. Yet why, it may now be asked—and if the deeper Biblical underpinnings of this poetic program, which made the “transaction between mind and nature” for these poets a deeply spiritual event, have ceased to be available to us—is this an act of seeing we would wish to perform, and a habit of feeling and seeing we could be motivated to more systematically embrace? It is a question that we will be able to pull into clearer focus by placing before us a more vivid and concrete expression of the ideal of vision traced out by Shklovsky and his forebears—a literary embodiment of this ideal that shares none of the Romantics’ religious presuppositions and that may thus permit us to inquire about its value in terms closer to our own. Though this, as we shall see, is an embodiment of wonder that compels us to pose the question “Why wonder?” by first appearing to suppress the very space in which it could be asked. For it is Zorba, that well-­k nown old laborer from Crete, in Nikos Kazantzakis’s eponymous book—call it a biography, call it a hagiography

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—who offers one of the best documentations in literary history of a kind of wonder that steps away from the familiar to remark it anew. It is a ceaseless ability to estrange the familiar—a childlike, “creative naivety, every day renewed, ceaselessly seeing everything for the first time and restoring virginity to the perennial elements of the everyday world— the wind, the sea, fire, woman, bread”—which forms one of the central threads in the image of that lusty laborer spun by Kazantzakis, flesh and blood yet larger than life itself, living each day with a visceral intensity that often breaks into song, into dance.42 Every so often, Zorba’s eyes widen, and things that we pass without noticing loom before him like “terrible mysteries”: He sees a woman passing by, and stops short in terror: “What mystery is this?” he asks. “What does woman mean, and why does she loosen the screws of our reason like that? What’s this about again, can you tell me?” In the very same way he gapes and asks questions as he gazes in amazement at a person, a tree in bloom, a glass of cool water. Zorba sees everything, every day, for the very first time. When we sat outside the shed yesterday and he had a glass of wine, he turned around and looked at me in terror: “What’s this red water again, boss—can’t you tell me? A bit of old wood shoots a few buds, a bunch of sour little things dangle out, time passes, the sun bakes them, they grow sweet as honey, and then we call them grapes; we trample over them, we get their liquid out, we put it in barrels . . . and wine comes out! What miracle is this again? You drink it, this red liquid, and the soul grows large, this shoddy old body can no longer contain it, it challenges God to battle.”43 Fresh from sleep he stands at the doorway, forgetting appearances, forgetting names: “What’s that, boss?” he cried out in amazement. “By God, I’m seeing the world for the first time. What wonder is that, boss, that blue thing moving about over there? What do they call it: Sea? Sea? And that thing wearing the green apron with the flowers? Earth? What kind of zesty craftsman made it all! I swear, boss, I’m seeing them for the first time.” His eyes had filled with tears.44

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It is a wondering step away, as Kazantzakis recounts it, that seems to occur entirely without antecedents, and with an effortlessness that lends it the character, not of a performance that might require reason-­giving or explicit motivation, but of a mode of being in which the space between acting and being (the very space we thought we had earlier carved open: “PRODUCES”) has been wholly closed up. Zorba’s wonder emerges spontaneously as a natural concomitant of his very engrossment in the present in all its sensory concreteness. Zorba seems to look, and see again. Zorba’s seeing reaches to the other side. The step away seems to occur with the step itself, the distance between being and acting so slender within this backward step that there seems to be no space for effort, and a fortiori none for art, and as Kazantzakis is keen to stress, none for reflectivity. “There are mules in this world!” Zorba can exclaim, and the image of the mule has been seen, and seen as extraordinary, in the same breath. “What a mystery again, the moles on a woman’s cheeks!”—and a mole that had been as good as glued to one’s face by dint of its matter-­ of-­factness detaches itself to be remarked with surprise.45 The space for asking “Why?” of this undoing-­like wonder might here appear to have been elided. Yet it is a space, we must observe, that is carved open by the very mimetic act that has placed Zorba’s wonder before us—and which in doing so has also opened up a space in which our own responses to this wonder can be more lucidly sought. For Kazantzakis’s (or the writer-­narrator’s) artistic preoccupation with Zorba is rooted in a conviction that Zorba embodies something extraordinary that is worthy of the profoundest reverence. Zorba is the one person he would have chosen for himself as spiritual mentor and model for living, he avows in his introduction to the work, calling him up to take his place next to those figures who have left the deepest intellectual tracks on his spirit—Homer, Bergson, Nietzsche. It is a sense of reverence with which Kazantzakis’s mimetic portrait is stamped throughout, and which motivates the act of mimesis even as it appears to antagonize it, lending it an air of inescapable paradox. For Zorba represents an ideal of action, not reflection, an ideal one yearns to enact rather than make the subject of reflective discourse, to live out rather than artistically imitate (“Those who experience the mysteries have got no time [for writing]; and those who’ve got time, don’t experience the mysteries”), and one that, in the very act of artistic mimesis, one must fear one denatures into a dead letter of thought.46 It is an act of crafting Zorba without which Zorba could not become imitable; yet out of the narrator’s/Kazantzakis’s struggle with the form

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in which this life-­become-­story best stands to be crafted—as a romance, or a song? a fantastic Arabian tale, or a dry report of facts?—it is clear that this Zorba-­become-­art must in part be counted in the genre of the epic, setting up the central character as a hero in an inverted epic in which the heroism consists of the most ordinary deeds in the world. It is openly the notion of heroism that occurs in Kazantzakis’s climactic statement: “The highest a human being can attain is not knowledge, or virtue, or goodness, or victory; but something higher, more heroic and desperate: awe, holy fear. What lies beyond holy fear? The human mind cannot advance further.”47 An attainment—an attainment of wonder here inflected with a darker tincture, with which Zorba’s ever-­renewed glance at the everyday, as the above passages had suggested, is itself deeply dyed (“What mystery is this?” “His eyes had filled with tears”), revealing Zorba’s life-­ loving immersion in the present to carry a deeper seriousness that sets it apart from the reveling sensuality of the aesthete. Yet bracketing this darker element for the moment, we now need to lean closer to Kazantzakis’s portrait, and in leaning closer, lay our fingers more firmly on our own pulse, to then ask ourselves whether our immediate responses to this portrait do not indeed offer a foothold to Kazantzakis’s evaluative language of “attainment” strong enough to bear up even the notion of “heroism” that attends it; and whether Zorba’s exclamations of wonder at the everyday elements of a familiar world—“Sea!” “Earth!” “Woman!” “Wine!”—do not indeed wield a power of attraction in which we may recognize, not only the roots of Kazantzakis’s desire for artistic mimesis, but of our own yearning for an imitation to be carried to the larger stage of our lives. And yet: would this, after all, be the first time in which, closing in on our own pulse, we have felt the pulsing of this evaluative recognition, and the acknowledgment of an impulse to a wonder understood in such terms? If indeed we wished to locate our earliest encounter with it, we might look for it in a moment of our foregoing discussion which we had passed over without remark even though it had been pivotal in moving our plot forward. It was a moment of falling shadows, a type of shadow that had tarnished the natural wonder at the new as Philip Fisher had limned it (“SUDDEN”). A shadow; or what we had called this wonder’s “tragic flaw”: its fate of senescence, of conferring an all-­too-­brief visibility to unfamiliar objects that blaze into awareness only to be swiftly assimilated into the unseen backdrop of our everyday lives. It was a shadow that had thickened over our past, with far-­reaching repercussions for

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our present: for since wonder, we said, depends on background distinctions between what is expected and unexpected, familiar and strange, which as children we lack, we first meet some of the potentially most wondrous things in our world—fire and snow, the sun, the moon and the stars—with the jaded sensibility of old people inured to vision; and in this state of eclipse such objects mostly remain throughout the course of our lives, during which we accumulate an ever-­increasing fund of eclipses of vision. The fall of this shadow had driven a wedge into a different possibility of wonder’s grammar; and it had done so by driving a wedge into a will to wonder that runs crossbeam to the one that is blind to all but the new. It is a will to wonder that may enter our experience as a more sweeping chagrin to which we find ourselves exposed at different moments of our life, for shorter or longer durations. It is the flicker of regret that a child’s innocent curiosity may provoke when it alerts us to our matter-­of-­fact transactions with things that had once also arrested our thought, that a student’s enthusiastic questioning may excite when it makes us realize with shock how smooth the ripples of our thinking have become around points on which their waves would have once loudly crashed. It is the subdued pang of discomfort, often masked under a thin veneer of disdain, to which a tourist’s marveling gaze might call us as we pursue our indifferent daily march through wonders that rivet her gaze. This regret connects us to a kind of discontent that poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge and spokesmen of the poetic gaze such as Shklovksy may have expressed in more programmatic terms, and may have sometimes anchored in horizons no longer accessible to us, yet whose basic intuition we can still acknowledge for its truth. For we know all too well that our world gradually dims as familiarity sets in; that the new is destined to fade, that what surprises and dazzles us today will have lost its sap tomorrow; that our awareness is a war of attrition against the dulling effects of habit and a battle against our own inbuilt love of an orderly world, which regularly trades a lively consciousness like the one we train on things in the first bloom of our relationship with them for a more easy neglect; that our minds love to multiply what we may unthinkingly take for granted, surrendering conscious awareness to unreflective repose. We know that we often no longer notice the road we walk on, the sky above our heads, or the roses we planted last year, the painting we lovingly hung on the wall after it had taken our breath away or the cherished photograph we pinned to our desk so as to be nourished by it daily; that the tragedies of childhood are still our own,

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that the moon and the stars rarely arrest our attention, and that these stillborn luminosities remain occluded. Writing in a different context, Hume once remarked that the mind “can never totally forget the points of space and time, in which we are existent,” receiving “such frequent advertisements of them from the passions and senses, that however it may turn its attention to foreign and remote objects, it is necessitated every moment to reflect on the present” (T, 427–28). The mind is bound to its present by bonds of reflective necessity? Looking back at our lives, we should know better than to subscribe to this as an unqualified truth—for beyond what our practical purposes demand, the present is precisely what we would seem most highly disposed to forget, and for which explicit reminders or “advertisements” need to be willed. It is a will to wonder that would bid us to unsee these luminosities to see them again; a will that, with Zorba, would unsee the earth and the sea, women and wine, unsee the world that surrounds us to reclaim an exclamation of wonder or claim it anew. A will that would bid—yet let us now finally ask again more clearly: On what ground? For if we parse this demand in the terms from which we began—as a question of justification to be assessed against wonder’s appropriateness or justice to its objects, and raised outside narrower intellectual contexts in which wonder’s value could be appraised in forward-­looking or relative terms—it would seem questionable whether such objects offer grounds that make the act of wonderingly remarking them a claim of justice to which we might be obligated to respond. Framing his own earlier lament about our natural attraction to the new, to urge a different kind of wonder that would respond to what is great, Seneca had distinguished between those things that in fact provoke our wonder and those that ought to, and that rather “deserve admiration” (admiratione digna) (Natural Questions, 7.1.1). A wonder judged just to its objects; a wonder duty-­bound to honor their deserts—a wonder one could not only invite but enjoin, connecting the notion of wonder to that of appreciation, and that in turn to its root semantics of preciousness and price, to spell out a demand of commutative justice that would pay out of our passions the price that objects command.48 Yet even those of us who sympathize with Seneca’s sense of grandeur and Seneca’s lament may have to own that this, after all, is a claim of justice for which no strict support could be given, and one that stands as thin or thick, as brittle or robust, as any naked affirmation of worth. “No transcendental argument seems feasible,” as Hepburn writes, “to show that wonder is

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rationally demanded towards the world.”49 Faced with the world, the road forks between different possible responses: wonder versus cynicism; wonder versus nausea; or dread; or despair. (Why did Roquentin, in Sartre’s Nausea, remark the fact that things exist and bend double over a black space of nausea instead of a star-­fi lled awe?) Taken as a claim of justice, it is possible to say: the road I walk on, the sky above my head, can demand nothing of me; the tree in bloom I see before me, the glass of cool water I hold in my hand, cannot make Zorba’s unlabored wonder an obligation to which I must labor to respond. The earth or the sea, the sun or the stars at night have no claim that obligates me to face them with mute awe; the newborn infant that may sometimes startle me with the fact of life and its definite moment of beginning, already pointing the imagination ahead to the definite moment of its end, has no real claim over my mind. I owe no debt of wonder to any of the objects that surround me, to the solid ground on which I stand, to the natural laws that make my merest movement possible, to the fact of light because of which I see, the fact of language thanks to which I can write these words, the fact of my own continuity which allows me to start a single sentence and finish it, start a single life and complete it. I owe no wonder to what sometimes strikes me as the mysterious fact that these should have been my parents and none of the thousands of people whom I pass on the street without noticing; to the fact that this should have been the century in which I was born; to the fact that I can even think the possibility that there was a different moment in time in which my life could have traced its course, that I can grasp the passage of centuries and the lapse of time, or the fact that time should lapse; to the fact that what we call human beings should have developed through the contingencies of evolutionary history and I should be standing on my two feet with everything that is between my ears. Instead, the road would seem to fork between wonder and indifference; a bifurcation mirrored in yet another: between a justification one might speak of as a claim, and one that would derive its force from desire; and this is a desire that now points to a justification which looks away from the objects themselves, and looks to the condition of the subject that confronts them. For turning back to one of the spokesmen of the regret we articulated above to recall Shklovsky’s proclamation of the need to pass from mere “recognition” to “seeing,” we may ask ourselves: How could the necessity of this task be argued to someone who failed to acknowledge it? Why see? Why remark?—Why wonder? It is a question

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we might find the words for asking; yet one which in doing so would seem to carve up the very ground on which we stand. Why “return sensation to our limbs”? Why “make a stone feel stony”? Why “feel objects,” as Shklovsky wrote we ought, and, through art, could? Shklovsky’s own words suggest that the readiness with which the language of obligation comes to our lips should not obscure that this is a location where one must really say: “I have exhausted the justifications”; “I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned” (Wittgenstein’s phrasing: PI, 217)—and that is because it involves a reason as self-­justifying as the desire it reduces to. If our fate of drudging through our lives surrounded by phantom objects which we only recognize as we slouch past on our way elsewhere—to the next goal, to the supermarket, to the bank, to the philosophy lecture—can be lamented, it is for a reason that Shklovsky states with the self-­evidence of an ultimate when he forms the conditional sentence with a telltale apodosis: if “the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it’s as if this life had never been.”50 This, it must be presumed, is not an apodosis whose tragic character we need to be convinced of, or can be obliged to accept, or whose negation we can be forced to desire. It is the same sense of ultimacy that Henry David Thoreau—heir, himself, to the aesthetics of Romanticism and its characteristic gravitation toward the wondering gaze—expressed distinctly when he exclaimed: “How much virtue there is in simply seeing! . . . We are as much as we see.”51 Seeing and being are here intertwined in a way that leaves no space for asking: “Why see?” “Why wonder?” The terminus of value is already present in the act, and such questions can only leave us mute. To wonder: to be conscious: to EXPERIENCE—a set of notions, we argued earlier (“PRODUCES”), that cannot be collapsed, despite how closely several voices in our narrative seemed to draw them together; yet whose close conjunction, we can now discern more clearly, nevertheless speaks volumes about the roots of our passionate attraction to the passion of wonder, even as it questions how deeply we might expect to dig beneath them. A case for wonder, on these terms, would turn out to be an argument for the value of something as basic as the value of a life lived consciously: as basic as our desire for conscious experience and aliveness to the world. And yet—beneath this seemingly frozen ground of stony ultimates, is there no deeper normative muscle, probed more sensitively, that we can feel moving? For if the notion of “regret” invoked above finds its

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foothold at all, this reveals something that is flagged again plainly in the distinction between the different types of wonder to which our will can be drawn; and this is that we may have conflicting wills or desires, one of which may habitually fail of its object and may have to be held up as a higher desire or normative ideal. It is a normative element indeed that, reaching back to our recent articulation of this regret, we may rediscover within several elements of our phrasing, in the contrast between “dazzling” and “dimming,” in the pejorative tones of “unthinkingly” and “indifferently,” and in the contrast between “conscious” and “unreflective” which makes of the latter a term of disapproval and of the former a term of high praise; as we discover it again in the language of “really” and “truly” that tracked the boundaries between different notions of seeing at several moments of our discussion. To wonder: to be dazzled by seeing, to truly remark, to be alive in the consciousness of what stands before our eyes; to see, to really see. Marked in these notions, we may say, is wonder’s status as a mode of attentiveness whose higher status as an ideal speaks to our yearning for a way of being or way of living shaped by an intense aliveness to the world. It is this picture of visceral aliveness that we may recognize in the portrait of Zorba that Kazantzakis places before us, and as an element that accounts for its magnetic appeal. This aliveness attracts Kazantzakis’s/ the narrator’s reverence by presenting itself as the redemptive contrary of his writer’s self-­conscious reflectivity, the reflectivity of one who writes and does not live, who thinks and does not fully experience, and who when seeking to depict the life of one who lives, must fear the inherent danger of disfiguring his subject.52 It is an ideal we may rarely embody; but we may be able to acknowledge its force sufficiently to mark it out, not merely as an object of contingent passionate attraction, but as an excellence to be defended or commended—to resume the terms of our stage setting—as a valued way of seeing and being that should be more permanently our own. And having thawed this frozen ground to locate the claims of wonder in the mode of being it opens up for its subject, it may now also be possible to turn back to the claim we had initially sought to locate in its objects, for a thicker ethical reprise. For when we suddenly notice with pain that, hurrying onward to our next end, we have been making our way through the world oblivious of the world, failing to see the tree-­ lined road we walk on, the glittering sky above our heads, the beauty of the snow-­brilliant scene that surrounds us, so that even the companion who walks beside us has become a phantom figure with whom our

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rushed words are filtered through the mist of our preoccupations—is this a sense of shame at our sightless gaze and the ghostliness of its objects that registers nothing of the claims of the world that surrounds us? It is a sense of shame that returns us to a tension with far-­reaching significance for our understanding of wonder which formed a critical theme of our preceding discussion (“PRODUCES”), when we located wonder within a contrast between the aesthetic and the practical stance, or what we also called the relationship of “use.” The practical counterpoised to the aesthetic; the interested to the disinterested—a tension between an inward-­looking state of absorption in the cares of the self and an outward-­looking openness to what lies outside us that has profound effects on the way the world presents itself to our gaze. For “by opening our eyes,” as Iris Murdoch writes, “we do not necessarily see what confronts us. We are anxiety-­ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-­preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.”53 Yet this tension, as Murdoch makes clear, and the visual acts in which it plays itself out, is one whose significance stands to be told not in narrowly aesthetic, but also in larger ethical terms, in doing so revealing where the demands of art and morality meet. For in both cases, and whether what we are looking at is a person in need or a natural object, “a human being or the root of a tree,” the quality of “detached, unselfish, objective attention” runs against the natural grain of our self-­concern and requires discipline to be achieved—a discipline that shows realism to be a “moral achievement,” and that conversely prompts Murdoch to characterize morality as a “form of realism.”54 It is an achievement of attention—a demand for the transcendence of the self-­directed gaze—that came into central view in our earlier account of wonder, and that we saw foregrounded most strongly within wonder’s aesthetic appropriations. In raising this demand, wonder thus demands a movement away from the self and an openness to what is other that embed it in thicker ethical relations which writers on the subject have often picked up on. For there is a “close affinity,” as Ronald Hepburn writes, “between the attitude of wonder itself—non-­exploitative, non-­ utilitarian—and attitudes that seek to affirm and respect other-­being.” An affinity with gentleness, and with compassion, for living beings whose otherness wonder acknowledges (Nussbaum: “When I see with compassion the beating of an animal, a wonder at the complex living thing itself is likely to be mixed with my compassion”).55 An affinity with humility, which had been present in one of our earliest interpretations

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of wonder’s naturally expressive face (Frijda), registering as a picture of openness and receptivity that seemed to resemble nothing more than the artless vulnerability of a child. And yet to these ethical specifications one would wish to add another, which can be counted, not merely among wonder’s affinities or associations, but as a moralized inflection of wonder itself, one that retrieves the notion of “claim” or “debt” we distanced ourselves from above, to instate it on new terms. For on the one hand, what the sense of shame picked out above betrays, it may now be said, is a discomfort that, unpacked more fully, contains an acknowledgment that our wonder at the world that surrounds us may have a normative force rather more binding than that of a freely bestowed gift. To confront the phenomena with the plenitude of sharp attention, to stand fully present before the world that surrounds us, fiercely open to its reality, ready to be surprised at the very fact that it stands before us at all—the ferocious act of sight that wonder exacts has the character and ethical force of a moment of self-­limitation, carrying the recognition that a vision of the world that exhausts itself in the vision of its utility is a vision that mortifies it by failing to mark that it does not exist for us, exclusively for our use and enjoyment, but precedes and outlives us and exists in its separate being, which demands to be honored as such. To “really see” objects or “truly remark” them—to strive to ensure that the gaze we settle on them is not always the sightless gaze of one who looks inward as he looks outward—is a mode of acknowledgment that honors their otherness, and, even if not an exclamation of value demanded by strict justice, an honor we owe.56 It is a stance of honor that we may not be able to maintain ourselves in every day as we go about the circuits of our practical lives, and may need to cultivate in disciplined forms if we are to inscribe it within our lives more securely. We might call this discipline: a spiritual exercise, or a form of askesis. Yet having uncovered the notions of “debt” and “demand” at this juncture, it might also be possible to press for an even stronger modification of their force. The stars at night have no claim over us that obliges us to face them with mute awe, we said above; the fact of life that stares back at us through the struggling eyes of the newborn infant has no claim over our mind. I owe no debt to the world that surrounds me, the solid ground on which I stand, the natural laws due to which I move; to the fact of language, to the fact of my own continuity, to the fact that these should have been my parents, to the fact that what we call human beings should have developed through the contingencies of evolutionary

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history and I should be standing on my two feet with everything that is between my ears. And yet—I owe no debt? For inscribed within this inventory of disavowals are many of the facts that supply my own existence with its basic preconditions, and constitute its possibility and its specific character. Recalled to such facts, I am recalled to what is not only other than me, but greater than me; to what I not only use but more fundamentally depend on, and to what, by the same token, transcends me. Such facts place me in contact with a sense of my indebtedness—the multiple forms of my contingency—whose wonder has the darker inflection of all encounters with what surpasses us. Stabilized, enshrined, rehearsed, it is a wondering acknowledgment of debt that we might call, more thickly if more precariously, an exercise of “piety” or “reverence,” and that we will make central to our lives if we grant that the contact it establishes must shape the self-­understanding against which we live.57 Wonder Judging Wonder: Sight as Self-­Knowledge

A wonder which, brought up against an interrogation of its value, first leaves us mute before the stoniness of its evaluative ground; which, probed further, points to a deeper significance bound up with our state as subjects and the demands to which objects may hold us, allowing us to anchor the will to wonder on stronger normative grounds. Yet there is something more, it may be said, that still stands to be elicited from this thawing ground—an element already present, on one reading, in the stance of darkened wonder with which Zorba faced the world of sun and sea, wine and cool water, that surrounded him; and one that points us back to an experience of wonder which came into sharp view at an earlier juncture of our narrative, and to which we must now return for a closer reading of its evaluative significance. Zorba’s wonder, Kazantzakis suggests to us, needs to be read as an expression of visceral life, as a celebration of visceral aliveness to which rational reflectivity has no access. Zorba does not reflect with the coldness of reason, Zorba stands passionately rooted in the sensory concreteness of the present; Zorba lives, Zorba experiences, Zorba is full-­blooded life itself—Zorba is man in his wholeness. Yet is there nothing, in this image of a man confronting the world, that speaks, not of wholeness, but of lack—indeed: that makes this lack an element of the wholeness that so moves us? For if Zorba’s gaze, as it confronts the world by a stepping-­back from its smaller print and then its grander print, does not

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reflectively question or quest, it is a questioning that is implicit in this moment of confrontation and in the tone of darker wonder—a wonder before mystery—with which it is laced, and that becomes explicit in Zorba’s ceaseless questions throughout: “Is there a God?” “Who the devil brings us onto this earth and who the devil takes us away?” “And, above all, why do people die?”58 The man confronting the world is a man confronting himself. In Zorba’s stance before the world there is no visible trace of effort, a fortiori none of a conquest of self; Zorba’s wondering glance spans what is great and what is mundane, the glass of water and wine as much as the earth and the sea; Zorba’s wonder joins terror to joy in more ambiguous ways. Yet put in the above terms, we can still allow Zorba’s wonder to recall us to a rather different and grander scene of wonder which eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century writers had made the subject of concerted meditation in articulating their accounts of the sublime. Man confronting the world, in the grander spectacles of crashing waves, high mountains, and starry skies that both invite and repulse confrontation, and as such require a conquest of will—man facing the world and in doing so turning to face himself. It was a wonder we earlier approached with a question about the notion of doing or activity it presupposes, bringing to view the reasons why it should demand an act with the higher intensity of a conquest. Yet in doing so, we may observe, we had simultaneously brought to view the reasons why this is a wonder we might will and aspire to—aspire to with sufficient force to conquer the elements of our being that oppose it. And these are reasons that we might again describe, reaching for the terms of our opening framework, in the cognitivist language of what our passions can “tell” (the emotions “tell us something about the world”), yet that now bring together an even more potent compound of judgments of value and judgments of fact. For it is explicitly as a moment of “telling” or “truth telling” that we might recount the passionate response to grandeur as articulated by the philosophers we surveyed (“PRODUCES”), and account for the value it carries. It is a moment of passionate telling that we might be surprised to find here given the negative view of the passions usually associated with these thinkers, not only with Kant—often taken to have sidelined the emotions as either hindrances to moral choice or nullifications of its moral character—or with Schopenhauer—for whom emotions were movements of the will and thus tied to suffering—but also with many of the ancient philosophers whose thought shadowed the Romantic

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sublime, such as the Stoics, who saw the passions as false judgments of value and principal causes of our suffering. Yet if Kant speaks of the sublime as a judgment, there is no doubt, as Robert Clewis observes, that the sublime is also, importantly, a feeling: “Remove the feeling, and you lose what is aesthetic about the experience of the sublime. Indeed, given Kant’s terms, without feeling a judgment could not be aesthetic at all.”59 And this is a feeling, as we already have reason to suspect, that is far from blind, and that is defined by—and derives its heightened meaningfulness from—its intelligible content.60 Confronted with spectacles of grandeur, the wonder that grips us is a passionate response that turns back to us as subjects to make us see ourselves with new eyes, transforming our evaluative vision and telling us something profoundly significant about ourselves and our relationship to the world that frames us. We are members of the natural world, natural phenomena subject to its laws; yet we are also members of a noumenal realm in which these laws are transcended, free to obey the moral laws our reason dictates and to disdain the value of sensible things for the higher dignity of our moral vocation. Schopenhauer’s account of the sublime can be recounted in similar terms; for here, too, the sublime signals a confrontation with the world that becomes a thrilling confrontation with our own nature. We are individuals that belong to the phenomenal world; but what we discover in the sublime is an identity that transcends our status as individuals, revealing us as creators of the world through our representation of it, who as such escape its power. In both cases, the sublime is a feeling that, unlike other forms of feeling, carries a value intimately linked with its power to tell. Mutatis mutandis, one could say the same for many of the ancient philosophers, whose transformative exercises, including the imaginative pursuit of a cosmic flight, were situated in a larger aspiration for a revolutionized seeing that would displace objects from ordinary human value-­laden vision to an “objective” or “physical” vision of which one could say: this is to see things as they really are. To see things as they really are, here, is to see them in their true value, or, to be more accurate, in the absence of the value judgments that ordinarily color our perception: to see them with wonderless eyes. But it is also, as with these philosophers of the sublime, to see ourselves with the eyes of a wonder whose judgment of “grandeur” on us is linked to a judgment of fact about our true nature, identifying us with the rational element within us that makes such self-­transcending exercises possible, and that is continuous with the divine.

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To see: to see things as they really are—a truth-­telling moment calculated to leave nothing untouched. For already in the eye-­opening moment of the sublime as Kant and Schopenhauer understand it, this is a wondering apprehension that places us in relationship with the aspect of ourselves of which it tells and as such cannot but leave us transformed. This transformative aspect registers more openly in the ancient roots of this scene, given the stronger ethical and spiritual aims structuring ancient philosophical practice. Knowledge must transform; the seeing that places us in relationship with the higher aspect of our being must be a contact that comes close enough to lend the aesthetics of vision all the viscerality of the aesthetics of touch. This is a wonder that must perform its truth in the telling, and the question “Why wonder?” is one whose answer could be grounded both in what wonder truthfully tells and in the way this telling transforms us. And yet to put the answer in these terms is finally to bring ourselves up against a question that had haunted the margins of our earlier discussion of the sublime at several moments—a question that can be parsed as an interrogation, both of the notion of “truth” just invoked, and of the quality of the ethical transformation it effects in us. Raised as a question of truth, it thematizes a scruple about the sublime that concerns its historicity. For the historicity of the sublime, on the one hand, is implicit in its very emergence as a culturally salient experience from the seventeenth and especially eighteenth century onward, against a background of intellectual developments that, while rooted in an older literary tradition, opened up new experiential possibilities that made the grandeur of nature the object of awed aesthetic response. Yet in this context, it is less the contingency of its historical emergence as an experience, than the contingency of its reflective historical articulations at the hands of prominent exponents such as Kant and Schopenhauer that would seem to pose the deeper concern—a concern that would lead us to query the value of this experience by querying the substantive philosophical claims which, on these analyses, underpin it. For readers of Kant and Schopenhauer cannot fail to note that the climactic moment of wonder which turns away from the world to take oneself as its object is theorized by both philosophers in terms that are thick with substantive philosophical commitments: to a particular understanding of our status as self-­legislating rational agents participating in the domain of noumenal freedom (Kant); to a specific understanding of our status as world-­creating subjects of knowledge whose inner nature is will (Schopenhauer). These are philosophical commitments,

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commentators have sometimes argued, that betray themselves loudly in the incoherencies they introduce into their accounts.61 And if the commitments of these later articulators of the sublime stand out clearly to view, they do so equally for their precursors in ancient philosophy, whose thick metaphysical postulates—the belief in a realm of superhuman Forms constituting the object of the wondering vision achieved in contemplative ascent (Plato); in a realm of universal reason accessed through acts of cosmic aviation that transport one to higher moral ground (Stoics) —seem no less questionable to us than the thinner yet still substantial postulate concerning our own nature they contain: the conviction that these acts of intellectual and moral transcendence provide a testimony to, and place us in contact with, the element of the divine that is alive within us as it is alive without. Such philosophical postulates serve not only to constitute the experience—notably accounting for the emotional transitions of pain and pleasure, humiliation and exultation, that define the sublime, as we earlier saw—but also to support its value. Shorn of its metaphysical baggage, it would seem that little of its value could remain. This philosophical misgiving can be joined to a misgiving which, while not unrelated to the first, this time problematizes the ethical quality of the experience such philosophical commitments serve to constitute. It is a problematization, importantly, that recalls us to a central woof of our preceding discussion, when the value of wonder as a passion of inquiry came into focus and we outlined some of the besetting ethical difficulties with which the wonder of inquiry has been fraught. The needs of the self are often thematized within inquiry, we said, and often present it with special ethical dangers, registering in the quality of the discomfort which the questioning of our intellectual order provokes in us, and in the quality of the pleasure which its reestablishment produces. This drama of self-­evaluation was laid plain with particular potency— and made accessible to a more discriminating ethical characterization— in Smith’s depiction of the terminus of intellectual inquiry as a pleasured wonder at the order of nature that turns back to become a wonder at the mind and its ordering powers. Wonder’s spooking flaw appears again, now addressing itself to wonder in its capacity as a passion of aesthetic response. And it appears, after all, in a spot that had already been prepared for it by our own analysis (“PRODUCES”), which had thematized the character of the sublime as a dialectic of self-­esteem, and as a displacement of value that divests the overawing external spectacles of their value to reinvest this value in the subject that contemplates them, and that turns back to contemplate

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itself with thrill. It is not the world that is great; it is the subject that has the power to overcome it. This thrill of grandeur invites a critical question about the place of mastery in this experience of wonder that we will thus recognize. It is a critical worry, we may observe, that Heidegger had openly voiced when framing his own approach to wonder as we earlier adumbrated it (“DELIGHT”). Heidegger’s approach, as we saw, found its context in a larger preoccupation with our irrepressible drive to mastery which expressed itself in a seminal critique of traditional metaphysics: hostage to the subject-­object representational-­calculative mode of confronting beings and the manipulative stance to which it is linked, this metaphysics fails to remark the ground, the fact of Being, on which it stands. And this critique, crucially, was conjoined to a critique of competing ways in which wonder might be understood, and had so been understood in the past. Included in this critical survey was a form of wonder designated by the term “admiration” or Bewunderung that had been tightly linked with the sublime in some of its most important philosophical articulations, including Kant’s. The dismissal of this mode of wonder might seem surprising on first sight, given the elements Heidegger’s truer wonder shares with it—not only the darkness of its tincture, but also its preoccupation with transcending the interested perspective of practical action for which the will to mastery seems but a broader name, and which the philosophers of the sublime we have considered rejected doubly in specifying that the sublime arose, not only in the absence of interest, but in open conflict with it. Yet it is the same troubled attitudes—of “self-­a ffirmation,” of “self-­mastery,” of “comprehension,”—that Heidegger claims to detect in this wonder.62 Heidegger himself offers a particular way of reading the grounds of his charge: for admiration, he writes, “always involves a certain freedom over and against what is admired,” which is expressed in its claiming “the right and the capacity to perform the evaluation which resides in the admiration and to bestow it.”63 Yet with the sublime more clearly in view, it may now be easy to see how this criticism might find its target more directly. For faced with crashing waves and thundering skies, the drama unfolding in the observer is one that, as we saw, involves a double movement: a movement down or away, recoiling before the apprehension of one’s vulnerability, and a rebounding movement upward, in triumph—a double movement which marks out this drama as one that has a power struggle as its core and that terminates in a moment of mastery and a

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thrill of grandeur directed to oneself under the highest aspect of one’s being. And while it is the lower aspects of one’s being that have often imparted to the notion of “interest” its most immediate meaning, the pleasure in which the sublime terminates points to a wider notion of interests or needs that will not be unfamiliar to us at this stage. The content of the “self ” may have shifted; but its exulting “affirmation” remains. This is an affirmation whose troubling character is brought out even more starkly, and in terms that Heidegger himself would have commended, by recent critics of the sublime, who have picked up on the ethically problematic relationship to nature it entails. For within the terms of these analyses of the sublime, it has been said, nature is degraded to the status of a mere “means to our own self-­discovery” and to the revelation of the higher glories of our soul. Nature (to rephrase only slightly) becomes a mere instrument for our use. The sublime, from this perspective, seems too humanistic, too “self-­regarding” and “egotistical,” to attract us ethically as an aesthetic response.64 It is a critique that can be mapped onto a larger story that stands to be told about wonder’s historical vicissitudes, in which the transcendental subject central to both Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s accounts of the sublime forms a key point of transition. For the story of wonder, as this has been recently told, is not so much one of eclipse as of displacement, like the many displacements with which wonder’s history has been marked—quite as if the wonder in the world can never be lost and can only be redirected to new objects of fascination. And at the last junction of this wending history, it was wonder’s turn to turn more decisively inward, when the reverence attracted by the gods or by God, having first been drained into the cosmos, was then drained into the human soul whose different powers of mastery and self-­mastery the philosophical sublime celebrated, and whose powers of determination and self-­ determination have not ceased—under different philosophical guises and in different permutations—to be acclaimed ever since.65 Taken as a transcendental power of world-­creating—one finding its emblematic expression in Schopenhauer’s “The world is my representation,” which masters the world by revealing it in its dependence on the human gaze— this is an assertion of power whose godlike aspect would be brought out by several post-­Kantian idealists, joined to a glee voiced with special clarity by Fichte when speaking of the “full feeling . . . of absolute self-­ sufficiency” which “enables him to ‘look down with . . . disrespect’ on the ‘spiritual servitude’ of the ‘dogmatist’ who still requires the crutch of a world separate from one’s activity of constructing the world.”66

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It is a sense of self-­divinizing glee that would appear to be preserved in the sublime, uneducated by the type of admonition against our “cosmonautic desire to soar above the merely human” which Wittgenstein would be among several later thinkers to press, tempering the taste for transcendence with a recognition of the dependencies that make for descent. And with it, it would preserve a charge of hubris which these godlike conceptions have often attracted, and against which Heidegger’s critique of excess self-­a ffirmation can also be suggestively read. In the rarefied heights of the sublime, one breathed an air that mixed itself dangerously with the air of the gods—an air that may after all seem to bind the sublime of later philosophy to its ancient philosophical precursors with tighter chains of continuity. And this should force us to seriously question whether a breath drawn from such regions is one we should wish to deeply inhale, and whether the transformation this wonder effects or performs is one we should welcome. Chains of tight continuity? Yet here, we might pause for some finer discriminations. For while there is much to make the moment of high thrill articulated by Kant and Schopenhauer commune with the thrill pervasive in ancient philosophy which, as suggested earlier, shadowed it, there is also much to divide these experiences of thrill—not only across the long stretches of philosophical history, but even among intellectual coevals. The wonder placed at the heart of Schopenhauer’s articulation of our encounter with grandeur, certainly—a wonder that turns back to the subject to thrill at its representational conquest of the world—is not a wonder that shares everything, for all its contemporaneity, with the wonder at the heart of Kant’s. This latter is a wonder that turns back to the subject, to be sure; yet a wonder that redounds to the subject not insofar as it conquers the world, but insofar as it conquers itself; and one that shows the subject conquering itself for the sake of something that, even though legislated by the subject and grounding its greatness (its dignity), is bowed to as a commanding object of grandeur. For Kant may speak of the “sublimity” of human nature; yet this, as Melissa Merritt points out, refers us to the “sublimity of our moral vocation” and to our capacity for “looking up to an ideal of perfect rationality and making the approximation of that ideal one’s end.”67 Drawing a distinction we marked at the same juncture when discussing the question of pride within scientific inquiry, in fact, we would say that any sense of grandeur we experience here attaches to us, not as individuals competing for superior stakes of esteem—in which status “we have reason to have but a low opinion of ourselves”—but as “representatives of mankind.”68

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Something similar could be said about the sense of grandeur at work within the ancient context. For if the great-­souled man acknowledges nothing in the external world to be “great” and judges the human soul to be the truly “great and noble thing,” in Seneca’s words, his greatness lies in his moral (as also intellectual) virtue, making his own grandeur derivative from the grandeur of the higher excellence in which he shares, and embedding the recognition of a grandeur other than his own in the structures of his evaluative understanding. It is a moral grandeur that, on some ancient views, properly belongs to the gods, whom human beings strive to imitate when they strive for the acquisition of virtue. To escape from the earthly, in the influential phrasing of the Theaetetus (176a-­b), is “to become like God, so far as this is possible”; and to become like God is to “become righteous and holy and wise.”69 To be placed in touch with our divinity is thus to be put in touch with something that transcends us; and if it affirms us, it does so by pointing to what is superior to us. Even this mode of self-­a ffirmation, it is true, would come under criticism later in philosophical history, with the Christian appropriation of the ancient legacy, as a form of pride in need of education toward a truer spirit of humility and a deeper acknowledgment of our debts.70 Yet with these distinctions and ethical possibilities newly carved out, we are now in a better position to turn back to the thread of our questioning. A wonder that tells, we said, and that transforms us in the telling; and then we paused to interrogate the truthfulness of wonder’s telling, and the ethical soundness of the transformation it effects. There is room, the above suggests, for more than one way of conceiving this transformative effect. Yet in doing so, it throws us back to the question we had parsed as a problem of substantive philosophical commitments and dubious reflective articulations, and which we can parse again as the question whether the experience at stake can still be isolated once this metaphysical baggage is subtracted from it; or again, whether the experience of the sublime, minus the baggage, and even minus the vocabulary, is still open to us in any sense and retains a meaning that makes it worth dwelling on. For the vocabulary of the “sublime” has after all loosened its hold on our linguistic habits—even the habits of the more sophisticated, who, unlike Kant’s Savoyard peasant, might have used this vocabulary to express their aesthetic responses—and has receded to a region of our language that makes it unnatural for us to reach for it when confronted with the kind of spectacles that had made our eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century forbears shudder. Yet is this a type of shudder whose possibility, along with the passing of this language, has also closed? For on the

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one hand, the same spectacles that breathed awe into Kant and Schopenhauer and their historical predecessors and immediate successors— nature that towers; that thunders; that pummels down; that stretches endlessly above our heads—are spectacles that, whatever the historical circumstances that first enabled them to do so, still speak to us, even if many of us encounter them but rarely, and even if we no longer have a philosophy and considered account of their significance that might lead us to seek them out. And they speak to us in a language that our predecessors would also have recognized, dwarfing us to unsettle us, to unnerve us, to make us shudder—and to make us shiver with something rather more finely thrilling. A shiver, standing beneath the nighttime sky, reflectively thickened into a representation of the larger cosmos that surrounds us—how to tell it and recount it? It is a question like this one that Malcolm Budd, discussing Kant’s problematic theoretical articulation of the sublime, addresses when he asks how the “invigorating, pleasurable effect of the experience of vastness or overwhelming power” might be explained once we subtract its contestable philosophical interpretations—a question, of course, that implies that the experience can be identified independently of such theori­za­tions. This pleasurable effect, he suggests, is bound up with “the disruption of our ordinary sense of self ”—the “sudden shock of a change of vision.” With the sudden dropping away, when confronted by the magnitude or power of nature, of our everyday sense of the importance of our self and its numerous concerns and projects, or of our normal sense of the security of our body from external natural forces, the heightened awareness of our manifest vulnerability and insignificance in the natural world counteracting our normal self-­centredness, in the experience of the sublime the disappearance of our preoccupation with and concern for self is, after the initial shock, experienced with pleasure.71 A suspension of our sense of self—yet would this be to say that the self been entirely eclipsed from this scene? And this is to ask: Can the pleasure this scene provokes in us be told in terms that entirely elide it? They are terms in which we might not, it must be conceded, always be equally prepared to tell it; and whether we do so may depend on the kind of journeys of individual reflective formation that trace out detailed histories for our passionate responses and the judgments that

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ground them, and in doing so determine how we can account for them— passionate histories in which the disciplining and reeducation of our attention will play a crucial role. For standing beneath the nighttime sky, standing before the storming seas, the trajectory of shock and pleasure marked by Budd flags an event so trivial as to almost escape notice: a disappearance of preoccupation that Budd’s construction parses passively as a “dropping away” from our everyday sense of self and our sense of what is important, but that we can also parse more actively as a stepping back from our ordinary frames of reference—a step away from our ordinary sense of self that nevertheless does not step beyond the self altogether but merely points to the larger surface that constitutes it. For the surface of the self that gives this visual confrontation its traction is a basic capacity to draw away from what is nearest and bring what is farthest to view, which even within this scene exhibits itself in a multiplicity of ways. If, standing under the nighttime sky, I can be brought to a thrill of wonder, this possibility owes itself to the way I can reflectively thicken spots of light into distant stars, and thicken the stars into a cosmos extending backward and forward in time, in doing so calling on a long history of attentive remarking by human observers before me in which familiar pinpricks of light were seen and seen anew to be interpreted. It owes itself to my ability to thicken the sky into a sense of the whole which I can then step away from—sometimes, on extraordinary occasions perhaps, occasions enshrined in another history of disciplined remarking—to ask how it came it to be, and then in the next breath, to call my gaze back to myself to ask how I relate to it and what this means for the way I lead my life; to my ability to relocate myself against a broader vista which leaves my ordinary projects and self-­conceptions behind, and when it returns me to them has brought them into question. I confront the sky as a being whose standing is constituted by an awareness of where it stands, which opens its stance to question and drives it to ask how it ought to live in light of the broader standpoints it commands. And this is a question in which its own self-­understanding as a being capable of such acts of stepping back and stepping out must occupy a central place, though it will take yet another step back, and now a turn of the gaze inward, for this identity to come into view and enter into the judgments that constitute my wonder and the ways I tell or recount it. It is a confrontation with the environing world that we might no longer be able to call to a close with an assured thrill; that may raise more questions than it answers; and that may, in this respect, be more akin to Zorba’s vulnerable way of standing before the world and to the

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sense of lack it expressed than that of his philosophical forbears’. Yet having been called to this confrontation to have my outbound gaze directed back to myself to make me wonder at what I am, the gaze I then return outward will be thickened with a self-­understanding that can at least deepen the space of questioning I inhabit; and that may even extend a firmer ground beneath my feet that makes it easier for me to maintain myself within its sense of lack. And does it after all matter whether we stand under the nighttime sky or before the sunlit Cretan sea? Under the nighttime sky in the open of nature, or under our own roofs within the enclosed quiet of our rooms? Eyes roving over the walls, across the ceiling, scaling the roof, to thicken my surroundings into a whole that can be held at arm’s length— that things are, I say to myself: how remarkable. I look around, and the room seems more real than before. (Was this what Sartre-­Roquentin was experiencing when nausea overtook him?) But then, the next moment: how remarkable, that such wonder should be possible, that I should be able to think my way outside what is, to what is not and to what might have been. How remarkable, what I can do. That I am a being capable of wondering: a capacity I count and re-­count as I try to account for what this wonder tells and why it strikes like a sense of ground against me. And if this is a ground beneath and not identical with the one that had earlier seemed to strike wordlessly against our spade—to see, to remark, to experience—it is because it delivers us, not to experience, but to a place outside it; not only to what we are conscious of, but to ourselves as conscious beings, and to a self-­understanding. This—to reach for terms that return us to the sublime and its constitutive structures—is a wonder that tells us who we are, and provokes us to wonder by relating us to our own being.72 How might the sublime, we asked, emptied of its metaphysical baggage, retain its significance and indeed its identity? Yet let us here at last push this exercise of metaphysical subtraction to its farthermost limits: for if we peel away the thicker ways in which the “higher” aspect of our being had been theorized within the sublime in its different embodiments, ancient and modern, moral and epistemic—if we peel away the ancient philosophers’ divine reason, put aside Kant’s noumenal subject and even Schopenhauer’s world-­creating subject of representation—then what the different forms of ascent or transcendence that had typified it could be said to participate in and reflect is a human capacity as ordinary or extraordinary as what, feebly echoing Sartre (“PRODUCES”), we might describe as our basic ability as conscious beings to step back

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from what is given—to detach ourselves from the different elements of our world and our own being—to relate to it on new terms. A basic, an almost threadbare self-­description; yet one thick enough to surprise us with a sense of discovery, for it is something that in the hurly-­burly of our practical lives and under the glare of our particular identities we are apt to remain absent to even though it forms the basis of everything we think or do or say, so that, made present to it, it can open up the sublimity of the most mundane. One may doubt whether the scene of this wonder, like the scene of any other wonder, is one from which the needs of the self could be wholly excluded, and in which the need for affirmation could have no play; and one may doubt whether, to the extent that what this wonder’s telling picks out is an aspect of ourselves parsed through the positive notions of a “capacity” or an “ability,” this sense of wonder could be entirely free from a positive texture akin to a masterful thrill. What may be important to remark, however, is that the wonder that confronts us with our own reflection as we last described it, is a wonder in which willing, and the concern with notions of mastery, pride, and self-­possession, will have a very special bearing. For a wonder directed to oneself under one’s aspect as a being capable of wonder is a wonder directed to oneself under an aspect of one’s being that is not of one’s own doing, and in this respect, relates one to the otherness with which one’s being is shot through. A capacity for wonder is not one we master or author or possess. Like the will to wonder, it possesses us—though like all possessions, it can be left derelict or lost, and may require active exercise or nurture or practice to flourish. Yet even where wonder opens itself to active nurture or practice—to what Heidegger would more suspiciously call an attitude of techne toward our own being—this is a doing perpetually resting on foundations as opaque to us as those which govern the individual journeys of formation and detailed histories that bring such disciplined practices of wonder into our reach, and which reveal us once again, not in our transcendence, but in the dependencies that make for descent.73 Seen in this light, wonder may be seen again. How remarkable, what I can do: it is the irruption of what we may allow ourselves to call “mystery” within our being, the dapple of something darker within the daylight of the everyday uses to which the soul is put, which leave the soul unnoticed; one that thrusts the foreign into the familiar and makes the familiar strange, bringing a “surprise of the soul” that surprises the soul with itself, in a self-­discovery that, being less certain of its meaning and

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so light as to be almost inconsequential, may lead a longer life than that other self-­discovery (“I think”) whose formulation forms Descartes’s better-­k nown bequest. For nothing strictly follows from the wonder of “I wonder.” Except, perhaps, the non sequitur of a hope that all mysteriousness carries as its more luminous underbelly, and that despite its featherweight grip, may be able to carve a space open within us to make us wonder about our origins and ends and about the meaning our wonder carries, enough to return us to the point from which we started and which we spend our lives seeking to more insightfully regain: the artless openness and humble receptivity of a child, willing and unashamed to avow: “I wonder.”

Notes

Introduction 1. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 55. WONDER: An Emotion Unlike Others?

1. Mary-­Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 3. Cf. John Sallis’s remarks in “‘. . . A Wonder That One Could Never Aspire to Surpass,’” in The Path of Archaic Thinking: Unfolding the Work of John Sallis, ed. K. Maly (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 255. 2. This neglect is foregrounded in Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman’s discussion of wonder in chapter 23 of their Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), where they consider it under the rubric of “strengths of transcendence” together with a family of attitudes that include awe, admiration, and elevation and are involved in the appreciation of beauty and excellence—an account that the authors signal is still rife with unknowns. This neglect is also a theme in Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt’s “Approaching Awe, A Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion,” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2003), and likewise in Robert C. Fuller’s Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). These are among a small handful of recent works to attempt to directly explore wonder and its emotional field. 3. As pointed out by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables,” in Handbook of Emotions, 3rd Edition, ed. M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-­Jones, and L. F. Barrett (New York and London: Guilford Press, 2008), 115. 4. Fuller, Wonder, 11. 221

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5. For a helpful overview of different accounts of basic emotions, see the tabulation provided in Andrew Ortony and and Terence J. Turner, “What’s Basic About Basic Emotions?” Psychological Review 97 (1990): 316. Yet as Paul Ekman’s reply to Ortony and Turner suggests, a great deal turns on how one construes the scope of a given emotion. Ekman’s complaint that Ortony and Turner have exaggerated the degree of disagreement among researchers about the identity of basic emotions (“Are There Basic Emotions?” Psychological Review 99 [1992]: 550) implies that apparently divergent emotion words are rather to be read in terms of the larger categories to which they belong. This is a point he had already picked out as an important conceptual concern in his key piece (with W. Friesen and P. Ellsworth), “What Emotion Categories or Dimensions Can Observers Judge from Facial Behavior?” in Emotion in the Human Face, ed. P. Ekman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd ed.), where, having identified the main emotion categories emerging from the work of previous researchers, he had raised a question about how the “boundaries and inclusion rules for defining each category” should be determined (44–45); and his conclusion that happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust/contempt, and interest emerge from this work as recurrent emotion categories had implicitly involved grouping divergent individual emotions under these broader categories—including, significantly for our purposes, amazement, bewilderment, or awe, which had appeared in the research Ekman drew upon, and which seem to have been homogenized under the category of surprise. 6. Keltner and Haidt, “Approaching Awe,” 301–302. Yet compare Michelle N. Shiota, Belinda Campos, and Dacher Keltner, “The Faces of Positive Emotion: Prototype Displays of Awe, Amusement, and Pride,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1000 (2003), where a case is made in favor of a distinctive expression. What is partly at issue of course is what counts as an adequate or legitimate scientific method for establishing the distinctive expressive profile of a given emotion. A helpful overview of recent views on the topic is provided by David Matsumoto et al., “Facial Expressions of Emotion,” in Handbook of Emotions, 3rd Edition, ed. Lewis, Haviland-­Jones, and Barrett. 7. In Frijda’s brief discussion (The Emotions [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1986], 18–19), amazement, surprise, and wonder appear to shade into one another without distinction. A similar disregard of such distinctions is reflected in John Onians’s discussion in “‘I Wonder . . .’: A Short History of Amazement,” in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honor of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. J. Onians (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), which is notable for its concern to approach wonder in naturalistic terms, as a phenomenon whose history must be written as a “natural history” (11). The case of McDougall is more complex, for while he opens his discussion in his Introduction to Social Psychology (30th ed., London: Methuen, 1950) with the caveat that science may need to do violence to words in adapting them to scientific usage (41)—a caveat then borne out by

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the revisionary proposal that construes curiosity as an instinct, and wonder as the emotion that corresponds to this instinct—he is also careful to indicate the points where his account departs from common usage (see e.g., 49–50, discussing the relationship between wonder and curiosity). 8. See Jon Elster, “Emotion and Action,” in Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. R. C. Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), for a succinct account of the action tendencies of emotions that bears an open debt to Frijda’s work. The distinction between actions and expressive behavior (such as facial or bodily expression) which was implied in the above is, after all, a relatively tenuous one, as Frijda suggests in Emotions, 11–12. 9. Frijda, Emotions, 18–19. 10. For a brief statement of this view formulated in these terms, see Peter Goldie, “Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World,” in Thinking about Feeling, ed. Solomon. 11. See generally Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), ch. 1, for an outline of her view. And while Nussbaum articulates this view in a philosophical context, she considers it to be fundamentally in accord with cognitivist views of emotions as articulated by contemporary psychologists, such as Richard Lazarus, Keith Oatley, and Andrew Ortony—see esp. ibid., 106–13. 12. Ibid., 54–55. 13. Ibid., 26. 14. Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 112. 15. There is, of course, something too swift in the above; for what we experience as uncontrollable is after all not inscribed in the nature of things—of our passions or desires, physical or psychological—but partly depends on judgments of value concerning what is proper or appropriate, too little or too much, and in need of control. And as we will see in the next chapter (“DELIGHT”), despite the exceptional place that wonder has often occupied among the passions, there have been moments in its history when it has indeed been understood as a passion that strikes more than it ought, just as there are moments in our own present (see “OBJECT”) that invite us to approach wonder as a passion whose striking can be governed well or badly. 16. This is suggested in Upheavals of Thought, 55. 17. Goldie, “Emotion, Feeling, and Knowledge of the World,” 99. 18. In search for something that could be more easily dignified with words, and with the status of a judgment, I was earlier drawn to a proposal that would account for the judgment of wonder in modal terms. To wonder at x, on these terms, would involve the judgment “it was possible for x not to have existed”— though if my discussion in the main text is sound, this judgment would have to be complemented by a positive judgment of value for x. This proposal would dovetail interestingly with Nussbaum’s analysis of the emotions, which also implicitly

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incorporates a modal element: for if emotions are often directed to entities or states of affairs under the perception of their vulnerability and our lack of control over them (Upheavals of Thought, 42–43) and thus under the perception that they are subject to change or might be/have been different than what they in fact are, this introduces a crucial modal dimension into the emotions. But this analysis seems too rigid taken as an account of all varieties of wonder, whose diversity Ronald W. Hepburn instructively calls attention to in his essay “Wonder,” in “Wonder” and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984). 19. Richard S. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 295. 20. René Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 349–50 (art. 52 and 53). 21. Quote from ibid., 353 (art. 71). 22. See ibid., 354–56 (art. 73–78). Descartes, to be sure, attaches a crucial positive value to wonder taken as a motivation to knowledge, in line with a long philosophical tradition. Yet this stance is not free from ambivalence, as often foregrounded in discussions of Descartes’s view of wonder; see e.g., Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-­Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), esp. 187–91, and Deborah J. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. 6. See also the discussion in the next chapter, “DELIGHT.” 23. Robert C. Solomon, “The Logic of Emotion,” Noûs 11 (1977): 41. 24. For my understanding of this distinction I am indebted to a comment paper presented by Brad Inwood at the conference “A Sense of Wonder: Cross-­ Disciplinary Perspectives” (Cambridge 2008). Inwood gives context to the second, positive type of wonder in his account of the status of physics in Stoic philosophy, “Why Physics?” in God and Cosmos in Stoicism, ed. R. Salles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). This distinction (or tension) mirrors the one found in Aristotle, given Aristotle’s apparent depreciation of wonder in the Nicomachean Ethics (describing the great-­souled man: oude thaumastikos, 1125a1– 5), and his embrace of wonder as the stimulus of philosophical inquiry in the Metaphysics. There will be more to say about both types of wonder—as well as about a further type of positive wonder to which they are tied—in later chapters; as there will be more to say about wonder’s exemption from the attitude of distrust directed to other emotions (see especially “OBJECT”). 25. I draw on Critique of Practical Reason, ed. and trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), with a slight modification. 26. Peter M. S. Hacker, “The Conceptual Framework for the Investigation of Emotions,” in Emotions and Understanding: Wittgensteinian Perspectives, ed. Y. Gustafsson, C. Kronqvist, and M. McEachrane (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 50; my above remarks lean on Hacker’s discussion. The point about hope and regret is brought out by Wittgenstein in different parts of his

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work, and is associated with a related point about their lack of characteristic expression. Wittgenstein himself outlines several aspects of the concept of emotion in his psychological writings, focusing on their possession of duration, their possession of characteristic expression and their lack of localization; several of these aspects are reflected in my next remarks about wonder’s status as a passion. Joachim Schulte provides an overview of Wittgenstein’s account of the concept in “Wittgenstein on Emotion,” in Emotions and Understanding, ed. Gustafsson, Kronqvist, and McEachrane, while arguing that Wittgenstein later moved away from this unitary position. 27. Returning to another of wonder’s seemingly orthogonal features, in fact, its intractability to evolutionary rationale, it is this basic motion—an impulse of approach and engagement that can take a variety of higher forms—that may also enable us to account for wonder’s adaptive significance. On a proposal outlined by Robert Fuller, this significance can be tied to wonder’s character as a response to stimuli that disrupt our cognitive structures and drive us to accommodate our minds anew to the world. In enlarging our field of perception and opening our attention to a wider field of stimuli, wonder encourages engagement with the world and provokes new forms of higher-­order intellectual accommodation— though even so, Fuller argues, wonder may constitute an evolutionary byproduct rather than an adaptation. See the discussion in Fuller, Wonder, and see also his “From Biology to Spirituality: The Emotional Dynamics of Wonder,” in Practices of Wonder: Cross-­Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. S. Vasalou (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2012). Another evolutionary account, articulated by Keltner and Haidt, focuses more specifically on awe rather than wonder and builds on the social effects of awe, and more specifically its role in solidifying social hierarchies. See their “Approaching Awe”; and cf. Onians’s related discussion in “‘I wonder . . .’” 28. Hacker suggests that reactions such as astonishment, surprise, shock, horror, among others, should be classed as “agitations” rather than emotions proper, constituting “short-­term affective disturbances, typically caused by something unexpected,” which as such “are not motives for action as emotions may be, but temporarily inhibit motivated action” (Hacker, “The Conceptual Framework,” 46). Hacker does not mention wonder, but he may well have placed it in the same class. I am not convinced about the durability of this distinction, or about the narrow notion of motivation it invokes; the important motivational role that has often been ascribed to wonder in connection with intellectual inquiry, certainly, could scarcely be accommodated in Hacker’s terms. The same holds of wonder’s status (to be discussed in later chapters) as a response to things other than the unexpected, which may occupy a more stable place in our lives. In any case, these are categorial distinctions that I do not believe it would serve my discussion to track, so I have kept my distance from them in what follows. 29. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, 20; Fisher is referring to Wittgenstein’s remarks in The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 127–30.

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30. Brown, Descartes and the Passionate Mind, 147. Indeed, Descartes’s fuller view would suggest that wonder not only lies at the historical root of our present, but forms an inalienable element of our present experience itself to the extent that it is presupposed by other passions (wonder “normally occurs in and augments almost all of ” the other passions: “The Passions of the Soul,” 353 [art. 72]). For a gloss on this, see Theo Verbeek, “Generosity,” in Emotional Minds: The Passions and the Limits of Pure Inquiry in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. S. Ebbersmeyer (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 20. 31. The important qualifier here is “in the first instance”; for as will be discussed in later chapters, wonder’s natural direction to the unfamiliar is not the only direction possible, just as the tenuous anchor wonder would naturally have in our lives can be strengthened in ways that give wonder a more stable presence within them. 32. PI = Philosophical Investigations, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte, 4th rev. ed. (Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009). PPF = Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment, included in the same work (formerly “Part II” of the PI). In citing the Investigations in what follows, I draw mostly on the revised 2009 translation, with a handful of exceptions in which I retain the phrasing of the 2001 version. 33. Hacker, “Conceptual Framework,” 51. 34. See respectively Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 94 and 107. 35. Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990), 63, and see 62 ff. for his broader discussion of the importance of context. 36. Quotes respectively from Cavell, Claim of Reason, 89, 111, 90, and for these themes, see generally chapter 5. See also Mulhall’s commentary on these themes in Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 114–22. 37. Wonder is an emotion “eschewed but also craved, wildly popular and markedly absent as a value, in discourses of power such as those of business, government, the sciences, and ‘rigorous’ scholarship”: Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 4. 38. See Hepburn, “Wonder.” In tracking the relationship of wonder to rational understanding and causal explanation, Hepburn outlines different kinds of wonder that include cases in which a cognitive element is clearly present—e.g., our lacking an explanation for a given phenomenon—but also others in which this element seems to be largely absent—for example, where wonder is the product of sensory impressions, as in our view of a vivid blue ocean or a dazzling sheet of mountain ice, where the object of our wonder is “not the genesis of the phenomenon . . . but the phenomenon itself ” (139).

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39. The quote is from David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-­Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 448; hereafter cited in the main text by initial and page number. Hume himself devotes a lot of attention to investigating the fluid boundaries between hope and fear in Book 2, section 6 of the Treatise. I am also taking my lights here from Nussbaum’s brief remarks in “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” in Thinking About Feeling, ed. Solomon, 185. 40. There is also the expression, “I wonder that . . .” to denote surprise (Jane Austen’s “I wonder that I should be tired” or Shakespeare’s “I wonder that you will still be talking”), which seems rather less frequently used at present. For a fuller overview of past and present usage of the term, see the entry “wonder” (v.) in the Oxford English Dictionary. 41. For more on this notion of “feeding” in relation to wonder, see Derek Matravers, “Wonder and Cognition,” in Practices of Wonder, ed. Vasalou. 42. Hepburn, “Wonder,” 136. I interpolate “always” because Hepburn’s context is rather more specific: he is speaking more narrowly of mathematical or logical truths, where the appropriateness of wonder would seem to come under even stronger challenge given the necessity with which these truths hold. 43. Hepburn also states it explicitly later in the essay: “To judge wonder appropriate does seem to presuppose value in its object, whether in the object itself intrinsically or as a condition for something else having value” (ibid., 142). 44. Cf. Fuller’s suggestion that wonder attaches, not merely to what is novel and unexpected, but within this category, to what strikes us as “especially powerful, real, true, and/or beautiful” (Wonder, 33). 45. “More neutral,” though it has in fact been questioned whether emotion could wholly lack an evaluative cadence. In Frijda’s words: “What is interesting about the emotion is the emotional. Feeling is not cognition, it is feeling—it is responding ‘yes’ or ‘no’” (Emotions, 5). Cf. Ortony and Turner, “Basic Emotions,” 317, in the interesting context of an argument against counting surprise as an emotion. 46. The terms “miracle” and “admiration” are connected to an Indo-­European word for “smile,” as noted by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park (Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 [New York: Zone Books, 1998], 16). The attitude of “passive submission” may of course appear to be in tension with the more positive movement toward picked up on here; there will be more to say about this tension in later chapters. 47. This account is obviously meant to be ecumenical, and to allow for the fact that the vocabulary of wonder may sometimes be employed in connection with objects bearing negative valence—as when we might say: “I wonder at his cheek,” or “I wonder at his imprudence.” In such cases, however, it is noteworthy that the negative state of affairs often seems to be such that it does not directly affect us, tying in with a common understanding of wonder’s “disinterestedness.” Cf. Howard L. Parsons’s remark that wonder “retains an element of

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detachment or ideation . . . a control of emotion that gives psychic distance to the event” (“A Philosophy of Wonder,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 [1969]: 87). McDougall’s discussion of related emotions such as curiosity, wonder, awe, and reverence (Social Psychology, 110–16)—which presents these as falling on a continuum and brings out their interrelationships while proposing markers for their individual seams—offers a helpful steering wheel in thinking about the topic. 48. This is to simplify things, of course; it ignores, for example, the ways in which our experience of an emotion—whether as pleasant or unpleasant—is affected by the judgment we place on that emotion. See the next chapter. 49. Fuller, “From Biology to Spirituality,” esp. 80 ff. It is a view shared by Matravers in “Wonder and Cognition”; and lest we think this assumption is confined to our own cultural experience, we should note that we also encounter it in the Indian understanding of wonder, as Michel Hulin’s discussion of Indian aesthetics attests (“The Conception of Camatkâra in Indian Aesthetics,” in Practices of Wonder, ed. Vasalou). This is similarly the presupposition of Alexander Rueger’s account of the changing place of wonder in the traditions of literary criticism from antiquity to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the same volume (“Literary Wonder in the Seventeenth Century and the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Experience’”)—though this account, as we will see, is directly linked to Daston and Park’s narrative context, and stands at the crossroads of some of the historical transformations they intend to chart. 50. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, 55. DELIGHT: Histories of Wonder between the Rainbow and the Harpies 1. I draw on W. D. Ross’s translation of the Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). 2. Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” 353 (art. 70) and 355 (art. 76). 3. The translations are taken respectively from George A. Kennedy, trans., On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Joe Sachs, trans., Poetics (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing and R. Pullins, 2006). The full line of the first text reads: “to learn and to admire (to thaumazein) are usually pleasurable.” See James V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearian Tragedy (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1964), 62–64, for some helpful remarks on the connection between wonder’s pleasurableness and wonder’s role in learning in Aristotle; aesthetic pleasure and the pleasure of instruction are in turn strongly connected. 4. Quoted in James V. Mirollo, “The Aesthetics of the Marvelous: The Wondrous Work of Art in a Wondrous World,” in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, ed. P. G. Platt (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 24. 5. My understanding of the above context is indebted to Cunningham’s discussion in Woe or Wonder, 60ff. See also James Biester’s helpful overview of

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the Aristotelian literary-­critical view of wonder providing later poets with their intellectual resources in Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), ch. 1. Both Biester and Cunningham, however, suggest slightly different—and less positive—ways of specifying the affective tone of the wonder at stake in such literary appropriations, as we will see below. There is a growing body of literature on the “Age of the Marvelous” and its preoccupation with wonder in its different contexts and forms. For a good wedge into the subject, see Joy Kenseth’s introduction in The Age of the Marvelous, ed. J. Kenseth (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 1991); and for a wider sweep of the literature, see Peter G. Platt’s introduction in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters, ed. Platt, and references there. 6. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, respectively 44–45, 32–33. 7. Ibid., 111, 118. 8. Ibid., 122. 9. See, for these final developments, broadly ibid., ch. 6, of which 217–18 quoted. 10. Ibid., 303–305. 11. See particularly ibid., 307–10. There are a number of recent works that treat the history of curiosity in the early modern period in greater detail, but a good starting point is Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), which offers a fine-­ grained account of the evaluative recalibrations to which curiosity was exposed across different cultural settings and discourses during this period. These recalibrations, as Kenny shows, presented a far from monolithic front across different contexts. 12. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 305, 316. 13. Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” 354 (art. 73) and Benedictus de Spinoza, Spinoza’s Ethics and “De Intellectus Emendatione,” trans. A. Boyle (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1910), 129 (III, Def. of the Affects IV); cf. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 316 ff. Despite Descartes’ linking wonder with the disposition to acquire knowledge (“Passions of the Soul,” 355, art. 76; cf. 353, art. 71: it “has as its object . . . knowledge of the thing that we wonder at”), his discussion of wonder is in fact remarkable for the emphasis it places throughout on the stabilizing rather than mobilizing epistemic effects of wonder—on its tendency to “fix” things in the mind (to help us retain or recollect them) as against its tendency to move the mind to an active process of inquiry. 14. The quote is from “Passions of the Soul,” 356 (art. 78). 15. Frijda, Emotions, 18–19. It is worth noting that Frijda’s intellectual line of descent—passing through the work of Darwin, whose discussion of the expression of the emotions passed through the illustrations of the passions by the seventeenth-­century French painter Charles Le Brun, who was in turn drawing on Descartes’s philosophical account—here seals a more organic continuity between the modern and its past.

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16. Compare also Susan James’s remarks regarding Descartes’s puzzling treatment of the relation between wonder and movement in Passion and Action, 187–88; James ties this to Descartes’s concern to negotiate the tensions implicit in appointing a passion to a central role in inquiry, and to “detoxify” wonder by distancing it from ordinary passions, which usually have a corrupting effect on knowledge. For a more fruitful way of reading this definitional fiat, see below. 17. Campbell, Wonder and Science, 4. 18. Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 176. 19. The quotes are from Claude-­Olivier Doron, “The Microscopic Glance: Spiritual Exercises, the Microscope, and the Practice of Wonder in Early Modern Science,” in Practices of Wonder, ed. Vasalou, 198 (quoting the Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam) and 192. 20. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 328. 21. See ibid., ch. 9. 22. Ibid., 326–27. 23. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 159–62. See also Amélie O. Rorty’s relevant remarks (“Enough Already With ‘Theories of the Emotions,’” in Thinking about Feeling, ed. Solomon, 273–74); Rorty stresses the interrelationship between emotions and other attitudes, which affect the way we identify and individuate emotions (forming what Daston and Park might have called an emotion’s “emotional neighbourhood”). 24. Adam Smith, “The History of Astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 34–35. At the same time, Smith suggests that his account is probably faithful to common usage, though he immediately adduces examples that contravene it. Cf. Eric Schliesser’s remark in “Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions: Adam Smith on Newton’s ‘Proof ’ of Copernicanism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (2005): 699, that Smith’s account of the meaning of “wonder,” “surprise,” and “admiration” is “in part stipulative.” 25. “Passions of the Soul,” 328 (art. 1). 26. Smith, “Of the Nature of That Imitation Which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 185. 27. Useful discussions for approaching the specific standpoint of Smith’s “Astronomy” include Charles L. Griswold’s remarks in Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 155–73 (the context is the question of Smith’s skepticism), and the editors’ general introduction in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. Annette Baier’s discussion of Hume in A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), esp. ch. 1, has strongly influenced my understanding of the Humean context of Smith’s venture. 28. For helpful accounts of Hume’s epistemology, see the collection of essays in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. D. F. Norton and J. Taylor, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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29. Hume’s invocation of these notions is too pervasive for documentation, but a good sample passage in which they are placed in characteristic display is T, 355–57 in the context of Hume’s proposal to explain why a mother’s remarriage weakens her children’s sense of bond with her. 30. Hume’s metaphorical description of the imagination as a “galley put in motion by the oars” which, once set on a train of motion, “carries on its course without any new impulse” (T, 198) is thus particularly telling in concretising the notions of flow and fluidity that govern Hume’s thinking about the mind’s regular operations. 31. The focal word here, it should be noted, is not “wonder” but “surprise.” 32. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 37, 41. See the editors’ “General Introduction” to the Essays, esp. 16–18, for a few additional remarks about Hume’s influence on Smith in this context. 33. Ibid., 39 (emphasis added); the language of “brinks,” “bridges,” and “gashes” (or “gaps”) is drawn from 41–42. In several respects, Smith’s account evokes Fuller’s Piagetian account of wonder, in which the experience of wonder marks the stress fractures of our cognitive structures. See Fuller, Wonder, ch. 6. Piaget’s model, of course, was developed through the study of the cognitive development of children, in whom the surprise produced by the unexpected usually lacks the negative phenomenology described by Smith (a point also reflected in Fuller’s positive understanding of wonder’s phenomenology). Yet children certainly do not always experience surprise as a source of pleasure; and what often accounts for this affective difference is how unexpected events interact with their sense of security—cf. the analysis below. 34. Quote from “History of Astronomy,” 50. That wonder shares the grammar of suffering is suggested by a remarkable turn of phrase Smith employs in another context, when speaking of a person who sees another wonder at what he no longer wonders at himself, and who (Smith writes) may often be “disposed rather to laugh at, than sympathize with our Wonder” (ibid., 44). Taken alone, however, such a remark would not suffice as evidence of the negative or suffering quality of wonder, given the once again highly specific philosophical understanding of the notion of “sympathy” at work in Smith’s thought. For sympathy, in the terms set out in the Moral Sentiments, is not confined to negative emotions or experiences, but can rather be taken “to denote our fellow-­feeling with any passion whatever,” including the pleasant along with the painful, and joy and happiness no less than pain and sorrow (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982 (1976, reprint)], 10). 35. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 43–44. 36. I draw on Cunningham’s translation of the relevant passage in Woe or Wonder, 77. 37. Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, q. 41, art. 4. I draw on the new (and still progressing) translation of Aquinas’s work by Alfred J. Freddoso, to avoid the difficulties generated by the inconsistent translation of admiratio in the standard version, which notably renders it as “wonder” in the context of the question

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whether wonder is a cause of pleasure (IaIIae q. 32, art. 8) and as “amazement” in the question whether wonder is a species of fear—an inconsistency that obscures the tension between these statements. At the time of writing, the translation of IaIIae was not yet published in book form, and was available online at www .nd.edu/~afreddos/summa-translation/TOC-part1-2.htm (accessed February 12, 2014). 38. Two of the most relevant passages were cited at the opening of this chapter: Rhetoric 1.11.21 and Poetics 1460a15–20. Aquinas’s discussion is in Summa Theologiae, IaIIae q. 32, art. 8. 39. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder, 89 (emphasis added); and see the evidential survey that precedes. 40. Biester, Lyric Wit, 4–6. It is worth observing that central to Biester’s account and to his proposed genealogy of the wonder at stake among the “metaphysical poets” is the stylistic quality of deinotes as approached by a set of classical literary theorists that notably include Longinus—father of one of the best-­k nown forms of darker wonder that simultaneously attracts and repulses (the sublime), whose influence has often been associated with a later period. I would also note that while, as suggested above, there are reasons to doubt whether Adam Smith’s account of wonder speaks for his linguistic community, the stronger association of wonder with positive meaning is a development that would seem to have taken place far closer to our own times. Even as late as the end of the nineteenth century, “wonder” appears to carry a neutrality that allows for its use in more negative contexts or its modification by other, more negative emotions, as evidenced by George Eliot’s usage of the terms “contemptuous wonder” and “frightened wonder” in Middlemarch (1871–72) (New York: Bantam, 1985), 581 and 753. Cf. Jane Austen’s use of the term in Mansfield Park (1814), where wonder can be deployed next to overtly negative judgment (Fanny Price “could never see Mr. Crawford with either sister . . . without wonder or censure” [London: Penguin, 1994], 118), as well as to positive emotional response (she was “more disposed to wonder and rejoice,” 285; cf. the association of wonder with beauty at 211). 41. See Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity, especially the orienting methodological remarks in the “Introduction.” 42. My formulation of this thought owes a debt to Baier’s remarks in A Progress of Sentiments, 35–37. And see also her essay “Feelings That Matter,” in Thinking about Feeling, ed. Solomon, 200–201, for a few interesting examples of emotions with mixed hedonic tone; Baier includes anger in this list, suggesting that the hedonic tone which Nussbaum links to the Roman context may not be that unfamiliar to us after all. 43. Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, 4, 3. 44. Ibid., 4, 5, 7. 45. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder, 65 (emphasis added); and see Rueger, “Literary Wonder in the Seventeenth Century,” for a discussion of the tensions between the constraint of probability just indicated (and thus the rules of literary decorum) and the poetic aim of provoking wonder, which formed an important

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preoccupation for the later heirs of this literary tradition. Platt, who argues that Aristotle’s wonder—extinguished by reason, assimilated, appropriated—is not the only notion of wonder present in this period, and that there is another wonder, exhibited by Shakespeare among others, in which “wonder is ongoing and its own end,” and in which “the urge and the human capacity to bring reason to bear upon it are diminished,” has precisely the defiance of literary decorum in mind. See Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 46. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 50. 47. It is one of the first two meanings, for example, that would seem to account for Hume’s use of the term “to embarrass” in a passage of the Treatise (T, 293) with an intriguingly close connection to Smith’s train of thinking. The OED “leaves some doubt” to the extent that its earliest documentation of the third meaning occurs in 1828 (Smith died in 1790); yet this evidence significantly draws on a dictionary, and thus incorporates a longer backward look into linguistic history. A psychological definition of “embarrassment,” minus the element of self-­assessment, can certainly be traced to Smith’s time: Samuel Johnson’s 1755 edition of his Dictionary offers “to distress” as one of the meanings of “to embarrass.” 48. My reading here agrees with that of J. Ralph Lindgren in “Adam Smith’s Theory of Inquiry,” Journal of Political Economy 77 (1969): 903: “The new and singular seems therefore to occasion inquiry . . . because it raises doubts about one’s ability to order and harmonize appearances. The unusual excites inquiry because it is interpreted as humiliating” (emphasis added). 49. The quoted phrases are Caroline Walker Bynum’s, who names this as one of three arguments characterizing recent work on early modern wonder: “Wonder,” The American Historical Review 102 (1997): 4. 50. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 58 (part II, section 2). 51. Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, esp. 9–11. 52. Quotes from Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xii. 53. Ibid., xiii and 17. 54. See generally Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, ch. 1. 55. I draw on Cunningham’s translation of this remark in Woe or Wonder, 70. 56. The phrase is from Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 260; and see chapters 4–7 for Nussbaum’s account of Plato’s stance on the main theme of her book. 57. Though as Julia Annas notes in outlining the traditional classification of dialogues into early, middle, and late, the Theaetetus belongs to a handful of dialogues bearing an awkward relationship to this scheme: see Julia Annas, “What Are Plato’s ‘Middle’ Dialogues in the Middle of?” in New Perspectives on Plato,

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Modern and Ancient, ed. J. Annas and C. Rowe (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University,  2002), 7–8. Several of the other papers in the same volume address the kinds of interpretive complexities referred to in the main text. 58. Andrea W. Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 261, and see generally “Epilogue: ‘Broken Knowledge?’” on which I have drawn in the above. The understanding of Platonic wonder as an accompaniment and end of philosophical activity—one carrying strong religious connotations—is also a feature of Sylvana Chrysakopoulou’s account in “Wonder and the Beginning of Philosophy in Plato,” in Practices of Wonder, ed. Vasalou. And while Chrysakopoulou, like Rubenstein, emphasises the vertiginous elements and suffering quality of this wonder, connecting these to Socrates’s maieutic metaphor of labor (97–98), this is a suffering that she takes to be welcomed due to the “knowledge that it will ultimately lead to birth in the soul of the sufferer” (100–101), and thus due to the promise of positive knowledge it contains. 59. Descartes, “Passions of the Soul,” 383 (art. 150). James thus speaks here more neutrally of a response to “scale” to allow for both extremes: Passion and Action, 169; cf. in this connection Brown’s brief distinction between types of wonder in Descartes and the Passionate Mind, 145. 60. James, Passion and Action, 170. Cf. Verbeek’s remarks in “Generosity,” 26. A central question here, of course, is whether the first form of wonder—the one provoked by the new—is indeed wholly devoid of evaluative judgment; a point closely linked to the question whether it involves judgment sans phrase. Amélie Rorty suggests that we see Descartes’s l’admiration as something close to “our notion of salient attention—to Achtung!” (“The Functional Logic of Cartesian Passions,” in Emotional Minds, ed. Ebbersmeyer, 13). On these terms, the point could be parsed as a question whether salient attention involves an implicit judgment or judgment of worth. This is not the place to enter this larger debate, whose outcome will depend on how tightly we ring-­fence the notion of “cognition” or “judgment,” yet which may find its simplest resolution in the Wittgensteinian thought: when I stop and stare, I can then be asked to give an account of why I did so and may often be able to give one. I side with Amy M. Schmitter when she picks out an interpretive “as” within the wondering response in addressing Descartes’s wonder, writing that “wonder and species of wonder do not [present their objects as good or evil], but they do present their objects as being something—as novel, significant, and worthy of attention, even if only by their extreme triviality” (“How to Engineer a Human Being: Passions and Functional Explanation in Descartes,” in A Companion to Descartes, ed. J. Broughton and J.  Carriero [Oxford: Blackwell, 2008], 435; emphasis added). Note that Descartes significantly conjoins “unusual” and “extraordinary” in discussing the first type of wonder (“unusual and extraordinary”: e.g., “Passions of the Soul,” 353 [art. 70], 354 [art. 75]). See also my comment in the next chapter, n. 25.

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61. See Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 133, and passim for the context of Le Brun’s project. And see Descartes’s seeding remarks in “Passions of the Soul,” 350 (arts. 54 and 55), and 383 (art. 149) ff. 62. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 33. 63. The quotes are respectively from ibid., 53–54 read in conjunction with 50 (“While the great objects of nature thus pass in review before them . . .”), and 46. Cf. 75 for a suggestive remark regarding the role of aesthetic considerations in philosophical/scientific judgments. The role of such considerations in Smith’s account is stressed by Schliesser (“Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions”) and Lindgren (“Adam Smith’s Theory of Inquiry”) as well as by Elias L. Khalil in his “Adam Smith and Albert Einstein: The Aesthetic Principle of Truth,” History of Economics Society Bulletin 11 (1989). And in the same connection, see Lisa Shapiro, “What Are the Passions Doing in the Meditations?” in Persons and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier, ed. J. Jenkins, J. Whiting, and C. Williams (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2005), for a reading of Descartes that would also incorporate this second type of wonder, oriented to the great (and more specifically to God), in the body of Descartes’s own inquiry in the Meditations. Schliesser suggests that there is another respect in which Smith’s wonder might be misrepresented by an exclusive alignment with Aristotle’s. Despite first impressions, he argues, Smith does not agree “with Aristotle that philosophy starts in wonder and ends in dogmatism”; rather, for Smith philosophy “is an open-­ended enterprise,” and in this respect he agrees with Plato (“Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions,” 727). This judgment seems to be based on Smith’s presumed awareness that while philosophy aims at the appeasement of the imagination, no appeasement is ever likely to be final. Here, much depends on what we mean by talk of “Smith’s wonder.” For this awareness is expressed by Smith from his higher-­order perspective as a historian of scientific systems commanding a more global view of the successive appeasements of the imagination, who can thus see that “that summit of perfection to which [natural philosophy] is at present supposed to have arrived . . . has equally been supposed to have arrived in almost all former times” (“History of Astronomy,” 46). This, of course, is not the perspective from which actual inquirers operate (and one may wonder whether, to the extent that it rests on a more detached view of natural systems as “mere inventions of the imagination” [ibid., 105], inquirers can operate within it). Or if individual inquirers do acknowledge this open-­endedness, this would have to be seen as an achievement—an achievement, however, that does not seem to enter Smith’s opening picture of the psychology of ordinary inquirers and the wonder-­as-­distress-­to-­be-­purged that actuates them. 64. We will be returning to this point in the last chapter, “OBJECT,” for a more direct consideration. 65. Quotes from Strange Wonder, 9, 8.

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66. “May be taken,” because while Rubenstein’s discussion has a strong ethical dimension, this is articulated in rather different terms than the ones outlined here and in the context of a different set of concerns. 67. Remarks to the former effect have already been cited. The latter remark is made in Rhetoric 1.11.19 (and taken to refer to habitual action, it is also a standing motif in the Nicomachean Ethics); it is followed by another that asserts the pleasurableness of change. 68. Whether Aristotle’s wonder can indeed be plausibly conceived as wholly “free” is of course open to question, particularly if “utility” is taken in a sense sufficiently broad to include the psychological needs of the self. Nussbaum implicitly denies this freedom when, glossing the opening of the Metaphysics, she describes philosophy as grounded in a “hatred of being at a loss in the world” (Fragility of Goodness, 259). This construal, in one respect, merely brings out the privative note already contained in the term a-­poria present in Aristotle’s text, and in doing so it calls to question whether a self-­attribution of ignorance (“a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant,” Aristotle writes) can be wholly separated from a sense of vulnerability and limitation that is experienced with discomfort. Cf. my earlier point about “what we call a difficulty” or “experience as a limitation” apropos Smith’s embarrassed wonder. 69. I draw on the translation of Seneca’s Natural Questions by Harry M. Hine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Though as Seneca elsewhere points out, our fearful response to unfamiliar events may often be due, not to any threat they immediately pose, but to the threat that our mediating interpretations—particularly religious ones—read into them. 70. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), V, 355. With this background, the emphasis on “appropriation” and “assimilation” in several narratives of early modern wonder already signals that we would be wrong to expect the wonder aroused by the new and the exotic to be accountable in purely pleasurable terms, and would need to make room for the element of the fearful in fully accounting for the motives driving the effort to assimilate and possess. It is not incidental in this respect that Stephen Greenblatt, in whose study of the place of the marvelous in the European encounter with the New World the appropriation of the radical “other” forms a key theme, speaks of wonder as “charged at once with desire, ignorance, and fear,” and links the late medieval and Renaissance marvelous to “the unfamiliar, the alien, the terrible, the desirable, and the hateful” (Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991], 20 and 22–23). Cf. Campbell’s remark about the “raw, even frightening admiratio of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century people of enough leisure and education to concern themselves with New World societies, heliocentrism, plural worlds, or fiction. Then, wonder had a valence with horror and terror” (Wonder and Science, 8).

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71. The different types of motivations, to be sure, are locked into complex relations within Seneca’s text, as indeed within Stoic philosophy more broadly. See Inwood, “Why Physics?” for a good entry point into the broader debate surrounding this topic and for a strong argument in favour of the intrinsic value of natural inquiry. As will be suggested in “PRODUCES,” the ethical character of this achievement can be told in even thicker terms, as an exercise of greatness of soul or megalopsychia, thereby uniting it even more strongly with the discussion that follows in the main text. 72. Summa Theologiae, IaIIae q. 32 art. 8 quoted. The link between wonder and pleasure via the pleasurableness of learning had already been present in Aristotle, as already mentioned; yet Aquinas’s remarks offer a clearer way of addressing the fact that learning may lag behind long after wonder has struck, and wonder may be separated from its desideratum by sufficient distance to cause suffering. I am aware that my last remark about hope as a form of possession owes a lot to René A. Gauthier’s discussion of Aquinas in Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1951), esp. the remarks on 333–34. 73. Wonder, the Rainbow, 48. It may thus seem unsurprising that, in connecting wonder with fear at the dawn of philosophical inquiry, Albert the Great should have stressed the lack of skill of early inquirers: “So it was in the beginning when men, up to that time unskilled, began to philosophize” (cited in Cunningham, Woe or Wonder, 77). 74. And it will be doubly so with those things in which we are aware that anything we achieve must be complemented by, and remains vulnerable to, what we receive, and what does not depend on our own powers or skills. The understanding of hope just sketched out has been set out somewhat more fully in my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 6, in the broader context of ancient views of greatness of soul (megalopsychia) and Aquinas’s more specific articulation of this as a virtue that governs the passion of hope. My interpretation of Aquinas’s double discussion of wonder, particularly in taking the notion of hope as its unifying backbone, draws heavily on this larger background. 75. What may seem striking in this point is the sudden shift in the specification of the object of wonder. In Aquinas’s discussion of wonder under this heading of the Summa, wonder appears to be construed as a response to the “great,” and it is amazement (stupor) that forms the response to the unfamiliar. In the discussion of the pleasurableness of wonder, by contrast (q. 32 art. 8), wonder was linked to the unusual. Whatever else one makes of this shift, it is important to note that the double connection of wonder to the novel and to the great was preserved—as already mentioned above—in later philosophical writings on wonder, including Descartes’s. 76. Summa Theologiae, IaIIae q. 32, art. 8, ad. 4 and ad. 5.

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77. The quote is from Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae q. 129 a. 1; and see my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, ch. 6 and references there for more on Aquinas’s view of greatness of soul. 78. Cf. Hume’s remarks on the “love of wonder” in “Of Miracles,” Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 117: “With what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, their descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures  .  .  . ?” Cf. the reference, a few lines above, to “the passion of surprise  and  wonder, arising from miracles” as “an agreeable emotion.” It should again be noted that Hume’s focal term is surprise rather than wonder in several of the remarks cited in the main text. 79. See also the remarks at T, 421–22, 423–24. 80. Hume had, after all, indicated strongly in his discussion of skepticism, in the conclusion to Book 1 of the Treatise, just how nauseating or vertiginous such a wholesale concussion of epistemic structures might feel. Yet Hume’s remarks on the effect of security on the passions clearly suggest (T, 421–22) that security is something of which there can also be too much. 81. The context of this remark, interestingly enough, is Hume’s discussion of an emotional experience aligned with the aesthetics of the sublime; “esteem” and “admiration” are the central affective notions. Cf. the telling remark at T, 434: “Whatever supports and fills the passions is agreeable to us; as on the contrary, what weakens and infeebles them is uneasy. As opposition has the first effect, and facility the second, no wonder the mind, in certain dispositions, desires the former . . .” The relevant question here, of course (and the question that Daston and Park made central to their account of intellectuals’ growing suspicion of wonder) is whether the unexpected or unfamiliar always excites this active response, or in other words, whether an active curiosity always follows on surprise—something that Hume’s frequent jibes about the “indolence” of mankind (T, 452) would seem to cast in doubt. Yet in the passage on the fearful effect of the unexpected, it is worth noting that Hume describes the unexpected as inciting a mental commotion that “naturally produces a curiosity or inquisitiveness” (T, 446). Similarly, even when observing the human tendency toward indolence and insatiable appetite for amusement, Hume sees people as drawn to types of amusement—such as hunting or games—that constitute forms of activity and involve an element of challenge or difficulty (see, e.g., T, 452, 352–53). But of course if, as suggested above, this active response constitutes an achievement, talk of wonder (or surprise) as intrinsically or naturally “leading” to or “producing” this response will need to be understood in a highly qualified way. 82. See the discussion at the end of Book 2, T, 448–54; though it is worth noting that philosophical curiosity is directed not so much to the unexpected, as to what is already familiar and needs to be understood more deeply, as suggested by Hume’s remarks in the conclusion of Book 1, particularly T, 270–71. Hume in

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fact notes that uncertainty is “in one respect as near ally’d to hope as to fear” (T, 446–47), yet the space for ethical choice that this remark might have opened up is not inhabited, and Hume’s remarks remain descriptive. 83. As noted by James in Passion and Action, 47. 84. Which is not to say that the elements that enter into Aquinas’s perspective—such as the more positive notion of hope, or expectation—are absent from Rubenstein’s account, within its own terms and specific context. Only, if Aquinas had appeared to hold out the prospect that hope might enjoy rational support in specifying its object as a possible good, hope or “the mood of expectation” is here directed to the “possibility of the impossible,” to that whose possibility is incapable of being rationally supported or derived as from a “calculable field”—except perhaps by its very impossibility (Strange Wonder, 192–93). 85. Josef Pieper, whose reflections on wonder were visibly leavened by Aquinas’s remarks, seems to have been responding precisely to this question when he compared wonder to hope (“To wonder is to be on the way, in via . . . wonder reveals itself as having the same structure as hope, the same architecture as hope”) and continued: “We are essentially viatores . . . beings who are ‘not yet,’” only to add: this is a perpetual “not yet.” For philosophy “aims at a type of wisdom which is unattainable . . . wisdom is the object of philosophy, but as lovingly sought, and never fully possessed” (Leisure, The Basis of Culture, trans. A. Dru [London: Faber and Faber, 1952], 136–37 and 142). 86. Though it should be observed that the wonder tracked by Rubenstein through the work of these thinkers is one that shades strongly into neighboring members of its larger emotional field, such as astonishment, shock, and awe. 87. Though Boileau’s contribution, as recent writers have emphasised, needs to be read against a richer picture of the multifaceted intellectual buildup to his work. For a suggestive discussion, see Éva Madeleine Martin, “The ‘Prehistory’ of the Sublime in Early Modern France: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. T. M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 88. Marjorie H. Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 27. 89. Rueger, “Literary Wonder in the Seventeenth Century.” 90. Quote from Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 143. This thesis is not free from debate though, as Nicolson’s account rests on a controversial premise concerning the limited role of the rhetorical tradition—and in particular the influence of Longinus, as suggested notably by Monk—in the genesis of the “natural” sublime, or the sublime as a response to the natural world. See Mountain Gloom, 27– 33, and generally chapter 7; and for a brief critical response, see Rueger, “Literary Wonder in the Seventeenth Century,” 220–21. Similarly, it is important to keep in mind that evolving views of the infinity of the universe and of the plurality of worlds during this period were not simply driven forward by scientific developments, but had deeper roots in theological and philosophical ideas centering on

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the principle of plenitude that went back to Plato and Plotinus and still enjoyed wide diffusion during this period. On this point, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1964), ch. 4. 91. Longinus, “On Sublimity,” trans. D. A. Russell, in Ancient Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 467 (8.1). 92. See respectively Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-­Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 48–49, and 208–209. Though note that Shaftesbury, like Kant, also seeks to distinguish the positive enthusiasm associated with the sublime from the suspect enthusiasm linked with superstition and fanaticism: James Kirwan, Sublimity: The Non-­R ational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 13; the connection between the notion of enthusiasm and the sublime is a recurring theme in Kirwan’s work. See also in this connection Susie Tucker’s study of the linguistic history of the term “enthusiasm,” which provides an overview of its uses across different contexts: Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972). It is telling that several of the examples Tucker offers regarding its use in the context of (eighteenth-­century) response to scenery are linked to the aesthetics of the sublime (Enthusiasm, 115–19); cf. her discussion of enthusiasm in the literary context (77–93), which similarly includes critics or poets linked to the discourse of the sublime and its development. 93. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 154 (§ 29). 94. For discussion of this, see Robert R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 95. The quote is from Henry Hart, “Robert Lowell and the Religious Sublime,” New England Review 14 (1991): 31. 96. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 7. 97. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 322–23. 98. See Meyer H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973); and see also the discussion in chapter 3, “SUDDEN: Stoking Wonder.” Daston and Park’s characterization of the historical wane of wonder has been contested by several other readers. Mirollo queries this claim by similarly calling attention to the sublime (“The Aesthetics of the Marvelous,” 39). It is also one of the aims of Michael Funk Deckard and Péter Losonczi’s collection of essays, Philosophy Begins in Wonder: An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology, and Science (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), to query this part of Daston and Park’s narrative. To the extent that the above has focused more directly on wonder’s continued

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life as an aesthetic passion, of course, it may seem like a very limited codicil to Daston and Park’s discussion, given their focus on the displacement of wonder as passion of (philosophical) inquiry more narrowly. Yet the distinction between the aesthetic and the philosophical and scientific may not be as impermeable as it appears once we take into account the newfound status of aesthetic experience as a crucial (literally numinous) location of philosophical insight from the eighteenth century onward. 99. These gleams will come more fully into view in chapter 4, “PRODUCES.” SUDDEN: On Seeing the Extraordinary; or: On the Different Ways of Being Struck 1. For the Latin, see Jacques Le Goff’s brief remarks in The Medieval Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 27–28. For the Greek, I am indebted to my mother, Eva Tsitsibakou-­Vasalos, who placed the resources of her still-­unpublished dictionary on Homeric etymology (with Eleni Peraki-­Kyriakidou) at my disposal. 2. For a probing of these different terms, a good starting point is Nightingale’s Spectacles of Truth, which aims, among other things, to foreground the importance of the contemplation of heavenly phenomena and the (physical) cosmos within Plato’s philosophical ideal. Just how comfortable we feel using the term “outward-­looking” to characterize this visual confrontation of the cosmos depends on more complex questions regarding the notion of vision at stake in the work of both philosophers (notably: Is this a vision of the mind as against the senses?), on which Nightingale also offers important insights. 3. Z = Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). 4. For more on Le Brun’s project and his illustrations of the passions, see Montagu, The Expression of the Passions. 5. See Fuller, “From Biology to Spirituality,” 66–67, and Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, 264. It is not incidental, similarly, that John Onians emphasizes the character of wonder as a response to the new and unfamiliar, given the naturalistic angle of his discussion: wonder may be characterized “as a universal response to a strikingly new and puzzling sight or sound” (“‘I Wonder . . . ,’” 11; note Onians’s inclusion of the aural as well as the visual among the provocations of wonder, which he bases on etymological grounds that notably pass through the term “astonishment”: “astonish,” étonner, attonire—to thunder at). This is an understanding that Onians then finds naturally exemplified in the kind of wonder at stake in the “Age of the Marvelous” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which “came into being as a result of an excess of novelty, and was brought to an end, as nature prescribes and Bacon and Descartes had foreseen, by a wave of explanation and classification” (26; emphasis added). “As nature prescribes”: it is a phrase to hold on to, in order to probe.

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6. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, 2, 6, 1. 7. Ibid., 40. 8. Ibid., 17; emphasis added. 9. The last phrase is from ibid., 39. 10. Quotes respectively from ibid., 56, 6, 60. 11. Ibid., 48. 12. See the discussion in the last chapter, “OBJECT.” For the “delight of visibility” at stake, as we will see, carries rather deeper significance than the notion of the “aesthetic” may here suggest. 13. Ibid., 20. 14. Ibid., 19. 15. Ibid., 33. 16. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 154 (§29). 17. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, 21. 18. Quotes are from ibid., 6, and 21. 19. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 60–61. 20. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, 52 and 55. 21. Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” 188; cf. the discussion in Upheavals of Thought cited earlier. 22. Fisher certainly sensitizes us to the different ways in which (wondering) vision can lead to thought; yet less so, it would seem, to the crucial ways in which the latter can constitute it. 23. Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, 40. 24. Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World,” in Thinking About Feeling, ed. Solomon, 83. 25. Note that like Kant, Smith also dissociates the second type of wonder from novelty, linking “wonder” to the new, but specifying that “admiration” is directed to what “we have seen . . . often before”: “History of Astronomy,” 33. There is indeed an interesting question to be asked concerning how closely these two notions of wonder—and thus the two senses of the “extraordinary” outlined above—are linked, which could be parsed as a question as to whether our response to the new is in fact entirely independent of evaluative assessment. For after all, not everything that is new or unfamiliar catches our attention. My attention is not caught by the newest configuration of clouds that floats across my window as I work; the car that whizzes past me on the street may be a model I have never seen before, but it hardly registers on my radar. What this partly brings out is that I may need to have even a basic concern or interest in the kinds of objects in question—an interest that may vary from person to person, and that I certainly lack in the latter type of case—in order for my attention to be engaged by novelty in that direction. One might of course explain my unresponsiveness by saying: I have seen this kind or type of thing before even if I have not seen this particular instance or token. But what we choose to count as a “kind” and as the “same”

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kind would seem to reflect an evaluative assessment as to the types of differences that are significant or relevant or worth attending to. And such assessments can no doubt exhibit cultivated differences depending on the quality or depth of one’s interest in the kinds of objects in question: the cloud watcher or car fetishist may see noteworthy difference where we see merely unremarkable sameness. See also the related remarks apropos Descartes in “DELIGHT,” n. 60. 26. Is this positive note of value always inscribed within it? The boundary drawn around the notion of wonder in the first chapter was, it should be kept in mind, a permeable one. 27. That wonder (whether in its natural or less natural form) was twinned to the narrative arts, of course, places another question mark over Fisher’s dissociation of wonder from narrative. In the medieval and Renaissance context, indeed, the ligaments between wonder and the narrative arts went beyond these direct literary enmeshments. For even where wonder was provoked not by artistic phenomena but by phenomena and events in the natural world, the wonder of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was tied to textual representation in crucial ways, as Stephen Greenblatt suggests: “The experience of wonder was not initially regarded as essentially or even primarily visual; reports of marvels had a force equal to the seeing of them. Seeing was important and desirable, of course, but precisely in order to make possible reports, which then circulated as virtual equivalents of the marvels themselves”—we need only think of Marco Polo’s Book of Marvels or Mandeville’s Travels. See Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. I.  Karp and S. D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 50–51. 28. The formulation of my thought here owes a debt to Jennifer A. Herdt’s discussion in Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), ch. 1, esp. 28–29. 29. I have in mind the key remarks in Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It,” Ideas and Opinions, new trans. and rev. S. Bargmann (New York: Crown, 1982), 11. 30. The passage quoted is from Unweaving the Rainbow, 6–7. These exercises in shifting vision may well recall us to Pascal’s “two abysses” in the Pensées, despite the very different methods through which each is performed (one grounded in actual observation using technological means of extending human vision, the other an exercise in the vision of the imagination). As intimated in the main text, it is a separate question here how successful we deem Dawkins’s overall argument and how acceptable we find some of its specific polemical aspects, including the claim that it is science (rather than poetry or religion) that should cater to our “appetite” for wonder. Those sympathetic to the notion of “Platonic” wonder outlined in the previous chapter will find Dawkins’s superficial aestheticism uncompelling. The calculated evangelical tone that governs the book, likewise, does much to undermine Dawkins’s efforts to performatively illustrate the view of science he theoretically articulates.

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31. Quotes from Unweaving the Rainbow, 4, 5; “paradoxically,” given Daw­ kins’s overt hostility to religion. 32. To return here to Daston and Park’s earlier-­cited assertion that, with this development, “wonder proved intractable to such a dramatic orientation and ceased to be a philosophical passion” (Wonders and the Order of Nature, 328), one might want to respond: this view rests on an overly restrictive (or prescriptive) view of what wonder is, and what its objects can be. 33. See the discussion in Wonder, and again in “From Biology to Spirituality.” Notably, Fuller does not seem to tie this claim to a consideration of specific types of experiences of wonder. The implication appears to be: any or all experiences that defy our existing cognitive structures point beyond themselves and ultimately prepare for a spiritual sensibility. 34. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. S. Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 276 (cf. 296); 358, 356. 35. Ibid., 252, 110. 36. This ties in with the attitude of tawakkul or trust in God which is an important theme for Muslim mystics; see Abu Hamid al-­Ghazali, Ihya’ ‘Ulum al-­Din (Beirut: Dar al-­Fikr, 1999), vol. 4, 208–49 (4:212 quoted). This part of al-­ Ghazali’s work has been translated into English by David B. Burrell as Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2001). 37. Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 10, and Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 86e. These expressions in turn echo the well-­k nown lines about the “mystical” at the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. 38. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 7. The previous quote is from Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, xii. 39. For the above, and for what follows, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, esp. ch. 7; the above quotes are from 384, 66, 380. 40. Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 5. 41. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, ch. 8, for a finer-­grained discussion of the post-­Romantic reverberations of this legacy and its more specific constitutive filaments. 42. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. B. Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991), 4–5. Fisher himself briefly refers to defamiliarization in both its Romantic and Russian Formalist articulations (Wonder, the Rainbow, 27–28) yet he dismisses its relevance to wonder on two grounds. One appears to be, simply, an apophthegmatic view of wonder and its objects: referring us to the rainbow as a prototypical object of wonder, he suggests that it is the “rare and compelling object itself ” and not a “jaded renewal” of it that produces attention. More constructively, he also suggests that the notion of defamiliarization or estrangement constitutes a response to “the problem of boredom,” which

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forms a specific historical preoccupation. This understanding of the value of a deliberately cultivated wonder, however, seems too narrow, overlooking the deeper roots of our yearning to restore the unseen to visibility which Shklovsky points to, and which my discussion in the final chapter, “OBJECT,” tries to spell out more clearly. 43. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 5, 6. 44. “If not exclusively”: enough has been said about each of these practices to reveal the need for this rider; artistic practice in particular has often been linked with the wonder of novelty, as exemplified by the “poetics of the marvelous” in an earlier period and as suggested by Fisher’s discussion in our own. 45. Chrysakopoulou, “Wonder and the Beginning of Philosophy in Plato,” 117. The remarks that follow are indebted to Nightingale’s discussion in Spectacles of Truth. Nightingale brings out starkly the religious undertones of philosophical theoria in tracing its roots to a more traditional notion of theoria as a “journey or pilgrimage abroad for the purpose of witnessing certain events and spectacles,” paradigmatically, oracles and religious festivals (Spectacles of Truth, 3). 46. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), 2:160–61. This work will henceforth be cited as WWR. I have discussed the kind of wonder at work in Schopenhauer’s philosophy at greater length in my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint. 47. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 143; and Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and The Religious Temperament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 9. 48. Nagel, Secular Philosophy, 9. 49. The quote is from Pieper, Leisure, 128. 50. Quotes are from ibid., 130–31 and 93. The above bid to connect wonder to some of our central spiritual and intellectual practices is hardly meant to be exhaustive. For how, in that case, could one leave out of view the transformation of vision effected by a host of other storytellers or inquirers, from the historians capable of surprising us into perceiving the contingency of staples of our everyday world—the notion of a book or a photograph, of a pair of trousers or a necktie, the rules of traffic or the modern practices of childrearing—to the archaeologists capable of “making a stone feel stony” in quite different ways than those Shklovsky had in mind, as by shocking us into the discovery that this stone had been felt in its stoniness thousands of years ago by similar-­feeling minds? Our divisions between disciplines and practices should after all not obscure the basic structures of inquiry they share, above all the concern to question our perspective and to educate our attention in novel and more reflective ways. 51. For my first set of examples, I have D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in mind; my second example is drawn from the opening of Wilhelm Genazino’s Der Fleck, die Jacke, die Zimmer, der Schmerz (2004); readers could come up with better

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examples of their own. Whether these examples constitute good illustrations of Shklovksy’s specific view of the estranging task of art as described above could be debated, yet any view of this task that could not accommodate particular cases in which an effect we are prepared to call estrangement has been achieved would surely have to be ruled too restrictive. PRODUCES: Practices of Wonder 1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (London: Duckworth, 2007), 187. 2. Note that the above remarks deploy the term “excellence” to refer to two notions that MacIntyre himself terminologically keeps apart: the standards of excellence within particular practices that mark out one performance, product, etc., as better or worse; and the qualities of character or virtues that, on Mac­ Intyre’s account, enable such standards to be achieved. See After Virtue, ch. 14, for MacIntyre’s fuller account, and see also the remarks in the next chapter, “OBJECT,” where MacIntyre’s schema is outlined in slightly greater detail. Mac­Intyre himself focuses on a limited number of virtues or excellences in the second sense, and the habit of wonder is not among them. 3. Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 83. 4. Homer Hogan, “Structures of Wonder in Aesthetic Experience,” Dialogue 11 (1972): 224–25. 5. Michel Hulin, “The Conception of Camatkâra,” 229. The intellectual ingredients of the scheme Hulin discusses, indeed, are not as alien to our own context as might seem, and there are many chords (including the one just struck) that recall us to important topoi of the Western philosophical tradition. 6. Hogan’s words, in this respect, fall with special resonance when, characterizing “the pure expression of intentionality” more fully, he densely refers us to the occasions when consciousness does not seek to “satisfy the intentions or motives belonging to its content, but rather the motive belonging to its form, specifically the hunger of consciousness for self-­realization, for being as consciousness, a hunger which is appeased only as consciousness fills itself with objectivity that intensifies awareness.” In these terms, he continues, “‘wonder’ denotes how the fulfilling of this hunger is experienced, as well as, to some extent, the hunger itself ” (“Structures of Wonder,” 225.) Yet of course if we can speak of a “hunger” here, it is already clear that there is a distance to be marked that is sufficiently large to separate a desire from its fulfillment—a distance that Hogan’s references to “purity” (of intentionality) and “intensification” (of awareness), like the reference to the distinct “occasions” when consciousness answers to one type of motive (as against another), then come to flag even more strongly. And this is also a distance that Hogan’s focus on a category of experience paradigmatically understood as a privileged mode of awareness—the aesthetic—further entrenches,

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leaving little room for surprise when the notion of “being” is openly joined to that of “becoming” to yield a description of wonder (not far from the spirit of Hulin’s eloquent equivocation) as the experience in which “we become what we are” (226). 7. For an illuminating discussion of the case of “voluntariness” that brings the question of pragmatic context into sharp view, see Stanley Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 83–84. 9. Which is not to say that the only relationship people can have to wonder in their lives must take the form of discrete, highly isolated episodes—that there are not, for example, people whose perspective is informed by a more diffuse and enduring sense of wonder. The analogy here might be with the distinction between emotional responses and character traits that regularly issue in such responses; between a momentary experience of compassion and compassion as a more lasting quality of one’s character. Such qualities, however, also have their (at times debatable) criteria of attribution—criteria tightly bound up with momentary experiences and “discrete and isolated episodes,” and with their cumulative record. 10. “Lecture on Ethics,” 8–9. 11. Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 5.62. 12. Peter M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind—Part I: Essays (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 239; emphasis added. 13. For Wittgenstein’s discontent with this type of utterance, as already suggested, was also grounded in a sense of its deficient pragmatic context; and Wittgenstein had made a number of suggestions, in the same vicinity, concerning some of the contexts in which such utterances might find an ordinary home: e.g., “I tell someone who believes I am in a faint ‘I am conscious again’” (PI, 416). My discussion can be taken as a way of broadening Wittgenstein’s own suggestions, which seem too narrow in certain respects, not least in assimilating the expression “I am conscious” or “I have consciousness” to the grammar of telling or informing. To find a pragmatic home for these statements, however, is compatible with the recognition that these statements do not belong to the “considerations of our ordinary life” (PI, 412) but indeed to some of its more extraordinary moments or achievements: in this respect, it is indeed “extraordinary . . . that there should be any such thing” as their appearance. 14. I draw on Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 225, 226. To suggest that intellectual and spiritual practices offer a linguistic home to such expressions is not to say that it is only in such practices that these expressions may find their pragmatic context and linguistic home. I think of the moment in André Gide’s L’Immoraliste where the protagonist, having recovered from a bout

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of tuberculosis that brought him to the precipice of death, takes his left hand in his right and raises it to his head to touch it. “Why? To assure myself that I was alive, and to find it wonderful (admirable)” (L’Immoraliste [Paris: Mercure de France, 1972], 58). “Here I am!”: The circumstances that give such an exclamation its sense may be as broad and as varied as the unusual events that disrupt the basic conditions of ordinary life and thereby render them visible—and indeed, as this passage suggests, give us the will to strive to render them visible and find them astounding. 15. This proposal is close to the one I earlier formulated in “The Expression of Wonderment,” Philosophical Investigations 30 (2007). 16. Frijda, The Emotions, 18. 17. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 55. 18. Smith, “The History of Astronomy,” 51, 50; this view, of course, is not free from internal tensions, given what we earlier heard about the psychological interests—the needs of the self—with which wonder is interlocked. Smith’s association of wonder-­driven philosophical reflection with pleasure in this vicinity (e.g., 51) is particularly striking given his strong association of wonder with distress elsewhere. 19. Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” 350 (art. 53). 20. “Bracketing this thicker characterization”: the needs of the self and larger psychological interests with which wonder is bound up will in fact be an implicit theme in the discussion that follows, but will have to wait until the final chapter (“OBJECT”) to come up for explicit (and more critical) discussion again. What that discussion will suggest is that the “cognitive excellence” required for surmounting this inertia must also be an ethical excellence. 21. Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, 4–5. 22. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2: 7. 23. For a useful overview of the life this notion has led in the philosophical tradition, see Jane Kneller, “Disinterestedness,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2, ed. M. Kelly (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 24. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 90 (§ 2). 25. Malcolm Budd, The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 14. 26. Here I follow Guyer’s exemplifications of the mathematically sublime and his understanding of Kant’s remarks about the Pyramids and St Peter’s in Rome apropos the mathematically sublime: Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 158, n. 16. 27. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 141 (§ 27). 28. Ibid., 144 (§ 28). 29. Ibid., 134 (§ 25). 30. Ibid., 145 (§ 28); emphasis added. 31. Ibid., 130, 129 (§ 23). 32. The temporal or sequential terms in which I here read the phenomenology of the sublime—reading pain as a “beginning” or first “movement” which

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then “cedes to” or is “displaced by” a second movement or moment of pleasure— find their basis in Kant’s remarks, but as Paul Guyer points out, these also lend themselves to a different construction, in which pleasure and displeasure are not sequentially arranged but are part of a “single feeling simultaneously both painful yet pleasurable.” See his Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 203–205. This ambivalence, as Guyer suggests later (210–16) is closely connected to an ambivalence regarding the role of explicit, conscious judgment (as against mere feeling resting on subconscious processes of reflection) within this experience. Elsewhere, Guyer refers to this as a tension between a “purely aesthetic” as against a “cognitivist” account of the sublime, the latter being the one foregrounded in the dynamically sublime (“The German Sublime After Kant,” in The Sublime, ed. Costelloe, 104–105). The cognitivist emphasis in my own discussion can be taken as a reflection of its emphasis on the second form of the sublime. 33. There will also be something more critical to say in the next chapter (“OBJECT”) about the negative ethical status of the sense of mastery structuring the sublime. 34. There was a plethora of other theorists, of course, who made the sublime a topic of explicit reflective attention during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and there were several other post-­K antian philosophers besides Schopenhauer who took Kant’s analysis forward and developed it into new directions, including Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel. My focus here is necessarily selective, but it is not without rhyme or reason. The two analyses of the sublime I focus on are unified by two main features: (1) the subjectivization of the sublime, i.e., its analysis as a response to the subject, and (2) the understanding of the sublime as a paradigmatic response to nature as against art. As Paul Guyer notes, these are features that were displaced in many post-­K antian analyses of the sublime: see his discussion in “The German Sublime,” in The Sublime, ed. Costelloe, which offers a helpful overview of Kant’s continuants, though my focus on Schopenhauer is based on a different assessment of the sublime’s centrality in his work than Guyer suggests (102–103). For more inclusive discussions of the history of the sublime, there is now a growing literature to consult which includes Kirwan, Sublimity, and Philip Shaw, The Sublime (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 35. For more detailed discussion of the above, and of the importance of the sublime for approaching Schopenhauer’s philosophical project as a whole, see my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint. 36. The formulations quoted are from Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 150 (§ 29). 37. Kirwan, Sublimity, 64–65. Just how felicitously, on the other hand, it speaks to the terms of these thinkers’ own schemes is open to debate. For Schopenhauer in particular, who foregrounds the notion of effort or struggle most strongly in his discussion of the sublime, the appearance of this notion is attended by a paradox that has often been brought to Schopenhauer’s door: for

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by what act of will, and by what source of doing, could an overcoming of the will that is understood to be wholesale be accomplished? This points to a larger question about the importance of the controversial philosophical commitments texturing these accounts of the sublime, a question that addresses itself equally to Kant’s moralistic theorization. For more on this point, see the next chapter, “OBJECT.” 38. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 151 (§ 29). For discussion of this claim and more generally of the ethical value of aesthetic experience in Kant’s account, a good starting point is Guyer, Values of Beauty, ch. 8. 39. Ibid., 195, 201–202. 40. Critique of the Power of Judgment, 148–49 (§ 29). 41. Ibid., 146–47 (§ 28). 42. Ibid., 152–53 (§ 29). Cf. Malcolm Budd’s (critical) discussion in “The Sublime in Nature,” in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. P. Guyer (Lanham and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 135–37. 43. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 153 (§ 29). 44. Budd, “The Sublime in Nature,” 136. 45. For further comment on this point in the context of a broader discussion of the active as against passive picture of aesthetic contemplation within Schopenhauer’s work, see my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, ch. 1, esp. 31 ff. The imagination was also accorded an important role in Kant’s account of the sublime, though on different terms. This role is clearest in the mathematically sublime, which Kant organized around the striving of our imagination and its ultimate frustration. The role of the imagination in the dynamically sublime is less transparent; for an attempt to articulate it more clearly, see Budd, “The Sublime in Nature,” 130–32, and also Emily Brady, “Reassessing Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature in the Kantian Sublime,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 46 (2012): 99–100. 46. The quote is from Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (London: HarperPress, 2008), 205. And if Lovejoy is correct in drawing attention to the longer intellectual lineage of these ideas (see the remarks in “DELIGHT,” n. 90), the education of the seeing eye would here have to be unpacked in even more complex terms, anchoring it in a richer set of philosophical and theological as well as scientific practices. 47. Ibid., 106, quoting John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy in Letters to his Pupil (first ed. 1786); Byron’s encounter with the newly interpreted starry sky had also been laced with the same mood: see ibid., 205. Bonnycastle’s next remark, equally significantly, suggests an effort to conquer that opening mood and reassert control over the natural spectacles that so unnerve us, through an emphasis on the human powers of investigating and understanding such spectacles. 48. See “DELIGHT: The End of Wonder?” and n. 90. 49. See generally Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, ch. 3, 137 quoted; and see also the opening of chapter 4 (144–45) for another striking exemplification of this

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topos. Nicolson’s view of wonder’s dominant tincture here is one which several of the writers we have heard from (including Stephen Greenblatt and Mary Campbell) would invite us to question. Cf. Holmes’s description of the spirit of Bonnycastle’s above-­cited remark as “a certain kind of wonder, mixed with disabling awe or terror” (The Age of Wonder, 106). 50. For the above, see Longinus, “On Sublimity,” 468 (9.1–3), 494 (35.2–4); the other translation is William Smith’s (1739). And see Monk’s discussion in The Sublime, ch. 1. 51. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 242, and see generally chapters 6, 9, and 10 for more detailed discussion of this topos. For further discussion, see also Troels Engberg-­Pedersen, “Marcus Aurelius on Emotions,” in The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. J. Shivols and T. Engberg-­Pedersen (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), and also my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, ch. 5. 52. I draw on the translation by R. M. Gummere: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, vol. 3 (London: Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925). 53. Here I use the translation of this passage in Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 183; quotations from the Meditations are otherwise drawn from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, trans. A. S. Farquharson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 54. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 184; cf. 242. 55. I draw on the translation of the Republic by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1992). 56. Harold N. Fowler’s translation: Theaetetus, Sophist (London: Heinemann, 1921). 57. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 97. 58. Ibid., 83. 59. My use of this term here may recall Carlo Ginzburg’s argument in “Making Things Strange: The Prehistory of a Literary Device,” Representations 56 (1996), in which Ginzburg proposed a longer genealogy for Shklovsky’s specific technique that notably linked it to the Stoics’ strategies of visual transformation; the passage of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations cited below (6.13) formed a prominent piece of evidence. Not everybody will be convinced by this view taken as a historical claim of influence: the historical links seem too swiftly made, and the omission of certain more obvious links (such as the concern with renewed vision in Romantic poetics) puzzling. Similarly, the claim of historical unity or continuity has to be sustained in the face of important distinctions (many of which Ginzburg himself signals) between the terms in which the practice of “estrangement” is understood in different contexts and the purposes to which is harnessed. What counts as “really seeing” among the Stoics, for example, is very different from what counts as “really seeing” in Shklovsky or in Proust, whose ideal of preserving the “freshness of appearances” seems to have little to do with the vision of true value pursued by the Stoics against a larger ethical program

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of mastering the passions. Yet “estrangement” is after all (and in the English language at least) not a technical term. And taken in the broadest meaning that Ginzburg indicates in closing—estrangement is an antidote to our habit of “taking the world, and ourselves, for granted” (22); to estrange is thus at its simplest to hold the familiar at arm’s length and see it anew—we do not need to subscribe to thick claims of historical continuity to allow this as a minimal continuity that these practices share, and which Ginzburg’s diverse portfolio of cases heuristically lights up. One can learn from such collocations regardless of their historical relations: consider Marcus Aurelius’s estranging confrontation of wine; now consider Zorba-­K azantzakis’s (see the next chapter, “OBJECT”). 60. On this topic, see Gauthier, Magnanimité (his discussion of Plato can be found in pt. 1, ch. 2). Gauthier, however, has often been charged with overstating the connection between greatness of soul and philosophical contemplation in Aristotle’s account in particular; my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint provides some extra background on these issues, and on the link between greatness of soul and the topos of the cosmic viewpoint (see esp. ch. 5). 61. I draw on the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 62. See my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, esp. ch. 5, for further discussion of the above and what follows, including the composite movement of contempt and aspiration present in greatness of soul, as well as the different ways of configuring the relationship between external and internal goods, and thus the force of the transcending movement from the former to the latter. 63. The translation is Cyril Bailey’s: Lucretius on the Nature of Things (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910); Lucretius is more specifically referring to the power of comprehension afforded by Epicurus’ philosophy. 64. Critique of the Power of Judgment, xxxii. The remark is framed as a criticism of recent appropriations of Kant’s sublime by postmodern theorists; for it is this sense of satisfaction that makes it difficult to read Kant’s sublime as an expression of the postmodern experience of the world as incomprehensible by traditional standards of rationality. Cf. the remarks in Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 187–92. 65. See my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, esp. ch. 3, for further discussion of this dense characterization. 66. Some of the most important differences between these philosophical moments are discussed in connection with Schopenhauer’s sublime in my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint. 67. The quotations from Schopenhauer are slightly paraphrased from WWR, 2:479 and WWR, 2:485; for a more detailed discussion of these points, see my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, chs. 2 and 3. 68. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 184. 69. Pascal’s “flight,” at the same time, seems to differ in important ways from the ancient topos and its reappropriation in the philosophical sublime as notably

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articulated by Kant. The emotional texture seems differently determined: Pascal’s flight ends, not in exultation, but in terror, not in triumph, but in humility; and not in the overcoming of limit but in the acknowledgment of limitation (above all, the limitation of the human power to understand: having completed one’s double sway between the two infinites, one terminates at the reflection that “the ends of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from [one] in impenetrable secrecy”: Pensées, 61). See also Lovejoy’s illuminating remarks on Pascal’s “two infinites” in The Great Chain of Being, 126–30, in the context of his broader discussion of the moral and religious uses to which the new cosmographical ideas about the world’s “incalculable vastness” were put. There is no doubt a longer story to be told here, part of which would have to pass through the specificities of Pascal’s religious viewpoint: it was precisely one of Pascal’s complaints against Stoicism, as John Sellars notes, that it ascribed far too much power to the individual, ignoring the need for the grace of God (Stoicism [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006], 145). It is also worth noting here that Kant’s interpretation of the sublime in terms of a culminating feeling of grandeur marked a departure from the views of earlier writers who had read its terminus as a sense of humility before God, as pointed out by Paul Guyer in Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 239–41. 70. For an overview of these exercises, see generally chapter 3 of Philosophy as a Way of Life. 71. Hadot’s phrase: ibid., 104. OBJECT: Why Wonder? 1. At the same time, as suggested earlier (“DELIGHT”), the phenomenological texture of particular emotions is not a biological given but is influenced by the cultural contexts in which they arise and the larger neighborhoods and ethical stances that frame them, which includes the value judgments served on them. 2. The phrase is from Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53. 3. It is not incidental, in this respect, that greatness of soul—a virtue linked to the responses of admiration and the zealous aspiration to emulate—should be specially connected to the period of youth by Aristotle. See his discussion of the character of the young in Rhetoric 2.12, and also the remarks on emulation at 2.11. The above builds on the suggestive remarks by William McDougall in Social Psychology, quoting 112, 111; McDougall suggests that we look upon admiration as primarily social in nature and directed to persons in its paradigmatic form. This suggestion points ahead to Keltner and Haidt’s evolutionary account of emotions such as awe as experiences whose “primordial form” is the reaction of a subordinate to a powerful leader (“Approaching Awe”). Focusing on the more basic hierarchical relationship between children and adults, McDougall’s

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proposal lacks the uncomfortable swiftness I find in Keltner and Haidt’s genealogical hypothesis. 4. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 395. 5. Ibid., 399; and see generally chapter 7.3. 6. See the discussion in Doron, “The Microscopic Glance.” 7. While this discussion takes several starting points from Rubenstein’s account in Strange Wonder—and while it will also suggest a way of rereading one of its specific junctures—the thread of my concern diverges from hers, governed as it is by a larger preoccupation with the notion of the self and the constitution of its identity, and with the different forms of closure/self-­enclosure that have shaped our philosophical approaches to it. My assertion of the positive place of mastery within inquiry should not thus be heard as an interrogation of Rubenstein’s project, or indeed as a denial that any sense of mastery must always communicate with what unsettles or ungrounds it, or with what reveals it in its vulnerability and dependence. This is a point that will hopefully be audible in the discussion that follows as a running theme. 8. Note that Wittgenstein’s focal term, unlike Kant’s, is sublim rather than erhaben (e.g., PI, 89, 94). For more on Wittgenstein’s use of “subliming” as a term of critique, see Gordon C. F. Bearn, Waking to Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Existential Investigations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), ch. 3; Bearn emphasizes the chemical rather than the aesthetic associations of this term. And see also Stephen Mulhall’s discussion in Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2001), 87–93. 9. See Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); my ensuing discussion is deeply indebted to Kerr’s. 10. Ibid., 111. 11. Ibid., 72. 12. “Narcissism” is Kerr’s critical term: ibid., 73. 13. Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 27; Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” Must We Mean What We Say?, 72. 14. Cavell, Claim of Reason, 15, 31. 15. Quotes from ibid., 112, 115, 178. 16. Both phrases are Cavell’s: “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” 61. 17. McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, 18–19. 18. My account here dovetails with the one offered by Bearn in Waking to Wonder; see esp. ch. 4, 155–60. 19. “Lecture on Ethics,” 12 (“Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein”); cf. the earlier remarks at 11: “The scientific way of looking at a fact is not the way to look at it as a miracle.” See Kevin M. Cahill, The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), esp. ch. 2, for a finer-­grained discussion of these remarks against a broader

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reading of the significance of wonder in Wittgenstein’s early work and indeed his philosophical project as a whole. Cahill notably links Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with wonder to his ethical or “spiritual” aims: to his pursuit of a “spiritually charged” cultural critique of modernity—including a widespread but problematic “scientific worldview”—that runs through both Wittgenstein’s early and later work, on Cahill’s view. 20. For it is questionable, as mentioned earlier (“DELIGHT”), whether the aporetic kind of wonder Rubenstein focuses on characterizes the entirety of Plato’s work with equal fidelity, given the presence of another notion of wonder— wonder as reverence—whose features are rather differently drawn up. 21. Rubenstein, Strange Wonder, 4. 22. This is a theme explored more concertedly in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). To thus resume the description adumbrated earlier (“SUDDEN: Stoking Wonder”): even though philosophy has often been conceived as a battle against self-­evidence and against what we take for granted, not all ways in which this battle has been waged (including several figuring within my initial description) have been modes of wonder, and not all might be deemed equally salutary. 23. This is my misgiving regarding certain recent efforts to provide substantive accounts of specific intellectual virtues, including Jason Baehr’s otherwise illuminating discussion in The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For while Baehr calls attention to “the deep interrelatedness of intellectual virtues” (21, n. 6) and to the fact that “there is more than one way in which a character trait can qualify as an intellectual virtue, or more than one substantive and univocal criterion for the possession of an intellectual virtue” (89), his own account appears to be invested in a rather more restrictive regimentation of these criteria. The key intellectual virtue of courage, for example, is articulated with reference to a sharply delineated notion of the threat to one’s well-­being involved—a threat or risk of “social, political, professional, or bodily injury” (172)—which would rule out using it to describe successful negotiations of the kind of threat discussed at length above, which is tied to the disruption of one’s intellectual order itself and the needs of the self implicated within it. 24. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 191; original emphasis removed. MacIntyre’s notion of “practice” briefly came into view at the start of the previous chapter. 25. Ibid., 197; emphasis added. 26. Baehr, The Inquiring Mind, 4, 93, 17. Baehr notably includes wonder among the intellectual virtues required for successful inquiry, and more specifically among those virtues that help initiate it. 27. After Virtue, 187. There is also, and even more obviously, a distinction to be drawn between developmental stages within the histories of individual practitioners: “success” is something we only become capable of attaining incrementally.

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28. Ibid., 219. 29. For similar reasons, while Baehr grounds the intellectual virtues in their “usefulness” for “successful inquiry,” he distinguishes his position from the stronger claim (articulated by other virtue theorists) that the intellectual virtues are those traits that are in fact reliably effective in producing intellectual success, e.g., the acquisition of true beliefs—for that is ultimately not an end which it is in the agent’s power to control. See the discussion in The Inquiring Mind, ch. 7, especially 7.2.1 and 7.2.3. 30. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 53–54, and 46. 31. Lindgren, “Adam Smith’s Theory of Inquiry,” 904. Cf. Smith’s remark in “Of the Imitative Arts,” 185, about the “pleasing satisfaction of science”: “We wonder and are amazed at the effect; and we are pleased ourselves, and happy to find that we can comprehend, in some measure, how that wonderful effect is produced.” Smith’s reference to the “pleasing wonder of ignorance” just before this remark—a reference that sits awkwardly with the view of wonder he takes elsewhere—complicates the context of this statement. 32. The last phrase quoted is from Smith, “Of the Imitative Arts,” 205 (where Smith compares the pleasure derived from a musical composition to the pleasure derived from the contemplation of a great scientific system); and the term “creating” invokes Smith’s characterization of philosophy as “creat[ing] another constitution of things” as it seeks to render phenomena coherent (“History of Astronomy,” 75), which ties in with Smith’s specification of his aim in the “History” as that of examining scientific systems as “inventions of the imagination” (105). In the backdrop is a controversial larger question as to whether our minds, in Smith’s view, make real contact with the world in producing these systems, or whether the type of causal connection we track “lies merely in ourselves,” in Hume’s phrase, “and is nothing but that determination of the mind” (T, 266). 33. And this suggests something to which the preceding and ensuing stages of our discussion in this chapter also lend force: for while, resuming an earlier theme (“PRODUCES”), wonder has often seemed to lack connection to our goals and self-­referential concerns—“floating free,” as we put it, from our ordinary passionate reactions to things that impinge on our interests and the anxious clutch we seek to retain on these—wonder may not always float free from our interests in a wider sense; or if it does, this must be an achievement. 34. Schliesser, “Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions,” 717. 35. “Can be read as Aristotle’s” is a necessary caveat given the paucity of Aristotle’s own remarks regarding this process; see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, ch. 1, for a fuller sketch of an account along these lines which is in the backdrop of my remarks here and in the following paragraphs. To emphasize this aspect of moral education is not to exclude the more complex cognitive aspects highlighted by other writers, such as Nancy Sherman in The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 36. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, 19; and see generally Baier’s illuminating discussion in chapter 1, which my above remarks lean on. The nautical imagery

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(“swimming,” “at sea”) is offered by Hume himself in the conclusion to Book 1 of the Treatise; see especially T, 263–64. Cf. Schliesser’s remarks (glossing Smith) about our need for approval as rooted in the “fundamental uncertainty that each of us has about our own judgements” and “our recognition of the fallibility of first person authority” (“Wonder in the Face of Scientific Revolutions,” 712). 37. This process of transformation, as well as the dialectic between dependence and independence noted above, are central themes in Herdt’s discussion in Putting on Virtue. 38. The idiom just deployed is Henry Sidgwick’s, discussing the question of psychological hedonism in The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1981), Book 1, ch. 4. 39. As Herdt notes, Hume adopted a pointedly positive attitude on pride that was part of a broader bid to reclaim a pagan ethic and disclaim the Christian ethic with its celebration of the “monkish” virtue of humility. See Herdt, Putting on Virtue, ch. 11, for a discussion that brings out the problematic aspects of the central moral role given by Hume to pride as a form of reflexive self-­assessment; the distinction between internal and external goods invoked in my above remarks is also a key motif in Herdt’s. Smith’s view of the role of praise or honor in our lives would require a more nuanced treatment given his more complex understanding of the “impartial spectator” and his qualifying view that what we desire is “not only to be loved, but to be lovely” and “not only praise, but praise-­worthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, 113–14). 40. Martin Rees, Our Cosmic Habitat (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 2002), xi, and see Einstein, “The World As I See It,” Ideas and Opinions, 11, for Einstein’s fuller remarks. 41. I have in mind Nagel’s use of the term in Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament, ch. 1. Just how we appraise Smith’s specific wonder on these terms may depend on several things, including the view we take of his recognition of the open-­endedness of inquiry and the provisional nature of systems of thought (cf. the point made in “DELIGHT,” n. 63); and also the view we take on the more complex question of Smith’s skepticism, which affects the way we read the achievement of intelligibility and thus its debts. 42. The quote is from Nikos Kazantzakis, Bios kai Politeia tou Alexe Zorba (Athens: Ekdoseis Kazantzake, 2007), 8. 43. Ibid., 63. 44. Ibid., 234. 45. Ibid., 163, 136. 46. Quote from ibid., 225; and see Kazantzakis’s introductory remarks to the book. 47. Ibid., 275. Peter Bien answers the question of genre by describing Zorba the Greek as a “tragic myth” (“Zorba the Greek, Nietzsche, and the Perennial Greek Predicament,” Antioch Review 25 [1965]: 155), calling attention to the deeper Nietzschean background of this work; cf. the discussion of the latter issue

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in Morton P. Levitt, “The Companions of Kazantzakis: Nietzsche, Bergson, and Zorba the Greek,” Comparative Literature Studies 14 (1977). Both commentators help highlight that the apparent antagonism noted above between life and art or reflection needs to be taken with nuance, not only because Zorba’s life itself is, in true Nietzschean fashion, life-­become-­art (Levitt, 371: “the poem of his life”; Bien, 159: “a dithyramb sung and danced to the honor of his god Dionysus”), but also because Zorba represents a revised notion of reflectivity rather than a wholesale suppression of it (see Levitt, 368–69). Levitt’s caution against reading the work in purely autobiographical terms and identifying the narrator too closely with Kazantzakis also needs to be borne in mind. 48. The link with appreciation is central to the account of wonder (along with awe and elevation) as a “strength of transcendence” in Peterson and Seligman’s discussion in Character Strengths and Virtues, ch. 23. 49. “Wonder,” 144. 50. Theory of Prose, 5. 51. Quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 413. A similar ultimacy seems to be carried by Homer Hogan’s analysis of wonder as outlined in the last chapter (n. 6), which linked wonder to the “pure expression of intentionality,” reflecting the “hunger of consciousness for self-­realization, for being as consciousness” (“Structures of Wonder,” 224–25). 52. These remarks are not intended as an exhaustive characterization of Kazantzakis’s own understanding of Zorba’s significance and appeal. Such a characterization, certainly, would require attending more closely to the intellectual fraternity Kazantzakis summons for Zorba when he juxtaposes his name to Homer’s, Bergson’s, and Nietzsche’s—a fraternity that already points to Zorba’s larger significance as an embodiment of freedom, of authenticity, of man as a law unto himself. Levitt, “The Companions of Kazantzakis,” and Bien, “Zorba the Greek,” provide good starting points for considering this larger significance. 53. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 82. 54. The quoted phrases are from ibid., 64 and 57; and see generally the discussion in the essay “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’.” Murdoch more specifically thinks of love as the “faculty” that relates us to what is real and that constitutes our ability to direct our attention outward (64–65). 55. Hepburn, “Wonder,” 145, and Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 321–22. Cf. Fuller’s remarks in “From Biology to Spirituality,” 84–85, in the context of a broader assessment of the value of wonder (79–85). The status of wonder as a recognition of otherness or difference is also central to Marguerite La Caze’s account of the ethical and political significance of wonder in Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). 56. It is this sense of owed acknowledgment that Hadot also seems to voice when he refers to “the scandal of the human condition: man lives in the world without perceiving the world”: Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 258.

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57. For a more concerted effort to articulate the attitude of reverence as a value or ethical ideal, see Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), and also Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-­Up Idealists (Orlando: Harcourt 2008), ch. 8. 58. See Levitt, “The Companions of Kazantzakis,” 373, for some concentrated examples. 59. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime, 59. Clewis has a special concern with the notion of enthusiasm, which is closely linked to the sublime, and which offers an interesting example of an affective state valuable for its intelligible content. Glossing Kant’s characterization of enthusiasm as “the idea of the good with affect” (Critique of the Power of Judgment, 154 [§ 29]), Clewis brings this out when he writes: “Under the throes of affect, we can see, or more precisely feel, the good for what it is” (The Kantian Sublime, 3). An important distinction Kant draws in this context, and one relevant for relating this point to Kant’s suspicion of emotion, is that between affects and passions; it is the latter that interfere with moral choice. And see my Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, 37–38, for a brief discussion of the related problem within Schopenhauer’s scheme. 60. Though it is again worth keeping in mind Guyer’s discussion of Kant’s critical ambivalence in this context: see “PRODUCES,” n. 32. 61. Kant’s introduction of the infinite into his analysis of the mathematically sublime has formed a frequent subject of philosophical comment and critique in this regard: see, e.g., Budd’s remarks in “The Sublime in Nature,” 126–29, and Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 104–106. 62. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 142; cf. Rubenstein’s remarks in Strange Wonder, 29. I follow Rubenstein in linking Heidegger’s discussion of admiration to the sublime, even though Heidegger’s remarks locate admiration more directly in a social context—as a response to persons—instead of the kind of encounter with nature involved in the sublime. 63. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, 142. 64. See the discussion of this point in Emily Brady, “The Environmental Sublime,” in The Sublime, ed. Costelloe, esp. 177–82, and for a fuller response to this criticism, see her “Reassessing Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature.” 65. I look to Rubenstein’s narrative here, one of whose main aims is to reveal the “stubborn reinscription of one or another figure of the transcendental subject” in many moments of post-­Heideggerian philosophy (Strange Wonder, 175; cf. 187). Cf. Howard Parsons’s snapshot remark about the “history of the European mind in its attitude to wonder” in his “A Philosophy of Wonder” (85): “The direction of wonder has passed from God, to nature, to man.” 66. Quoted in David E. Cooper, The Measure of Things: Humanism, Humility, and Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 156; and see generally 153–60 for a discussion that sheds light on the self-­divinizing streak within this

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philosophical current—a streak that can be tied into Rubenstein’s narrative— and on the ethical charge of arrogance and hubris this has sometimes attracted. 67. Melissa McBay Merritt, “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime,” in The Sublime, ed. Costelloe, 42–43. Cf. 44, quoting the Critique of Practical Reason: the consciousness of the moral law “strikes down self-­conceit” and “humiliates every human being when he compares it with the sensible propensity of his nature.” 68. Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 263, quoting Kant’s Lectures on Ethics in the context of making a point directly relevant to the above discussion. 69. Cf. Republic 613a-­b. For more on this idea and its interpretive complexities, see Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 3. 70. Greatness of soul stood at the forefront of the Christian critical confrontation of pagan virtue, taken to embody a problematic form of pride in need of ethical revision—a project that would be central to Aquinas’s reconstruction of this virtue in his Summa Theologiae. The great-­souled man as portrayed by Aristotle has often seemed excessively preoccupied with his own greatness and deficient in the acknowledgment of his dependencies and debts, including the debts he owes for the formation of his own character (see, e.g., the discussion in Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 38–43). Yet, as Herdt points out, these problematic facets are in tension with other elements of Aristotle’s scheme (the self-­preoccupation threatening the structure of ethical motivation as Aristotle spells it out, the disavowal of dependency conflicting with its avowal elsewhere in Aristotle’s work). The recognition of these facets, more broadly, is compatible with the recognition of other ingredients that pull against them, both in Aristotle’s scheme and those of his fellow philosophers. 71. Budd, “The Sublime in Nature,” 134. The question whether the sublime is still open to us has come to be broached with increasing frequency in recent times. After a long period of neglect, the last three decades have seen a burgeoning interest in the sublime among postmodern theorists including Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, and others, with Kant’s work serving as a key point of reference. Yet most of these appropriations of the sublime, as Guyer notes, have “little to do with Kant’s own intentions,” and have made of the sublime merely “a palimpsest for theoretical concerns of our own day” (Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom, 188; for further discussion of these appropriations, see, e.g., Shaw, The Sublime, ch. 6, and David B. Johnson, “The Postmodern Sublime: Presentation and its Limits,” in The Sublime, ed. Costelloe). Far more interesting in this connection has been the recent work by Emily Brady, who seeks to “carve out a contemporary home for the sublime,” and specifically the natural sublime, and to make an argument for its enduring relevance, against a more nuanced understanding of the reasons for its neglect. See the discussion in Brady, “The Environmental Sublime” (171 quoted) and the book-­length discussion in The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Notes

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Press, 2013). Though my focus in these brief remarks is rather different, I am in sympathy with many elements of Brady’s discussion (and much of its spirit), including the central place given to the notion of “mystery” and to the related stance of humility in the encounter with the sublime, as also the openness to the “metaphysical” dimensions of the aesthetic experience of nature, particularly in the way suggested by Ronald Hepburn in his work. 72. This view has an affinity to the one articulated by Jeff Malpas in “Beginning in Wonder: Placing the Origin of Thinking,” in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. N. Kompridis (London; New York: Routledge, 2006), when he states (185) that wonder “is not so much a response to any particular appearance or set of appearances, although it always requires some such appearance as its focus and its immediate cause, as it is the response that is evoked in us by the very recognition of appearance as such (whether or not that recognition is well or clearly articulated).” My misgiving about this statement relates to the apophthegmatic definitional “is” in which it is couched: for even allowing for the inarticulacy of the judgments incorporated in our passionate responses, it seems wrong to deny that wonder sometimes simply is a first-­order response to particular appearances. 73. I have in mind the kind of suspicion Heidegger expresses in Basic Questions of Philosophy, which suggests that wonder and doing are doomed to be locked into problematic relations: for a practice tends to create its own standards of failure and success and epistemic (representational) knowhow, and brings in the calculative attitude through another door (155: “in carrying out the basic disposition [of wonder] itself there resides the danger of its disturbance and destruction”). I should hope that these relations are not as doomed as Heidegger suggests.

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Index

on wonder as a response to the familiar versus the unexplained or unfamiliar, 37, 56–57, 62 Platonic versus Aristotelian wonder, 55–59, 62–65, 67, 68 art, literary or narrative, 34, 52, 53–54, 57, 96, 104, 105, 155, 243; the ordinary as the object of wonder in, 112–115, 141, 174–75, 196 visual, 95–96, 105 askesis, see spiritual exercises astonishment, 28, 30, 41, 75–76 astronomy, 43, 80, 155 Augustine, 36, 37, 38, 60, 105, 110 Austen, Jane, 227, 232 awe, 12, 13, 19, 27, 28, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 80, 95, 110, 116, 177, 179, 199, 221n2, 222n5, 225n27, 228n29, 253n3

Abrams, Meyer H., 82, 113, 114 Addison, Joseph, 79 admiration, 13, 19, 43, 46, 53, 54, 65, 80, 189, 212, 221n2, 227n46, 238n81, 242n25, 253n3 aesthetic experience, 141–42 wonder as an, 60, 64, 65, 82, 89–91, 112–114, 140–54, 196 see also sublime; art aesthetics of the infinite, 80, 155 Age of the Marvelous, 34, 35, 241n5 Albert the Great, 52, 62, 237n73 amazement, 14, 27, 28, 30, 73, 75–76 American Transcendentalists, 82, 114 anger, 44, 232n42 Annas, Julia, 233n57 anxiety, 44, 47, 50, 56, 59, 68–69, 177, 180–81, 183, 186, 187, 188 Aquinas, Thomas, 62, 75–76, 102, 162, 172, 186, 187, 260n70 connection of wonder to pleasure and fear, 52–53, 71–74 aporia, 56, 63, 116 appreciation, 111, 201 Aristotle, 6, 19, 36, 39, 43, 53, 62, 73, 74, 86–87, 172, 190–91, 236n68, 260n70 on greatness of soul, 159–61 on the usual versus the unusual as a source of pleasure, 67 on wonder as a source of pleasure, 33–34, 52

Bacon, Francis, 38 Baehr, Jason, 255n23, 255n26, 256n29 Baier, Annette, 232n42 Baudelaire, Charles, 114 beauty, 30, 65, 110, 142, 147, 189 Bergson, Henri, 82, 198 Bernard of Clairvaux, 39 Biester, James, 53–54, 66, 228n5, 232n40 Boehme, Jacob, 114 Boileau, Nicolas, 79, 154 273

274

Index

Bonnycastle, John, 250n47 Boyle, Robert, 41 Brady, Emily, 260n71 Brown, Deborah, 21–22, 224n22 Budd, Malcolm, 142, 151, 152, 216–17 Burke, Edmund, 60, 79 Byron, George Gordon, 153, 250n47 Cahill, Kevin, 254n19 Campbell, Mary Baine, 27, 41, 226n37, 236n70 Cavell, Stanley, 24–25, 45, 46, 130, 180, 184 character, 170, 186, 191, 193 childhood, 88, 93–94, 113, 114, 129, 130 Chrysakopoulou, Sylvana, 116, 234 Clewis, Robert, 209, 259n59 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 82, 83, 113, 114, 135, 141, 175, 196 compassion, 205 consciousness, relation of wonder to notion of, 123–35, 203, 204 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 155 cosmic flight, 156–59, 161, 163–65, 209 courage, 186, 255n23 Cunningham, James Vincent, 53 cultivation of wonder, 101 in practices, 105–120, 121–23 as a conquest of the interested viewpoint, 138–54, 205–206 as a conquest of pride, 174–76, 176–84 curiosity, 13, 39, 42–43, 54, 75, 92, 190, 227n47, 229n11, 238n81 Darwin, Charles, 13, 52, 229n15 Daston, Lorraine, 6, 32, 47, 51, 55, 57, 78, 79, 81, 82, 227n46, 244n32 on the history of wonder, 35–45 Dawkins, Richard, 60–61, 89, 108–110, 112, 194 decorum, 42, 57, 79–80, 175, 232n45 Dennis, John, 79, 81 Derrida, Jacques, 78 Descartes, René, 18, 21–22, 33, 46, 57, 62, 87, 88, 92, 98, 102, 105, 138,

173, 181, 226n30, 229n13, 229n15, 230n16, 234n60 immobilising effect of wonder, 40–41, 75–76 on the “new” versus the “great” as objects of wonder, 64–65, 235n61 Donne, John, 53 Doron, Claude-Olivier, 176 doubt, 179, 181, 182, 184 Einstein, Albert, 108, 194 Ekman, Paul, 13, 222n5 Eliot, George, 232n40 Elster, Jon, 223n8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 82, 114 emotions, action tendencies, 13–14, 20, 169–70 adaptive significance, 12 basic or primary, 13, 222n5 cognitive content, 14–16, 17–18, 99–100, 169 cultivation of, 100–101 cultural context, 24 evaluation of, 168–70 hedonic tone, 31–32, 168–69 narrative context, 24–25, 130 physical expression, 23–25, 87 Enlightenment, 35, 51 enthusiasm, 42, 81–82, 240n92, 259n59 Epicureans, 134, 156, 158 esteem, 64, 238n81 estrangement, 115, 124, 140, 159, 251n59 experience, 21–22, 93, 203 explanation, 61, 92, 108, 109, 173, 185, 194 as the end of wonder, 56–57 explaining versus remarking, 182–84 extraordinary, see unfamiliar evaluative response, wonder as an, 29–31, 64, 65, 66, 102, 130, 138, 166, 195–207, 234n59, 242n25; see also greatness, as object of wonder wonder as a disinterested, 14–16, 18, 67, 78, 137–54, 205–206, 236n68, 256n32; see also aesthetic experience, sublime

Index

familiar, as object of wonder, 37, 41–42, 56, 61, 62, 82, 102, 103–120, 121–36, 138–41, 174–76, 182–83 as source of pleasure, 48, 67 justification of wonder as a response to, 196–207 fear, wonder and, 36–37, 51–54, 59–61, 63, 64, 66–77, 96–98, 236n70; see also sublime Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 213 Findlen, Paula, 59 Fisher, Philip, 2, 7, 21, 72, 123, 154, 171, 199 on the nature of wonder, 89–101 fortitude, 186 Frijda, Nico, 13, 14, 21, 40, 52, 66, 87, 88, 136, 222n7, 227n45, 229n15 Fuller, Robert, 12, 32, 88–89, 110, 225n27, 231n33 Galileo, 155 Genazino, Wilhelm, 245n51 Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid, 111 Gide, André, 247n14 Ginzburg, Carlo, 251n59 Goldie, Peter, 17 Gordon, Robert, 16 gratitude, 109, 111 greatness, as object of wonder, 64, 65, 73, 80, 102, 103, 107, 118, 174, 189, 201, 235n63, 237n71; see also sublime greatness of soul, 74, 75, 156, 158, 159–63, 186, 187, 188, 237n71, 260 as involving a displacement of wonder to the subject, 160–62, 215 Greenblatt, Stephen, 59, 236n70, 243n27 grief, 24 Guyer, Paul, 149, 248n26, 260n71 habit, 113, 140–41 Hacker, Peter, 20, 24, 133–34, 225n28 Hadot, Pierre, 156–59, 164–65 Haidt, Jonathan, 221n2, 222n6, 225n27, 253n3

275

Harpies, 60 Hart, Henry, 81 Heidegger, Martin, 61, 83, 117, 118, 183, 212, 219 Hepburn, Ronald, 28, 30, 112, 201– 202, 205, 226n38, 260n71 Herdt, Jennifer, 257, 260n70 Herschel, William, 153, 155 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 110 Hobbes, Thomas, 39 Hogan, Homer, 125, 246n6, 258n51 Homer, 198 honesty, 186 honor, 191, 193 hope, 20, 72–74, 75, 76, 186, 188, 220, 237n72, 237n74, 238n82 Hulin, Michel, 125, 126, 228 Hume, David, 14, 29, 39, 47–48, 54, 58, 67, 79, 104–105, 162, 181, 187, 190, 191–92, 193, 201, 227n39, 256n32, 256n36, 257n39 on the emotional response to the unexpected or unfamiliar, 48–49, 67, 69, 74–75 humility, 37, 64, 88, 188, 205, 215, 252n69, 257n39 Ignatius, of Loyola, 164 imagination, 98–99, 119, 131, 134, 135, 143, 145, 153–54, 155–57, 163, 164, 166, 243n30, 250n45 infinite, 143, 144, 152, 153, 259n61 intellectual inquiry, ethical negotiation of wonder’s pleasure and fear in, 66–77 ethical negotiation of pride in, 175–76, 176–84, 188–94 notion of mastery within, 184–94 wonder as an obstacle to, 40–41 wonder as an excellence or virtue in, 107, 117–118, 122–23, 255n26 wonder as a stimulus to, 33, 43, 86–87, 106–107 virtues of, 76–77, 186–88, 193–94 Iris, 60 James, Henry, 114 James, Susan, 64, 224n22, 230n16

276

Index

John Damascene, 52, 71 Johnson, Samuel, 53, 233n47 Joyce, James, 114 judgement of value, see evaluative response Kant, Immanuel, 19, 78, 81, 83, 95, 99, 102, 163, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 216, 218, 252n69 on aesthetic experience, 141–42 on the sublime, 142–47, 149–152, 161–62 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 252, 196–99, 204, 207, 258n52 Keats, John, 108 Keltner, Dacher, 221n2, 222n6, 225n27 Kenny, Neil, 54, 229n11 Kerr, Fergus, 178 Kierkegaard, Søren, 60 Kirwan, James, 149 Lawrence, D. H., 245n51 Lazarus, Richard, 18, 223n11 Le Brun, Charles, 64, 87, 88, 229n15 Levinas, Emmanuel, 78 Lindgren, J. Ralph, 189, 233n43 Longinus, 79, 81, 142, 154, 156, 158, 160, 232n40, 239n90 Lovejoy, Arthur, 239n90, 250n46, 252n69 Lucretius, 134, 135, 162 Mach, Ernst, 92 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 122, 185, 187–88, 192, 246n2 magnanimity, see greatness of soul Malebranche, Nicolas, 40, 44 Malpas, Jeff, 261n72 Mandeville, John, 243n27 Marino, Giambattista, 34, 53 Marcus Aurelius, 157, 158–59, 165, 251n59 mastery, 57–61, 64, 65, 78, 139, 140–41, 176, 179, 219 and the phenomenological response to the unfamiliar, 67–70 as a source of pleasure, 58, 93, 189–90

as aspiration of intellectual inquiry, 184–94 relation of hope to, 72–74 the sublime as a dialectic of vulnerability and, 146–48, 212–13 Matravers, Derek, 227n41 McDougall, William, 13, 222n7, 227n47, 253n3 McGinn, Marie, 179, 182 megalopsychia, see greatness of soul Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 82 Meritt, Melissa, 214 Milton, John, 113 Monet, Claude, 96 Monk, Samuel, 81, 155, 239n90 More, Henry, 80, 155, 156 Mulhall, Stephen, 25 Murdoch, Iris, 205 mystery, 60, 108, 110, 111, 194, 197, 208, 219–20 Nagel, Thomas, 117, 124, 194 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 78 nature, 42, 79–80, 113, 139, 142–54, 213 Newton, Isaac, 39, 48 Nicolson, Marjorie, 79, 80, 155–56, 239n88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 69, 198, 257n47 Nightingale, Andrea, 63, 241, 245 noumenal realm, 144, 209, 210 Nussbaum, Martha, 15–16, 22, 30, 44, 62, 100, 137, 205, 223n18, 236n68 Oatley, Keith, 223n11 Onians, John, 222n7, 225n27, 241n5 ordinary, see familiar ordinary language, 54, 178, 181, 182, 185 identity of wonder in, 26–31 wonder at the familiar and, 126–35 Ortony, Andrew, 222n5, 223n11, 227n45 Otto, Rudolf, 110 paradoxography, 36 Park, Katharine, 6, 32, 47, 51, 55, 57, 78, 79, 81, 82, 227n46, 244n32

Index

on the history of wonder, 35–45 Parsons, Howard, 227n47 Pascal, Blaise, 60, 104, 128, 154, 155, 164, 165, 176, 243, 252n69 on the two infinities, 96–99 patience, 186 Peterson, Christopher, 221n2 philosophy, 105, 122, 137–38 the ordinary or familiar as the object of wonder in, 106–107, 115–118, 139–40, 182–83 wonder as the beginning of, 33, 43, 86–87, 106–107 changing historical relationship to wonder, 35–45 Wittgenstein’s critique of wonder in, 176 see also science; intellectual inquiry physico-theology, 41–42, 175 Piaget, Jean, 231n33 Pieper, Josef, 117–118, 239n85 Plato, 6, 19, 20, 33, 71, 78, 86, 117, 158, 159, 160, 162, 184, 189, 211, 235n63 Platonic versus Aristotelian wonder, 55–59, 62–65, 67, 68 on wonder as aporia versus wonder as reverence, 63–64, 116 Platt, Peter G., 232n45 pleasure, connection of wonder to, 31–32, 33–35, 40–41, 52–54, 58–59, 82, 91, 93, 170–71, 189–90, 238; see also sublime as an achievement in aesthetic experience, 142–54 as an achievement in intellectual inquiry, 66–77 Plotinus, 239n90 poetry, see art, literary Pollock, Jackson, 96 Polo, Marco, 36, 243n27 practices, 105–120, 121–23, 138–41 as narrative context for wonder at the familiar, 129–35 and the virtues, 187, 188 pragmatic occasions, 126–35

277

pride, 39, 58, 175–76, 178–79, 189–91, 193–94, 214, 215, 219, 257n39, 260n70 Proust, Marcel, 114, 251n59 Qur’an, 111 rainbow, 60, 90, 94, 108 Rees, Martin, 194 regret, 20 religion, 122, 135 wonder as a religious emotion, 41–42, 82, 109–112, 175–76 Renaissance, 34, 52, 53, 57, 243n27 reverence, 63, 116, 207, 213, 227n47 Rimbaud, Arthur, 114 Romanticism, 19, 78, 79, 82, 95, 203 ideal of fresh perception, 112–114, 141, 174–75 Rorty, Amélie, 230n23, 234n60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 117, 124 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane, 6, 11, 63–64, 65–66, 67, 76, 78, 83, 84, 90, 116, 173, 176, 181, 184 typology of wonder, 55–61 Rueger, Alexander, 80, 228n49 Russian Formalism, 114, 244n42 Sallis, John, 221n1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 124–27, 202, 218 science, 43, 59, 60–61, 80, 89, 90, 105, 122, 153, 155, 183, 194 the ordinary as the object of wonder in, 41–42, 82, 105–110, 139, 175–76 see also philosophy Schliesser, Eric, 230n24, 235n63, 256n36 Schmitter, Amy M., 234n60 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 78, 117, 118, 165, 183, 208, 209, 210, 214, 218, 249n34 on the sublime, 147–48, 151–53, 162–63 Schulte, Joachim, 224n26 seeing, as an aided act, 98–99 special relation of wonder to sight, 86–87, 90, 91, 95–96, 203–204, 205

278

Index

seeing (continued) transformation of vision in ancient spiritual exercises, 156–63 transformation of vision in the sublime, 150–54, 163 self-discovery, wonder as, 145–46, 148, 207–20 self-esteem, thematisation in the sublime, 146, 148, 211 thematisation in the wonder of inquiry, 58, 174–85, 188–94 Seligman, Martin E. P., 221n2 Sellars, John, 252n69 Seneca, 67–68, 102–103, 107, 157, 161, 162, 172, 201, 215, 236n69 on the unfamiliar as an object of fear versus pleasure, 70–71 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 79, 81, 240 Shakespeare, William, 53, 227n40, 232n45 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 113, 114 Shklovksy, Viktor, 114–115, 127, 124, 140, 141, 196, 202–203, 245, 245n51 skepticism, 177, 181 Smith, Adam, 6, 53, 55, 67, 102, 137, 174, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 232n40, 256n31, 256n32, 257n39 wonder as a source of distress, 43–51 as exemplar of Aristotelian wonder, 57–58, 235n63 on the “new” versus the “great” as the object of wonder, 65, 242 Socrates, 55–56, 57, 63, 158, 182, 234n58 Solomon, Robert, 19 Spinoza, Benedictus de, 40 spiritual exercises, 159, 164–65, 176, 206, 209; see also cosmic flight starry sky, 94, 143, 147, 148, 152–54, 163, 216–18, 250n47 Stoics, 19, 71, 156, 157, 160, 209, 211, 251n59 sublime, 60, 78–83, 89–90, 95, 102, 142–54, 176–77, 179, 208–219, 249n37, 260n71 and greatness of soul, 161–63

as a displacement of value to the subject, 145–46, 148 as a self-discovery, 145–46, 148, 209 ethical criticisms of, 211–14 ethical dimensions in Kant’s account, 146, 149–50, 161–62 origins, 80, 154–55 relationship of pleasure and displeasure in, 143–47, 148 surprise, 13, 14, 27, 28, 43, 46, 74 Tanner, Tony, 114 Thaumas, 60 theology, see religion theoria, 63, 86, 245n45 etymological connection to wonder (thaumazein) Thoreau, Henry David, 203 Traherne, Thomas, 114 Tsitsibakou-Vasalos, Eva, 241n1 thumos, 74 tragedy, 53, 57 transcendental subject, 59, 148, 209, 213, 218 Tucker, Susie, 240n92 Turner, Terence J., 222n5, 227n45 uncertainty, 56, 59, 69, 72, 77, 174, 187, 188, 193, 194 unfamiliar, as object of wonder, 39–40, 56–57, 62, 64, 87–96 as source of fear or distress, 43–51, 67–70, 74 as source of pleasure, 62, 70–71, 72, 74, 93 Verbeek, Theo, 226n30 Vincent of Beauvais, 36 virtues, 39, 74–77, 159–61, 186–88, 191, 193–94, 215, 246n2, 255n23 vision, see seeing vulnerability, 56, 59, 68, 72, 88, 144–46, 148, 163, 173, 178, 181, 188, 181, 212, 217 Weber, Max, 42 will to wonder, 94, 126, 200–201, 219

Index

Wilson, Catherine, 41–42 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 21, 22, 28, 31, 46, 87, 112, 203, 214, 224n26, 254n8, 254n19 view of psychological concepts, 23–25 on the notion of consciousness, 126–27, 131–34, 247n13 renegotiation of philosophical wonder, 176–84 wonder, action tendencies, 13–14, 136–37, 171 adaptive significance, 12, 88–89, 225n27

279

as a natural reaction, 25 association with passivity, 14, 40–41 cognitive content, 14–16, 17–18; see also evaluative response, wonder as linguistic expression, 16–17; see also ordinary language physical expression, 13, 14, 24 relationship to basic emotions, 13, 222 Wordsworth, William, 82, 113, 114, 175, 196 Zorba, 196–99, 201, 202, 204, 207–208, 217, 257n47