Wonder: The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience 9781350085152, 9781350085183, 9781350085169

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Boxes
Introduction: The Power of Everyday Experience
Here be Dragons
Notes
1 Wondering about Wonder
1.1 In the beginning
1.2 First among passions
1.3 The age of the sublime
1.4 Wondering today
The Face of Wonder
2 The Wondering Mind
2.1 A complex vocabulary
2.2 Transcending dichotomies
2.3 The structural model
2.4 A paradoxical state
Wonder in the Wild
3 How Do We Wonder?
3.1 Engaging with the possible
3.2 Stages and processes
3.3 A dynamic model
3.4 What else and how else thinking
When Ideas Hatch
4 Accidents Will Happen
4.1 Take a chance
4.2 Happy accidents
4.3 The prepared mind
4.4 The value of randomness
Is This Art?
5 Making the Familiar Unfamiliar
5.1 The found object
5.2 When the invisible becomes visible
5.3 The process of inquiry
5.4 From wander to wonder and back again
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!i
6 In Praise of Playfulness
6.1 Flights of fancy
6.2 Trying things out
6.3 It takes two to wonder
6.4 Failure is good
On Fear
7 Wonder and the Other
7.1 Wondering about others
7.2 From others to otherness
7.3 Openness to difference
7.4 Wonder and ethics
#Rezist
8 Collective Wonder
8.1 Who’s afraid of the big, bad crowd?
8.2 Wonder and politics
8.3 Activism, art and wonder
8.4 Wondering about change
Children’s Questions
9 (Re)learning Wonder
9.1 Pedagogies for/of wonder
9.2 Wondering fully
9.3 Wonder-full teachers
9.4 Why wonder? Why now?
Epilogue: Living with Uncertainty
Glossary
References
Index

Citation preview

Wonder

Also available from Bloomsbury Hope, Utopia and Creativity in Higher Education, Craig A. Hammond Wonder and Education, Anders Schinkel

Wonder The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience Vlad Petre Glăveanu

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Vlad Petre Glaˇveanu 2020 Vlad Petre Glaˇveanu has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image © Chin Leong Teoh / EyeEm / Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Glaˇveanu, Vlad Petre, author. Title: Wonder : the extraordinary power of an ordinary experience / Vlad P. Glaveanu, Webster University Geneva, Switzerland. Description: London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book is dedicated to wonder and wondering, mundane phenomena that, despite their great value for education and other spheres of human experience, often go unnoticed both inside and outside the classroom. Praised as the origin of philosophy in ancient times, the concern for understanding and educating wonder has been present throughout history. It is not only the case that this basic psychological process opens our everyday experience to what is possible, what lies beyond the here-and-now, but does so with extraordinary consequences. Wonder transforms our experience of the world from early childhood onwards. It is ever-present in children’s play and games, it offers constant opportunities for learning and it fuels our creativity. And yet, we know little about this phenomenon, its biological, psychological, social and cultural underpinning, and even less about how to foster it and harness its benefits in education. This book fills this gap and gives a scientific yet accessible account of wondering. It proposes a new way of understanding wonder, while at the same time offering practical tools for cultivating wonder within ourselves, our interpersonal relations, and within educational practice”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020009665 (print) | LCCN 2020009666 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350085152 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350085169 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350085176 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Wonder. | Curiosity. Classification: LCC BF323.C8 G53 2020 (print) | LCC BF323.C8 (ebook) | DDC 155.2–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009665 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009666 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-8515-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-8516-9 ePUB: 978-1-3500-8517-6 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Alice, for sharing her world

vi

Contents List of Figures  List of Boxes 

xi xii

Introduction: The Power of Everyday Experience 

1

Here Be Dragons 

7

1

Wondering about Wonder  1.1 In the beginning  1.2 First among passions  1.3 The age of the sublime  1.4 Wondering today 

13 15 18 20 22

The Face of Wonder 

27

2

33

The Wondering Mind  2.1 A complex vocabulary  2.2 Transcending dichotomies  2.3 The structural model  2.4 A paradoxical state 

35 38 40 43

Wonder in the Wild 

45

3

51

How Do We Wonder?  3.1 Engaging with the possible  3.2 Stages and processes  3.3 A dynamic model  3.4 What else and how else thinking 

53 56 59 62

When Ideas Hatch 

65

4

69

Accidents Will Happen  4.1 Take a chance  4.2 Happy accidents 

71 73

Contents

viii



4.3 The prepared mind  4.4 The value of randomness 

76 79

Is This Art? 

83

5

89

Making the Familiar Unfamiliar  5.1 The found object  5.2 When the invisible becomes visible  5.3 The process of inquiry  5.4 From wander to wonder and back again 

91 94 96 98

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! 

103

6

109

In Praise of Playfulness  6.1 Flights of fancy  6.2 Trying things out  6.3 It takes two to wonder  6.4 Failure is good 

111 113 116 118

On Fear 

123

7

127

Wonder and the Other  7.1 Wondering about others  7.2 From others to otherness  7.3 Openness to difference  7.4 Wonder and ethics 

#Rezist  8

Collective Wonder  8.1 Who’s afraid of the big, bad crowd?  8.2 Wonder and politics  8.3 Activism, art and wonder  8.4 Wondering about change 

130 132 135 137 141 147 149 152 155 158

Children’s Questions 

163

9

169

(Re)learning Wonder  9.1 Pedagogies for/of wonder  9.2 Wondering fully 

171 174

Contents



9.3 Wonder-full teachers  9.4 Why wonder? Why now? 

ix 176 179

Epilogue: Living with Uncertainty 

183

Glossary  References  Index 

189 191 207

x

Figures 1 The Hunt–Lenox Globe (c.1503–7), Now Housed in the New York Public Library  8 2 The Illustration of Grief from the First Edition of Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals  28 3 A Structural Model of Wonder  42 4 Playful Baby Orangutan at the Aalborg Zoo  46 5 The Dynamic Model of Wondering  62 6 Star Motifs in the Work of Cristina Timu, Ciocănești Village  67 7 Three Days Photographing the Work of Judith Scott (United States) by Sylvain Deleu  86 8 Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988)  104 9 Irish Naval Personnel Rescuing Migrants as Part of Operation Triton  124 10 Slogans Used by Romanian Protesters in 2017  144 11 Children in Front of a Jellyfish Tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium  166

Boxes 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 7.1 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3

Theaetetus  16 The Sublime, Curiosity and Astonishment  20 How Do We Study Wonder?  23 Wondering at and Wondering about  38 The Meta-Position  58 Becoming Aware of and Excited about the Possible: Federico Fellini  60 Exploring the Possible: Federico Fellini  61 Poincaré on Creating  73 Inspiration  77 How to Make a Dadaist Poem  80 Found Objects  92 The Invention of the Microscope  94 Mind-Wandering  99 Fantasy and Reality  112 The Maker movement  115 Intelligent Fast Failure  120 Mead’s Theory of the Self  129 From Colonialism to Orientalism  133 Perspective-Taking, Empathy and Sympathy  135 Le Bon’s Crowd  151 Hannah Arendt’s Engaged Thinking  153 Artivism  157 Wonder and Stupidity  170 Wonder in the Science Classroom  173 A Call to Wonder  180

Introduction: The Power of Everyday Experience

Wonder is truly an ordinary experience. We wonder what to do when confronted with a new situation or with a difficult problem. We wonder what other people might think when communication breaks down or when we come across the unexpected. We wonder about the world and about our place within it whenever we are faced with stunning views of the night sky or with magnificent landscapes on Earth. Finally, we also wonder about wonder itself, and this is what makes books like this one possible. And it is through such books that we get to raise new questions: How exactly do we wonder? Is wondering experienced the same way by everyone? In fact, are we really wondering in all the instances mentioned above, or doing something else (as well)? What is distinct about wonder beyond mere curiosity, awe or contemplation? And, if we do wonder on a daily basis, what purpose does this serve? Do we wonder in order to understand things better, to get out of trouble or to explore the unknown? Or is there much more to it? In this book, I will argue that, indeed, there is much more to wonder than its use in everyday language suggests, where the word became so diluted that it often just stands for ‘thinking about’ something. Wonder is an ordinary experience, but this doesn’t mean we get to fully wonderi very often, for a variety of reasons. And yet, when we do, wondering can have extraordinary consequences for our lives. Wonder is, in many ways, a distinctively human phenomenon. While nonhuman animals could experience emotions like surprise and behave in ways that clearly signal curiosity, it is arguable whether they are able to take i The meaning of ‘fully’ will become apparent in Chapter 3, when I discuss how we wonder. I want to note from now, though, that I am not implying a hierarchy going from ‘imperfect’ to ‘perfect’ forms of wondering. Rather, I am referring here to moments of wondering that reflect all its characteristics, to be described later on.

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enough distance from their goals and projects1 to effectively wonder about things. Indeed, newborns probably cannot wonder either, in the narrow sense of the term. In order to wonder, as I  will explain at length in this book, one needs the immersion into experience (that animals and newborns excel at) to be matched by reflective distance (which depends on being able to develop and use meanings, including an understanding of one’s own self). This unique mixture of immersion and detachment characterizes wonder and, at the same time, sets it apart from awe, curiosity and surprise. To wonder means to be unsettled by something, at an emotional level, and to be able to explore that something, physically and/or imaginatively, and create meaning out of it. Wondering begins in early childhood, when the child becomes capable of grasping not only the world around but also his or her place within it. Indeed, as I will explain in the following chapters, wonder equally points to the wondrous and to the wonderer. This is why a clear sense of self and one’s own involvement in the world are necessary preconditions for wondering. It is also why wonder has a special part to play in the development of the person throughout the life course. While we imagine that children wonder about many more things than adults (and they often do), this doesn’t mean that wondering is only valuable during childhood. On the contrary, being able to wonder relates to mental health, well-being and creativity across the lifespan. This makes it all the more surprising to learn that wonder is largely absent from contemporary philosophicalii and scientific debates,iii a lack that is due to a variety of reasons. On the one hand, wonder is an intrinsically complex phenomenon to study (and wonder about). This is because, as a type of experience, it resists easy categorization and measurement. Wonder, as stated before, goes well beyond the wonderer – it constitutes a bridge to the world, one that transforms person and world through their relationship. Understandably, positivist science and its oftentimes narrow assessments of personal attributes and behavioural indicators cannot encompass such complexity in a holistic and dynamic manner.

ii ‘Philosophers once delighted in wonder, to the point where they claimed it as their own – as a special state of mind which defined their distinctive intellectual activity. Today’s philosophers, in contrast, show few signs of thinking about wonder at all. Wonder is curiously absent from contemporary philosophical concerns. It has, it seems, been relegated to the past’ (Lloyd, 2018, p. 1). iii There is ‘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’ (Vasalou, 2012, p. 17).

Introduction

3

On the other hand, wonder might be, for some, not really worth studying at all. Indeed, the history of reflection on this phenomenon is marked by periods of waxing and waning, from fascination in antiquity and the Middle Ages to scrutiny and even rejection during early modernity.2 The reason for the former has to do with the association between wonder and knowledge (or, at least, getting to know), while the explanation for the latter is grounded in the reverse: an assumed connection between wonder and not knowing. And, given the fact that not knowing can either be paralysing or invite in superstition and excess, critics of wonder have, through the centuries, argued that we are much better off reasoning than wondering. Wonder can be foolish, childish, even dangerous, so why indulge in it? Luckily for our aims here, this line of critique has been systematically challenged in recent decades. In many ways, we are witnessing today a true renaissance of this topic, with numerous books coming out on the history of the concept,3 its relation to fiction and literature,4 its role in education5 and its study within a cross-disciplinary framework.6 Today’s writing shows support for wonder as a practice and optimism regarding its role. Wonder is claimed to stimulate intellectual, moral, aesthetic growth and, on the whole, to make life better and more worth living.7 Of course, though, such pendulation between being considered useless and dangerous and being seen as vital and enormously helpful left its mark on our contemporary understanding of wonder. In particular, it left us rather confused as to what wonder actually is and ambivalent as to what it is for. Does wonder help us have a deeper engagement with reality or give us opportunities to escape from it? Does it make us more critical or more gullible? Does it lead to some kind of knowledge or keep us in a perpetual state of not knowing? And what about the oftentimes uncomfortable feeling we are left with when wondering without ever getting to know? If wonder is not meant to solve problems but, on the contrary, to keep them open, then it risks being, within the Western scientific and philosophical tradition, ‘progressively relegated to something like a temporary irritant: a discomfort not to be endured, but rather to be cured  – or at least tranquilized’.8 Arendt warned, in this context, about the wonderer becoming disconnected from his or her social and political reality and, gradually, uncapable of forming opinions or making decisions.9 Not an enviable state by any means. So, is wonder finally good or bad? Of course, it is neither, or rather, it is both at the same time (like most things, actually). Wondering can lead to emotional discomfort and mental paralysis, but it doesn’t have to. It can stimulate a healthy

4

Wonder

development and open us to others and to spirituality, but it doesn’t always achieve this. Between deep suspicion and uncritical optimism, there is a middle path we need to travel when discussing the act of wondering. In this book, I  start from the premise that wonder is part and parcel of our everyday experience. I  also claim that wondering can have tremendous consequences for the self, for others and for society, some of them sudden and visible, others accumulating gradually, over time. These consequences are welcomed inasmuch as they help us develop new perspectives on ourselves and on the world. What uses we end up putting these perspectives to will depend on personal inclination and circumstances. But this makes it all the more important to unpack the processes of wondering and learn from them. When we do, as we are trying here, we will notice a series of contradictions. Being able to understand and enjoy rather than integrate or ‘solve’ them is the first step towards unlocking wonder’s potential to transform our existence. Why do I personally wonder about wonder? As a social psychologist who has been studying creativity for more than a decade, I often came across studies that mention wonder but never get to examine it.10 I also noticed that many of the people I talked to about creativity – designers, artists, craftsmen and scientists, no matter their level of expertise, children and adults alike  – describe their process in terms of wonder or what I call, for now, associated phenomena: awe, contemplating, pondering, marvelling, experimentation and curiosity. And yet, wonder has rarely been theorized in psychology, and almost never in the psychology of creativity.11 And this, in my view, represents a significant gap in our knowledge of what it means to create and, ultimately, to exist as a human being. In this regard, what I repeatedly found was that creative people can not only tolerate ambiguity and contradictions well, they actually thrive on them. And this, as noted above, is precisely what wondering can offer us all.iv Above all, what makes me study wonder is the insight that what this experience of not knowing and wanting to know does, above everything else, is open us to a world of possibility. Wonder, in the way I discuss it in this book, holds the key to our engagement with the possible in our existence, from mundane insights to revolutionary transformations. How does wondering help us engage with the possible? By making us aware of the fact that our experience of the world is one among many, and that the perspectives we develop in this world are exactly

iv Just like Rubenstein (2008, p. 23) aimed before me, in this study I will also be ‘asking what it might mean to stay with the perilous wonder that resists final resolution, simple identity, and sure teleology’.

Introduction

5

that – perspectives – not ultimate and singular truths. But I anticipate perhaps too much here. For the purpose of this introduction, I  want to guide you, the reader, through the logic behind this volume. I conceived it as a journey that takes us from historical reflections on wonder to personal experiences of it, from general statements to specific processes, and from a focus on the self to a focus on society and on education. Along the way, I propose two ‘models’ of wondering:  a structural one, which connects it to similar phenomena while specifying its unique characteristics, and a dynamic one, based on a set of interdependent and cyclical phases. These theoretical proposals come from empirical observations about wondering, both my own and of others, and open up (hopefully) new horizons for research and application. Indeed, while this is not a practitioner’s guide, I want this book to be not only available to a general public but also useful in a pragmatic sense. In order to facilitate this process, I included several short stories, in between chapters, that in my view capture something essential about how, when and why we wonder. To ease reading, I include comments as footnotes and references as endnotes. A short glossary with definitions of key terms in the volume is also offered. In the end, by outlining a view of what wonder is and how it ‘works’, my aim is to offer readers the practical means to both think about and cultivate wonder in their own life and the lives of others. If these two aims are contemplated by you, I will declare myself satisfied. With these ambitious goals in mind, let’s begin.

Notes 1 See Nussbaum (2001). 2 For details, see Daston & Park (1998). 3 See Evans and Marr’s (2016) edited book Curiosity and wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and Lloyd’s (2018) Reclaiming wonder after the sublime. 4 See Kareem’s (2014) Eighteenth-century fiction and the reinvention of wonder and Economides’ (2016) The ecology of wonder in romantic and postmodern literature. 5 See Egan, Cant and Judson’s (2014) edited book Wonder-full education: The centrality of wonder in teaching and learning across the curriculum. 6 See Vasalou’s (2012) edited book Practices of wonder: Cross-disciplinary perspectives and Gallagher, Reinerman-Jones, Janz, Bockelman and Trempler’s (2015) A neurophenomenology of awe and wonder. 7 See Fuller (2009), pp. 1–2.

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8 See Rubenstein (2008), p. 12. 9 See Rubenstein (2008), p. 21. 10 One example, Rothenberg’s (2015) Flight from wonder: An investigation of scientific creativity. 11 For first attempts in this direction, see Glăveanu (2019c, & 2017a).

Here be Dragons

It is hard to imagine what it meant for early civilizations to know only parts of the world and wonder about what was not  – and maybe could never be  – known from it. Of course, even today there are corners of our planet that remain unexplored, but we tend to have a rather clear picture of the Earth’s geography and its inhabitants. Perhaps the closest we get to approximating this feeling is by considering outer space and its mysteries. Then and now, we have a lot to understand and marvel about when it comes to our universe. Also then and now, humans did not satisfy themselves with not knowing – they had to guess or approximate. And what better way to do this than by building on current experience and all the miraculous things that are already part of it? And yet, the unknown is not only there to become known. Sometimes we might want to avoid it, play it safe and keep the aura of mystery surrounding our existence on this planet. These impulses arguably made Roman and medieval cartographers place the inscription HIC SVNT LEONES (here are lions) over unknown and potentially dangerous territories. It wasn’t until the early sixteenth century that we find a variation of this expression on artefacts such as the Hunt–Lenox Globe (see Figure  1)  – HIC SUNT DRACONES (here are dragons), written around the eastern coast of Asia. This remark, for as rare as it is, makes perfect sense in the context of the medieval practices of embellishing maps with mythological creatures, dragons and sea monsters as a warning to potential travellers. ‘Here are dragons’ or the more popular version today, ‘here be dragons’, might be interpreted as invitations to wonder about but not to wander off, to respect the unknown and yet make it somehow familiar. In many ways, dragons filled up a void in knowledge that both satisfied and opened our appetite for wonder. The practice of placing dragons on or at the corner of maps precedes the expression itself. The Borgia map from c. 1430, now in the Vatican library, writes

Figure 1  The Hunt–Lenox Globe (c.1503–7), Now Housed in the New York Public Library. Note: As illustrated in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn, Volume X, 1874, Fig. 2. The figure reproduced here has been authored by Kattigara (file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).



Here Be Dragons

9

on a dragon-looking figure in Asia the following, in Latin: ‘Here there are even men who have large four-foot horns, and there are even serpents so large that they could eat an ox whole.’ Why Asia again? It can be assumed that some of these remarks refer to the big Komodo lizards living on some Indonesian islands. While a reputable foe, the Komodo dragon offers but one ‘incarnation’ of a vision that both terrified and fascinated Europe for centuries: that of terrible monsters and grave dangers hiding away in caves, at the bottom of the sea or lurking within lands unknown. Monsters didn’t have to be products of wild fantasy, however. They could easily have been living or imagined beasts considered repulsive or treacherous. This is how, for instance, Tabula Peutingeriana, a medieval copy of a Roman map, has written on it in Latin ‘in these places elephants are born’, ‘in these places scorpions are born’ and ‘here Cynocephali are born’ (which, in case you are wondering, designates a human with a dog’s head, doubtlessly not very pleasant to meet). It is interesting, in this context, to reflect a bit on the related notion of Terrae Incognitae, or the lands that remain unknown, and to note the overwhelming pull these kinds of lands have on our imagination. The unknown is not only a space of mystery and, at times, terror (going back to the presumed dragons) but also one of fascination and fantasy. Indeed, to mark a place as Terrae Incognitae means to signal it out for future exploration, physical or imaginative. Even today, when arguably there are few, if any, places on Earth that can claim this status objectively, there will always remain a land unknown in personal terms, not only metaphorical but also literal. Terrae Incognitae starts right after the line of the horizon and, for as much as we can anticipate (and many times correctly so) what is ‘out there’, and for as much as we are helped by technology today to communicate with people from beyond our physical horizon, the question of how we could ourselves directly experience what we don’t know remains as potent as ever. It is the song of the Sirens, other mythological creatures that, unlike their fictionalized counterparts in Disney productions,i represented the allure of dangers at sea. Their singing could drive sailors mad and make them wreck their ship into hard rocks. At the same time, being enchanted by such songs and resisting them (as was the case of Ulysses) is what makes any journey worth taking. Without the unknown, there is no motivation to start wondering in the

i Interestingly, the Sirens of Greek mythology were not the half-person, half-fish mermaids of today but creatures that combined women’s and birds’ parts in various ways.

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first place. Without the dangers, there is no excitement to go on and to wonder some more. John K.  Wright1 wrote compellingly, in this regard, about the role of imagination in geography. He saw imaginative explorations of the unknown, embodied in Terrae Incognitae, as an essential part of being a geographer and, more generally, a curious explorer of the world. What is unknown will always be contextual and depend on historical time, community of belonging and personal circumstances. But the process of turning the ‘incognitae’ into ‘cognitae’ should be matched by its reverse. Rediscovering the wonders of a land considered known, with the help of the imagination, is equally important as discovering the unknown in the first place. They both involve an aesthetic engagement with one’s world that goes above and beyond the cognitive understanding of it.ii It is a way to keep the Sirens’ songs (or dragons’ breath of fire) as part of the story, as a way of being inspired, instead of doing away with them within a fully classified and completely known universe. Returning to the phrase ‘Here be dragons’, it is widely used today but less in reference to voyages, maps or globes. Instead, it is referred to in fantasy novels or the exploration of extraterrestrial life.2 Interestingly, the expression entered urban dictionaries as well, where it became the comment often left by hackers in their codes in order to indicate that a following section of it somehow works even though they don’t know why, so it shouldn’t be touched.3 From medieval times to hackers’ codes, the message is clear: we don’t know what is here, so stay away. And yet, this not knowing is given a concrete, even if magical, face, in the figure of the dragon. Whether someone might want to avoid the journey due to this dangerous presence or venture out precisely because of it is a question that reminds us of the biblical story of Adam and Eve. The knowledge of good and evil was a temptation occasioned by another reptilian creature, with hazardous consequences. It marked the irreversible move from a paradisiac state of not knowing (blissful ignorance) to one of knowing (and being punished for it). It is debatable whether wonder played a role in gaining this knowledge or only started after it was bestowed upon Eve, and then Adam, ii Wright (1947) talks in his paper about three types of imaginative processes that are important for geography:  promotional imagining, intuitive imagining and aesthetic imagining. The first one ‘is controlled by a desire to promote or defend any personal interest or cause other than that of seeking the objective truth for its own sake’ (p. 5). It is thus animated by human passions (including greed, fear of love) and often fuelled by prejudice or stereotypes. The second one intends ‘to secure realistic conceptions’ (p. 6). The aesthetic type of imagining is marked by ‘a desire to enjoy the process of imagining itself, and to give satisfaction to others by communicating the results in written or graphic form’. It is an engine of wondering and being curious about the world and remaining so even after all the ‘unknowns’ have been turned into ‘knowns’.



Here Be Dragons

11

through biting the forbidden fruit. Metaphorically, wondering about what lies beyond the realm of the known brings us face to face with (our) dragons. But such an encounter – if survived – can only intensify wondering. Between good and evil, safety and danger, not knowing and knowing, how did we ever come to terms with this experience?

Notes 1 See J. K. Wright (1947). 2 See Koerner & LeVay’s (2001) Here be dragons: The scientific quest for extraterrestrial life. 3 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=here%20be%20dragons. Accessed 23 January 2020.

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Wondering about Wonder

Wondering is a state that places us squarely between rainbows and dragons or, rather, Harpies. This is, at least, what ancient Greeks assumed when they imagined the sea god Thaumas. The son of Gaia (earth) and Pontus (sea), Thaumas is not the kind of god many remember, yet he is crucial for giving us a glimpse into what wondering was about for ancient people. And this is because the Greek word for wonder, thaumazein, points us to this particular deity which embodied the wonders and dangers of the sea.1 While Thaumas himself might be little known, his descedents (from his marriage with Electra, one of the Oceanids) are not. Their union produced Iris, the rainbow, an ancient metaphor for how ‘wonderful’ thaumazein can be as an experience. Rainbows are colourful, bright, transcendent, and they represent as much as they invite wonder.i But Iris was not Thaumas’s only child. Wonder’s other daughters were the legendary Harpies, half-women, half-birds, symbols of perilous storms. Interestingly, both Iris and the Harpies were messengers, but while the former carried messages from the gods, the latter carried humans off to the underworld. Light and darkness, heaven and hell, the storm and its aftermath – these are the contrasts that make up wonder. Thaumazein, with its emphasis on surprise (Harpies) and transcendence (Iris), is not the only ancient root for our modern notion of wonder. Besides this Greek filiation of the term, there is a Latin one, taking us to mirari and miraculum and, through them, the modern concepts of miracle and admiration. Incomprehensibility and prostration also come to mind. And then there is the English word ‘wonder’, the one I am (excessively) using throughout this book. Its origin is presumably cognate with the German Wunde or wound.2 The experience of wonder is not only miraculous and transcendent; it can also be violent, leaving us effectively wonderstruck. i As it is in the biblical tradition, then, the ‘Greek’ rainbow is what Onians has called ‘the supreme wonder, a miracle linking heaven and earth’ (Rubenstein, 2008, p. 11).

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These diverse, at times contradictory, meanings are all reflected in today’s dictionary definition of wonder. As a noun, wonder is used to designate ‘a feeling of amazement and admiration, caused by something beautiful, remarkable, or unfamiliar’.3 We have here brought together within a single formulation the ancient Greeks’ amazement, the Romans’ admiration and its causes:  beautiful Iris and the strange and unfamiliar Harpies  – altogether, a remarkable experience that delivers a fatal wound to our feeling of personal comfort and secure knowledge. For millennia, thinkers have grappled with the complexity of wonder as a phenomenon and the difficulty of pinning it down to one meaning and one valence, be it positive or negative. Wonder was, is and will continue to be associated with polar attributes:  bliss, transcendence, surprise, ambiguity, the unknown and even terror. In defining wondering, it seems, one needs to make one’s own conceptual commitments, delve into the rich history of the concept and select those strands that make sense with respect to one’s worldview and to the general zeitgeist. What comes out of this exercise is a plethora of definitions, more or less elaborate and more or less scientific, philosophical or poetic. Wonder has been referred to, in the past, as ‘a sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight’,4 ‘man’s attitude in the face of the mystery of things’,5 ‘the effect of novelty upon ignorance’6 or, beautifully put, ‘the spark of excitation leaping across the gap between man and the world’.7 My own working definition of wonder resonates with the emphasis above on suddenness, novelty and excitement. But it also connects to a theme that, in my view, is not emphasized enough in discussions about wondering, that of the possible. A few years ago, I defined wonder as: ‘a particular type of experience whereby the person becomes (more or less suddenly) aware of an expanded field of possibility for thought and/or action and engages (more or less actively) in exploring this field’.8 I continue to adopt this formulation and propose it here as a way of stressing, from the start, what for me are two indispensable facets of wonder: awareness of the possible (often association with excitement about it) and its exploration.ii Missing the former turns wonder into cold curiosity. Without the latter, it becomes nothing more than surprise and awe. Together, these two processes underline the transformative power of wonder:  facing the rainbows and harpies of our existence with a view towards grasping their

ii For a similar dual emphasis, see Carlsen and Sandelands (2014, p.  375):  ‘Let us start by defining wonder as a combination of (1)  feeling startled or struck by something unusual in the usual and (2) being moved into incipient, self-transcending search that addresses Mysteries of being’.



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meaning (for as much as this meaning will end up ‘wounding’ us and our sense of security, certainty and equilibrium). Historically, wonder attracted considerable attention even if not always praise. It is important to start with the history of wondering about wonder for two reasons. First, because it offers us the background against which I will position a structural and a dynamic model of wondering and argue for their relevance. Second, because this exercise is conducive for the phenomenon we are talking about. Why did the first philosophers consider wonder as the starting point of their craft? And why, then, was it contested by seventeenth-century thinkers? How come we are witnessing nowadays a rebirth of these centurieslong debates? The historical account that follows is necessarily selective9 but hopefully sufficient for what is to come.

1.1  In the beginning From the very start, the story of wonder has been intertwined with that of the possibility of knowledge. Wonder is prompted by not knowing, but does it help us gain knowledge or, rather, keep us in a perpetual state of not knowing? And, if knowledge is acquired as part of wondering, does this knowledge come to replace wonder or fuel it further by revealing new areas of not knowing? Bottom line, does wonder lead us to knowledge or away from it? These questions were of great concern for ancient Greeksiii and have been discussed by some of their best-known philosophers:  Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Each one of them reached different conclusions about the relationship between wonder and knowledge. Nonetheless, all three valued wondering and considered it the birthplace of philosophy. This idea is most famously advanced in Plato’s Theaetetus10 (see Box 1.1), the dialogue that focuses on Socrates’ philosophical initiation of the boy Theaetetus. The topic of this dialogue is, unsurprisingly, the nature of knowledge. Through this exchange, as reported by Plato, Socrates advances his unique understanding of wonder as an emotionally

iii It is important to note, at this point, that wonder has been a topic of concern not only for Western thinkers; it represents a theme of reflection across civilizations, many of them more ancient than the Greeks. For example, as early as the third century bce, the Natyashastra, a canonical Indian text written in Sanskrit and dedicated to the nature of consciousness, listed wonder as one of the nine main human emotions. Unlike its Western associations with curiosity and surprise, however, ‘wonder in the Indic tradition is a reaction to the opportunity to witness divine, heavenly, or exalted phenomena. Wonder, therefore, is intimately linked with what the Indic tradition calls darshan, the ritual act of seeing divinity’ (Fuller, 2009, pp. 10–11).

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charged experience of coming to know, yet never fully arriving at complete and definitive knowledge. What emerges is the fact that the art preached by Socrates does not and, indeed, should not lead to fixed and definitive conclusions. On the contrary, the experience of wonder that makes a philosopher is one of constant doubt.

Box 1.1  Theaetetus Socrates: I fancy, at any rate, that such [logical] puzzles are not altogether strange to you. Theaetetus: No, indeed it is extraordinary how they set me wondering whatever they can mean. Sometimes I get quite dizzy with thinking of them. Socrates:  That shows that Theodorus was not wrong in his estimate of your nature. This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas. (Theaetetus 155d) The above passage is often cited in philosophy textbooks because of its conclusion. The discipline that cultivates one’s love of wisdom is said to originate in wonder according to one of the world’s best-known philosophers. Socrates was introduced to Theaetetus by Theodorus, the boy’s mentor in mathematics, a topic the young man excelled at. In order to test his inclination for philosophy, however, Socrates proceeded by helping Theaetetus reflect on the nature of knowledge only to show him how easy it is to end up in contradiction. To this, the young man responded with bewilderment, recognizing that his thinking had been brought to a complete standstill. Yet, he also felt ‘giddy’ about discovering what things can mean, a quality that instantly recommended him as a good student of philosophy. The combination of immobility and alert movement, impasse and turmoil, characterizes Socratic wonder, and as we will see, it leaves an important mark on our thinking about this phenomenon to this day.

Socrates had two interesting metaphors for this practice. One of them is that of midwifery. In this role, the philosopher is tasked with helping others bring nascent thoughts into being and inspecting the outcomes of these ‘births’. As Plato’s dialogue shows, these thoughts are, in fact, mostly unsatisfactory, and as such, the practice of midwifery needs to go on, uninterrupted. Of course, just like real births, this process can be tiring and frustrating. This is why Socrates also saw himself as a gadfly who constantly annoys others out of their feeling



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of smug certainty (a destabilizing role in society that ultimately led to him being sentenced to death for corrupting the minds of the youthiv). Instead of certitude, wondering makes us aware, at all times, of our limitations and lack of knowledge.11 Why, then, would anyone engage in it? As Socrates argues, such experiences make us better, more humble thinkers. They do result in knowledge, but knowledge that one does not know. This, he insists, is ‘all my art can achieve – nothing more’ (210c). Aristotle agreed with Socrates, in his Metaphysics,12 that philosophy started when people began to wonder. In saying this, however, he had quite a different relationship between wonder and knowledge in mind. For him, wonder is motivated by a strong desire to understand and ends in the acquisition of knowledge. Interestingly, Aristotle also recognized the emotional nature of wondering (including its links to desire and pleasure) and the fact that we need to be alleviated from the tension it puts us through in pursuit of knowledge.v Wondering is vital for philosophy because it gives us the impulse to question things. But it is only a transitional phase:  once we have our answers, we can move on. The end is, here, more noble than the beginning.13 There is a clear contrast between Socratic and Aristotelian wonder. The former designates a never-ending process of searching for wisdom. The latter concerns the acquisition of knowledge as an end state and focuses our attention on the right methods for reaching it. Socrates celebrates not knowing as fundamental for wonder; Aristotle is concerned with how we can overcome this condition through wondering. Despite these differences, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all saw wonder as a positive phenomenon, an essential aptitude for engaging in philosophy and for living a good life. The tension between their accounts, however, will play out in seventeenth-century philosophy and, in many ways, continue to shape our thinking today.

iv And, in fact, Plato’s dialogue ends precisely with Socrates going off to face the charges brought against him. In this way, Plato outlines, in Theaetetus, a defence of the methods and role of his master as a promoter of wonder. v ‘The wondering mind is not just in a state of disoriented agitation. It yearns for relief from its own bitter-sweet perplexity. These connections with desire give Aristotle’s version of the thinking inspired by wonder an orientation that will prove crucial in later developments. The thinking which begins in wonder is distinctive in having as its rationale the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. It has no end or purpose, other than the alleviation of wonder’ (Lloyd, 2018, p. 25).

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1.2  First among passions Middle Age thinkers, by and large, adopted an Aristotelian approach to wonder. This is how, for instance, Adelard of Bath, twelfth-century philosopher, thought that knowing the cause of things ‘cures’ us of childish wonder; Albert the Great thought wondering befitted women and children but not mature philosophers; and Thomas Aquinas advocated curing oneself of as much admiratio as possible or risk becoming intellectually lazy.14 On the other hand, Augustine saw wonder as highly salutary and the proper reaction to God’s creation,15 a reminder of the Socratic humility that comes out of experiencing the wondrous. At the same time, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, there was a considerable expansion in stories of ghosts, monsters and miracles that made many consider Europe ‘awash in wonder’ during this period.16 Moreover, as the end of the Middle Ages saw new trade routes open with faraway places, the accumulation of exotic objects increased, culminating in the famous ‘cabinets of curiosities’ (Wunderkammern), precursors of modern museums but accessible at the time only to royalty or the very rich.vi It is against this complex background of ambivalence towards wonder that we need to place Descartes’ seventeenth-century account of it. Generally considered the father of modern philosophy, Descartes saw wonder (l’admiration) as an epistemological passion given its emotional and cognitive nature and the fact that it is triggered by experiencing unusual objects.vii More than this, if our passions reveal a certain judgement of approval or disapproval towards an object, wonder doesn’t, as it marks our first contact with and reaction to it.17 It thus earns the status of ‘first of the passions’.18 Before an appreciation of good or evil, love or hatred, joy or despair, there is the act of wondering, simply pointing to what takes us by surprise.

vi Interestingly, these cabinets were meant to cultivate wonder while, at the same time, doing away with it. Francis Bacon, for example, was a great supporter of collecting and classifying every strange object or inexplicable event. He was hoping to compile every last marvel into a complete scientific Wunderkammern of sorts, conceived that a total catalogue of all ‘preternatural’ phenomena would give rise to new laws that would account for every seemingly irregularity. Wonder, in other words, would serve its own demise, giving way to an exceptionless knowledge of causes. Bacon therefore called wonder ‘broken knowledge’, a signal of the incompletion of the inquiry it provokes. (Rubenstein, 2008, p. 15) An Aristotelian inspired view of wonder’s relation to knowledge, as far as we can see. vii His list of ‘primary passions’ included love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. What gives them this status is the fact that they are considered irreducible to other emotions.



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But herein lies the problem. In wonder we cannot tell if something is useful or harmful; in other words, we don’t yet have real knowledge of it. As such, while a bit of wonder is useful, since it focuses our attention and memory, too much makes one highly ignorant. In this case, wonder ends up in astonishment (l’estonnement), ‘an excess of wonder which can never be anything but bad’.19 Stuck with it – literally, wonderstruck – we become unable to investigate further and form any clear and distinct ideas about the source of our astonishment. Thinking might begin with wonder, but it soon needs to abandon it to do its job properly. What we see here is wonder being largely reduced to surprise and incapable of moving us past it. It supposedly occurs together with other passions, adding to their turbulence.20 This emotional excess is not favourable to reason, even if wondering can drive us towards future knowledge. Astonishment is similar to Socrates’ state of being unable to move or reason further. But, while for him this was an ideal state (because it prompts us, in the end, to keep questioning), for Descartes it can endanger us and our well-being. Extreme wonder fixates us in a way that can never be other than problematic. Conversely, a total absence of wonder makes one equally ignorant, depriving him or her of the impulse to pay attention and learn. In line with Aristotle, we need wonder to get us started, but nothing more. What is unique for Descartes, however, is to consider wondering (in its excessive form) as a clear threat to knowledge.21 Yet he was not the only seventeenth-century philosopher concerned with wonder. Baruch Spinoza also had something to say about it, and something very different indeed.22 To begin with, wonder was not at all a passion or emotion for him (even if it had a lot to do with the dynamic of other emotions). Most importantly, by confronting us with unexpected singularities, wondering had a positive part to play in the mind’s functioning and existence. Even when it marks a pause in thought, this pause is essential for the dynamic of our thinking and our strive for understanding.viii What we can notice so far in the transition from antiquity to early modernity, through the Middle Ages, is the fact that wonder and wondering remained topics of great concern. However, while Socrates and Aristotle saw their role in problematizing and acquiring knowledge, respectively, as positive, Descartes warned against too much wondering and labelled it a clear danger to knowledge

‘For Spinoza, in contrast [to Descartes], wonder coexists with and strengthens the pursuit of knowledge, rather than impeding it; and it has connections with other aspects of mental activity which make it an important intellectual resource’ (Lloyd, 2018, pp. 4–5). viii

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and understanding. The contestation of his account, through Spinoza, continued in the eighteenth century. But another interesting move took place with Descartes and Spinoza that was exacerbated a century later – the treatment of wonder as an emotion and, in particular, the emotion we feel when faced with strange, unfamiliar and exceptional things. Intellectual wonder became emotional awe and this transformation led the way to the sublime.

1.3  The age of the sublime The mixed legacy of antiquity and the seventeenth century greatly shaped wonder’s journey through the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The notion of admiration, used as a proxy for wondering, morphed through the writings of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant into the new and intriguing notion of the sublime.ix An important concept in art and aesthetics, the sublime transformed our understanding of wonder to this day (see also Box 1.2).

Box 1.2  The Sublime, Curiosity and Astonishment  In his acclaimed work, A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, from 1757 (see the 1969 edition published by Routledge), Edmund Burke didn’t mention wonder specifically. Instead, his views about it can be retrieved from his discussion of two other emotions, curiosity and astonishment. The first one he considered to be one of the simplest emotions, marking the pleasure we derive from discovering novelties and, as such, being part and parcel of almost all emotional experiences. Although it initiates our engagement with the world, curiosity lacks depth in Burke’s account. Indeed, its perpetual change of object and appetite that can be easily satisfied condemn curiosity to being rather superficial in nature. Besides, novelty soon loses its shine and passes into familiarity, so the person doesn’t get to be transformed by the experience of being curious. In contrast, astonishment  – which, for Descartes, had negative connotations as the excess of wonder – is connected by Burke to the sublime. This feeling is caused by ‘the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully’, for example, magnificent landscapes or the view of a sky full of stars. Instead of mere surprise, these

ix In fact, the sublime was claimed to have much older roots than the eighteenth century, in particular through an ancient text, On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus.



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scenes can inspire fear and yet, nonetheless, they both attract and delight us. This is, in fact, the intriguing nature of Burke’s sublime: it’s a mixture of pain and pleasure. It is terrifying to witness scenes and landscapes that overwhelm us, but, being away from any real danger, it makes us experience satisfaction at being utterly wonderstruck (in ‘a sort of tranquillity shadowed with horror’).

In essence, the sublime designates a particular kind of experience, typically overwhelming, of landscapes or scenes that leave us both terrified and delighted. This rather contradictory nature of the sublime, the highest level of astonishment, makes it, according to Burke, one of the strongest emotions we are capable of feeling.x Its unique combination of emotions builds upon old associations between wonder and both the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing and the pleasures of getting to understand. Nonetheless, the sublime is not synonymous with wonder. What is specific for it is the element of terror or horror which has little to do with previous accounts and is rarely reflected in how we conceive of wondering today. And yet, with his notion of the sublime, Burke separated wonder from reason with long-lasting consequences. If Socrates pointed to the state of being blocked and Descartes lamented the perplexity associated with wondering, they nevertheless related it back to thinking. The sublime makes us appreciate astonishment in its own right and stop asking whether or not it strengthens our thinking. To experience the sublime is very different from engaging in shallow forms of intellectual curiosity. It can, and should, transform our experience of world and self. It was Burke’s contemporary, Immanuel Kant, who reclaimed the sublime for reason.23 In fact, reason itself was, for Kant, the most suitable object of wonder. In his essay, Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime,24 first published in 1764, Kant distinguishes between the terrifying sublime (associated with a feeling of dread), the noble (associated with quiet wonder) and the splendid (associated with beauty). How is reason called upon by the sublime? Because in experiencing it, our imagination grapples to understand something that lies beyond its limits. This is why, in fact, it is not the outside world where the sublime originates but within the mind of the perceiver. The wondering mind

x The sublime, according to Burke, produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates. (Lloyd, 2018, pp. 58–9)

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and its thought processes are, thus, the first and foremost source of the sublime.xi Reasoning about them is the mission of the philosopher. In the decades that followed, the Romantics took over the sublime but preferred Burke rather than Kant’s reading of it. In this way, they were able to name a range of powerful affective phenomena while keeping them separate from the work of reason. To this day, the sublime corresponds to aesthetic theory and is considered in its relation to nature and art rather than scientific pursuits. What the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries accomplished above all, however, was to set up a rather misleading dichotomy between curiosity as a more intellectual emotion and the sublime, associated with trembling awe. Wonder’s unity between these two ‘sides’, specific for ancient accounts, was questioned first by Descartes’ critique of the role of wondering in thinking and, later on, by Burke’s separation between them. At best, these two facets became different expressions of wonder. At worst, wonder itself turned into a tamed version of the sublime.25

1.4  Wondering today The history of wonder, from what we could see above, is marked by tensions between different, at times contradictory, accounts. Socrates emphasized the benefits of knowing the fact that one doesn’t really know, Aristotle considered its importance for getting to know. Descartes saw it as a passion that can interfere with exactly this process, Spinoza said it is a necessary moment of thinking.xii Burke separated it from reason, Kant made it a condition for reason.xiii In each case, wondering about wonder was shaped by larger historical debates concerning knowledge and ignorance, movement and pause in thinking, emotion and cognition. Twentieth-century philosophers were bound to enter the same maze, yet they did so by adding new dimensions to it. After the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the topic of wonder had been all but integrated within the sublime. This movement obscured, among others, wonder’s relation to intellectual pursuits assigned now primarily to curiosity. In this context, Heidegger is to be credited for referring back specifically to wonder xi ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me’ (Kant, 1997, p. 133). xii Wonder referred to here as admiration. xiii In this case, discussing the sublime (closer to awe and astonishment).



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(and not the sublime, admiration or astonishment) in his attempt to reconnect to its original (and largely positive) meanings from Greek sources. In particular, he saw wonder as a state of dwelling or ‘questioning that asks what the most usual might be such that it can reveal itself as what is most unusual’.26 This is already an interesting break with the seventeenth-century focus on rare, unfamiliar and unexpected events as triggers of wonder and the eighteenth-century obsession with grandiose scenes and experiences. Wonder can and should be found in the everyday, including within the most common and familiar settings. This is because the main function of wondering, according to Heidegger, is to direct us to the strangeness of the everyday and the discovery of the mysterious within the ordinary.27 The Heideggerian rediscovery of wonder was critically considered by Hannah Arendt, who added an important political dimension to it. Her questioning came out of a broader concern for why Heidegger himself did not wonder about the advancement of Nazi ideology and continued to serve under it (see also Box 8.2). The answer, for Arendt, goes back precisely to the notion of the everyday. To understand it fully, we can return to a story told in Theaetetus, that of Thales of Miletus who, gazing at the stars above, ended up falling into a well. Wondering about a common sight made him unaware of the dangers lying in front of him. Did a similar thing happen to Heidegger? Was he too concerned with wondering about familiar philosophical topics that he became unaware of what the Nazis were doing around him? And, if so, is wondering supposed to distract us from being a critical and engaged citizen? Arendt refused this view. She, in fact, saw wonder as a key process in confronting unexamined opinion, an ally to our critical judgement which is the most political of man’s abilities.28 Another ancient Greek idea is rediscovered here: the wondering philosopher as a gadfly attacking deeply held social beliefs.

Box 1.3  How Do We Study Wonder? One of the main features of contemporary approaches to wonder has to do with its empirical study. If philosophers of the past were content to use introspection and generally meditate on the meanings and value of this phenomenon, wondering about wonder today is supported by new scientific and methodological developments within psychology, neurology and cognitive science. For example, Gallagher, Reinerman-Jones, Janz, Bockelman and Trempler took on the ambitious aim of building a neurophenomenology of awe and wonder. And they did so by replicating the experience of space travel in a

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Wonder mixed reality simulation, in the lab, as a way to study directly and rigorously manner, the awe and wonder clearly experienced by astronauts. A  similar concern for reproducing intense emotions such as awe in a laboratory setting led Chirico, Ferrise, Cordella and Gaggioli29 to build virtual reality scenes that can simulate it. They noticed, in the process, that virtual environments induced significantly more positive than negative affect. Are we, here, on the verge of eliciting something close to the sublime but with new technological means? And are these studies telling us something we did not know from centuries of philosophizing about awe, wonder and the sublime? It is important to note that recent experiments like the ones above certainly build on the long history of awe and wonder in order to define and create the conditions supposed to stimulate both. They also capitalize on the use of modern technologies, in particular, immersive online environments and virtual reality, that were not accessible – or even conceivable – centuries before. Whether these new tools can bring us considerable new knowledge remains, for the moment, an open question.

What about today? What do contemporary, twenty-first-century views of wonder take from this long and complicated history? It is, I  think, safe to say that the history briefly sketched above is still with us, reflected in both scientific studies of wondering (see Box 1.3) and lay uses of the term. Wonder is nowadays connected to not knowing, wanting to know, getting to know and everything in between.xiv It is deeply emotional, but still bound to thinking. It helps us make the familiar unfamiliar as well as the other way around. Wonder, thus, with all its inherent contradictions (or because of them!) became a highly versatile concept that covers a wide range of phenomena touching on curiosity, surprise, awe, astonishment and the sublime. Historically classified under these terms, wonder is emerging as the broader category that helps us integrate multiple dichotomies and overcome the numerous contradictions referred to above. This, in any case, is the proposition I put forward in this book, starting with the next chapter.

Notes 1 Gallagher, Reinerman-Jones, Janz, Bockelman & Trempler (2015), p. 116. 2 Rubenstein (2008), p. 9.

According to Fisher (1998, p. 41), philosophy ‘begins in wonder, continues on at every moment by means of wonder, and ends with explanation that produces, when first heard, a new and equally powerful experience of wonder to that with which it began’. xiv

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Wondering About Wonder https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/wonder. Accessed 23 January 2020. Fisher (1998), p. 55. Verhoeven (1972), n.a. Johnson (2010), p. 828. Parsons (1969), p. 85. Glăveanu (2019c), p. 2. For more extensive presentations of the history of wonder, I recommend reading Daston and Park’s (1998) Wonders and the order of nature, 1150–1750, Fisher’s (1998) Wonder, the rainbow, and the aesthetics of rare experiences, Rubenstein’s (2008) Strange wonder and Lloyd’s (2018) Reclaiming wonder after the sublime. See the 1903 edition edited by Burnet. Lloyd (2018), p. 17. See the 1984 translation by W. D. Ross in the edition edited by J. Barnes. See Lloyd (2018), p. 28; also Nightingale (2001), p. 43. Rubenstein (2008), p. 13. Vasalou (2012), p. 37. Bynum (1997), pp. 2–3. Kareem (2014), p. 36. See Descartes’ The passions of the soul, 1989 edition. Rubenstein (2008), p. 15. Lloyd (2018), p. 33. Lloyd (2018), p. 34. See Spinoza’s Ethics, the 1996 edition translated by Edwin Curley. Lloyd (2018), p. 63. See the 1960 edition translated by J. T. Goldthwait. Lloyd (2018), p. 78. Heidegger (1994), p. 148 (the original published in 1938). Lloyd (2018), p. 10. See Arendt (1977). See Chirico, Ferrise, Cordella & Gaggioli (2018).

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The Face of Wonder

How do we know someone is wondering? It is always easier to notice this phenomenon in the case of the self than that of others given that there are few clear behavioural (or external) indicators of wonder, or at least few reliable ones, and people who say they are wondering about something might simply use this term as a synonym for thinking or doubting. And yet, some gestures and facial expressions are more common than others when it comes to wonder. These are likely to vary across cultures and individuals, but having an idea about them can help parents, teachers, colleagues and leaders. So, what are the faces of wonder? Before addressing this question let’s note that our fascination with facial expression is very old, going back at least to antiquity and its theatre masks. The face as the gateway to the soul and, as such, to understanding other people has been closely inspected through the centuries. Unsurprisingly, some of the first scientific observations spanning biology and psychology focused on this area. A famous example is Darwin’s third major work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, following On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), which was originally published in 1872.1 In this book, initially intended as a part of The Descent of Man, Darwin set out to investigate the biological underpinning of our emotional life and their evolutionary trajectory. And there are clear continuities that cut through the divide between species in this regard, for example, the lifting of eyebrows when being surprised. But are observations like these sufficient to proclaim the biological  – and thus universal  – basis of emotions? Darwin believed so, at least in the case of six basic emotional states:  happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Interestingly, Darwin’s research at the time included a questionnaire and the use of photographs to check whether a wide range of emotions are universally

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Figure 2  The Illustration of Grief from the First Edition of Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Note: Published by J. Murray, London, 1872. Image courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. This work is in the public domain.

recognized. His pioneering book from 1872 gave us, therefore, not only an early example of a psychological survey but also a richly illustrated collection (see Figure 2). One of the key questions raised by Darwin concerning the innate versus cultural nature of our emotions  – or, at least, our expression of them  – is important for wonder as well given that this phenomenon certainly has a strong emotional component (as we have seen in the previous chapter). But, unlike the basic emotions of Darwin and those who continued his legacy,2 wonder is a much more complex phenomenon that involves everything from perception to social interaction. This is the reason why wonder, just like awe and curiosity,



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which are closely related phenomena, rarely features in lists of ‘basic’ or universal emotions or forms of expression.i There is virtually no study focused on the facial expression of wonder because of this, just as there are very few studies of curiosity.ii More research has been conducted on awe given that, from the three processes, it seems closest to Darwin’s basic emotions. In fact, Darwin himself was interested in the related phenomenon of admiration which he considered to be a combination of surprise, pleasure, approval and astonishment, bodily signs of the latter including ‘raised eyebrows, bright eyes, gaping mouth, and, in extreme cases, hair standing on end, or goosebumps’.3 In more current research, Shiota, Campos and Keltner found that displays of awe frequently include raised inner eyebrow, widened eyes and an open, slightly drop-jawed mouth.4 Informed by these old and new studies, let us return to the face of wonder. One way through which we can obtain interesting information about its expression or, better said, the social representation of its expression is by typing the word ‘wondering’ in a Google Images search engine and examining the result.iii What an analysis of the first one hundred images as ranked by Google on 22 May 2019 revealed was a wealth of information about facial and bodily postures when it comes to representations of people who wonder. These images depicted a total of 35 men, 27 women, 14 children, 3 animals (e.g. chimp, dog), 1 other (a cartoonish pizza slice with human features) and 15 generic pictures of human bodies. In terms of facial expression, 22 of the people represented had one eyebrow higher than the other, 20 had raised eyebrows and 10 of them frowned. The mouth was pointing down in 27 cases, up (including in a smile) in 13; 9 had pursed or tight lips, 8 the mouth in the shape of the letter O and 1 the mouth in the shape of the letter S. When it came to posture, almost two-thirds of the images (63) showed people touching or holding their chin or cheeks with either one finger or the whole hand, 5 scratching their heads, 5 holding their arms out (suggesting the ‘I don’t know’ posture), 4 holding one or both arms on i Ekman (1994) did include awe as a potential ‘pan-cultural’ emotion with amusement, contempt, contentment, embarrassment, excitement, guilt, interest, pride in achievement, relief, satisfaction, sensory pleasure and shame. ii In this regard, Nojavanasghari and colleagues (2016) used a dataset including hundreds of videos of children being curious and offered only a general list of visual, auditory and verbal behaviours that are important for recognizing curiosity: (1) observing a new object; (2) inspecting the object; (3) carrying out manipulatory behaviours; (4) thinking; (5) asking questions and making comments on the topic and (6) dominating the interaction. iii I did not type in ‘wonder’ directly given the fact that there was a 2017 movie with the same name, plus the Wonder Woman movie, which both feature extensively in the results of the search.

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their hips, 2 folding their arms and 2 supporting their head between their hands. Interestingly, almost a third of the images (32) included one or multiple question marks. What does this imply? That wondering is associated with questioning, doubt, surprise and uncertainty, including frustration  – let’s remember that more people had the corners of their mouths pointing down than up. The most common wondering posture included touching one’s chin, pensively, and, at a facial expression level, raising one eyebrow more than the other (perhaps a mark of suspicion?). I also wanted to see how these popular representations might compare to those for curiosity and awe.iv The top 100 images for a curious face already showed an interesting difference in terms of age, with 27 instances of children and even babies, suggesting the fact that curiosity is often associated with lower ages compared to wonder. The dominant facial expression is slightly different, with raised eyebrows being most frequent (23), followed by one eyebrow raised higher than the other (18) and frowning (2). The mouth in these cases was equally likely to point upwards or downwards (17 instances each), and there was a higher number of mouths making an O shape (11) than for wonder. Finally, the number of people represented with their hands touching or supporting their faces was much lower (21). This implies that curiosity is closer, in its imagery, to surprise than wonder is (raised eyebrows, mouth in O) and perhaps associated with more positive emotions. Unexpectedly, only 3 images showed question marks. Last but not least, awe. A similarly big number of children or babies (23) were depicted in the first 100 images of being ‘in awe’, alongside men (30), women (24) and, in addition, groups of people (5). The facial expression of those in awe is clearly marked by raised eyebrows (16) and wide eyes (11), with much less frowning (3) or wonder-like differently positioned eyebrows (1). The mouth is mostly open, often the jaw is dropping (28), but many are also smiling (24) compared to looking sad or frustrated (5). The most common posture was holding one’s hands raised to the sky (9), perhaps as a sign of letting oneself go or feeling defenceless, exposed. Very few people held or touched their chin or cheeks (2), held their head between their hands (2) or had their hand over the mouth (1). What we can see here, therefore, is an interesting overlap between curiosity and awe when it comes to the element of surprise (raised eyebrows)

iv Once more, it was not feasible to search directly for these terms because they each led to top images that represented popular culture rather than actual people, so, instead, I opted for ‘curious face’ and ‘in awe’.



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and a more positive mood, but also awe’s specificity which is the sensation of being overwhelmed. Of course, some might raise here the issue of the type and size of the sample used. It is certainly not enough to take 100 images, even if they are the highest ranked by a popular search engine, and make any conclusive statements about the expression – and even less about the phenomenology – of states as complex as wonder, curiosity and awe. Yet this is a good starting point for a much deeper conceptual analysis. Wonder seems, at a social representation level, to be closely associated with doubt, suspicion, critical thinking. And these processes are often experienced as uncomfortable – they are unsettling, as Aristotle reminds us. Interestingly, there are also multiple continuities, as well as discontinuities, between wonder, curiosity and awe and, as we shall see in the next chapter, other related phenomena such as pondering and contemplation. There might be no specific ‘face’ of wonder (or awe, or curiosity), but its different ‘faces’ are highly familiar to us. After all, we see and depict them on a daily basis.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See the 1965 edition published by the University of Chicago Press. See, for example, the landmark research of Ekman & Friesen (1971). Keltner & Haidt (2003), p. 302. See Shiota, Campos & Keltner (2003). Also Cotter, Silvia & Fayn (2018).

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The Wondering Mind

When do we begin to wonder? Historically, as we saw in the previous chapter, wondering starts when the feeling of possessing certain knowledge ends. That is, for many thinkers across time, where philosophy begins as well. But much more than philosophy starts in wonder. Arguably, most of what defines human civilization  – mastering fire, domesticating animals, creating tools, the emergence of the first symbols and drawings – have their origin in acts of creative wonder.1 It is because of our capacity to be surprised by novelties, try to understand their meaning and use them in the future that our species was able to leave the comfort of the known and the predictable and venture into the unknown, take risky decisions and learn from them. Besides, wonder plays a part not only in the creation of culture – both material and symbolic – but also in its transmission and accumulation.2 It is by wondering about how the world was in the past and how it is for other people that we are able to build the bridges of communication and exchange needed to pass on a shared cultural heritage and, among others, to imagine collective futures.3 It is debatable, from an evolutionary perspective, whether wonder and curiosity have been especially selected in the course of human evolution or whether they exposed representatives of our species to unnecessary harm and, thus, had to be constantly reined in. It is quite possible for both of these scenarios to be the case.i Given the likely costs associated with wondering (revisit the Here i Even if wondering about wonder’s role in evolution is relatively scarce. Both biologists and psychologists bring an evolutionary paradigm to their study of emotions. As a consequence, they tend to emphasize those emotions that lead to the performance of adaptive behaviors such as withdrawal, avoidance, mating, or aggression. It is relatively rare for biologists and psychologists to study emotions that have no immediate survival value. Wonder, curiosity, and interest would be prime examples of emotions that lead to sustained attention to one’s surroundings. All three motivate thought, perception, and action in ways that enable organisms to develop new and more creative modes of interaction with their environment. They are all adaptive, but in a less obvious and more long-term way. Researchers also tend to ignore wonder because of its propensity to prompt humans to contemplate nonphysical

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be dragons segment at the start of the book), those who engaged in it constantly might have lived shorter – yet probably more meaningful and exciting – lives. On the other hand, not wondering at all would have surely put the person at a disadvantage in an ever-changing environment like the one our ancestors lived in and we also inhabit today. But when do we begin to wonder as individuals? In other words, how early does wondering start in early childhood? This question is more difficult to answer given the fact that wonder can be defined in different ways. If wondering is all about exploring the world around us and being surprised by it, then it has a very early developmental history. Indeed, we could argue that we start wondering from the moment we are born and thus thrown into an environment that is different, strange, at times uninviting and yet full of wonder-full and exciting new stimuli. If, on the other hand, we associate wondering with asking questions, then this becomes possible only after the acquisition of a system of symbols (e.g. language), around 2 years of age.4 Further still, if we take wondering to mean explorations of the possible, in the way I propose in this book, then the developmental history of wonder goes through different stages, from early infancy to old age. This is because the awareness or sense of the possible is an ever-present companion in our life-course, from the mainly physical explorations of early childhood to the complex imaginative constructions of adolescence and beyond.5 Do children wonder more than adults? This is a bit of a misleading question as it invites us to quantify and compare experiences that cannot easily be quantified or compared, at least in a numerical fashion. Wordsworth, and he is certainly not alone, believed that children’s lives are full of wonder and, for this, they represent an ideal for us all.6 In a similar vein, Howard Parsons noted, ‘Philosophy begins in wonder, but wonder begins in the child.’7 And yet, adults certainly wonder as well, even if they wonder about different things and might also wonder differently (or, at least, their physical expression when wondering and the types of questions they ask will differ). Such variations shouldn’t invite evaluations in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less’; they should encourage us to understand when, how and why people wonder across their lives and, most importantly, what kind of support they receive for wondering and, conversely, what kind of obstacles they face when trying to do so. It is undoubtedly the case that children and adults alike require a certain supportive environment to keep features of the universe (mistakenly leading some researchers to conclude that wonder is a misapplication of the brain’s cognitive abilities). (Fuller, 2009, p. 11)



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wondering and that this environment is built differently across cultures, just as it was across historical time.8 In this book, I  will explore such developmental, cultural and historical variations of the wondering mind and do so by expanding first the scope of wonder in order to capture its ‘entire’ vocabulary. This expanded lexicon includes, as we shall see, other common (and popular) notions such as curiosity, awe, contemplation, astonishment, marvel, pondering and so on. By including all of these under the label of the ‘wondering mind’ I  am not trying to erase the differences between them. On the contrary, I will use these differences to position wonder per se within this complex landscape in ways that both show its continuity with related experiences (such as curiosity and awe) and set it apart from them. The structural model of wondering I  propose ultimately reveals wonder as a paradoxical state – the kind of paradox we have been comfortably living with for a long time, in both evolutionary and developmental terms.

2.1  A complex vocabulary People talk about wonder and display it in various ways, as demonstrated by the small research on facial expressions presented before this chapter. They also talk and display curiosity and awe in ways that are sometimes similar, sometimes different from wonder. While this is by no means unexpected, an important question remains: How do we disentangle wonder’s meaning from that of other, closely related concepts? And, in the end, do we even need to engage in this exercise? First of all, we should note that there are a range of emotions that have been historically associated with wonder, from marvel and dread to amazement and terror.9 Second, that context often determines the exact meaning of these different states as none of them has a fixed historical connotation.ii Last but not least, it is phenomenologically complicated to disentangle the emotions referred to above and their relation to wonder because they all participate in creating unique mixes and singular experiences.iii This is always the case when ii ‘Wonder is part of a broad and shifting semantic field in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century psychology and aesthetics that at various times includes surprise, curiosity, admiration, suspense, stupor, awe, amazement, and astonishment. Context determines wonder’s closeness, at a given moment, to cognitive passions like curiosity or aesthetic categories like the sublime’ (Daston & Park, 1998, p. 15). iii ‘Wonder is sometimes an important ingredient in other emotions. In grief there is, I think, often a kind of wonder – in which one sees the beauty of the lost person as a kind of radiance standing at a very great distance from us’ (Nussbaum, 2001, p. 54).

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looking at complex and compound emotional states, especially when the focus is on wondering which, for many authors, has several subcomponents, for example, cognitive, perceptual and spiritual.iv All these complications made psychologists rather confused about where to place wonder after all and how to conceptualize its connection with surprise, awe and curiosity.v In order to understand these connections, we need first to consider briefly these other states. The two most important phenomena that wonder seems to pendulate between are awe and curiosity. In fact, the strongly emotional awe and cognitive (intellectual) curiosity combined is what makes up wonder for some scholars.10 Others consider awe and curiosity to be two senses of the term ‘wonder’.11 In this book, I want to differentiate the three while emphasizing the fact that experiences of awe and curiosity can morph into wonder and the other way around. There is, therefore, more of a continuum than a strict or absolute separation between these states. Curiosity is typically situated at the ‘intellectual’ end of the wondering spectrum. It designates a desire to know or learn about unusual things, people or events. This is why, for instance, curiosity is often cited as a key component of the creative self constantly looking for answers,12 just as wonder is as well.13 However, as shown in the historical presentation from the last chapter, many thinkers have been keen to distinguish between the two. For example, Burke saw curiosity as the simplest emotion of our mind, quickly to come and pass, and contrasted it with the longer lasting and transformative sublime, the eighteenth-century incarnation of wonder.14 For Heidegger as well, curiosity is lacking because it is concerned with getting to know rather than dwelling in uncertainty and the unknown specific for wondering.vi

iv ‘Cognitively, wonder involves appraisals of perplexity – wondrous things are hard to fully capture in our conceptual schemes. Perceptually, wondrous things engage and captivate our senses. Spiritually, wondrous things are regarded with reverence; we look up to them’ (Fingerhut & Prinz, 2018, p. 116). v ‘Psychologists continued to define wonder in a variety of ways and, in doing so, placed it in different relationships to surprise, awe, and curiosity. For example, Mercier (1888, pp.  352–3, 361)  placed wonder in one category and the latter three in another. McDougall (1908), on the other hand, defined wonder as a primary emotion that accompanied the instinct of curiosity. More recently, wonder has been defined in a similar way to surprise (i.e., as a response to the unexpected; Frijda, 1986), and has been discussed in the sense of awe (Haidt & Keltner, 2004). In this latter sense, its status as an emotion has been questioned (Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994, pp. 129–36). On the other hand, Ekman and Cordaro (2011), who define wonder in contrast with awe, expect that wonder is an emotion for which evidence of universality will be found’ (Lamont, 2017, p. 1). vi Piersol (2013), p. 8. Also Rubenstein (2008, p. 28): ‘curiosity has nothing to do with the contemplation that wonders at being, thaumazein, it has no interest in wondering to the point of not understanding. Rather, it makes sure of knowing, but just in order to have known’.



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Overall, there is a sense that experiencing curiosity is a more superficial state than experiencing wonder. The former orients us towards specific things and encourages us to learn about them, leaving the big questions unasked. The latter ‘probes deeper  – or leads us to probe deeper  – than curiosity’15 and engages the whole person. Another interesting distinction mentioned by Schinkel is that curiosity usually focuses our attention on what is new in our experience and ends up familiarizing it. Wonder often takes the other direction, helping us discover the unknown within the known and to make the familiar unfamiliar (see also Chapter 5 of this book). If curiosity is commonly seen as a ‘lighter’ state of wonder, awe is diametrically opposed to it. The feeling of being amazed or astonished is gripping, deep, mixing fear and attraction. It is associated with being moved or touched by something in a significant manner.16 Just like curiosity, awe is also considered conducive for creativity or, at least, openness to experience, a key predictor of creativity that also predicts, in turn, experiences of awe.17 Interestingly, there is much more of an association, in conceptual terms, between wonder and awe than wonder and curiosity. Historically, the two have been joined by the notion of the sublime,vii and to this day authors tend to describe wondering in terms usually associated with awe.viii And yet, other scholars strived to distinguish between them,ix primarily on the basis of awe’s strong emotionality and wonder’s reflective element which necessarily puts more distance between the person and his or her situation.x In the end, Nussbaum offered perhaps the most fitting experiential separation when she wrote, in a footnote, that ‘Wonder and awe are akin, but distinct:  wonder is outward-moving, exuberant, whereas awe is linked with bending, or making oneself small. In wonder I want to leap or run, in awe to kneel.’18

vii ‘When wonder is mentioned in romantic and/or ecocritical scholarship, it is typically seen as synonymous either with the “awe” that characterizes one side of sublime affect (fear being the other primary emotion) or with sublimity’s early “humbling” phase’ (Economides, 2016, p. 16). viii ‘The wonderer wonders:  jaw dropped in astonishment, incomprehension, anticipation, rage; ears trained on what calls for help, for justice, for thought; eyes wide open to the absence of sense, the limits of knowledge, the touch of all things that opens out possibility’ (Rubenstein, 2008, pp. 195–6). ix For instance, Weger and Wagemann (2018) proposed a theoretical model in which wonder can turn into awe whenever we experience external or internal vastness, if special conditions are in place. x ‘Awe hits you more immediately at the first-order level of experience; wonder is more reflective or second-order. One can think that perhaps an immediate experience of awe motivates a more reflective experience of wonder’ (Gallagher, Reinerman-Jones, Janz, Bockelman & Trempler, 2015, p. 6).

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2.2  Transcending dichotomies What the discussion of awe and curiosity sets up, in relation to wonder, is a dichotomic view of this experience. We have, on the one hand, the passive and rather overwhelming reaction to surprising, new or unfamiliar elements, and on the other, the active search and exploration of these elements. Passive and active,xi rational and irrational, exciting and disturbing, ordinary and extraordinary  – these are just a few of the states that characterize wonder at the same time. As we know from the previous chapter, one of the first dichotomies to be set up in the study of wonder was that between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’. Socrates and Aristotle both saw wondering as the unity between the two,19 even if, for the latter, not knowing gradually leads to knowing, while, for the former, they are in tension with each other. In the end, wonder keeps the person, at once, in a state of knowing and not knowing, and it is precisely this capacity to bring together opposites that sets it apart as a phenomenon. Perhaps the most popular dichotomy of all when it comes to this phenomenon is that between wondering at and wondering about (see Box 2.1). This distinction goes directly at the heart of wondering by distinguishing between the more ‘passive’ and ‘active’ sides of it while maintaining the two in relative unity with each other. Wondering at is close to being startled or in awe. Wondering about strives towards explanation. Importantly, just as in the case above, ‘both are necessary to move understanding and sustain inquiry’.20

Box 2.1  Wondering at and Wondering about The first, a receptive and inward type in which the feeling of surprise or excitement is dominant and the signifying element more or less disappears; the second, an active and outward type which brings to the fore a creative, signifying interest and subordinates the receptive element. The expressive ‘wonderful’ and the ‘ah!’ of pure excited joy illustrate the first type of wonder experience, whereas ‘wondering’ in the active voice indicates the formative, intentional force that aims at

xi ‘The tensions between metaphors of stasis and of turmoil recur throughout the history of the philosophical understanding of wonder. On the one hand, there is the image of a mind transfixed – “wonderstruck”. On the other hand, there is what seems an equally appropriate image of a kind of mental restlessness – of a mind wandering, uncertain of its bearings. We can think of wonder as frozen paralysis, but also as restless vacillation’ (Lloyd, 2018, p. 16).



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putting into meaningful form the relative disorder of the emotional experience.a Wondering at is associated with contemplation, when peaceful, and astonishment, when tense. Wondering about is closely related with many of the elements people would use to define curiosity.b Some authors see these two facets – ‘wonder in the sense of curiosity’ and ‘wonder in the sense of the magical, miraculous and incomprehensible’ – as contradicting each other, the latter of which, at times, ‘destroys curiosity and anesthetizes the intellect’.c Most would agree, however, that these two dimensions are integral to wondering. In fact, I  argue here that no experience of wonder is complete without an element of both wondering at and wondering about. Indeed, wondering at without wondering about would make the experience emotionally intense but static, not moving the person any further. Conversely, wondering about without wondering at can feel dry and superficial. It is important to note here that this doesn’t mean that these two facets always follow each other, with wondering at (triggered by surprising events or the unexpected) turning into wondering about. In fact, the exploration that is essential for the latter requires, at all times, the emotional and motivational impetus of the former. a b

 arsons (1969), p. 93. P Hadzigeorgiou (2012), p. 987. However, we need to remember this is not curiosity per se as wonder and curiosity remain different phenomena: One, of course, could identify astonishment and admiration, that is, the poetic nature of wonder, with a ‘wonder at’ attitude, which, certainly, is not curiosity. What should be stressed though is that even a ‘wonder about’ attitude should not be identified solely with curiosity. A person, for example, can wonder about how to proceed in approaching or solving a problem, without his/her curiosity to have been aroused. In such a case there is first an awareness of a problematic situation, and second, feelings of perplexity, doubt, and uncertainty. This simple situation shows that wonder and curiosity are two different notions, and it is misleading to use them interchangeably. (Hadzigeorgiou, 2012, p. 988)

c

Silverman (1989), p. 44.

What these dichotomies do is, first of all, complexify the phenomenon of wondering. If awe, astonishment and curiosity are more or less unidimensional, wonder is (at least) two-dimensional and, as such, it is harder to theorize and identify in practice. Experiences that go in the more passive direction of wondering at might end up being confused with contemplation or awe. Those that move clearly towards the more active wondering about seem like good old curiosity. This is precisely what led some to propose distinct varieties of

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wondering. Schinkel, for example, talked about active and deep wonder:  the first invites us to explore and is animated by the desire to know, the second is more contemplative and leaves us lost for words.21 But, for as intuitive as these distinctions are, they might actually harm rather than help our understanding of wonder as an integral, multifaceted phenomenon. We need new ways to think about wondering in an integral way. Going back to the first and most basic dichotomy between the passive and active elements and Theaetetus’s oscillation between paralysis and turmoil, Plato offered us a beautiful metaphor to grasp the unity between the two: the boy’s mental state, he said, resembled ‘the quiet flow of a stream of oil’.22 We need more of this thinking to build a comprehensive rather than fragmented model of wondering and related experiences.

2.3  The structural model The structural model of wonder I propose here is based on the premise above: that the ‘fullest’ forms of wonder integrate rather than maintain dichotomies such as active or passive, wondering at and wondering about. At the same time, we often get to wonder in ways that pull us towards one dimension or another and, thus, towards related phenomena such as awe and curiosity. Taken together, these two observations make us aware of the fact that, while the central characteristic of wonder is that it helps integrate (and, in doing so, transcend) dichotomies, these dichotomies are, in practice, continuous and, as such, wonder itself becomes continuous with other processes. The question thus becomes:  What exactly are the dichotomies being transcended and how do they relate to these other, wonder-like processes? The model I propose is predicated on a particular answer to this question, one that doesn’t claim to be the only one possible but tries to offer a strong, structural basis from which to start inquiring into the functional aspects of how we wonder (see the next chapter). The two dichotomies I focus on capture an old and a new criterion. The old one is the established distinction between more passive ways of wondering (typically associated with awe and astonishment) and more active ones (related to curiosity and exploration). To these I  add a second criterion: immersion versus detachment. This dichotomy has rarely been mentioned as such in the literature,xii yet it represents an important qualifier xii With the marked exception of Kareem (2014, pp. 9–10), who formulated a theory of wonder focused on balance: ‘This delicate balance is both epistemological – the interaction between credulity and



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for the active–passive dimension. Immersion, in this context, refers to wonder’s ability to bring us very close to the issue, object, scene or event that triggered it, in ways that make us, experientially, ‘lose’ ourselves within them. This facet, however, is typically balanced within wondering by its opposite – detachment – expressed in wonder’s ability to also create a reflective distance between the wonderer and the wondrous.xiii Once more, there is a continuum at play here rather than strict separation.xiv The phenomena related to wonder that I include in this typology are the more ‘classic’ awe (or amazement, astonishment) and curiosity, on the one hand, and pondering and contemplation (or admiration), on the other. The last two have not been discussed much so far, yet they both belong to the expanded vocabulary of wondering I am referring to in this book. Pondering is close to curiosity, yet not synonymous with it. It involves a careful consideration of things before taking a decision. Contemplation requires a similar element of detachment, one aimed not at the analytical investigation of things but at their appreciation or admiration.xv Putting together the passive (wondering at)/active (wondering about) dimension and the immersion/detachment one, we are left with a two by two model with four categories (see Figure 3). They are labelled here: contemplation (passive and detached), pondering (active and detached), awe (passive and immersed) and curiosity (active and immersed). Right at the centre, balancing activity and passivity, detachment and immersion, I have placed wonder. This conceptualization of wonder  – as a phenomenon that stands out in comparison to contemplation, pondering, awe and curiosity because of its capacity to bring together seemingly opposed states – has been hinted at before numerous times. For Lloyd, for example, wonder ‘can be construed as a balancing or reconciliation between opposed tendencies to motion and rest’.23 Or, in the words of Kareem, the technologies that help produce wonder rely equally on

skepticism – and phenomenological, involving an equilibrium between what I term engrossment and reflection, this latter term indicating detached contemplation.’ Analysing fiction, Kareem argues that the union between engrossed and detached wonder  – in the form of skeptically informed engrossment – is a historical invention of the eighteenth century. xiii In the words of Parsons (1969, p.  87), ‘wonder retains an element of detachment or ideation, a minimal curiosity, a control of emotion that gives psychic distance to the event and permits at least in some small degree the play of imagination’. xiv Something noted by Kareem (2014, p.  8) as well when she wrote:  ‘my findings suggest that eighteenth-century thinkers conceived of wonder as a finely gradated spectrum that moves from astonishment through curiosity toward radical doubt’. xv The term ‘admiration’ follows the Latin root, mirari, and has been referred to extensively by authors like Descartes (partially because it is a word used to designate wonder in French, among other terms).

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Figure 3  A Structural Model of Wonder.

‘engrossment and reflection’.24 Moreover, such unions between opposites have been captured by dictionary definitions of wonder that typically refer to being surprised or astonished, on the one hand, and curious and wanting to know, on the other. This double meaning is present mainly in the English version of the word, however. In other languages, we often find two (or more) terms that ‘split’ the concept into its components (se demander and s’étonner in French; sich fragen and sich wundern in German; a se întreba and a se minuna in Romanian, etc.). Another observation is that I  am not implying, with this model, that contemplation, pondering, awe and curiosity are all subordinated to wonder. By assigning each to a quadrant I  want to capture what is essential for them from the perspective of the two criteria outlined above.xvi This does not mean, in any way, that they are subforms of wondering. But it does mean that wonder, given that it possesses characteristics from each one of them, could easily slide towards one or another. For example, more immersed and passive forms of wondering at readily resemble awe, more detached wondering at moves towards contemplation, immersed and active wondering about is close to creativity, while simply detached wondering about can be confused with pondering. In other words, wonder is a highly versatile phenomenon that is often encountered in ‘impure’ or mixed forms.xvii How is ‘pure’ wonder experienced then? Even if, for some if not all, I  am certain other experts might not agree with their placement within the model. For instance, curiosity might not be really more ‘immersed’ than ‘detached’, or pondering might not be altogether too different from curiosity. My reasoning for placing these phenomena in the model where they are is based on both their current definitions and the history of these definitions (e.g. Burke and Heidegger’s consideration of curiosity as an active, changing and rather superficial phenomenon – thus lacking in reflective detachment). xvii By which I don’t mean at all that they are ‘lower’ forms of wondering, simply compound phenomena. xvi



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2.4  A paradoxical state In its ‘pure’ form, wonder is a rather paradoxical state of mind. This, as I will argue throughout the book, gives this otherwise ordinary experience its extraordinary power to transform our relation to ourselves, others and the world. This power stems precisely from the fact that, when we wonder, we do several things at once. We are amazed about what we see, hear or feel but, at the same time, burn with the desire to explore things further. We are closely connected with the object of our wonder while, at the same time, ready to reflect about it in a detached manner. We are thinking a lot about our own cognition even if wondering is ‘hot’, infused with affect and motivation. Finally, we are focused on the self while opening up to others and to their world. Where does this leave the dichotomies mentioned in this chapter? Is wonder alternating between them, integrating them at all times, being pulled apart by them or transcending them altogether?xviii Once more, experiences of wonder do vary  – personally and contextually  – and, if the ‘pure’ form is able to accommodate activity and passivity, immersion and detachment simultaneously, this doesn’t preclude undergoing these dimensions in turn, cyclically, or even experiencing some tensions between them. It is this unique feature, in the end, that places wonder at the centre and grounds it in the interplay between different faculties of the mind.25 In this interplay, for instance, we combine wonder with awe, with curiosity, with contemplation or with pondering (or several of them at once). But the important criterion, if we are to talk about wonder and not another mental process or emotion, is that all these tendencies need to be intimately and unmistakably bound to each other. Even when, for example, wondering about follows wondering at, it must do so in an integrated manner. Any break or separation between wondering at and wondering about, and especially the priority given to one over the other, radically changes the experience and turns it from wondering into something else.xix And, with this detournement, the promise of wonder weakens as well. To understand how we can hold on to this promise, though, we need to move from the structural to a more dynamic view of this phenomenon.

‘Including both marvel’s transfixed passivity and curiosity’s active movement toward an object, wonder encompasses both stupefaction – “Ah!” – and recognition – “Aha!” – thereby pulling in two different directions simultaneously’ (Kareem, 2014, p. 8; emphasis added). xix Not worst, but different. xviii

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Notes 1 See Festinger (1983). 2 For an example of the role of wonder in science in early modern Europe, see Campbell (2004). 3 See de Saint-Laurent, Obradović & Carriere (eds) (2018). 4 See Chouinard (2007). 5 For the development of creativity and imagination, see Vygotsky (1990). 6 See Piersol (2013), p. 7. 7 Parsons (1969), p. 101. 8 For more on this, see Bynum (1997). 9 Rubenstein (2008), p. 9. 10 Nussbaum (2001), p. 427. 11 Gallagher, Reinerman-Jones, Janz, Bockelman & Trempler (2015), p. 1. 12 Karwowski (2012), p. 555. 13 Glăveanu (2019c). 14 Lloyd (2018), p. 55. 15 Schinkel (2017), p. 5. 16 Konečni (2011), p. 64. 17 Silvia, Fayn, Nusbaum & Beaty (2015). 18 Nussbaum (2001), p. 54. 19 Lloyd (2018), p. 28. 20 Carlsen & Sandelands (2014), p. 377. 21 Schinkel (2017), pp. 6–7. 22 144b; pp. 261–2, in Lloyd (2018), p. 16. 23 Lloyd (2018), p. 2. 24 Kareem (2014), p. 24. 25 Lloyd (2018), p. 207.

Wonder in the Wild

Do animals wonder? Even more, can animals wonder? The ‘wondering mind’ is something we associate with human beings to the point of making it the feature that most distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. But is this characterization fair, or is it yet another sign of our pervasive and self-serving anthropocentrism?1 After all, we do know that many animals, just like humans, actively explore their environment and show clear signs of surprise. We even have popular sayings like ‘curiosity killed the cat’ to warn us against scooping around too much. But are these external indicators enough to say cats and other animals ‘wonder’ in the sense of the term outlined in the previous chapter, that is, by engaging in explorations of the possible? Anecdotal evidence should always be taken with a grain of salt; nonetheless, I will start from it since it is a personal experience that made me first wonder, years ago, about animal wonder. I  was visiting with friends the Aalborg Zoo on a (rare) sunny day when we stopped in front of the orangutans’ enclosure (see Figure 4). I confess that visiting zoos always leaves me with a mixed feeling of excitement and discontent no matter how much space animals might enjoy or the fact that zoos today avoid the heavy cages of the past and replace them with more discreet forms of captivity. This uncomfortable feeling is most vivid in the presence of monkeys, in particular the great apes. Making direct eye contact with a caged ape is the type of experience that reminds us of the fact that intersubjectivity can cross the divide between species.i

i And, in fact, during another one of my visits to the Aalborg Zoo I  had the pleasure of being accompanied by a phenomenology expert with a particular interest in monkeys and intersubjectivity. He would start gently by imitating the monkeys and then, suddenly, a connection would be formed based on the mutual imitation of gestures. Even if, arguably, the animals could never experience the situation in the same way as my colleague did, it was undeniable that they experienced it intensely and displayed emotions and motives that we find in fellow humans.

Figure 4  Playful Baby Orangutan at the Aalborg Zoo.



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On that day I decided to look at them from a distance as a mother orangutan and her offspring were bathing in the sun, surrounded by blankets, near a wooden structure built in the middle of the grounds for their enjoyment. The scene that followed piqued my interest. The baby orangutan was especially playful, pulling away the blanket and trying to run away with it. The mother, on the other hand, wanted nothing of it. As the baby moved away, she would come drag him back to the same spot they were nesting in. Every time, the baby’s movements had to become more ‘creative’ in order to avoid being caught and dragged back. And, every time, the mother would calmly find a way to return her infant. This must have lasted for a good ten minutes until the mother gave up and, taking the lead from her offspring, relocated the two of them up the wooden structure, blanket and all. This scene is highly common in zoos around the world. What witnessing it can do  – as it did for me  – is make visitors wonder about the inner life of monkeys. They clearly want and feel things, but do they also think or wonder about them? Now many would legitimately ask, at this point, whether we run the risk here of going from anthropocentrism to anthropomorphism. We are known to invest human thoughts and emotions even to the most simple, inanimate objects,ii all the more to highly complex creatures that resemble us. But are we right to do so? Descartes offered us an early and decisive answer: no. For him, animals were nothing more than automata, acting as if they felt things or thought about them without in reality feeling or thinking.2 This sounds like a rather harsh view and, indeed, it has been used across history to either ridicule or condemn Cartesianism. But its echoes reverberate to this day within debates on animal consciousness.iii Today’s advocates of it tend to start from a more nuanced understanding of consciousness as a continuum rather than a black and white, all or nothing type of phenomenon.3 But are different forms of consciousness on

ii Heider (1944) famously demonstrated this when he had students look at a short video displaying moving geometric shapes and showed how they consistently attributed intentions, thoughts and feelings onto them. The need to make meaning of what we see in terms of psychological causality, the basis for Heider’s attribution theory, is certainly extended to animate beings. The question is, are we correct in doing this? iii ‘A creature with a very large brain, capable of storing large numbers of complex patterns, and capable of carrying through elaborate sequences of internal representations, with this capability refined and elaborated to a very high degree, would be a creature like you and me. Somehow, as I have stressed, consciousness conspicuously enters the scheme at this point of highly elaborate dynamic internal representations. Correctly or not, most of us find it hard to imagine that an insect is conscious, at least conscious in anything approximating the sense in which humans are conscious. But it is hard to imagine that a dog is not conscious in at least something like the way an infant is conscious’ (Margolis, 1987, p. 55).

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this continuum capable of enabling wonder? Can they experience awe? And are they curious in a remotely similar way to how we, humans, are curious?iv While awe requires a certain feeling of transcendence that borders on spirituality, curiosity seems to be largely accepted as a characteristic of some, if not most, animals.v This is based on the fact that animals, just like humans, have a natural tendency to explore their environment and to play with objects as part of this process. Whether or not animals show an interest in the world for ‘its own sake’, that is, wonder about it, or are simply at the mercy of their instincts even in exploration and play is a question that is answered differently in the behaviourist and cognitivist tradition. For the former, animal exploration is shaped by conditioning (e.g. rewards from trial and error learning); for the latter, both animal and human cognition is based on information processing (and exploration is worth engaging in even without immediate pay-offs). From an evolutionary point of view, the environment will play a huge role in stimulating curiosity: animals living in complex, fast-changing environments will gain more from being curious and exploring their surroundings actively, something that applies from rats to dolphins. This, in the end, helps some of them spread rapidly around the globe and inhabit a variety of environments (unlike creatures with more specific niches that can be much more risk-averse). What might animals be curious about? Byrne postulated that most would be capable of sustaining an entry level of curiosity by paying attention to the what, where and even when of their world (e.g. some birds and animals are known to store food resources for winter, clearly showing a remarkable capacity to remember). It is debatable, however, if animals can easily wonder about how and why, although social beings like elephants, for instance, investigate dung or urine in order to learn about and keep track of other, faraway members of the family. How can we study animal curiosity? A simple but effective method has been used for a long time, in fact. Glickman and Sroges,4 in the 1960s, presented animals with novel and intriguing objects and measured how long they were interested in them and how they manipulated them. In this way they found that old world monkeys are the most ‘curious’, predators are highly attentive but lose interest rather quickly and marsupials are pretty incurious. The story of curiosity iv Some evidence coming from neuroscience seems to suggest that monkeys such as Japanese macaques, when awake, have blood flowing in areas of the brain associated in humans with having internal thoughts as evidenced by PET scans (Watanabe, 2011). Whether these are actual thoughts and what they might be about is anyone’s guess. v The discussion and examples here are largely based on Byrne’s article, ‘Animal curiosity’ (2013).



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in animals is made more complex by recent discussions about neophilia, or the desire to acquire new information, and neophobia, its reverse. In other words, animals (just like humans) vary in their openness towards novel stimuli and in their appreciation of novelty. Moreover, one and the same individual or species might be able to express both at different moments in time or in relation to different stimuli. As already mentioned above, studies show that animals living in more complex habitats tend to show lower levels of neophobia and also that highly ‘innovative’ species of parrots and corvids, for example, display high levels of both neophilia and neophobia (they are drawn by the new yet fearful of it). It even seems that the levels of these tendencies might vary across the lifespan, with neophobia gradually increasing along the development of a young corvid and neophilia peaking in juveniles and subadults.5 Where does this leave wonder? Well, while the jury is still out when it comes to whether we can even properly talk about this phenomenon in animals, even in our closest relatives, the great apes, it is clear that seeking novelty, experiencing surprise and engaging in exploration exist throughout the animal kingdom. In some ways, just like with consciousness, it might not be a question of either/or, but of how much and how. And this how is really important for humans too as we still have a long way to go in understanding the inner mechanisms of our own wonder.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

See de Saint-Laurent (2015). See Cottingham (1978). See Dennett (1995). See Glickman & Sroges (1966). For more details, see Auersperg (2015).

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How Do We Wonder?

Before we unpack how wonder works, it would be good to start from what kind of phenomenon it is. As we have seen in the previous chapters, it has been conceptualized differently by different thinkers across time. For Socrates, Plato and Aristotle wonder relates to knowledge, its absence and its acquisition.1 Descartes sees wonder as a ‘passion’ and, therefore, a type of emotion.2 For Heidegger, wondering is a form of dwelling3 and, as such, it involves much more than thinking or feeling. It is closer, in fact, to what I propose here – wonder as an experience. In using the word experience, I  don’t mean that wondering necessarily leaves a strong impression on the wonderer, although it can. I  use the term here in a pragmatist sense in order to designate a way of relating to the world.i An experience is not, thus, an inner kind of process, taking place ‘inside’ the individual, for as personal and idiosyncratic wonder might feel like at times. Equally, experiences are not occasioned (only) by finding oneself in exceptional circumstances or witnessing rare events, even if the latter sometimes make us wonder or even be in awe. Experiences take place at the point of encounter between person and world and are defined by the bidirectional relation between them. What this means for wonder, practically, is that it is not considered here a mental process or state, nor is it seen as a property of the environment.ii i For John Dewey (1934, p. 256), experience is a matter of the interaction of organism with its environment, an environment that is human as well as physical, that includes the materials of tradition and institutions as well as local surroundings. The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction. The self acts as well as undergoes, and its undergoing are not impressions stamped upon an inert wax but depend upon the way the organism reacts and responds. There is no experience in which the human contribution is not a factor in determining what actually happens. The organism is a force, not a transparency. Because every experience is constituted by interaction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, between a self and its word, it is not itself either merely physical or merely mental, no matter how much one factor or the other predominates. ii In the words of Carlsen and Sandelands (2014, p. 375), ‘we should not place wonder either outside everyday experience as extraordinary happenings or inside people as psychological states’.

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Wondering happens in between person and situation and effectively relates the two. Indeed, wonder offers us a bridge towards a world that is wider than we initially knew or felt; as an experience, it radically expands our possibilities of acting and being. In doing so, it also becomes oftentimes a state that is difficult to articulate in words or even to think about.iii It is interesting to note at this point that it is not only the experience of wondering that poses conceptual problems for those interested to theorize or study it, but the notion of experience itself has been historically hard to unpack. The latter became the mission of different philosophical currents, most famously phenomenology. It is not surprising to discover, then, that one of the fathers of this school, Edmund Husserl, was in fact concerned with wonder and advocated returning to its Greek roots.4 For him, this phenomenon included, at an experiential level, three interrelated parts: the wonderer, the wonderful and their connection represented by the act of wondering. Its experience was, for Husserl, integral rather than fragmented into cognitive, affective or situational dimensions. Moreover, what was ‘wonderful’ for him was not only the object of wonder, whether internal (e.g. wondering about one’s own mind and its functioning) or external (e.g. wondering about the infinity of space), but the act of wondering itself. The experience of wonder, again, encompasses person and world through their relation.iv But this interrelation could be said to apply to all experiences. What is further specific for wonder is that it is one of the main phenomena that engages the possible in our existence.5 Wondering opens up new possibilities for our thinking and for our action in the world, independent of what we wonder about. This is the case given that, as we will see here, wonder essentially make us aware of the fact that whatever perspective we adopt on the world, this perspective is

iii ‘Wonder can be a hard concept to articulate. For me, wonder begins as a wave of ‘surprise caused by something unexpected or unfamiliar’ or by an example of amazing achievement. At first, I delight in this feeling and briefly hold it like a worn stone, tracing my fingers over it as it lays fixed before me. I am momentarily frozen by the feeling that I am holding. As Albert Schweitzer writes, “If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness” (1969, p. 115). Yet, the moment I begin to contemplate it, I move from holding the wonder to letting it hold me; it shape-shifts from a noun to a verb through me. I now embody feelings of doubt, curiosity and amazement. The world grows larger and I feel like a stone being worn in waves of possibility. I realize that I still have much to learn’ (Piersol, 2013, p. 3). iv ‘What is wonderful, Husserl suggests, is not simply the oak leaf I look at, making me wonder why there is not nothing, for this feeling soon ceases. What is also wonderful is this experience of wondering itself, and myself as the person in whom astonishment before the world is felt. Wonder invites not only investigation of the world, but also reflection on the subject who experiences it, and on the experience itself. In short, the phenomenon of astonishment cannot be seen as one aspect to the exclusion of others: “wonder” is all together the experience of wonder, the world it points to (as astonishing), and the subject who feels the astonishment’ (Kingwell, 2000, p. 89).



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one among many. By revealing the world as perspectival,6 wondering ‘teaches’ us about more than to see a certain aspect of reality (what we wonder about) in a new light. It makes us aware, in a Socratic manner, that the knowledge gained through wondering is provisional and that there is much more to discover about ourselves and about the world. This is why the experience of wonder can be not only exhilarating and freeing – we realize that there is a beyond to our understanding – but also fighting or, at least, unsettling – this beyond might not be reached, or it will always remain there, for us to wonder about. Experiencing wonder means experiencing the possible and the latter is, by definition, the depository of endless possibilities. Once we fixate on one such possibility, we might be able to find peace and assurance, but we will have left the experience of wonder (and moved on to others: satisfaction, excitement or dread about our chosen path, for instance). To wonder is to dwell, according to Heidegger. In this book, we will see how, in wonder, what we are dwelling in specifically is the possible. In what follows, I will unpack this claim further and, in doing so, I will propose and exemplify a dynamic model of wondering that will be used to structure the rest of the book.

3.1  Engaging with the possible Engaging with the possible qualifies as a rather vague and mysterious phrase. This is why it’s highly advisable to start by defining its key terms. By engagement here I  mean both awareness of what is possible and its exploration. By the possible I  mean all those areas of experience that are not immediately given within our here-and-now but come to enrich the here-and-now should we decide to engage with them. These areas are represented by other temporalities than the present, other spaces, the minds of others, the imagined, including imaginations of what is impossible in reality.v How do we bring all these spaces and contents within our immediate experience? With the help of a variety of social and psychological processes such as imagination, counterfactual thinking, as-if thinking, anticipation, hope, foresight and forecasting, and so on.vi Key among these processes, I argue, is the phenomenon of wonder.

v An extensive discussion of the possible can be found in my upcoming book, The possible: A theory. vi A good introduction to many of these processes can be found in Roberto Poli’s book Introduction to anticipation studies (2017).

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In order to understand why this is the case, we need to start from some basic observations about our everyday experiences of the world.vii First of all, the fact that we all occupy at all times, as embodied beings, specific physical positions within our environment. Each position affords the development of certain visual (or, more broadly, sensorial) perspective on the environment. For example, if we are in a traditional classroom, we could either be seating in one of the benches and seeing the podium or the other way around. These two perspectives give us different information about the classroom, of course, but they can also make us feel differently. The latter is because physical positions are often intertwined with social ones. Students usually seat in benches, looking up towards the teacher and teachers typically stand up in front of the class, surveying the students. Going back to school, even in our imagination, means remembering what a student perspective is like, including in visual terms or, for those who teach, how it feels to speak in front of a class and observe the students’ faces and reactions. So far so good, but where exactly is the engagement with the possible here beside our capacity to imagine such scenes even when we are not experiencing them directly? The story of this engagement starts from a very simple possibility: that of exchanging positions in the world, both physical and social.viii This means that, through our life-course, we get to experience multiple positions by moving between them. Going back to the classroom context, we all got to be in both the position of the student and of the teacher even if the latter might have happened during class presentations. Nonetheless, we are familiar, from our own broader experience, with what listening to someone share information in class is like and what sharing information with others is like. More than this, we are familiar with these positions also because we talk to students and teachers, observe them, read about them in books, talk about them at home, watch movies involving them. And, from all of this, we build a set of conceptual perspectivesix vii These observations are based on sociocultural theory (Valsiner & Rosa, 2018) and, in particular, pragmatist (Dewey, 1934; Mead, 1934) and neo-pragmatist scholarship (Gillespie, 2005; Martin, 2006). viii In psychology this observation led to the development of a very interesting theory called Position Exchange Theory (PET) proposed by Alex Gillespie and Jack Martin (2014). They summarized the assumptions of PET as follows: The first assumption is that society comprises a multitude of social positions, many of which are interdependent (Durkheim, 1893). Social positions only exist in social situations. They are socioinstitutional locations within our social structure from which people speak and act, constituted by rights, responsibilities, and situational demands. … The second assumption is that social positions constitute perspectives, that is, psychological and embodied orientations, interests, and even world views. … The third assumption is that people move between social positions. (p. 74) ix Conceptual in the sense that these perspectives carry meaning, they are not based on sensorial images alone like, for instance, visual perspectives are.



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about what it means to be in each position. And, even more importantly, we get to develop and enrich these different perspectives by moving, physically or symbolically, between their different positions. This dynamic is well rehearsed in children’s games.7 In fact, we can argue that play and games are almost entirely premised on the possibility of adopting various positions (the roles available in the game), experiencing them and their associated perspectives, and then moving between them (by changing roles in future rounds of the game). It is interesting to observe here that a lot of popular children’s games are based on a duality of roles: playing parent and child, doctor and patient, sheriff or thief, the one who hides and the one who seeks, and so on. And children get to really understand the meaning of the game, and become good players, when they had enough opportunities to switch between roles and practice the perspectives they offer. This is also how, in the end, children come to understand and ‘practice’ society, by constantly performing it, in varied ways, within their play and games. And it is certainly how, from early on, children get to experience and engage, for the first time, with what is possible. Returning to this topic, we can now note that the possible is enabled by the opportunities we have to occupy various positions in the world – physical and social  – and acquire the perspectives associated with them  – from sensorial to conceptual. Engaging with the possible, in this context, means being able to physically or imaginatively change positions and exchange perspectives, thus expanding one’s immediate experience of the world by bringing in other experiences:  those of others, in whose position we have been or can imagine being.x This is a monumental achievement for human beings in both evolutionary and developmental terms, although we have seen in the discussion preceding this chapter that playfulness as an occasion to exchange positions and perspectives is not uniquely human (even if the complexity of these positions and perspectives, because of being infused by meanings and culture, is certainly grater in humans than in any other species we know). And it is an achievement that is both facilitated by and, in turn, facilitates wondering. Wonder is made possible by inhabiting and exchanging positions and perspectives because it is grounded, as noted in the previous chapter, in being immersed in the world (the inhabiting part) while having the possibility of taking some reflective distance from it (the exchanging part, allowing us to see our own x Note that this doesn’t mean that we literally take the perspective of others, which is impossible, but that we construct it based on interactions with them and their positions in a shared world. The degree to which we can ‘correctly’ approximate their experience of this world is of secondary concern here. What matters is that we can meaningfully engage with their perspectives and ‘become others’ to oneself.

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positions and perspectives as an other would). There is no option to wonderxi without the capacity to look beyond one’s own position and escape singular perspectives on the world. This is especially the case given that, as I suggested a bit earlier, we don’t only wonder about the new perspectives we come to acquire but also wonder at the realization that we hold a perspective (and, thus, one among many) in the first place. This is essential for our engagement with the possible since the latter comes out of multiplicity, not singularity. Someone who cannot see or conceive beyond what is given by one’s immediate positioning in the world could never wonder about this position because the latter would imply, at a minimum, relating to it from an external position (that of an other). In turn, wonder facilitates our awareness and exploration of the possible precisely because it invites us to search beyond our own experience and understand it from new points of view. How does this take place?

3.2  Stages and processes Wondering can be understood in two different ways: as a single, instantaneous event or as a process that takes time and goes through different stages. Most scholars would agree with the latter view.xii Based on what I  mentioned just before, instantaneous wonder would not allow any form of real engagement with the possible. While it might be conceived as gaining immediate awareness of what is possible, this awareness would be empty without exploration and exploration itself takes time, ranging from a few moments to the lifelong recurrence of wondering. If we are to think of wonder as sudden and all-at-once, then what we are doing is focusing only on wondering at and separating it from wondering about (see Box 2.1 in the previous chapter). What other options are there? Recognizing the temporality of wondering invites new reflections on what its different stages or processes might be. And there is a difference to note here between stage and process. The first one assumes that a phenomenon has relatively self-contained moments that are distinct enough to be differentiated from each other. The second points to developments that take place across the entire phenomenon, even when their manifestation might be heightened at some xi And, more broadly, for agency (Martin & Gillespie, 2010) and creativity (Glăveanu, 2015). xii In this respect Kareem (2014, p.  9) included the following footnote observation:  ‘I understand wonder differently from Philip Fisher for whom wonder is an essentially sudden, “all-at-once” experience; my view is more in line with Peter de Bolla’s characterization of wonder as a “variety of rooms” through which we move.’



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points rather than others. To exemplify with the distinction between wondering at and wondering about, seeing them as phases implies that they are rather separate and a person can engage either in one or the other at a given moment in time.xiii In contrast, treating wondering at and about as processes would mean accepting that they could occur at the same time, even if one process might take the lead compared to the other. In the structural model I’ve put forward in the last chapter, wonder was described as a paradoxical state of being active and passive, immersed and detached at once; my view, therefore, is that we should consider from now on the functioning of wonder in terms of processes rather than stages. Nonetheless, there are important things we can learn from stage models as well. A recent one has been advanced by Carlsen and Sandelands8 including four stages or ‘moments’:  arousal, expansion, immersion and explanation. Arousal includes surprise and the appreciation of something new, strange or beautiful. Expansion refers to moments of expansive thought and questioning, when the person tries to achieve a new understanding of the situation. Immersion signals becoming absorbed by some phenomenon in the social or natural world. Last but not least, explanation reveals a sense of beauty, harmony or truth on the path to a new understanding. The two authors were careful to note that these four moments should not be treated as a deterministic pathway for wondering as, indeed, their manifestation and order are always highly contextual. More than this, they also proposed an overarching view of wonder as a twofold movement between receptive appreciation and self-transcendent search, a formulation that is closer to describing a process rather than a stage theory of wondering.xiv What would a pragmatist model of wonder as experience tell us in this regard? To begin with, it would consider the experience of wonder as unitary, even if internally differentiated. In other words, there is a transversal experiential quality associated with wonderingxv which doesn’t mean that, within this experience, different processes or movements cannot be identified. If we return to our discussion of positions and perspectives, what characterizes wondering is not the possibility of adopting a new position or gaining a new perspective on the world, for as often as this might be the outcome of it, but the fact of being in a meta-position xiii This doesn’t exclude the possibility of a circular or back and forth movement between the stages, but, nevertheless, it does suppose that one can be at all times at one stage or another and never in both. xiv There are also in-between models of this phenomenon that blur the line between stages and processes by discussing early, middle and late moments in the temporal pathway of wondering. For example, Kareem (2014, p. 9) notes in her book that ‘wonder is a durational affect that more often responds to the passage from unknowing to knowing rather than to a singular epiphanic moment. Rapt attention characterizes both wonder’s beginning and end, whereas its intermediate stage is interrogative.’ xv One that I identified before as the union or balance between activity and passivity, immersion and detachment.

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vis-à-vis an existing set of positions and perspectives (for more details about meta-positions see Box 3.1). This meta-position involves the realization, sudden or otherwise, that any given issue or situation invites multiple points of view and, as such, that it could be constructed and experienced differently.

Box 3.1  The Meta-Position The word ‘meta’ comes from Greek where it means beyond, after or behind.a In other words, taking some distance from what is and being able to experience it in a new way. This meaning led to the generation of a series of new concepts that include the particle ‘meta’ such as metaphysics, metacommunication, metalinguistics, metahistory and so on. Every conceivable domain of knowledge or process could be considered from a meta-perspective when seen in context or reflected upon, including with its own means.b In our discussion of positions, to adopt a meta-position means to occupy a vantage point from which existing positions become ‘visible’. For instance, if we take again the concrete example of being in a classroom in either the position of the student or that of the teacher, occupying a meta-position would mean being able to consider the situation from the position (and perspective) of the student and of the teacher, at once, and to reflect on how the two are interrelated. More than this, it means gaining the deep realization that more positions and perspectives are possible within the situation which cannot be comprehended by it being considered from a single point of view. This invites us to wonder, literally, about what other positions and perspectives are possible and could expand our experience of the world. In our example, these might be the position and perspective of parents, of the school director or of the general public. Not being able to take distance from one’s own position and adopt, even if temporarily, a meta-position denies us, conversely, of the possibility to gain a deeper understanding of the situation, the possibility to effectively communicate with others by grasping their point of view and the possibility to wonder about what else might be the case. For a detailed description of the roots of this word see the Online Etymology Dictionary where it is specified that meta is a word-forming element of Greek origin meaning (1)  ‘after, behind; among, between’, (2)  ‘changed, altered’, (3)  ‘higher, beyond’; from Greek meta (prep.) ‘in the midst of; in common with; by means of; between; in pursuit or quest of; after, next after, behind’, in compounds most often meaning ‘change’ of place, condition, etc. b This is how, for instance, metacognition commonly designates thinking about one’s own thinking. a



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My argument here is that this experience of the meta-position is at the heart of what wondering is about.xvi Whether we wonder about a practical problem or the meaning of life, what we are effectively doing is expanding the field of what is possible around these issues to include positions and perspectives we might have never adopted or considered before.xvii In and of itself, this latter process could be simply called learning – what gives it the quality of wonderxviii is precisely the emergence of the meta-position. The meta-position invites wonder as to what is and what else might be possible. It does so by helping us realize that our position and perspective in the world are not absolute or singular, but one among many. Coming to terms with the fact that we live in a world of perspectives and that our understanding is necessarily perspectival in nature is the origin of wonder itself. What precedes and what follows this realization, part of every experience of wondering, can tell us a lot about the processes involved. It is reflecting on these issues that led me to a new theory.

3.3  A dynamic model In the previous chapter, I outlined a structural model of wonder that placed it at the intersection between passive and active, immersed and detached states of mind, a unique ‘location’ that differentiates it from awe, contemplation, pondering and curiosity. In this chapter, I defined wonder as a key experience that engages us with the possible in our lives. The question remains of what the processes are, within this experience, that connect us to the possible in passive– active and immersed–detached ways. This question is answered by the dynamic model of wondering. This model is premised on the interconnection, within experiences of wonder, of awareness, excitement and explorations of the possible. Let’s consider these in turn.

xvi I have first written about this idea in a short paper on Creativity and wonder, see Glăveanu (2019c). xvii This is also why wondering is often triggered by coming in contact with an unexpected or unfamiliar event that brings to our attention new perspectives on our reality. At the same time, as we will see in Chapter 5, the experience of wonder can also involve deliberately making the familiar unfamiliar by inviting perspectives on it that make it look different or strange. The first dynamic is illustrated by Aristotelian wonder, eager to understand new perspectives and turn them into knowledge. The second one is specific for Socratic wonder, constantly problematizing what is known by opening it up to new perspectives and contradictions. xviii That nonetheless has a huge part to play in learning, as we will see in Chapter 10.

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Becoming aware of the fact that a new perspective is possible is the kind of micro-moment of rupture that triggers wondering. This realization can come about from witnessing an unfamiliar or strange event, from a sudden moment of serendipity or from starting to question one’s existing beliefs. In all cases, there is an element of surprise that accompanies our awareness of this expanded field of possibilities.xix The process of becoming aware of one or more new perspectives on the world can be instantaneous or take some time. It is akin to wondering at and, as such, has a more passive and immersed qualityxx associated with it. The other process that becomes manifest early on in wondering is excitement. By excitement I  don’t mean necessarily experiencing a positive emotion as much as being aroused or activated which can have positive and/ or negative emotional connotations depending on the object of our wonder. Excitement captures a motivational resource that is essential for moving from awareness of the possible to its exploration and back again. At the same time, the excitement associated with discovering the world as perspectival and the interest in what new possibilities for our thinking and action such realization can bring about, represents the inner ‘engine’ of wonder. It is often linked with both frustration at the fact that things don’t yet fall into place and, at the same time, certitude that they will, that a new understanding will emerge out of wondering.xxi A good example of awareness and excitement coming together can be found in the reflections of celebrated film-maker Federico Fellini, reproduced in Box 3.2.

Box 3.2  Becoming Aware of and Excited about the Possible: Federico Fellini As a man I am interested in everything, and as far as what you call problems are concerned, I  go in search of them, because I  am curious, and anxious to learn. But as a film director, I am quite indifferent to abstract problems,

Given that this new perspective needs to relate somehow to existing ones and, in doing so, opens up the possible by enabling the meta-position discussed in the previous section. xx This process of wondering is thus the closest to being in awe or astonishment and one of the reasons these phenomena have often been grouped together. Nonetheless, awe typically involves a higher emotional intensity than wonder, one that keeps the person at the stage of wondering at (and involved in awareness and excitement about the possible) but might inhibit exploration or wondering about. xxi We can see here how the Socratic method for cultivating wonder played on the frustration of not understanding, while the Aristotelian version stressed the certitude of future knowledge (see Chapter 1). xix



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those which are now called ideological. For an idea or a situation or an atmosphere to kindle my mind or my imagination, to amuse me or to move me, it must come to me as a concrete fact. This may be a certain person or character that comes out to meet me; it may be the memory of a particular adventure or of a particular coincidence of human beings in a landscape or a situation. Then my imagination is kindled. If I were a composer, I would then start writing down notes, if I were a painter, I would scribble on the canvas. As a film director, I find my means of expression in the film image. I am a storyteller in the cinema and I can’t honestly see what other qualification can be attributed to me apart from this – which may seem modest but, to me, is terribly demanding. (From Fellini on Fellini by Federico Fellini (1976), p. 176, translated by Isabel Quigley)

Last but not least, there is in wonder a clear exploration of the possible. This process resembles wondering about and is closest to curiosity and pondering. Explorations of what is possible can involve an embodied enactment of different perspectives, in order to learn what it means to relate to the world from different positions, and/or imaginative exercises of repositioning oneself and, in this way, experiencing different perspectives at a symbolic level. Importantly, unlike curiosity, exploration in wonder involves an intense feeling of not knowing and deriving satisfaction from it, as we can see, again, in Fellini’s words (see Box 3.3).

Box 3.3  Exploring the Possible: Federico Fellini I hate logical plans. I  have a horror of set phases that instead of explaining reality tame it in order to use it in a way that claims to be for the general good but in fact is no use to anyone. I don’t approve of definitions or labels. Labels should go on suitcases, nowhere else. Myself, I should find it false and dangerous to start from some clear, well defined, complete idea and then put it into practice. I must be ignorant of what I shall be doing and I can find the resources I need only when I am plunged into obscurity and ignorance. The child is in darkness at the moment he is formed in his mother’s womb. (From Fellini on Fellini by Federico Fellini (1976), p. 53, translated by Isabel Quigley)

The three processes of awareness, excitement and exploration are interdependent. This is what makes wonder a unitary, integrated experience and helps it integrate, in turn, key dichotomies. It also means that, in the way

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Figure 5  The Dynamic Model of Wondering.

we wonder, the three processes can take place at oncexxii or we can move back and forth between awareness and excitement while experiencing excitement throughout.xxiii This dynamic is captured in a visual representation of the model put forward in Figure  5. In this depiction, the crux of wondering is placed on the integral relationship between the three processes discussed above and the fact that wonder requires all of them, even when they pull it in slightly different directions.xxiv At the same time, the dynamic model reminds us that one component without the others does not lead to a ‘full’ experience of wondering.xxv This, as we shall see later on, has significant practical and educational implications.

3.4  What else and how else thinking A few words in the end about the conceptual proposals made so far and the concepts used. Both the structural and dynamic models consider wonder to be an experience grounded in a special kind of relation to the world. The xxii For example, we gain new awareness of what is possible during the exploration of different perspectives while being excited about what might be discovered next. xxiii Excitement and activation are, in this model, the ‘glue’ that holds together awareness and exploration. xxiv See also Kareem’s (2014) discussion of wondering as reflective engrossment. xxv Indeed, the meta-position wonder invites requires all three processes:  (a) an awareness of new perspectives and the perspectival nature of our own experience; (b)  excitement about the possibilities opened up by this realization; and (c)  their active exploration leading to renewed awareness of the possible and renewed excitement about it.



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type of relation wonder enables is one oriented towards the possible and, ultimately, the unknown or the not-yet-known.xxvi Wonder keeps in balance our tendency towards passivity and activity, immersion and detachment through the interdependence between awareness of, excitement about and the active exploration of new perspectives. In this way, wondering is intimately connected to the meta-position9 since it is this type of positioning that allows us to be, at once, immersed in different perspectives while able to take some distance from them, actively trying perspectives out while contemplating the effects of our exploration. While all of these processes are grounded in action, in a pragmatist sense, and reflect our embodied existence in a world that is, at once, material, social and symbolic, they can be summarized by, even if not reduced to, a new type of thinking:  what else and how else thinking. By discussing the role of new perspectives and the meta-position, what I propose here is a view of wonder as looking for alternative explanations and points of view to an existing event or situation, triggered by the fact that what we usually know and do is not suitable anymore. This construct didn’t receive almost any attention so far,xxvii being largely eclipsed by the much more famous as-if and what-if thinking.xxviii While the latter also allow an exploration of the possible, in particular the imagined, they lack wonder’s drive to discover and its dissatisfaction with simple or easy solutions. What else/how else thinking might represent a ‘popular’ way of defining the theoretical construct of meta-position, but it is also a formulation that could find traction with practitioners who both observe it in practice and look for new ways of cultivating wonder. In what follows, I will unpack in this book the different processes of wonder that are presented here as unitary. The next two chapters focus our attention on becoming aware of new possibilities through accidents and serendipity, on the one hand, and making the familiar unfamiliar, on the other. The following chapter covers two types of exploration: imaginative or fanciful, and embodied or experimental. Excitement about the possible is related to acts of becoming other. In the end, I discuss the role of wonder in society (collective wondering)

Depending on where the reader is placed on the Socratic–Aristotelian continuum (see Chapter 1). xxvii With the exception, perhaps, of recent articles like the one written by Kathleen M. Wilburn and H. Ralph Wilburn (2016) on Asking what else, but that nonetheless focuses more on how to answer this question (in view of assessing unintended consequences) rather than what it means to raise it in the first place. xxviii These point us to the possibility of pretending something in our reality is not what it actually is and it is fundamental for play and imagination (see Weininger, 1986), as well as counterfactual thinking (Roese, 1994). xxvi

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and education (relearning wonder) before concluding on what it means to live with uncertainty.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

See Lloyd (2018). See Descartes (1989). See Heidegger (1994). See Kingwell (2000). For more on the possible as a field of inquiry, see Glăveanu (2018). For a discussion of the self and world as perspectival, see Martin (2005a). For a detailed analysis of position exchange in games, see Gillespie (2006). See Carlsen & Sandelands (2014), p. 378. See this argument also in Glăveanu (2017a).

When Ideas Hatch

The hands are working fast. They turn around the egg with skill and precision, applying warm wax on it masterfully. ‘After hundreds of eggs, that’s when you will have learnt how to decorate.’ It was true. It’s late evening, on a winter day, the third year of preparing eggs for Easter. The sun has long set and everything and everyone is quiet at last. The animals are all fed, children are sleeping next door and the lights of the village are twinkling outside. Six of the eggs are ready now, at least the first phase. They sit neatly near each other with the first round of motifs drawn on the white background. Five of them look almost the same, but they are not. Not if one looks closely enough. The fringes of a motif turned into triangles for one, the other’s net pattern didn’t work so well so it became squares, yet another one has one star more than the others. Why? Because it could fit. The sixth egg stands out but not on purpose. From the start, its shape was different than that of the others, round rather than elongated. The belt wouldn’t look nice on the long side, it simply had to be drawn the other way. When the clock struck eleven, two more stages of decoration had been completed. The eggs had been all immersed in a bath of yellow pigment, then worked on some more with wax  – the familiar patterns filled up, but up to a point. The last touches need to happen on red, so another bath of colour was applied, leaving everything to dry in between of course. Again drawing with melting wax and, at eleven, the final act: immersing the eggs – uneven looking balls of colour and wax – in black pigment. And here they are, dark and bumpy, six small treasures to unpack. When finally dry, with a beating heart, each egg is brought close to a candle. With a clean piece of cloth, the wax on them is gently wiped off. There! The shades emerge, one by one  – white, yellow, red and black  – neatly organized geometrically, one motif next to the other in a mesmerizing series. One of them

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reveals a small mistake: one star has five instead of six rays. A sigh. No matter, they won’t be able to tell, eggs are admired usually from a distance. But this one won’t work, it cracked just at the end. The sixth, round egg, the special one … It knew that it was standing out, she thought with a tired smile. But there is something so nice about this belt motif that it needs to be kept, broken as it is. A wooden box is brought to the table and opened. A small cabinet of accidents and failures collected for three years now. Or, rather, of dormant ideas that can and will inspire future work, luckier than the one laying there. It’s midnight. Five perfect looking eggs are added to the large, weaved basket on the table full of similar riches. Similar but never the same. Some more red than others. Some displaying curvy rather than linear motifs. Some more dear than others for the decorator – a risk well taken, a moment of chance that was worth all the tiredness in the world. And, with that, off to bed. *** The scene above is entirely imagined but very close to the lived reality of Easter egg decorators, at least those from villages in northern Romania, at the border with Ukraine. What makes this activity interesting, as is the case with any craft, is the delicate balance it tries to reach between tradition and innovation.i Indeed, what my own studies of creativity in this traditional craft1 showed is that craftswomen (as the vast majority are women) are shy of claiming ownership of the tradition but proud of telling everyone the ‘small things’ they added to it. This pride comes also out of having done something with their own hands. Pye called this the workmanship of risk and opposed it to the workmanship of certainty.2 The latter, specific for mechanical reproduction, is perfectly anticipated and executed. The former is born at the encounter between hand and object, an encounter that can be anticipated by the mind but only up to a point. The rest is accidental, serendipitous, maybe even random. And it is this randomness that generates surprise in the viewer of Easter eggs (How is it that they are so perfectly made? Was a machine used?) and in the craftswomen themselves (How did it come out exactly this way?). Such reflections can inspire awe and they certainly make one wonder. Decorating eggs is a very old tradition, older than its appropriation by Christianity and its connection to Easter.ii Painting stones or eggs red, for i In the end, no tradition can exist outside of innovation and the other way around. This is because traditions need to constantly renew themselves in order to continue and to adapt to ever-changing environments. Conversely, one’s creativity builds on different traditions and habits and ultimately contributes to them. For an insightful discussion of this dynamic see Negus & Pickering (2004). ii ‘The use of eggs at Easter is generally believed to have diffused to Europe from the East and probably came from Persia through the Greek Christian Church. The egg was a symbol of the universe in



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Figure 6  Star Motifs in the Work of Cristina Timu, Ciocănești village.

example, has been associated since pagan times with vitality, spring and rebirth. The Christian tradition maintained many of these significations while transforming the colour red into a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. With time, the colours themselves diversified and motifs were added, first figurative, representing animals, occupations or places familiar to the decorator, then more and more abstract and geometrical. The village of Ciocănești, where I did my field study on the topic, adopts mostly geometric motifs like the cross (of religious inspiration), the star (symbolizing perfection and femininity), the net (marking the separation between good and evil) and so on. Interestingly the colours, and especially the background shade, tend to vary from village to village, making Easter eggs an important cultural identity marker. Ciocănești is well-known in Romania for the fact that the background is black, a symbol not of death or darkness but of eternity and stability, at least according to local folklore (see Figure 6). Taken together, all these features place the Easter egg at

the worship of Dionysius in Greece and many peoples regarded the egg as a symbol of life. Hence the association of the idea of life, spring and potential new life was easily made. When Christians borrowed the egg they made it symbolic of the resurrection of Christ. The practice for coloring eggs was followed by the ancient Hebrews and Persians. The colors used today are assumed to be symbolic of the colors of spring flowers in the Western world’ (Barnett, 1949, p. 65).

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the intersection between art, religion, folklore and a growing market for selling such products. What is of interest for me here is the role played by chance in the production of craft objects and its relation to surprise, frustration and also excitement. Marilena Niculiţă, one of the craftswomen from Ciocănești, captured this state well when she said that decorators can hardly wait to see how the egg looks at the end. ‘We worked it, we made it, but we can’t really tell until the very end.’3 The fact is that the egg can break, colours can be badly applied, the lines can turn out to be less straight than initially thought, the wax might not catch on properly. At the same time, these accidents are an opportunity for learning. More than this, they make artisans wonder about what they did wrong, what they need to do next time, what they should be doing, moment to moment, in the process of decoration. Even within a highly constrained form of expression like a traditional craft, there is freedom, there is choice and there is possibility. ‘When you work all sorts of ideas come to your mind’4 (Maria Timu). They are ideas that come from constantly wondering what to do next, what works best, what could happen, even by accident. In the end, decorated eggs are not made but discovered. They come out of an initial set of ideas that meet the world in both expected and unexpected ways. A big part of the skills of the decorator has to do with welcoming the latter and being able to integrate the unexpected back into familiar patterns and existing motifs. Sometimes this integration leads to surprising outcomes. Other times it ends in failure. Either way, there is always something to marvel at.

Notes 1 2 3 4

For details, see Glăveanu (2010a, 2013). See Pye (1968). See Glăveanu (2013), p. 146. See Glăveanu (2013), p. 151.

4

Accidents Will Happen

In his Theaetetus,1 Plato tells a story about Thales, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, mathematician and astronomer from Miletus, famed for his attraction to naturalistic explanations for phenomena. According to legend, one night while walking he was so consumed by the wondrous sky and caught up by his astronomical observations that he fell into a well. This incident became an anecdote made popular by generations of fabulists, from Aesop to Jean de la Fontaine. It was especially humorous to add to it the rescuer’s remark that Thales would have done well to pay more attention to the land in front of him rather than keep gazing at the stars. And, in many ways, this is also a warning against excessive wondering. One false step and we move, metaphorically, from solid ground to an abyss of uncertainty and of the unknown.i In this chapter, I  will focus on accidentsii and accidental (or seemingly accidental) phenomena such as chance, luck, serendipity and randomness. A  few brief definitions are thus in order.2 Accidents are typically seen as unexpected events that either happen by chance or don’t have a deliberate cause. The etymological root of the word, interestingly, takes us to the Latin accidentem (occurrence, chance, misfortune) and accidere (to happen, to fall or to fall upon). The idea of falling, going back to Thales, is central to how we view accidents and captured by phrases like ‘rolling of dice’ or the ‘coin toss’. This brings us to the concept of luck – the chance happening of fortunate (good luck) or unfortunate (bad luck) events. And this, in turn, takes us to chance, in many i As mentioned in Chapter  1, Hannah Arendt (1977) also questioned if wonder doesn’t actually disconnect us from the realities surrounding us. While she finally argued against this view, the remark was made in the context of an analysis of Heidegger’s life and work. Heidegger, just like Thales, was famous for his fascination with wonder and, just like the ancient philosopher, he might have been too consumed by it to notice the situation of the world around him. His career benefited from the rise of the Nazis and this, for many, represents his ultimate fall into disrepute. ii ‘Accidents will happen’ is a popular saying, with origins from 1755, generally used today to designate the fact that things can go wrong despite our best efforts. Here the meaning of accident, as we shall see, is both positive and negative as accidents are related with the possibility of wonder.

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ways the root phenomenon behind accidents, luck and serendipity. Chance is, by definition, unknown and unpredictable (even if we can estimate chances with the help of probability theory, for instance), a mysterious and, at times, feared force behind current events, again both positive (the lucky strike) and negative (risk or hazard). Some things are said to happen ‘by chance’ or without planning and we can also ‘take a chance’ – an invitation to use the accidental in our favour. The latter is at the heart of serendipity, the capacity to make fortunate discoveries randomly or, as we shall discuss here, through a process that is not entirely random. Something random has no specific pattern, purpose or objective; it is unsystematic. Randomness is thus dreaded by some, happy to always be in control and anticipate things, but cultivated and even worshiped by others. What could motivate the latter? To answer this question, we necessarily have to refer back to wonder. Chance events often create a rupture in our experience of the everyday. They can bring about a welcomed change or a terrible misfortune, they can delight, annoy or terrify us. But, in each case, they make us wonder, even if briefly, about why things happen and why they happened the way they did. In other words, chance events offer the initial surprise and, soon after, invite an active search for an explanation.iii They thus bring together wondering at and wondering about (see Box 2.1), being wonderstruck and starting to explore the new world opened up by the accidental. Accidents and chance often reveal a new and unexpected perspective on the world, one we did not anticipate or look for. Let’s take the example of Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin.3 When he noticed that mould had grown in one of the culture dishes and that staphylococci lived around it, he decided to explore it further. In other words, instead of applying the conventional perspective of his fellow colleagues that mould was an unfortunate error or nuisance, he developed a new one: that might be a promising scientific lead. In order words, this accident made Fleming wonder and, in wondering, placed him in a meta-position vis-à-vis his lab cultures. This meta-position (see Box 3.1) fostered a dialogue of perspectives between conventional views and alternatives,

iii ‘The collapse of cohesion is one of the features that characterize chance. By sheer accident, or so it seems, something breaks the typical regularity of the natural world, like a comet disrupting the solar system. At a human scale, we find examples like unexpectedly bumping into an old friend, or losing a loved one in an accident. Such (seemingly) random phenomena appear arbitrary; they disrupt our lives and frustrate our human need for logic and meaning. The ensuing feelings of uncertainty and apprehensiveness, in turn, trigger us to search for explanations that will help restore order and normal patterns of cause and effect. In a word, we are challenged by chance, and we have been so at least since antiquity’ (Landsman, van Wolde & ter Berg, 2016, p. 1).



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one that ultimately led to a breakthrough discovery. Many would talk, in this case, about serendipity. This phenomenon ‘refers to the fairly common experience of observing an unanticipated, anomalous and strategic datum which becomes the occasion for developing a new theory or for extending an existing theory’.4 We have here, again, all the main ‘ingredients’ of wonder. Its trigger is the unanticipated and unexpected that positions us differently towards the world. From this new position, we acquire a new type of perspective or understanding that puts into question what we knew or expected to happen. The discrepancy between what should have been and what is invites exploration and meaningmaking (or the creation of more perspectives). Chance events often, but not always, make us wonder. If we quickly explain them away, our wondering stops. But, every so often, we go deeper and, in those moments, we don’t wonder only about the new perspectives coming about but about chance itself. We come to wonder about the underpinning of nature, of society and of human existence. These are the moments in which we discover the world around us as open, indeterminate and perspectival.

4.1  Take a chance In ancient time, the Romans personified luck in the goddess Fortuna, one of the daughters of Jupiter. Her depictions often include a wheel, Rota Fortunae, that she would spin to determine the rise and fall of individuals or entire communities.5 She also had a cornucopia or horn of plenty, marking the possibility, at least, of good fortune. However, on the whole, this deity stood for the capriciousness and fundamental unpredictability of life. Reflecting the same ambivalence, in ancient Greece an accidental finding was often called hermaion, or a gift of Hermes,6 the messenger God and classic symbol of mischief. In this way, his gift could be good or bad or, even more, it could turn out one way or the other without seeming like that at first. Even if we stopped worshipping Fortuna or Hermes (Mercury for the Romans) today, accidental losses and accidental gains remain vivid objects of wonder, asking, then and now, for an explanation. In the words of Milan Kundera, Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its messages much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.7

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In the quote above, chance moves from the periphery to the centre of our existence. It is no longer designating one-off or strange events to be quickly explained away. On the contrary, chance events give our life meaning and they do so, I would add, because they invoke in us a sense of awe and of wonder at what is possible beyond the given, the mundane and the expected. We are eager to wonder about chance happenings since they present the world to us anew and, instead of being disempowering, they often come to fuel our creative expression. The role played by chance in creativity has been observed for a long time and continues to be the topic of sustained debate.8 Different sources tend to include a variety of compelling examples, just like Fleming’s above and Poincaré’s below (see Box 4.1), to support the claim that accidents are at the origin of many great discoveries and inventions and that creators across time relied on serendipitous moments to generate their finest work. But there is still another way to argue for the importance of chance for creativity and that is to include it within the creative process itself. This step has been taken by scholars such as Donald Campbell and Dean Keith Simonton who both advocated for a blind generation and selective retention model in creativity research.9 This model builds on insights from evolutionary theory and postulates that the creative process, at least in its first stages, is non-teleological, meaning that it follows no particular purpose and cannot anticipate, in advance, which outcomes will be the most useful. Consequently, at the heart of generating ideas stands, according to these authors, a kind of blindness akin to chance. Indeed, for Simonton, ‘the concepts of luck, chance, and randomness are highly descriptive of how discovery, invention, and creativity function in renowned geniuses’10 which is a rather counterintuitive thought. We tend to think about great creators as somewhat organized and methodical people. This might be the case in the selection and retention of their ideas, but not in their production. Creativity becomes, according to this view, a matter of luck rather than deliberation as it depends on finding original and useful solutions through the free (and blind) recombination of existing ideas.iv This kind of serendipitous process is well illustrated by people like Poincaré, the French mathematician famous, among others, for keeping a detailed record of his own creative process (see Box 4.1). iv ‘The disciplinary ideas making up each creator’s sample are then subjected to free recombination, with the aim of finding original and useful permutations. These ideational variations actually have a relatively low probability of arriving at a creative combination, because a large amount of time is spent sifting through useless combinations. Fortunately, however, the low likelihood of success is partially compensated by the large number of trials. Not only will each creator working within a field engage in this combinatory process for many years, but also there will usually be more than one creator subjecting roughly the same set of ideas to the same combinatory procedure’ (Simonton, 2004a, p. 43).



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Box 4.1  Poincaré on Creating For fifteen days I  strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I  seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. But the next morning I  had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I  had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. … Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’ sake I verified the result at my leisure. (See Henri Poincaré’s reflections on mathematical creation, reprinted from his 1908 Science and method.)

Whether one agrees or not with this view of the creativity is secondary; what is undeniable is the deep relationship between this phenomenon and chance rather than choice (alone). Taking chances, also associated with risktaking, another correlate of creativity, becomes in this context a necessity in any creator’s work. Wondering about problems often results in stumbling upon solutions which, in turn, make us wonder at new ideas and the workings of our own mind. Serendipity turns, thus, from a trigger of wonder into its ever-present companion.

4.2  Happy accidents The fact that the bull is one of Picasso’s recurrent motifs is well-known. And, within the category of works reflecting this, one of the most famous is his simple,

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elegant and surprising Tête de taureau or Bull’s Head. This is a found object artwork created in 1942 from putting together the seat and the handlebars of a bicycle. His own account of this creation goes like this: One day, in a pile of objects all jumbled up together, I found an old bicycle seat right next to a rusty set of handlebars. In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the Bull’s Head came to me before I had a chance to think. All I did was weld them together … [but] if you were only to see the bull’s head and not the bicycle seat and handlebars that form it, the sculpture would lose some of its impact.11

This is, for many, an exemplary account of a serendipitous find. It also tells about the birth of a new perspective, by accident – the instantaneous moment of wonder about a new artistic possibility and its immediate exploration. The importance Picasso generally placed on such lucky finds, the hermaion of ancient Greeks, is obvious also from his famous dictum ‘I do not seek, I  find’.v Stumbling upon is, here, more wonder-worthy than looking for a specific thing. The notion of serendipity, embodied above, has a nice history of its own.12 Serendip was the old Arabic name for the island of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. The association with the phenomenon of serendipity came from an old Persian fairy tale, The three princes of Serendip, telling the story of three travelling heroes who made discoveries, by virtue of accidents and sagacity, when they weren’t looking to make them. In the sixteenth century, this story was translated first to Italian, then into French. In the eighteenth century, Horace Walpole, an English man of letters, coined the term ‘serendipity’ and mentioned it in a letter to a friend in 1754 after reading about the three princes in a French collection of oriental tales (a serendipitous find in and of itself). One of the interesting things about serendipity, significant here for our discussion of wonder, is the fact that it doesn’t stop at the accidental discovery of something. Walpole’s reference to the story praises the princes for their sagacity as well, something that is often left out but vitally important. Chance alone does not help us create; it is what we make of this chance that matters. In a similar vein (see Chapter 2), wondering at or being surprised doesn’t constitute a full

v ‘In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spending his life looking for the pocketbook that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something … even if his intention were not to search it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration … When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for’ (Picasso, cited in Hyde, 1996, p. 19).



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experience of wonder without wondering about or active exploration. And this exploration often requires perceptiveness, knowledge, even wisdom – in a word, sagacity.vi But not all experiences of serendipity are alike. One can distinguish, for instance, moments of true serendipity, when the discovery is not only accidental but also unintended (like Columbus’s discovery of America or Picasso’s sight of two bike parts near each other), and pseudo-serendipity, when the find is accidental but was part of a general orientation towards the solution (e.g. Fleming’s case, briefly mentioned above, of realizing the antibacterial properties of Penicillium).13 The latter is in no way inferior to the former. Another interesting typology was proposed by Friedel in his discussion of serendipity in science.14 He distinguished between Columbian serendipity, Archimedean serendipity and Galilean serendipity, all named after great explorers or inventors. The first type is the most straightforward, implying looking for one thing but finding another and recognizing its value. The second one is a bit more specific as it involves thinking about a given problem and relating one’s current action to it, even when this action is as mundane as taking a bath. Thirdly, serendipity can come about from pure exploration. When a new technological tool becomes available, for instance, it is not pure luck to discover something interesting by using it (for instance, the telescope); nonetheless, what exactly is found remains a matter of chance (and of sagacity, as a non-expert looking through a telescope would not know what to make of the sight). Today there is a growing literature on the topic of serendipity, including across various domains.15 This is a welcome trend given that it generally makes us more open to and curious about phenomena that reflect the ‘messiness’ of creating and of our everyday lives against a backdrop of giving priority to order, logic and linearity. Wonder certainly corresponds to the former rather than the latter (see also Chapter 1). And yet, there is room for order and logic in serendipity, just as there is in wondering, a topic I turn to elaborate on next.

vi ‘Accidents and sagacity. Sagacity – defined as penetrating intelligence, keen perception, and sound judgment  – is essential to serendipity. The men and women who seized on lucky accidents that happened to them were anything but mindless. In fact, their minds typically had special qualities that enabled them to break out of established paradigms, imagine new possibilities, and see that they had found a solution, often to some problem other than the one they were working on. Accidental discoveries would be nothing without keen, creative minds knowing what to do with them’ (Meyers, 2007, p. 37).

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4.3  The prepared mind One of the most emblematic anecdotes when it comes to chance discoveries must be the story of Newton ‘discovering’ gravity by observing (or being hit by) a falling apple. Certainly embellished, although there seems to be a kernel of truth to the story after all,vii this is much more than a case of a lucky accident. Apples fall on the ground all the time, but it took someone like Newton, with his expertise and mindset, to make the most out of it. Through wonder (or perhaps contemplation), he became capable of observing a common natural event and give it a completely new meaning. This meaning did not come out of the blue, however; it was anticipated by years of work and reflections. Like in most similar cases, it can be said that chance favours the prepared mind.viii What this means, in practice, is not only that creators should cultivate a minimum state of awareness about what surrounds them and be, at all times, sensitive to unexpected solutions for the problems they tackle. It also points us to the preparation required for finding the solution, a process that can take moments, weeks, months or sometimes years before the serendipitous incident. Indeed, it has long been claimed in creativity research that ten years of sustained practice are needed before any major breakthrough takes place.ix Even chancebased models of the creative process, like those formulated by Campbell and Simonton (see the previous section), are premised on the fact that the individual acquires initially domain-specific knowledge – otherwise there would be little to combine ‘blindly’ – and, especially, that this knowledge gets to be applied at the important stage of selective retention.

vii Newton never wrote about this incident himself and one of the oldest accounts of it comes from William Stukeley, one of his younger contemporaries and his first biographer, who wrote that: After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden & drank tea under the shade of some apple tree; only he & myself. … Amid other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly the notion of gravitation came into his mind. Why sh[oul] d that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why sh[oul]d it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the Earth’s centre? Assuredly the reason is, that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth’s centre, not in any side of the Earth. Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or towards the centre? If matter thus draws matter; it must be proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple. (From an article in the Independent written by Steve Connor in 2010) A phrase commonly attributed to Louis Pasteur. ix The ten-years rule, as it is known, recognizes the need for plenty of practice in a domain in order to acquire the necessary, domain-specific knowledge and skills, and attain mastery (see Simonton, 2004a). viii



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Another way of talking about this interplay between accidents and preparedness is by referring to inspiration (see Box 4.2), a phenomenon that is related to yet different from wonder. Inspiration is what the craftswomen who decorate eggs for Easter, referred to in the section preceding this chapter, gain from keeping and periodically looking at ‘failed’ designs or by noting them in their notebooks with motifs. These motifs, for the decorators from the village of Ciocănești, are not only those placed on eggs. In fact, the whole village, which is known in Romania as an open air museum, bears similar patterns to those on the eggs on houses, on traditional tablecloth and festive clothes. As one of the decorators told me during my fieldwork, everything can become a source of inspiration and, as she rides her bike through the village and looks at the houses, for example, one motif or another might stand out and generate a new decoration idea. In such moments, she hurries home to note it down in her booklet or, time permitting, starts placing it directly on an egg. This ongoing state of receptiveness represents the bridge between inspiration (the serendipitous observation) and wonder (the process often triggered by it).

Box 4.2  Inspiration Just like wonder, inspiration is a mundane type of experience that relates us to the possible. It has, as well, a long and complex history and received relatively little attention, at least in terms of scientific research, in recent decades. Unlike wonder, however, being inspired doesn’t cover the whole range of awareness of, excitement about and exploration of new possibilities (see the dynamic model in Chapter 3) but focuses on excitement and the thrill of ‘being on to something’ and anticipating a big insight.a Etymologically, the root of the word inspiration is Latin, where inspirare meant ‘to breathe into’ (in plus spirare or ‘to breathe’, also related for the word for ‘spirit’), ‘to be filled’ or ‘to inflame’. These are already valuable indicators of the receptive state of mind inspiration puts us in, and also the spark of arousal or excitement associated with it. Psychologically, inspiration is commonly considered as ‘a specific epistemic process … characterized by a remembrance or recognition of some knowledge or perspective valuable in the social or psychological context given’.b In other words, coming across a perspective, accidently or not, and recognizing its utility. There are many possible sources of inspiration, including nature, mentors, the work of others and even one’s own ideas (like the notebooks with motifs kept by Romanian Easter egg decorators). Being inspired by any of them means becoming excited about their possible contribution to solving a problem or understanding oneself or the world better. The moment the solution is reached,

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or the understanding is found, we stop being inspired (even if we might still be content with or, sometimes, left unsatisfied by the outcome). There is, therefore, a place for inspiration within the general dynamic of wonder. When wondering, we are basically prompted to consider a new perspective and what it suddenly makes possible; as such, we are bound to be inspired by it. But, in wonder, we also consider perspectives, old and new, from a meta-position, which is not a necessary part of inspiration. Conversely, we can be inspired by something in particular without wondering further what other possibilities this source of inspiration might open for our thought and action. Mirroring the wondering at and wondering about distinction, in inspiration we can distinguish between being inspired by (something) and being inspired to (do something).c In both cases, the former is more passive and receptive than the latter. And yet, in wondering about, one can be inspired to do not one but several things, or inspired by more than one perspective. One and the same moment of inspiration can include, thus, several topics and episodes of inspiration. And it is this component of inspiration that offers any experience of wonder its rather capricious nature. One cannot will inspiration,d and this makes eliciting wonder in a simple and straightforward manner in an experiment setting a difficult to impossible task. For more details about this interpretation of inspiration, see my Inspiration entry in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible (Glăveanu, 2019a). b Hart (1998), p. 32. c See Thrash & Elliot (2004). d ‘Inspiration tends to happen to people spontaneously in the natural context of everyday life. Authentic inspiration experiences usually are not the result of a deliberate effort of one party (e.g., a researcher, employer, or author of a self-help book) to inspire another; literally and figuratively, inspiration refers to “breathing in”, not to being ‘blown into”.’ (Thrash, Moldovan, Oleynick & Maruskin, 2014, p. 506) a

An example from ‘high’ instead of folk art comes from Damien Hirst’s work on his rather controversial butterfly series, where in some artworks the wings of actual butterflies got arranged into psychedelic patterns, reminding viewers of the huge stained glass windows displayed in cathedrals. How did this idea come about? I was priming a canvas and flies were landing in the paint. I remember thinking – again like an imaginary painter who’d be trying to paint monochromes and insects kept screwing it up and then they became the work. And I  thought wouldn’t it be brilliant if they were butterflies. So, the by-product of something horrible happening – like an insect in the paint – became a great thing.16



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Once more, a random event becomes a source of inspiration and, in doing so, triggers wonder as to how it could be used best (What if these insects were butterflies? What if they were placed on the canvas and become the work?). Of course, though, an insect landing in paint would not have generated a new perspective  – as opposed to the common interpretation of it as nuisance  – for many people, including many artists. It took someone like Hirst, with his preoccupation for breaking conventions and his fascination with butterflies as a symbol of death and resurrection, to turn a surprising event into a series of masterpieces.

4.4  The value of randomness What stands out in the example of Hirst, above, is the randomness of the event that triggered wonder. Insects being caught up in paint might not be an unlikely event, but for one to do so when the artist was ready to welcome a new idea strikes us as the divine work of Fortune or of the god Hermes. Can randomness be good for wonder and creativity? Another quick detour through etymology reveals new and interesting dimensions of randomness. The root of the word takes us back to the Old Frankish rant, cognate to the English running, which became randir, to run fast, and randon, rush and disorder, again in Old Frankish. In English, these words turned into ‘at random’ which initially meant at great speed and, thus, without order or haphazardly.17 As such, speed and confusion are at the heart of old meanings of randomness, yet its current signification tends to bring to mind mathematical theories. In fact, both the meaning and value of randomness, as well as luck and chance, can only be understood against the background of historical theories of determinism that strived either to reduce or even deny the role of chance and randomness in natural and human affairs.x For some empiricists and positivists, for example, explaining something in terms of chance simply means not having enough knowledge about the hidden chains of causality that determine everything at all times. x ‘It is conspicuous to see how, after a rigid exclusion of “chance” or “randomness” from the domain of scientific explanation in the early modern period, they were restored to full glory in nineteenth- and twentieth-century biology and physics … We will in some detail survey a number of key moments in the history of scientific (or natural philosophical) thought, from the divine fate of Greek tragedy and the chance swerve of Epicurean atoms through the deterministic machine world à la Descartes up to the reintroduction of chance and randomness in scientific theories as diverse as evolutionary theory and quantum physics’ (Lüthy & Palmerino, 2016, pp. 9–11).

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I am not going to get into these complex debates but, rather, point to the pragmatic importance of engaging with randomness for domains like art and design. It is interesting to note, in this regard, that avant-garde artists have often been keen to relinquish agency and conscious deliberation and, instead, place chance in control of the creative process. For instance, John Cage used randomness to create aleatory music and also to paint, with assistants famously reading computer-generated random numbers in order to determine the surfaces, tools and final position of what was painted. This is a good example of giving up some control, but not all. Perhaps an even more famous example is that of Gerhard Richter’s 4900 Colours: Version II composition, including 196 coloured panels each comprising a 5 × 5 square, each colour of the square determined by a computer program at random from a list of 25 options.xi Interestingly, even when the process itself is random, both the artist and viewer are able to find unique patterns within the composition and offer it a specific meaning. This is yet another instance in which randomness invites wonder about its outcome and meaning-making around it. Among others, one may wonder about how applying such a non-human, impersonal method can lead to products that look intentional and personal or, at least, for which intentions can always be imagined. Perhaps the best example of cultivating randomness in art goes back to the beginning of the last century and the current of Dadaism.18 While officially lasting only a few years, this defiant, anti-art movement associated with leading figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Tristan Tzara represented an invaluable source of inspiration for twentieth-century surrealists like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and André Masson. The name Dada itself seems nonsensical and the methods Dadaists used were curious to say the least (see Box 4.3).

Box 4.3  How to Make a Dadaist Poem To make a Dadaist poem: 1 . 2. 3. 4.

Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors. Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem. Cut out the article.

xi For details, see Pure randomness in art from https://understandinguncertainty.org/node/1066. Going beyond this, in 2016 Google researchers created strange (and pricey!) art using artificial neural networks alone.



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5. Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag. 6. Shake it gently. 7. Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag. 8. Copy conscientiously. 9. The poem will be like you. 10. And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar (Tristan Tzara).

While this last example might seem like one of randomness gone wild, it does invite us to reflect on the fact that there is always, by necessity, an element of randomness or chance in art making and, by extension, in all human endeavours. Doing art is, at all times, associated with a feeling of loss of agency and even of the self, given that the work itself emerges not from the head of the artist but from the interaction between his or her body and the material being worked on.xii This goes against the purest ideal of conceptual art, of having the entire outcome fully formed in the mind of the maker and then simply transposing it, as closely as possible, into matter.xiii Would there be any inspiration left in the process of making? Is there any room for wonder beyond the a-temporal moment of insight or ‘getting the idea’? These are questions to keep in mind as we move on to another important trigger of wonder: the act of making the familiar unfamiliar.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Plato (1903). See Simonton (2004a), also Lüthy & Palmerino (2016). See Rosenman (1988). Merton (1968), p. 158.

xii This point is compellingly made by Paul March in his 2019 discussion of playing with clay. In his words, when working with this material, ‘it feels like the clay and I  create something together’ (p. 134). xiii In the words of Sol Le Witt (1967, p. 79), one of the pioneers of conceptual art, ‘in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair’.

82 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

1 6 17 18

Wonder Lüthy & Palmerino (2016), p. 13. Hyde (1996), p. 20. Cited in Hyde (1996), p. 19. See, for example, Mach’s (1896) On the part played by accident in invention and discovery, Cannon’s (1940) The role of chance in discovery, Lestienne’s (1998) The creative power of chance, and Austin’s (2003) Chase, chance, and creativity. For details, see Campbell (1960), and Simonton (1999, 2004a, b). Simonton (2004a), p. 40. In Brassai (1999), p. 61. See Ban (2006); Meyers (2007). Simonton (2004b), pp. 9–10. See Friedel (2001), pp. 39–40. For serendipity in drug discovery see Ban (2006); for serendipity in organizations see e Cunha, Clegg and Mendonça (2010); for serendipity in contemporary ethnographic practice see Rivoal and Salazar (2013); for serendipity in entrepreneurship see Dew (2009); for serendipity in patent law see Seymore (2009). Hirst (2012), 15–15.30 mins. See Lüthy & Palmerino (2016), p. 16. For more details see Hopkins (2004).

Is This Art?

Visitors to the Art Brut museum in Lausanne must have asked themselves this question many times over. This impressive museum houses one of the most prominent collections in its area, including the initial five thousand works by 133 creators gathered by Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), the initiator of this art current, during the last forty years of his life.1 The word brut in French means, among others, raw or unrefined. So, who exactly are the creators included in this category? Dubuffet was in search of artistic forms of expression that escaped all or most social and cultural norms, including the strong conditioning exercised by the art world itself and the conventions associated with being recognized as an artist.i He found this ideal in the artistic productions of the mentally ill, the imprisoned and the less educated. Most of all, he found it in the productions of those who were severely oppressed by society and living at its margins. The Art Brut collection faces its visitors with, arguably, some of the most original or unconventional creative outcomes imaginable, outcomes that were not intended to be creative or, in some cases, even to be seen by other people. The materials used vary widely, from the more traditional canvases and paint to wood, thread, glass, metal and a series of everyday objects such as toys, envelopes and seashells. These unlikely art objects make full use of the everyday while re-presenting it to us as strange, unfamiliar and out of place. They might seat comfortably in a contemporary art exhibition, at first sight, but their

i He described his project as follows: We understand by this works made by people free from all artistic culture, in whom imitation, contrary to what happens with intellectuals, plays little or no part, so that their makers draw everything (subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, ways of writing, etc.) from their own accounts and don’t borrow from the schemas of either classical or fashionable art. Here we witness the artistic process quite pure, raw, reinvented by its author in the entirety of its stages, starting off with only his own impulses. (Dubuffet, 1973, pp. 91–2)

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existence marks an ultimate rejection of artistic currents. The very fact that they are displayed inside a museum is a paradox. In order to fully understand the phenomenon of Art Brut, we need to place it in its historical context.2 As a child of modernism, the quest behind this orientation was to discover the most original forms of creation that were immune to conventional culture, an ethos shared by Child Art, Primitive Art, the art of the insane and, to some extent, by Dadaism and Surrealism. Moreover, the very assumption that ‘true’ creativity resides within the person and is spoiled by society and culture goes back to the Renaissance and its celebration of individual geniuses and, most of all, to Romanticism and its fascination with the mad genius.3 What these historical developments point us to is the pervasive internalization of creativity as a psychological attribute and the radical separation between person and context, both of them highly questionable. The notion of outsider art, which is today seen as the broader category including Art Brut, reinforces this separation by placing a specific emphasis on the realm of institutionalized art. Outsiders are, in this case, creators who did not benefit in any way from conventional artistic training nor did they aspire to become artists in any traditional sense.ii Outsider art is, just like the productions it is used to designate, a strange and paradoxical category. It is an orientation defined not by any formal characteristics of the art products themselves but purely by the status of the person who created them.4 It thus includes a wide variety of forms of expression ranging from folk and street art to naïve art and Art Brut. What brings them together is the status of outsiders when it comes to the art world, society or both and, as a consequence, a sense of precariousness and unfamiliarity, even as they deal with highly familiar themes and the use of everyday materials. In the way they work, outsider and especially Art Brut artists tend to suddenly start elaborating their work without any preliminary sketches or trials, as if they had found their voice as soon as they started singing. Whereas the careers of conventional artists show progressive shifts of style, and maybe a restless ambition to keep on ‘making it new’, Outsider Art is often marked by a constant returning to the same motifs and an intense elaboration of them.5

This brings us to a last unifying characteristic:  the typical reaction of audiences when faced with works like the one housed by the museum in ii Roger Cardinal, who coined this term in 1972, noted: ‘I believe that a paramount factor in the critical definition of the creative Outsider is that he or she should be possessed of an expressive impulse and should then externalize that impulse in an unmonitored way which defies conventional art-historical contextualization’ (p. 68).



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Lausanne, which is a mixture of surprise, even shock and curious fascination; in one word, wonder. One example will easily illustrate the above. Judith Scott (1943–2005) was a prototypical outsider artist. Born into a middle-class family in Cincinnati as a child with Down syndrome, Judith also suffered from scarlet fever early in life which led her to lose her hearing. She was sent to an Ohio state institution at the age of 7 and remained there for thirty-five years, until her sister became her legal guardian. In 1987, Judith, who up to that moment did not exhibit any particular artistic impulse, was enrolled in a creative arts programme for people with developmental disabilities. There she discovered her passion for working with fibre and basically invented her own form of expression by taking common objects she could find and wrapping them in coloured fibres to a point where they resembled sculptures depicting cocoons, totemic poles or body parts (for an example, see Figure 7). The resulting collection, over eighteen years, included about two hundred pieces. Despite her adverse life circumstances, Judith Scott rose to international fame, with her productions being exhibited, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland.6 A legitimate question, given Judith’s incredible success despite such adverse life circumstances, is whether she can be considered an outsider artist or she became a contemporary artist. It is not only the case that her work now features in museums, but that her first exhibitions took place while she was alive. How much did this connection to the established art world contribute to her activity? And did being part of an art programme shape her expression to begin with? How ‘brute’ is her art, after all? These questions matter mainly for purists who claim the (unattainable) separation between artists and art or culture. In realty, there is a growing trend towards incorporating outsider works inside the world of art, of museums and galleries. This gives the whole project, starting with Dubuffet, its paradoxical nature: it comes to prominence by denying the very thing that makes it famous; it tries to fight art while using its very structures.7 We come back, thus, to the title question: is this art?iii And, if so, what kind of art is it? Historically the claim has been that Art Brut and outsider art represent forms of expression that are more original and authentic than art itself.iv What iii A question that has been and continues to be widely debated by artists and philosophers alike; see Davies (2009). iv Interestingly, there is some empirical research showing that deviant artists’ works are appreciated by the public more than mainstream contributions. In an interesting study, White, Kaufman and Riggs (2014), asked respondents to rate products from five different groups of artists (outsider

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Figure  7  Three Days Photographing the Work of Judith Scott (United States) by Sylvain Deleu. Note: License: CC BY-ND 4.0. Source: creativecommons.org.

binds them together is the emphasis on self-expression and the reconstruction of reality to serve this purpose. Understanding why and how this reconstruction takes place is of great interest for art audiences, who often wonder how artists live, why they chose to express themselves in the way they did and what it all meant for them. These questions and experiences of wonder are intensified in artists:  average-deviant artists, prison inmates, serial killers; and non-outsider artists:  averageregular artists and eminent creators) on warmth, creativity and likability, without being aware of the category of artist. What emerged was that average-deviant artists were rated the highest on all three dimensions, while serial killer artists received the lowest ratings.



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the case of outsider artists ‘because of the exceptional and isolated situation of their creativity, in which there is rarely any direct testimony from the individual concerned:  we wonder what triggered it off and how it managed to survive against so many obstacles’.8 The fact that we often don’t know much about their background, except for their unusual and exceptionally difficult life circumstances, and almost never have access to their own version of their story exacerbates the mystery. Every piece of information we do have suddenly adds new dimensions to their art and inflames our imagination. Their extensive use of familiar objects in unfamiliar ways makes us wonder, ultimately, about the many forms of creating and of being that seem to exist in the world.

Notes 1 For details, check the museum’s website at https://www.artbrut.ch. 2 For more details please see the following comprehensive sources: Fine’s Everyday genius: Self-taught art and the culture of authenticity (2004) and Maclagan’s Outsider art: From the margins to the marketplace (2010). 3 For a historical account of creativity see Glăveanu (2010b). 4 Tansella (2007), p. 133. 5 Maclagan (2010), p. 13. 6 See https://www.artbrut.ch/fr_CH/auteur/scott-judith. 7 See Maclagan (2010), pp. 7–8. 8 Maclagan (2010), p. 11.

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Making the Familiar Unfamiliar

In the previous chapter we saw how accidents, chance and serendipity can stimulate wonder. This happens because, in each case, we are confronted with a new and unexpected perspective that reorganizes our thinking and our actions. Both the occurrence of failure, in accidents, and of lucky discoveries, in serendipity, show us that more is possible than we initially thought or were prepared for. Entertaining these new possibilities often involves awareness, excitement and exploration – the three interlinked processes I connected with wonder in Chapter 3. But do we always need to be confronted by the unexpected in order to start wondering about the world? Certainly not. In fact, when the unexpected happens we might just become temporarily curious about it or, depending on how great the shock might be, experience a state of awe (for differences vis-à-vis wonder, see Chapter 2). Being surprised about a new, unfamiliar event is, in this case, conducive for wondering, curiosity or awe. But what serves as a specific trigger of wonder is, actually, becoming surprised by what is familiar or, more exactly, by the act of discovering the unfamiliar within the familiar.i This observation has important historical roots. Socrates’ method of stimulating wonder and, with it, cultivating a philosophical mindset was precisely aimed at helping people rethink their common or taken for granted assumptions. In doing so, and thinking through their consequences, these widespread ideas i ‘Whereas curiosity always concerns something new, an interesting novelty, a fact with which one is not familiar, wonder as often as not concerns the familiar; it defamiliarises the familiar, making it appear in a new light, as if seen for the first time (as is often said) – in that different sense, wonder also has an aspect of novelty (Parsons, 1969, p. 85). This is not to say one cannot become curious about something familiar; about how cheese is made, say, or where cashew nuts come from. But curiosity always concerns a new fact about the familiar object, it needs to tread new territory. Wonder, on the other hand, does not seek new ground but changes the ground under one’s feet. That being said, it is easier to experience wonder at something unfamiliar; Fisher (1998, p. 19) even says that “wonder has its elemental existence in surprise”. And it is commonly observed that (the ability to) wonder wears off with increasing familiarity. To sustain one’s sense of wonder at the (familiar) world, then, requires an effort’ (Schinkel, 2017, pp. 5–6).

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suddenly became indefensible and strange.ii This is a powerful reversal of our usual way of ‘familiarizing’ the world around us by applying existing schemas and beliefs to every novelty in order to make it understandable, tame and unable to disturb us any further by triggering wonder. And yet, when taming reality, we are also missing new opportunities to learn, to create and to grow. Living an everyday life that is unquestioned means wasting the chance to discover more than what meets the eye and to go beyond ‘normal’, conventional or dominant perspectives. In contrast, making the familiar unfamiliar is a process that helps things lose their usual identity1 and turn into something else, something we are excited to discover, to explore further, in other words, to wonder about. This is a process Heidegger considered to be central to our existence as human beings. Going back to the ancient Greeks, he claimed that wonder doesn’t ignore the usual or the ordinary; on the contrary, it makes it appear unusual and worthy of our attention.2 Wonder fundamentally reveals the strangeness of our existence by ‘uncovering and preserving the profoundly disturbing force of the mysterious within the everyday’.3 If for Heidegger wondering was a form of dwelling,4 then it was dwelling between the familiar and the unfamiliar or, more precisely, on the unfamiliar within the familiar. From a perspectival standpoint, this means adopting a new position (physical and/or symbolic) from which to relate back to the what is familiar and, as a consequence, develop a new perspective that transforms it into something, if not together unfamiliar, then at least less common and less known. The ways in which this is achieved in practice, within art, science, education and society, will be discussed in detail in this chapter. For the moment, let’s consider how frequent such moves from the familiar to the unfamiliar are in our everyday life. On the one hand, one could say they are certainly rare enough for us to be able to develop a strong set of habits and expectations when it comes to our daily activities. This process of conventionalization is, in fact, widely postulated by both social and developmental theories.5 In this sense, it is mainly through accidents and chance, things outside of our control, that we come to observe the everyday closer and question it. On the other hand, there is a certain pleasure or, at least, arousal, associated with defamiliarizing the familiar. We enjoy this in our novels and movies, for example, given that fiction re-presents reality in a new and surprising way,iii widening our own horizon of possibility. ii For William James, philosophy is grounded in wonder because it makes us ‘able to fancy everything different from what it is’, to see ‘the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar’ (James, 1979, p. 11). iii And has been doing so since the eighteenth century, in close connection with the science and religious beliefs of the time. In the words of Kareem (2014, pp. 3-4):



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This thrill has also been captured by Freud in his notion of the uncanny.iv In some ways, the uncanny offers us a reverse dynamic to noticing the unfamiliar within the familiar. When experiencing it, we actually perceive a strange familiarity in the presence of the deeply unfamiliar. This is usually unexpected and can awaken great emotions in us, including terror. In this case, the ensuing wondering is closer to the sublime than to conventional curiosity.

5.1  The found object It is undeniable that we live in a world not only of people but also of objects. While the materiality of this world rarely entered psychological or philosophical theories of wonder,v primarily focused on the inner experience of the wonderer, it remains there, at all times – a force to be reckoned with on an everyday basis. One important observation here is that all the objects (and, by extension, all places and bodies) surrounding us are the product of both nature and culture. This means that they have a material presence that is appropriated with the help of cultural means, that is, shaped by tools and made sense of using the system of signs available to us. This act of appropriation mirrors the familiarization or conventionalization mentioned above. Culturally we ‘tame’ the strangeness of things by giving them a meaning and a purpose, in other words, by turning them into objects.vi In this sense, when using objects as they are ‘supposed’ to be used, that is, by enacting a conventional perspective on them, they tend to disappear from our experience, to gradually fade into the background. It is with the help of accidents, when things don’t react as we expect them to, or with the In claiming that eighteenth-century fiction solicits wonder concerning both the real and the ordinary, I  suggest that the novel engages its readership both epistemologically and phenomenologically. Fiction appeals at once to doubt about the truth status of its representations and to marvel by endowing the ordinary with novelty. How, specifically, did writers solicit wonder at real, ordinary objects? One way was by adopting techniques used by seventeenthcentury scientists and Protestant writers to make the familiar seem strange. Seventeenthcentury scientists strived to sharpen their apprehension of the natural world by deliberately observing common phenomena as if they were rare phenomena. Likewise, the seventeenthcentury Protestant doctrine of special providence encouraged the devout to record the minute processes of daily life as miraculous manifestations of God’s will. iv Referred to ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’ (Freud, 1949, p. 369). v Or any other phenomenon, for this matter: ‘Both research and applied psychologists pay surprisingly little attention to the material objects encountered in day-to-day living, even though the significance of these objects in human development has been profound’ (Camic, 2010, p. 81). vi I am making a distinction here between things, defined by their physical properties, and objects, which are still things but become defined by their meaning and purpose within society. For details, see Glăveanu (2016).

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help of a conscious, effortful process of defamiliarization, that objects ‘reappear’. It is when making their familiarity unfamiliar to us that they are found by us once more. The theme of the found object is a common one in art (see also Box 5.1) both in a restricted sense (as a technique) and in a wide one (as a programmatic view of the mission of art in society). In terms of the latter, Shklovsky6 believed that art exists in order to recover the sensation of life, to make viewers feel things. These feelings are strongly linked, as explained above, with rediscovering objects by wondering about them. Art, for Shklovsky, uses a variety of techniques that make common objects unfamiliar to us typically by increasing the time it takes to perceive them and the difficulty to make sense of them. In order to achieve these effects, artists systematically disturb our usual labels and categories by calling our attention back to the physical, pre-symbolic features of the things around us.

Box 5.1  Found Objects The notion of found object is popular in art, yet it also has a simple everyday meaning. These are objects accidentally or unintentionally stumbled upon but that, either immediately or after some time, gain new value, typically aesthetic or practical, in the eyes of the one who found them.a In the history of art, the first mention of found objects or objet trouvé was made by Marcel Duchamp in 1913 with reference to readymade art. The latter was a radical shift in artistic expression whereby everyday objects came to be presented as art with little or no further elaboration. A good example from this category comes, once more, from Duchamp and his Bicycle Wheel, which is basically a wheel placed on a stool and labelled art. A more controversial example is represented by his signed urinal (signed R. Mutte), another readymade piece of art called the Fountain by its creator (or, better said, discoverer?). These objects, and many others like them, were meant to trigger astonishment and stimulate discussion about the meaning of art itself. But they also hold another important lesson for researchers of wonder and wondering. They give us a perfect illustration of what happens when we defamiliarize the meaning of a well-known object (for the urinal, the idea of it being used in bathrooms and meant to be kept away from public life), in a first instance, and then reverse it (the urinal becomes not only an object to be shown but also one to be celebrated as art). Similar uses of found objects were continued, for the same reasons, by the Dadaist and Surrealist painters of the twentieth century.



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For a more elaborate conceptualization: The term found object … refers to an existing object or artifact that is picked up (found) and generally not bought or originally intended as art, yet it is also considered to have some value (e.g., aesthetic, novelty, remembrance) to the finder. It is during the locating and finding process that the value of the object, once considered to be junk or rubbish, changes. The junk object becomes transformed into the valued found object. (Camic, 2010, p. 82)

When an old, dominant perspective comes into question, we start wondering at the new possibilities that are emerging in front of us. Equally, when a new, unexpected perspective is applied to a familiar object because of its newly found properties, we get to wonder about what else might be possible in relation to that particular object. Such artistic techniques are applied much more widely in fact, including within everyday life, for example, whenever we make new and unconventional connections between objects and their meaning. This is a method referred to by Burke as ‘perspective by incongruity’7 and it is used to expose initially unseen or unforeseen properties of common things or expressions. The same technique applies to language when, by creating an atypical association, we get to question existing meanings and discover new ones. For instance, we normally think of lions as big cats, but what if we were to use, as a poetic expression, ‘that big dog, the lion’? Immediately, we wonder: is there anything dog-like about lions? Or consider ‘trained incapacity’. Isn’t training always about gaining new skills? Are we able to train ourselves to fail? Playing with the meaning of objects or events in this way is not only the basis of poetic language; it also serves as a springboard for wonder within and outside of the artistic sphere. The use of found objects and incongruity techniques is thus inevitably linked to the phenomenon of wonder. This is because they necessarily place the creator (and viewers) in a meta-position (see Box 3.1) of entertaining multiple perspectives at once – the conventional and the new one or ones – and opening up unexpected spaces of possibility. The process of ‘finding’ objects in these ways also bears great resemblance to the dynamic of wondering outlined in Chapter 3. It begins with a surprise discovery (awareness), then reflections on what the object is and what it could be (exploration), accompanied throughout by feelings of joy and stimulation (excitement).8 This interplay between defamiliarization and refamiliarization is not specific for artistic practices alone, though, but can be easily observed in science, education and society.

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5.2  When the invisible becomes visible Imagine, for a moment, the exhilarating thrill of looking through a microscope or a telescope for the first time. Not the first time in one’s life, which is something one might not remember but could observe in the case of children, but the first time in the history of mankind. This is, of course, a rather misleading exercise given that neither the microscope nor the telescope were invented out of the blue; as any invention, they build on past achievements (in this case, in optics; see also Box 5.2) and required a trained audience to make sense of the newly ‘found’ view (to reference to the section before). What I am trying to get at with this example, though, is the fact that the objects that surround us – from small flies hovering around to far-away planets orbiting in space – are much more than what meets the eye. And, when the eye gets to discover that, we are half-way through an intense experience of either awe or wonder.

Box 5.2  The Invention of the Microscope Interestingly, the one-lens microscope was invented after the multiple lens compound one. The latter was produced in the early seventeenth century by Dutch opticians and commercialized by the mid-seventeenth century.a Microscopes, no matter their number of lenses, have been used ever since to make scientific discoveries and, more generally, to make us marvel at the world. The unique, if not bizarre, images seen through the microscope were not a topic of scientific debate alone, but contributed to popularizing science. One of the pioneers in this area, the Dutch amateur Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, was known for observing very small creatures such as bacteria, protozoa and spermatozoa with the help of microscopes of his own design. He also made his observations available to the public, mostly in writing. In the meantime, Robert Hooke in England had a different approach. Used to performing public demonstrations of science for the Royal Society in London, he produced not only written text but also captivating images of what he observed through the microscope. These fascinating depictions had been gathered in Micrographia or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses, published in 1665. They had a great success, affording a deeper understanding of animals, plants and minerals. Who would not be in awe, for instance, when seeing – for the first time – the details of a minuscule flea spread across a long foldout, with its suit of armour and jointed legs? Or the head of a fly, made enormous, with thousands of small compartments in each one of its eyes? These radically new perspectives brought, to some extent, the same sense of



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wonder in their audiences as the great travels of discovery a century before. This time though, instead of exploring the earth east to west and north to south, the public’s attention was focused on what all of them knew very well from home, from their everyday life; and yet, the familiar was represented anew with the help of the microscope. This new appreciation for visual imagery paved the way, among other things, for photography and its boom in late nineteenth century. a

 or more details, see Stafford, Terpak and Poggi’s (2001) Devices of wonder: From the F world in a box to images on a screen; also Wilson’s (1997) The invisible world:  Early modern philosophy and the invention of the microscope.

It is undeniable that an invention such as the microscope helps us wonder by turning what was initially invisible into something visible. But there is more than this at stake. The microscope, and the telescope for this matter, opened up a space of new knowledge beyond our senses. While technology mediated both discoveries, the visual representations that started to circulate based on them entered popular imagination and helped generations of scientists, artists (think, for instance, about the Art Nouveau current) and the public to forge a new type of relationship with nature and with what has been, literally, in front of us all along.vii These triggers of wonder were rarely private. In fact, it was common for Victorian era natural philosophers to organize performances in order to demonstrate and maintain their authority.9 Such shows appealed to the senses, matching Descartes’ consideration of wonder as a passion (see Chapter  1), and cultivated, first and foremost, an emotional, bodily reaction to novelty. Whether these early science shows were able to stimulate and scaffold wondering about to the same degree as they did wondering at is debatable. In some ways, such performances were also meant to ‘cure’ superstitious wonder and end the perpetual state of not knowing in the case of audience members.

vii And this discovery also became a proxy for a spiritual kind of experience. According to Doron (2012), the microscope served to produce, besides a more ‘objective’ image of the world, also a kind of ‘objective mystical experience’ and a way of attaining wisdom and knowledge of God. It is far from easy to distinguish between the experience produced by the microscope considered as a pure description of the world’s phenomena, and as one understood in terms of its capacity to produce an inner transformation of the observer – ‘a radical change in one’s being’, in Hadot’s words. In the latter capacity, it constituted a form of spiritual exercise in which the production of wonder in response to the ordinary, the despised and the minute, was decisive. (p. 180)

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Yet, paradoxically, their very existence maintained some of the glamour and fascination associated with the excitement of wondering about things.10 In the end, defamiliarizing ourselves of the everyday seems to combine the ethos of the artist, the method of scientists and the tricks of a magician. Unlike accidents or serendipity, discussed in the previous chapter, wondering in art and science tends to be staged and, thus, performed with and sometimes for an audience. This feature becomes even more obvious when we discuss education and social life – both of them domains that are grounded in self–other relations and that often try, at least, to get us to see the world not just as is, but as it ‘really’ looks like beneath the dead weight of old conventions and blind assumptions.

5.3  The process of inquiry Most of the artistic and scientific techniques used to cultivate wonder by making the familiar unfamiliar require learning and practice typically acquired within educational settings. These settings can be formal ones illustrated, for example, by how children are introduced to the microscope at school for the first time, or informal ones, for instance, Socrates’ dialogue with young people such as Theaetetus, discussed in Chapter  1. In each case, schooling has an important part to play in acquiring the tools necessary to wonder at everyday life and its objects. But do schools often rise to this task? There are many critiques of formal education pointing to the fact that, instead of fostering an attitude of reflection and of questioning daily life, schools reinforce hegemonic views and try to make students conform to them. Freire talked, in this context, about the banking concept of education in which students are mainly expected to store and have ready at hand the ‘deposits’ of information transmitted to them by teachers.viii Assimilation without inquiry excludes the very possibility of wonder. And yet, there is a glimmer of hope even as we In more detail, viii

banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole:  (a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught; (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) the teacher talks and the students listen  – meekly; (e)  the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f)  the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h)  the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. (Freire, 2017, p. 46)



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deplore education’s role in teaching children to conform instead of think for themselves. If wonder is triggered, among others, by making the familiar seem unfamiliar, this means that it requires a strong sense of what is familiar to begin with. Schools have always been a key driver for this kind of familiarization. What they require is a better balance with defamiliarization. And this is achieved, for example, by fostering processes of inquiry in the classroom and making practice (instead of rote memory) and dialogue (instead of the teacher’s monologue) the preferred way of building knowledge. But, in order to achieve this, we need to move away from the dominance of single perspectives and welcome pluralism, uncertainty and difference,ix all of which are often considered distractors in education. Montuori describes inquiry as characterized by joy, wonder, passion, hope and conviviality.11 Wonder features prominently in this approach given that what inquiry is meant to do is open new worlds for those practicing it. Wonder is cultivated here precisely by focusing on taken for granted assumptions and unpacking them, by turning what was deeply familiar into something worthy of discussion and of rethinking. As such, an education grounded in inquiry and wonder (see also Chapter  9) represents a fundamental reversal from the banking model of Freire or from what Montuori calls reproductive education. Instead of imparting certainty and ultimate truths, this kind of schooling teaches students how to question core beliefs and how to live with uncertainty (see also the Epilogue). Inquiry-based teaching and learning are discussed more and more nowadays, especially in relation to science education.12 Of course, the means of such education should not be restricted to learning about nature but extended to how students are introduced to the social sciences, the arts and the humanities. And there are good reasons to embrace this approach in school in terms of results, even if we are not always sure about how it works or how to prepare teachers for it.x ix ‘Creative Inquiry involves the cultivation of a fundamental attitude to the world that actively embraces uncertainty, pluralism, and complexity, and sees them as potential sources of creativity. … It is a way of approaching the world that recognizes the personal and social dimensions that go into our particular understanding of the world (and inform any view of the world), the possibility (and likelihood) of other perspectives, as well as a perceptual choice to remain open to experience with all its ambiguity and complexity rather than immediately superimposing an interpretive framework. Creative Inquiry sees life as an ongoing process of inquiry, creation and exploration. It assumes that understanding is by its very nature hermeneutically circular and indeed recursive, beginning not from a God’s eye view from nowhere, but in the very middle of existence, viewing learners as participants, not bystanders’ (Montuori, 2012, p. 66). x ‘In general, research shows that inquiry teaching produces positive results. It can work. In drawing such conclusions from the empirical research, however, one must be specific about what the criterion measures are and what the basis is for judging success. While research says inquiry teaching can produce positive results, it does not, by itself, tell teachers exactly how to do it’ (Anderson, 2002, p. 4).

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One concrete step towards this ideal is to get students, from an early age, acquainted with philosophy and involved in philosophical debates. If philosophy is said to originate in wonder, then postponing the teaching of this discipline until high school or college means assuming that students are not fully ready to wonder until that stage. This assumption has been challenged in the 1970s by people like Matthew Lipman who proposed a bold programme of philosophy for children13 meant to foster critical thinking in the classroom through dialogue about philosophical, everyday topics. Encouraging puzzlement, perspective-taking and discussion, this kind of programme aimed to develop critical, engaged and democratic citizens. However, philosophy for children should not be restricted to adding one more topic to an otherwise overloaded curriculum. Its ethos can and should transcend the philosophy class per se and encourage children to wonder about the simple things of life without falling into the trap of offering them immediate and final answers,xi as it is often the case with traditional education.

5.4  From wander to wonder and back again While the proper facilitation of inquiry education and philosophy for children requires considerable time and effort, their practice is ultimately rooted in everyday activities widely available to everyone living in a human society. This is because societies themselves are never unitary or homogenous but present us with countless differences and the opportunity to learn from them. These differences, as we shall see at length in Chapter 7, can trigger wonder even if this outcome is not really automatic. Experiencing difference first requires a capacity to wander beyond one’s sphere of familiarity, comfort and certainty. Wandering is, first and foremost, an exercise in moving away from the known. And, when successful, this movement sheds new light on not only the unknown but the known as well. It is, after all, only by taking some distance, physical or mental, that we can see the familiar with new eyes and start wondering about it.xii xi ‘Children can express delight and amazement at simple things and we could argue that many childlike questions such as ‘Where did the moon come from?’ or even ‘Why should I be good?’ show that, necessarily, through their lack of experience and understanding about the world, there is a natural tendency to ‘wonder’. The temptation to launch into explanations for these questions when children pose them can be great for any parent or teacher as a simple desire to inform and educate. However, Dewey would require that to be truly educational, any form of response should not close down the enquiry with an answer, but should preserve and inspire further capacity to wonder’ (Doddington, 2014, p. 1265). xii As poetically put by Proust (1993, p. 343), ‘The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.’



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There is a growing literature on wandering nowadays (see Box 5.3), one that starts to focus more and more on its positive consequences. Typically, this concept has been used to designate a symptom of mental illness, especially physical wandering, or an everyday life disturbance, in the case of mind-wandering. The relation between creativity and wander has only started to be explored and the relation with wonder is even more recent in the scientific literature. And yet, the connection between the two has deep historical roots. For example, as noted in Chapters 1 and 2, the phenomenon of wondering relates, at once, with passivity and activity; on the one hand, a state of mental paralysis, of being wonderstruck and, on the other, constant movement and vacillation akin to mind-wandering.14 This paradoxical state of mind is, after all, what Theaetetus, Socrates’ disciple, experienced while being encouraged to keep moving around his ideas.

Box 5.3  Mind-Wandering Mind-wandering is a common phenomenon; in fact, you are probably experiencing shorter or longer phases of it as you are reading this book, perhaps even this sentence. Defining it as the process of having the mind stray away from the here and now and entertaining thoughts unrelated to the task at hand, research shows that we engage in mind-wandering for almost half of our waking hours.a Understandably, then, this is a phenomenon that has been studied intensively in recent years, particularly in cognitive neuroscience, making some claim that we have entered the ‘era of mind-wandering’.b Traditionally, a lot of literature focused on the negative consequences of this process, in particular, for daily life performance,c but, in recent years, a more balanced view of it has been put forward, emphasizing both costs (e.g. for reading, tests of sustained attention, working memory and intelligence) and benefits (e.g. in autobiographical planning and creative problem solving).d An important question emerged from these investigations: if mind-wandering is so costly, then why do we do it so often?e Smallwood and Andrews-Hanna propose, for instance, that mind-wandering might in fact be an evolutionary adaptation that ‘(i) allows us to connect our past and future selves together, (ii) helps us make successful long-term plans and (iii) can provide a source of creative inspiration’.f The link with creativity received particular attention, with evidence pointing to the fact that allowing one’s mind to wander might help creative problem solving by providing it new and exciting sources of inspiration.g a b

See Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010). See Callard, Smallwood, Golchert & Margulies (2013).

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See McVay, Kane & Kwapil (2009). See Mooneyham & Schooler (2013). e Mooneyham and Schooler (2013, p.  16) propose the following answer:  ‘We have speculated that there may be a host of possible functions of mind-wandering that may help in part to mitigate its costs. These include but are likely not limited to: planning for the future, enabling creative incubation, allowing dishabituation, and relieving tedium.’ f Smallwood & Andrews-Hanna (2013), p. 1. g See Baird, Smallwood, Mrazek, Kam, Franklin & Schooler (2012). c

d

There are multiple practical and conceptual links between wandering around or travelling and gaining knowledge. In fact, the word theory itself, coming from Greek, referred to the situation of being a spectator travelling to a different land and, by doing so, developing new points of view. These acts of taking a detour and observing the world from new positions were related, by the ancient Greeks, to both knowledge and a perpetual state of wonder. They translate, today, in work done on the benefits of cultural contact15 and multicultural learning.16 In both cases, the familiarity of one’s culture is questioned, leading to a strong sense of wondering about differences, including about how one’s own culture might be considered by outsiders. Even cultural shock17 can play a part in this dynamic, making us acutely aware of how strange the habits of others might be and, conversely, how strange our own habits could appear to someone foreign. In the end, making the familiar unfamiliar always requires treating the former as foreign and trying to understand it anew as part of a larger process of wondering. This process goes beyond an initial state of surprise and requires some kind of exploration, material or imaginative. But this exploration, as we shall see next, needs to have a playful quality, otherwise wonder turns into scrutiny and the unfamiliar retreats back into familiarity.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Verhoeven (1972). Lloyd (2018), p. 129. Rubenstein (2008), p. 31. Heidegger (1994). See Wagoner (2008). See Shklovsky’s (1965) Art as technique. See Burke (1935).

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Making the Familiar Unfamiliar For more details about each phase, see Camic (2010), pp. 87–8. See Morus (2010). See Hunt (2008). Montuori (2008), p. 9. See, for example, Flick & Lederman (2004). For details, see Vansieleghem & Kennedy (2011) and Daniel & Auriac (2011). See Lloyd (2018), p. 16. See Wagoner (2008). See Maddux, Adam & Galinsky (2010). See Bochner (2003).

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Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!i

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!1 Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist (Figure  8), wrote this small poem at the end of an assignment for his university philosophy class. For that particular homework, he wanted to understand how exactly the stream of consciousness ends when going to sleep  – an intrinsically difficult issue given that it involves the person being aware enough to record the impression of falling asleep. The verses were meant to underline the main driver of introspection:  our incessant capacity to wonder while wondering and about its very nature. Feynman came back, again and again, to the topics of wonder, curiosity, imagination and playfulness. Celebrated for his work as a theoretical physicist in the area of quantum electrodynamics,ii for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1965 (jointly with Schwinger and Tomonaga), he was also known for his jovial, humorous and curious approach to life, science and nature in general. Partially because of these features, his personal and professional life have been the topic of numerous books,2 and his thoughts and observations, collected by Feynman himself,3 continue to be a treasured source of inspiration for young

i This is, in fact, the title of a book edited by Richard Feynman (1985), including an edited collection of anecdotes and stories from his life. ii He was also famous for assisting to develop the atomic bomb during the Second World War and for being part of the commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Besides theoretical physics, Feynman was credited as well for pioneering quantum computing and for introducing the notion of nanotechnology.

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Figure 8  Richard Phillips Feynman (1918–1988). Note: The Nobel Foundation, 1965.

scientists. Take, for example, his charming metaphor of science as a grand adventure: The same thrill, the same awe and mystery, come again and again when we look at any problem deeply enough. With more knowledge comes deeper, more wonderful mystery, luring one on to penetrate deeper still. Never concerned that the answer may prove disappointing, but with pleasure and confidence we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries  – certainly a grand adventure!4

The quote above beautifully captures the essence of wondering in scientific work. Resolving, in some ways, the gap between Socratic and Aristotelian wonder (see Chapter 1), Feynman sees here knowing as a temporary state within a sea of not knowing; more than this, not knowing is not the opposite of knowledge, but the driver that pushes us firmly towards it. What triggers this process is a deep fascination with nature, akin to awe and experiences of the sublime. Few people understand, he lamented, ‘the emotions of awe, wonder, delight and love which are evoked upon learning Nature’s ways’.5 And, with learning these ways, the opening up of new possibilities and the extreme excitement associated with



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this very process.iii In fact, his activity reflected very well the interconnected cycle of awareness, excitement and exploration of the possible postulated here as intrinsic to wondering (see Chapter 3). And Feynman was particularly keen on discussing exploration as an open-ended stage of finding things out: The way I think of what we’re doing is, we’re exploring – we’re trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me, ‘Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?’ No, I’m not. I’m just looking to find out more about the world. If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it; that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s like an onion, with millions of layers, and we’re sick and tired of looking at the layers, then that’s the way it is. But whatever it comes out, it’s nature, and she’s going to come out the way she is! Therefore, when we go investigate it we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re going to find, except to find out more.6

This kind of open exploration, without a ‘predecided’ end point, is essential for wondering. All other forms of exploration tend to separate it from the excitement of getting to understand the world by either following a predetermined goal or upholding a strict method. Feynman’s exploratory process was infused with a sense of openness towards discovering new possibilities and a matching excitement for pursing them, without any practical concerns. It had, in other words, a playful dimension to it, one that was recognized in exactly these terms by the great physicist who thought that it was due to this playful element that he achieved greatness. Remembering this experience, he notes: Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I  enjoy it? I  used to play with it. I  used to do whatever I felt like doing – it didn’t have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.7

It was, in fact, a similar play-like wonder about seemingly irrelevant, everyday phenomena that ended up securing him a Nobel Prize. As he went on to describe iii ‘Furthermore, in the search for new laws, you always have the psychological excitement of feeling that possibly nobody has yet thought of the crazy possibility you are looking at right now’, from the Nobel Lectures, Physics 1963–70, cited in Feynman (2015, p. 170).

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in the same passage, he started from that moment to look for opportunities to satisfy his curiosity without the pressure of making any great scientific discovery. Once in the cafeteria, he saw a person fooling around by throwing plates in the air, plates that had the symbol of Cornell University on them. All of a sudden, it became obvious to Feynman that the symbol went around faster than the wobbling plate. So he began to calculate the motion of the rotating plate. He discovered that, when the angle is slight, the symbol rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate, actually two to one. Then Feynman asked himself why that was the case. He wondered whether something more fundamental was taking place (but, again, without aiming to discover anything in particular, only to grasp what he was seeing). This is how he worked out what the motion of the mass particles was and how accelerations worked to produce that particular two-to-one rate. When sharing his finding with colleagues, they naturally asked him why he was making all those complex calculations. His reply, in the spirit of playful exploration, was: ‘for the fun of it’. And he was not discouraged. I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I  thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it … I  was ‘playing’  – working, really  – with the same old problem that I  loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis­type problems; all those old­fashioned, wonderful things. It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly …. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.8

Playfulness does pay off. And, when integrated into a long-term process of wondering, it becomes effortless and serendipitous (see also Chapter 4). In the end, there is no resisting it. Play-working as a new, integrated exploration of the world both satisfied him and paved the way for success. Feynman’s experience of discovery is exemplary, and he was certainly aware of it; that’s why he wanted to share it with others. Just as he was fully aware of the key role played by wonder throughout his life – the life of a wondering atom in a big, wide universe of atoms. Out of the cradle onto the dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness;



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matter with curiosity. Stands at the sea wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the universe.9

Notes 1 Feynman (1985), p. 48. 2 See, for example, Mehra’s (1993) The beat of a different drum – The life and science of Richard Feynman, Gleick’s (1993) Genius: The life and science of Richard Feynman, and Gribbin and Gribbin’s (1997) Richard Feynman: A life in science. 3 Beside Feynman’s (1985) well-known Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!, see also Feynman’s (2015) The quotable Feynman. 4 Feynman (1955), p. 14. 5 Toumey (2005), p. 82. 6 BBC, ‘The Pleasure of Finding Things Out’, 1981, cited in Feynman (2015, pp. 172–3). 7 Feynman (1985), p. 173. 8 Feynman (1985), p. 174. 9 ‘The Value of Science’, December 1955, in Feynman (2015, pp. 65–6).

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In Praise of Playfulness

Until now, we considered common triggers of wonder, in the form of accidents, chance and serendipity, on the one hand, and of marvelling at the everyday by making the familiar unfamiliar, on the other. Both of these processes make us aware of new perspectives on the self and world and, through them, of new possibilities for our thought and action that could be explored further. It is precisely the topic of exploration in wondering that concerns me here. It’s important to note, from the start, that I am not talking about exploratory behaviours in general,1 which involve seeking certain kinds of stimuli and scrutinizing one’s environment. In wonder, what we get to explore is not an object per se, but the possibilities associated with it. More than this, the ‘wondering about’ specific for exploration is interconnected with the ‘wondering at’ of surprise and awareness of the possible and supported by arousal or excitement (see Chapter 3 for the details of this dynamic model). So our focus should be only on those explorations that are infused by surprise, anticipation and openness to what is to come. One other human activity that shares all of these characteristics is play. There are deep links between play and wondering that go beyond the frequent incidents of wonder during play episodes.2 The main connection passes, once more, through the possible. Both play and wonder represent experiences that expand our horizon of possibility, as children and as adults. This is part of the reason why Anna Craft and her collaborators, for instance, related play and possibility thinking3 to the movement from ‘what is’ to ‘as if ’ types of questions and behaviours. The latter are enabled by a radical transformation that takes place around two  years of age when children start using signs and symbols. These allow them to build conceptual or symbolic perspectives on reality in addition to perceptual ones. So, for example, instead of simply relating to the world in terms of what is, children become capable of imagining what was, will be or could be. They thus become capable of pretend play, a momentous

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achievement in human development.i Pretence invites the player to transform reality by applying a completely new perspective on it. Its process is fundamental for the development of the meta-positioning specific for wondering (see Box 3.1). Children and adults often wonder in play but also, conversely, keep a playful quality to their wondering throughout the life-course. Playfulness is not the same as play and, as a mindset, can be applied to any type of human activity. Capturing the light-heartedness and combinatorial dynamic specific for playing, it is ‘a behavior that goes beyond the childhood years; and, through its component parts of sense of humor, manifest joy, and spontaneity, it has major implications for childrearing practices, educational planning, career choices, and leisure pursuits’.4 It is playfulness, rather than play proper, that characterizes the exploratory aspects of wondering. And this playful exploration, as we will see in this chapter, can be imaginative or enacted in very physical terms, builds on social interaction and welcomes, instead of being fearful of, failure. What this playfulness of wonder is not is ‘childish’ in the sense of useless or disconnected from reality, accusations historically addressed to play. We know today that children’s play is by no means useless. It adapts them to the social world and helps them practice, in a safe space, important life skills.5 Play does not disconnect children from reality; on the contrary, it gives them an excellent opportunity to experiment with it and, in doing so, understand it better.6 Last but not least, pretend play is never the same from one moment to the next and, because of this, it cultivates creative expression and marks the birth of imagination.ii In all these arguments, there is an implicit critique of the false dichotomy between playfulness and seriousness, a point also made by John Dewey more than a century ago.7 Even when playfulness gives experiences of

i ‘Unlike other animals and unlike the infant during the first year of life, the child of two has clearly entered the realm of symbolic activity. No longer carrying out an action (like feeding himself) just for practical ends, he can use other objects or elements including himself to enact various roles, produce various actions, secure various consequences. He may eat symbolically, using pretense gestures and pretend food. Moreover, such symbolic enactments are carried out seemingly for the sheer enjoyment of representational activity. … Needless to stress, this achievement of symbolic activity is enormous – in a sense, the greatest imaginative leap of all. Upon it will be constructed all subsequent forms of play, including play of literary imagination’ (Gardner, 1982, p. 170). ii ‘We can identify creative processes in children at the very earliest ages, especially in their play. A child who sits astride a stick and pretends to be riding a horse; a little girl who plays with a doll and imagines she is its mother; a boy who in his games becomes a pirate, a soldier, or a sailor, all these children at play represent examples of the most authentic, truest creativity. … A child’s play very often is just an echo of what he saw and heard adults do; nevertheless, these elements of his previous experience are never merely reproduced in play in exactly the way they occurred in reality. A child’s play is not simply a reproduction of what he has experienced, but a creative reworking of the impressions he has acquired’ (Vygotsky, 2004, pp. 11–12). See also Russ (2014).



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wondering an impression of lightness, this shouldn’t make us evaluate them as superficial or irrelevant.iii After all, as Feynman’s story referred to just before this chapter shows us, there is much more to playful wonder than meets the eye.

6.1  Flights of fancy One of the most frequent ways in which we explore the possible when wondering is by using our imagination. This social, cultural and psychological process plays an important part in wonder because its main function is to expand or enrich our experience of the here and now. It is because of our imagination that we transcend what is given within our current situation and become able to grasp and explore the past, the future, the mind of others, the possible and even the impossible or the fantastic. While this notion certainly has a long history,8 it became relatively neglected in the twentieth century and, later on, reduced to mental imagery.iv And yet, to imagine is much (much!) more than to create and manipulate mental images. Take, for example, the as-if, what-if and counterfactual types of thinking that would all be impossible outside of our capacity to imagine reality different than the way we perceive or know it,v without ever losing track of what is real. Imaginative explorations of the possible are crucially important in wondering because they construct and transform perspectives, adding new understandings of the world and examining their consequences. Just as children in pretend play  – which is always imaginative  – can adopt new roles and enact different perspectives on the same situation, so do adults, later on, play with possibilities in their mind before or while expressing them in words or actions.vi But it is also important to note that imagination can also trigger wonder, or wondering at, and not only contribute to its unfolding, or wondering about. The perspectives and experiences we bring into our here and now transform it, sometimes radically. A new thought or image can surprise us just as the act of playing new roles can make us feel both excited and curious. The combinatorial iii And, in fact, play is being more and more used in organizations in recent decades; see Mainemelis & Ronson (2006) and Schulz, Geithner, Woelfel & Krzywinski (2015). iv With some exception, the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, for example, Being and nothingness (2014). v ‘The concept of “what might be” – being able to move in perception and thought away from the concrete given, or “what is”, to “what was, what could have been, what one can try for, what might happen” and, ultimately, to the purest realms of fantasy – is a touchstone of that miracle of human experience, the imagination’ (Singer & Singer, 2009, pp. 19–20). vi The link between imagination and play is so strong that Vygotsky (2004) even referred to the latter as internalized play, meaning play that doesn’t require objects any more but mainly the manipulation of symbols and emotions.

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powers of our imagination are never fully under our control; thus, they can easily take us down unfamiliar paths (see Chapter 4). Conversely, our imagination also helps us go beyond the conventionality of everyday life and defamiliarize the familiar (see Chapter 5). In the end, there is no particular place or stage in the process of wondering that imagination can be assigned to – it infuses the whole experience with a sense of unknown or not yet known possibility. Which doesn’t mean that imagination cannot be much more mundane than this or lead us astray. We can easily imagine things we don’t wonder about, for example, what we know we will have for dinner, or wonder about things that can exist only in our imagination, for example, the size of the dragons in popular books and movies (pick the one you like best). The latter reveals a gap between fantasy or imagination and reality, but is this distinction really so sharp? (See Box 6.1.)

Box 6.1  Fantasy and Reality The expression flight of fancy (a contracted word for fantasy) is typically used to designate unrealistic dreams or ideas and it has been in use since the seventeenth century. Imagining owning a private island (when in debt), walking on Neptune (which happens to be a gas giant) or riding a dragon (outside of a movie set) are good examples of it. But are these illustrations of fancy going completely against reality? On the one hand, they certainly build on our experience of it, here our (direct or indirect) experience of islands, of walking and of seeing big lizards and flying creatures. But, on the other, perhaps they don’t adapt us best to our concrete circumstances  – just like daydreaming about dragons in class could make a student lose track of what is being taught – or lead to great inventions in the real world. After all, even someone like Richard Feynman, who was a big fan of imagination, noted: ‘This stuff of fantasizing and looking at the world, imagining things, which really isn’t fantasizing because you’re only trying to imagine things the way it really is, comes in handy sometimes.’a And yet why couldn’t we actually fantasize (also) about the world as is? If fantasy and imagination are related phenomena, historically and conceptually intertwined,b then all the arguments that support imagination’s close relation to reality apply to both.c As such, even the wildest and most outlandish flights of fancy have a creative function and a role to play in wondering. How else could we explore, with our minds, what might lay beyond our galaxy, as astronomers do? Or think of ourselves walking the land in the Jurassic era, as all palaeontologists surely imagine to be at some point? With an increased number of books, movies and, nowadays, virtual reality, the resources we have



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at our disposal for our fantasy have increased considerably. They open new doors for development and education as much as they do for society. BBC, ‘Fun to Imagine’ television series, 1983, cited in Feynman (2015, p. 169). See Glăveanu (2017b). c ‘Typically, people use the terms imagination or fantasy to refer to something quite different than what they mean in science. In everyday life, fantasy or imagination refer to what is not actually true, what does not correspond to reality, and what, thus, could not have any serious practical significance. But in actuality, imagination, as the basis of all creative activity, is an important component of absolutely all aspects of cultural life, enabling artistic, scientific, and technical creation alike’ (Vygotsky, 2004, p. 9). a

b

In the end, imaginative explorations are playful inasmuch as they allow the person to alter the meanings and emotions associated with a given situation in a relatively free manner. This is not to say that our imagination is not constrained, but constraints are not the enemy of play  – they are even its condition of possibility.vii What playfulness adds to the imagination is an open-endedness that is fertile for the phenomenon of wonder. Daydreaming and mind-wandering typically share this quality and, as we have discussed before (see Chapter  5, specifically Box 5.3), they often support wondering. As we shall see next, flights of fancy are never taking place in the mind alone. As we imagine, we tinker or experiment and generally move our bodies, not only our thoughts. And, as I will go on to show, also collaborate with others in the process.

6.2  Trying things out No exploration is ever complete without some degree of tinkering or trying things out. This is because, from mundane to exceptional, the products of our imagination call for some form of materialization in words, text, drawings, objects or performances. This externalization doesn’t only allow us to better understand and refine our mental representations, but subjects them to a kind of testing that welcomes chance discoveries. It is by way of good old trial and error that we can quickly formulate a perspective, enact it and reflect on it based on material feedback. vii We can easily realize this when seeing children at play as they first set up the rules of the game and make sure each player understands them. Young children, when they play alone, often talk out loud about such self-imposed norms in order to regulate their own behaviour.

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How is tinkering different from making things in general? The former is ‘characterized by a playful, experimental, iterative style of engagement, in which makers are continually reassessing their goals, exploring new paths, and imagining new possibilities’.9 In other words, tinkering, just like flights of fancy, designates an open-ended type of exploration that cultivates wonder and contributes to its dynamic. At the same time, perhaps precisely because of the fact that trying things out doesn’t offer the guarantee of success, tinkering is often overlooked or even downplayed by educators, companies and society at large. The same mentality is applied to play activities and the experience of wondering  – a view that needs to be challenged in today’s fast-changing, success-driven and output-obsessed world.viii Tinkering and imagining as part of wondering about things might be risky from an outcome standpoint, but they are intrinsically rewarding and rich in developmental opportunities from a process one. Historically, those who tinker have been labelled as bricoleurs. For LeviStrauss,10 the bricoleur works with whatever he or she has at hand and is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks. What the bricoleur uses to work on a particular project is therefore both constrained by what is available and also unexpected and heterogenous as it was not meant, from before, to address any particular problem. In this flexibility and capacity for improvisation resides the creative power of bricoleurs and their ability to wonder at the world in front of them.ix This approach to things was contrasted by Levi-Strauss with that of the engineer who, on the contrary, possesses many tools and instruments, each adapted for a particular task. There is little exploration and less opportunities to wonder in the activity of the engineer, as conceived by the French anthropologist. While the engineer might be more effective at his or her work, the bricoleur is adaptive, curious, able to improvise, the emblematic figure for the ‘do it yourself ’

‘It is not uncommon to hear the term used dismissively – just tinkering – in reference to someone working without a clear goal or purpose, or without making noticeable progress. But in our view, just and tinkering do not belong together. We see tinkering as a valid and valuable style of working, characterized by a playful, exploratory, iterative style of engaging with a problem or project. When people are tinkering, they are constantly trying out ideas, making adjustments and refinements, then experimenting with new possibilities, over and over and over’ (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013, p. 164). ix ‘Consider him [the bricoleur] at work and excited by his project. His first practical step is retrospective. He has to turn back to an already existent set made up of tools and materials, to consider or reconsider what it contains and, finally and above all, to engage in a sort of dialogue with it and, before choosing between them, to index the possible answer which the whole set can offer to his problem. He interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could ‘signify’ and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize but which will ultimately differ from the instrumental set only in the internal disposition of its parts’ (Levi-Strauss, 1966, p. 18). viii



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culture that, today, gave us its newest expression in the form of the makerspace (see Box 6.2).

Box 6.2  The Maker Movement The maker movement, according to one of its leading supporters, Dale Dougherty, ‘has come about in part because of people’s need to engage passionately with objects in ways that make them more than just consumers’.a It is made up of enthusiasts for creating things in their daily life who find physical and virtual forums to share their work processes and outcomes with others.b Given the relatively easy access to both tools and technology nowadays, this movement claims to have democratized the nature of making. At the same time, as Levi-Strauss’s discussion of the bricoleur comes to show, tinkering has a much longer – and perhaps more universal and ‘democratic’ – historical basis. Nonetheless, what today’s makers are capitalizing on are technological and cultural trends pushing people to be ‘engaged in building, creating, personalizing, and customizing things in the world around them …, a do-it-yourself approach to life, where people take pride and pleasure in creating things personally rather than only consuming mass-produced goods’.c Makerspaces, as places for interdisciplinary collaboration for learning, problem solving and shared wondering with objects, are popping up everywhere. But, in order to function well, they require a set of unifying (yet flexible) guidelines. These have been formalized in the form of a Makerspace Manifesto,d listing the following principles: Everyone is a Maker. Our world is what we make it. If you can imagine it, you can make it. If you can’t open it, you don’t own it. We share what we make and help each other make what we share. We see ourselves as more than consumers – we are productive; we are creative. Makers ask, ‘What can I do with what I know?’ Makers seek out opportunities to learn to do new things, especially through hands-on, do-it-yourself (DIY) interactions. The divisions between subjects like math and art and science dissolve when you are making things. Making is an interdisciplinary endeavor. It’s all right if you fail, as long as you use it as an opportunity to learn and to make something better. We’re not about winners and losers. We’re about everyone making things better.

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We help one another do better. Be open, inclusive, encouraging, and generous in spirit. We celebrate other Makers – what they make, how they make it, and the enthusiasm and passion that drives them. Many of these premises have already found their way into education and are trying to be applied as early as possible. This raises some practical challenges given that facilitating learning based on making is not always easy; it requires a very different mindset, including one that embraces failure.e Meanwhile, some are wondering if this is not simply the latest fad.f Dougherty (2012), p. 12. Halverson & Sheridan (2014). c Resnick & Rosenbaum (2013), p. 163. d See Kemp (2013), pp. 9–10. e Lock, da Rosa dos Santos, Hollohan & Becker (2018). f Halverson & Sheridan (2014), p. 500. a

b

Within or outside formal makerspaces, tinkering remains one of the most concrete examples of wonder-inducing exploration. While this kind of process sometimes follows a goal, more or less clearly specified, it never loses its intrinsic playfulness.x And, like most forms of playful exploration, it is at its most successful when engaged in with others.

6.3  It takes two to wonder Play, in particular symbolic or pretence play, is born out of social interactions. This is not only because the acquisition of culture, which includes meanings and language, would be impossible outside of a human community and the constant exchanges with caregivers but also because play itself is a highly social activity. We might assume otherwise by looking at the natural world and noticing the quasi-universality of play, but even there, it is the social animals that display the most complex forms of playing and it is certainly the case that our closest

x ‘We see tinkering as a playful style of designing and making, where you constantly experiment, explore, and try out new ideas in the process of creating something. Tinkering can be hard work, and sometimes it might not seem like play. But there is always a playful spirit underlying the tinkering process’ (Resnick & Rosenbaum, 2013, p. 165).



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relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, consistently engage in collaborative play.11 Even more, in humans: Memories of pretend play are often associated with a special person who encouraged play, told fantastic stories, or modeled play by initiating games, who perhaps had a flamboyant personality that inspired imitation or gave wonderful gifts of puppets and picture books or shared exotic travel adventures, who above all showed a trusting, loving acceptance of children and their capacity for playfulness.12

Other people matter when it comes to playing also because play and games are largely about living with others in a shared society.13 They open players’ minds to those of others and, in doing so, make them wonder about other perspectives and other lifeworlds (see also Chapter 7). This happens given that, in every play situation, there are multiple positions or roles the child (or adult) can adopt. Some of them are traditionally organized in pairs, such as playing parent and child, doctor and patient, policeman and thief, and so on; others are more basic and reflect the social articulation of positions such as proponent and receiver, speaker and listener, gift maker and recipient, etc. In all cases, what playing does is help the child occupy, repeatedly and in turn, different positions and, in doing so, develop and interrelate various perspectives on the situation.xi In this seemingly simple but highly complex social and psychological dynamic we can find the origin of both pretence and of our capacity to wonder. In the absence of a social other, whose presence is initially physical and gradually becomes (also) symbolic, there would be no real opportunity to inhabit new positions and develop new perspectives on the world. Without these perspectives, we would miss the possibility of constructing reality different than what it is (or what it is for us, at a given moment in time). The creation of subjunctive or would-be realities through make-believe play is made possible by a number of important developments in symbolic functioning …: the ability to manage multiple roles or perspectives, to playfully transform reality through counterfactual thinking, and to play with the playframe itself. Precursors of these abilities emerge in infancy, but they come truly into their own during the preschool years.14

And, during preschool years as well as afterwards, playful explorations of the world during wondering rely on the explicit or implicit presence of other people, xi This pragmatist view has been formalized as Position Exchange Theory by Gillespie and Martin (2014).

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their positions and their perspectives. If it takes two (or more) persons or roles to play, it certainly does as well to wonder. In adopting a meta-position that allows us to see reality as multiple and our perspective as one among many, we necessarily refer to the perspective of other people and the way reality appears to them. The playful element in exploring these various possibilities comes from approaching the same situation from different perspectives and allowing ourselves to experiment with them freely and openly. This is, once more, precisely what happens within a game situation, where roles are adopted and exchanged spontaneously, and a shared reality is being constantly negotiated by the players. It is a common human experience of wondering about things not only from our position but also from that of others. And realizing, in the process, how our position might look like to others. Alternating between immersion into and distantiation from a given role can make one feel strange, ecstatic, even dizzy. It is a wondering process that, as we have seen, requires imagination and is often accompanied by tinkering, including with ideas. And its consequences can be tremendous. If play is sometimes written off as childish or trivial, the outcomes of learning to wonder about, for and with others are transformative for one’s life and for society as a whole (see also Chapter 8). The lifelong development of wondering proves as much.xii

6.4  Failure is good This last subtitle sounds rather counterintuitive. If failure means not achieving one’s aims, how can that ever be good? As you would expect from a book on wonder and wondering, I  am taking here another route to defining ‘good’ in such situations. Some might be reminded of Samuel Beckett’s famous lines: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’15 This certainly sounds inspirational. It seems to imply not only that failure can be good but that we should try to experience more (and better) of it. This is because, no matter the outcome, at least it would be part of an effort to try and not give up. But few, xii ‘Imaginative play, imagination, and creativity evolve over the life course as practices and psychological functions that provide space for “playing at” and “playing with” alternatives and transforming cultural norms. They are pathways for the freedom of thought to both engage with and renew culture in response to changing conditions. Ultimately, it is creativity, and the human ability to see and act “other than” or “as if ”, to challenge and to question, that assists the creation of new practices along with the values that support them enabling the dialectic between continuity and change to become cultural transformation’ (Vadeboncoeur, Perone & Panina-Beard, 2016, p. 300).



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perhaps, are familiar with the lines that continue this well-known quote. ‘Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good.’ This sounds much more ominous, indeed. What does failure afford us, in the end? First and foremost, an opportunity to learn. In this way, failures, when integrated within a tinkering, playful approach to life and its chores, become a way of knowing16 rather than a process judged exclusively based on its outcomes. More than this, failure signifies the fact that there is something to learn without being a guarantee of us having learnt it. In this way, failing as an integral part of knowing is akin to wondering, the process of striving towards knowledge while accepting ambiguity, uncertainty and, finally, the state of not knowing (see Chapter 1). Why embrace failure as part of wonder’s exploration? Because ‘failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’.17 It is, indeed, failure that can make us reflect more, take a detour, pause, wonder, but this is only if and when we have the mindset of seeing it as a pathway to knowledge. In this paradigm, failing is integral to wondering because it makes us notice,xiii sometimes for the first time, that there are other ways of doing things out there, of living one’s life, of being in the world. This process can, in a considerable number of cases, pave the way to success, even to greatness. Thomas Edison is sometimes remembered for saying, among other things, ‘Don’t call it a mistake, call it an education.’ And he did have his share of educational mistakes along his illustrious career boasting 1,093 registered patents. When looking beyond this immersive number, however, we discover a long series of creative failures, including thousands of incandescent lamps and secondary batteries that never came to be. In fact, a closer look at his productivity shows us that for every successful patent he had somewhere between five hundred and six hundred unsuccessful or abandoned applications, documented in his notebooks, letters and interviews; that makes a staggering rejection rate of about one-third!18 But, perhaps, focusing too much on cases such as the one of Edison fails (pun intended) to make the point that failing in our playful exploration and engagement with problems should not be measured against eventual success. The value of wondering doesn’t come from what we know at the end, but from

‘Failure … makes visible what we often take for granted. In causing notice, it helps us see that there are other ways of moving through the world, alternative ways of coming to know lived experience’ (Carr, 2013, n.a.). xiii

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what its process teaches us: ultimately, that more is possible in the world than we initially imagined. This is a difficult lesson to learn for those who see failure only as a necessary pit stop on the road to innovation, a common view in today’s organizations,19 many of whom are starting to adopt an Intelligent Fast Failure culture (see Box 6.3).

Box 6.3  Intelligent Fast Failure Intelligent Fast Failure or IFF is an interesting cultural phenomenon aimed at maximizing individual and business productivity and innovation.a A teaching and learning tool applied today in various educational and organizational contexts, IFF as a concept originated in the work of Jack V. Matson in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What his work promoted, first and foremost, was a demystification of failure and, second, it encouraged controlled, informed and quick risk-taking activities that could end up in failures one can easily learn from. In the author’s own words, ‘Intelligent’ means that when you take a risk you want to learn as much as possible about what happened and why by gathering feedback. ‘Intelligent’ also means the risk is attempted in such a way that not many resources (time and money) are lost if it fails. ‘Fast’ means that risk is accelerated so that you know what happened quickly. ‘Failure’ means that you should not expect most plans to work out. Most will, in fact, fail; but it is through the process of failure that you acquire the knowledge of the partial truths which will enable you to develop successful risks. (Matson, 1992, p. 35) The story goes that Matson came up with the idea of trying out a creative approach in his teaching after seeing his 6-year-old son playing with Popsicle sticks. Later on, he asked his students to build the highest structure they could using such sticks. Interestingly, he observed that those who never stopped trying out different ideas, most of which had initially failed, succeeded better in the task than the students who worked hard at implementing a preconceived idea. Important as well for our discussion of playfulness, this had not been Matson’s only attempt to get students to experience and embrace failure, but when using more formal techniques he had little traction. It was the atmosphere of playfulness established during the Popsicle task that helped students fail enthusiastically, wonder more and ultimately succeed. a

For more details, see Tahirsylaj (2012).



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The ideas behind IFF are so popular today that academics and practitioners are talking about providing people the proper tools to fail or, rather, to practice failure.20 For example, rewarding effort and number of attempts and not results when it comes to obtaining mentoring and support, creating an anti-portfolio or an exhibition that curates failed works and turns them into opportunities for reflection, or proposing ‘how-not-to’ tools. All of these substantiate what Hay interestingly called pedagogies of failure, focused on process rather than outcomes and encouraging playful risk-taking and incessant wondering.21 Such ideas are, as expected, resisted by many educators working within the current assessment-obsessed and results-driven schooling we observe on a global scale (see also Chapter 9). And there are some legitimate reasons for concern, especially if an IFF mentality is applied to making technological innovations that end up wrecking the environment in the process or tearing societies apart through the spread of hate and misinformation.xiv But, in the end, it is the basis of this new way of doing education or business that is relevant here. Hay mentions four principles for this new pedagogy:  an invitation to think through failure; multidirectionality and multivocality; an assessment of failure’s contribution; and a formal recognition and encouragement to fail.22 Key among them, the multivocality aspect is essential for wondering as it not only recognizes the existence of multiple perspectives but actively seeks them out. Ultimately, we should not fail for the sake of failing and not even for that of succeeding later. We should appreciate failure for the opportunity it gives us to wonder about the possible in the midst of what was hoped for but clearly not possible.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

See, for example, Berlyne (1950). See Edeiken (1992) for a discussion of play and wonder in children’s museums. See Craft, McConnon & Matthews (2012). Lieberman (1977), p. xi. See Singer & Singer (2009). See Harris (2000). Dewey (1910).

xiv One can be reminded here of Silicon Valley’s informal motto, move fast and break things….

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8 For more details see the Handbook of imagination and culture co-edited by Zittoun & Glăveanu (eds) (2017). 9 Resnick & Rosenbaum (2013), p. 164. 10 See Lévi-Strauss’s (1966) The savage mind. 11 See Tanner & Byrne (2010). 12 Singer & Singer (2009), p. 4. 13 See Hviid & Villadsen (2018). 14 Bretherton (1989), p. 383. 15 From Beckett’s (1983) Worstward Ho. 16 See Hay (2016). 17 Halberstam (2011), pp. 2–3. 18 See Simonton (2015). For Edison’s failed attempts to develop fuel cells see http:// edison.rutgers.edu/fuelcell.htm. 19 See Leoncini (2017). 20 See Kim, Bagla & Bernstein (2015). 21 See Hay (2016). 22 See Hay (2016), pp. 91–2.

On Fear

In April 2019, there were 68.5  million forcibly displaced people worldwide; 25.4 million of them were refugees, more than half under the age of 18. A mere 102,800 refugees were settled. In Europe, over 1  million and a half migrants and refugees arrived since 2015, fleeing war, poverty and drought in their home countries. Since the start of 2017, over 2,700 people are believed to have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean, trying to reach Europe’s shores.i These numbers could never do justice to the tremendous human suffering involved in each case. In fact, the latter remains hidden behind an accountability exercise. The numbers are not the problem, of course, they are certainly needed to describe the European refugee crisis, as it came to be known since. It is the difficulty of grasping that each and every number represents a person, like you and I, that is the real challenge. It is the failure to wonder about these people as people. I am talking here about a failure to wonder given the underwhelming response to the crisis in Europe. Faced with one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since the end of the Second World War, many European governments reacted by condemning rather than understanding, threatening rather than cooperating and closing rather than opening boarders.1 The far right used this as a unique opportunity to step up the populist, nationalistic and xenophobe rhetoric and make some electoral wins or, at the very least, poison mainstream politics.2 The media itself often fell back on dehumanizing stories and images, comparing migrants to an invading army or a disease that had to be stopped.3 In each case, it was fear that came to replace wonder.ii What does it mean to wonder about migrants and refugees? First of all, it means going beyond a mere curiosity about their number, where they are from i Data gathered from the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) webpage, www.unhcr.org, on 24 April 2019. ii As noted also by Kearns (2015, p. 100), ‘when the imagination is overcome by fear/terror, wonder disappears’.

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and how many of them made it to their destination. We can be shocked or angered by these figures, like the ones I listed before, but, in order to wonder, we would have to consider the person of the migrant, his or her position in the world, his or her perspectives, dreams, needs, beliefs and emotions. And we should do this without resorting to stereotypes of what migrants ‘are like’ based on general notions about their country, ethnicity or religion. Wondering involves recognizing the unique, strange and, at times, incomprehensible presence and existence of the other in its own term, not the ones we made up for the other. It means being open to being surprised, challenged and moved by this experience (that can be emotionally draining). Above all, it means recognizing the shared humanity that makes the migrant a person who also occupies a position in the world, develops perspectives on it and wonders about things, including about us and our own wonderment. This process of identification that can encourage perspective-taking and empathy in wondering is cut short, however, by popular representations of migrants, like the one shown in Figure  9, that are typically used on TV, in newspapers, in movies and on social media. While this image documents a rescue operation, its depiction of migrants includes the boat full of people,

Figure 9  Irish Naval Personnel Rescuing Migrants as Part of Operation Triton. Note:  This image was originally posted to Flickr by Irish Defence Forces, licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.



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travelling in precarious conditions, people we see from a distance (here, from above), lacking any personal or personalizing characteristics. They are a group we can be curious about, but they include no person or story to wonder at. The rescuers remain similarly anonymous, hid behind full body suits that protect them from the possible diseases of the other. It is easy, from such images, to be left fearful about the sudden presence of these migrants and their number than wonder about their individual, singular existence. We have little access to their perspective, perhaps little interest in it. Fear is a powerful emotion that focuses us on our person and group, our well-being and preservation, rather than open us to others and otherness. Over the last years, I  became interested, together with a group of collaborators,4 by how we take (or not) the perspective of migrants and refugees. In other words, the social and psychological means we have to approximate their thoughts, emotions and intentions, especially in conditions in which most of the people in host countries rarely get to actually meet refugees in person, and their individual stories and perspectives are rarely publicized, as noted above. What we discovered by examining conversations on social media (in this case Reddit) was the fact that perspectives can be ‘taken’ based on different processes, depending especially on whether the person involved is open to identifying (i.e. finding similarities) with refugees or, on the contrary, rejects any such association (i.e. by reinforcing radical difference). The former leads to perspective-taking through identification and repositioning, in which the person is ready to imagine him or herself as the refugee or as being in the situation of the refugee, respectively. The latter forms of perspective-taking are grounded in essentialism and situationalism, cases in which we approximate the perspective of the other based on how ‘these people’ or ‘these cultures’ are. Needless to say, operating with pre-made stereotypes and not questioning them is antithetical to wondering, which should, in principle, be an open, reflective and critical exercise. But even identification strategies might not take us far enough in this regard as, by anchoring the experience of the other into that of the self, we make what is essentially unfamiliar familiar, a movement often opposed to that of wonder (see Chapter 5). What are we to do then? If we go back to the understanding of wondering proposed in this book, we discover that it involves realizing that our position and perspective in the world are one among many. These other positions and perspectives include those of migrants and refugees but, in order to engage with them, we need more than acts of categorization and even of imagination. We need to wonder why it is so difficult to access the perspective of refugees in the first place, to reflect on the

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long history of racist representationsiii and to question our own understanding of other people and their position. We need to overcome fear and rejection of the other, just as much as we need to resist the other’s ‘domestication’ through the use of familiar categories and self-serving views. In many ways, to wonder about the other, in this case migrants and refugees, means to be open to the possibility of not knowing how their experience feels like. But this state of not knowing should not become an excuse for either defeatism or racism; on the contrary, it should trigger a form of understanding that transcends our own position, perspective and experience of the world. This is, ultimately, what others present us with: an opportunity, if we accept it, to take some distance from our own beliefs, feelings and concerns and relate to them as an other would. In wondering about others there is, therefore, always an element of wondering about the self – our own self, and the human self, more generally. In wondering about others, we get to experience, vividly, the reality of the fact that we are, ourselves, other to those around us.

Notes 1 2 3 4

See Klaus (2017). See Lazaridis & Campani (2016). See Falk (2010). For details, see Glăveanu & de Saint Laurent (2015, 2018) and Glăveanu, de Saint Laurent & Literat (2018).

iii ‘Racism … is not a “clean” or rational phenomenon. Just as unemployment and insecurity can become joined ideologically with non-White immigration in the incoherence of the racist imagination, so Middle Eastern can become conflated with Arab, Arab with Muslim, Muslim with rapist, rapist with gang, gang with terrorist, terrorist with “boat people”, “boat people” with barbaric, and so on in interminable permutations’ (Poynting, Noble, Tabar & Collins, 2004, p. 49).

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The experience of wonder is deeply related to that of interacting with other people. Even when we wonder alone, as might often be the case, the act of wondering itself is an intrinsically social one. This is because, as advocated here, to wonder means to realize that the world is perspectival, that is, that multiple perspectives are always possible, and that our own perspective is one among many. This realization fundamentally depends on us living in worlds populated by other people, who have their own positions and perspectives, and on the possibility of being in dialogue with these positions and perspectives, of occupying or acquiring them in turn. In other words, in order to develop another perspective on self or world, one needs to occupy another position, physically or imaginatively, towards them. Occupy, that is, the position of the other. Our engagement with wonder then, according to this theory, developed along evolutionary time from the early days of mankind living in tight-knit groups and having, once in a while, the possibility of encountering members of other groups and finding ways of relating to them. According to Kapuściński, these men and women had – as we broadly do today – three main possibilities of reacting to the other: go to war, fence themselves behind a wall or enter in dialogue.1 The first two are fear-based reactions, offensive and defensive, respectively, brought together by a basic rejection of what the other might bring, including his or her perspectives on the world. The third one, I would argue, is wonder-based. No dialogue, at least no authentic one, is possible without some kind of openness towards who the other is.2 Real dialogues are born out of wonder and, through them, perspectives can be exchanged, enriching each partner’s mental universe and contributing to further moments of wondering. Of course, the situation hundreds of thousands of years ago, and especially since then, was much more complex, and what starts off as dialogue with the other could end up in war and separation, or the other way around. The interplay between dialogue and monologue, fear and wonder, makes up our social life, then and now.

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What are we to make of this other, the stranger? The figure of the ‘stranger’  – ranging from the ancient notion of ‘foreigner’ (xenos) to the contemporary category of alien invader – frequently operates as a limit-experience for humans trying to identify themselves over and against others. Greeks had their ‘barbarians’, Romans their Etruscans, Europeans their exotic overseas ‘savages’. The western myth of the frontier epitomizes this, for example, when Pilgrim encounters Pequot on the shores of Massachusetts and asks ‘Who is this stranger?’ Not realizing, of course, that the native Pequot is asking exactly the same question of the arrivals from Plymouth. Strangers are almost always other to each other.3

The stranger is, at the same time, a highly unsettling and highly familiar figure. It is unsettling because it confronts us with another way of being in the world, that is not ours. It is familiar because we occupy the same position for other people. Our capacity to wonder is premised on this basic reality. As soon as we come to terms with the otherness we ourselves represent, as Kearney aptly calls it, ‘acknowledge ourselves-as-others’,4 we overcome fear and replace it by the excitement of exploring new possibilities, a motivation that binds together wondering at and wondering about (see the dynamic model in Chapter 3). These possibilities are opened by seeing our own perspective from two standpoints at once – ours and that of the other. In other words, taking some distance from what we initially thought, believed or felt and, in doing so, acquiring new knowledge. This idea of a journey outside ourselves, typical for wondering, is embedded in fact in the very notion of theory, as I mentioned before in the book. Theōría, for the Ancient Greeks, was defined ‘as a journey or pilgrimage to a destination away from one’s own city undertaken for the purpose of seeing, as an eye-witness, certain events and spectacles’.5 This spectator theory of knowledge emphasizes the importance of acquiring new, strange, foreign perspectives and wondering at the ‘spectacle’ of otherness taking place both outside and within the self. There is no surprise, then, to see centuries later psychologists and philosophers of the self like George Herbert Mead premise the birth of a human type of self on the very possibility of adopting the perspective of others upon itself – the possibility of ‘becoming other’ (see Box 7.1). The fact that two perspectives, that of the self and of the other (the caregiver), can be placed in a reflective dialogue marks also, as I argue here, the beginning of wonder, an experience that will only develop to include more perspectives and unlock new developmental opportunities.



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Box 7.1  Mead’s Theory of the Self It is difficult to name exactly the type of philosophy and psychology practiced by George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) at the beginning of the last century, although many have tried, labelling it as social behaviourism, phenomenology, dialectical empiricism, social pragmatism, semiotic neo-pragmatism or symbolic interactionism, among others.a One of the key figures of pragmatism, together with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, Mead stands out for proposing one of the best-known theories of the development of the human self, grounded in a social ontology of action and intersubjectivity.b His main claim was that: The self is something which has a development; it is not there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process. (Mead, 1934, p. 135) For Mead, this social experience meant interacting with the perspectives of others and becoming able to see oneself and relate to oneself as another person would. He took this kind of distantiation as the basis for emergence and agency,c given that it is only by reflecting on the self from an outside position that one is able to observe and to understand more, including to notice new possibilities for acting on the world and interacting with others. While Mead didn’t theorize wonder as such, his thinking has deep implications for how we conceive it, starting from the idea that wonder begins, developmentally, by wondering about self and world in social terms, that is, the terms of other people. Second, Mead’s theory suggests that it is a human type of self, endowed with symbolic means such as language, that can have the capacity to reflect on itself and, consequently, to wonder about itself. Third, Mead’s philosophy makes a strong case for living in multi-perspectival worlds as a precondition for engaging with the possible in our existence. For details, see Gillespie (2005) and Martin (2005b). See Mead’s (1934) Mind, self and society, a volume put together posthumously based on student notes and a selection of his unpublished manuscripts. c See Martin & Gillespie (2010). a

b

As I will go on to elaborate in this chapter, the fact that wondering requires the position of the other also has significant ethical implications. It is not only the case that we wonder about others (see the next section) and with others (see the next

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chapter) – other people are, in and of themselves, subjects of wonder.i This invites more than openness and respect; it involves a deep sense of responsibility for cultivating wonder in and through our encounter with otherness.

7.1  Wondering about others We are curious about other people from very early on in life. This is the case not only because of our complete dependence on others during our first years but, most of all, because of the social drive towards understanding and interacting with them. Curiosity, as we established in Chapter 2, is different from wonder as the latter relates us to others in a different way than purely cognitive or curiosity based. Nussbaum, for example, saw wondering as instrumental for the development of a child’s capacity for love and compassion.6 Nonetheless, it is curiosity towards others that received more research attention in recent years.ii In this area of study, Phillips distinguished between empathic curiosity (wondering and finding out about others) and relational curiosity (being curious with others).7 Both these types are seen as increasingly important for building bridges in today’s highly diverse and fragmented societies. But a question soon emerges here: How far should our curiosity about others go before it becomes problematic, intrusive, unwanted? There are arguments to be made for keeping a respectful distance from other people, a social practice that is highly praised, especially in individualistic societies, as the most practical way of living together. This is, after all, the meaning many people give to the notion of civility  – cultivating polite yet distant relations. Such an attitude might avoid open conflict or confrontation, but it also makes us miss important opportunities for wonder, including about one’s own self. Superficial social i ‘Others too are a wonder, not a mystery to be solved or an alien to be dissected, analyzed, or totalized, but a wonder that exists to be appreciated, discovered, and rediscovered, puzzled over, even doubted, but never to be known completely and fully, so that a future potential, possibility, or story is encouraged and not denied. In appreciating others as a wonder, in valuing their beings, I am compassionate, humble, respectful, and gentle’ (Kearns, 2015, p. 99). ii ‘Renner (2006) defined social curiosity as “an interest in how other people behave, think, and feel” (p.  305) and considered it essential for building and maintaining human relations. Interestingly, research established a negative relationship between anxiety and curiosity (see Litman & Spielberger, 2003) bringing proxy evidence to the idea that a negative relationship exists also between fear and wonder. Psychometric scales have been proposed for the measurement of interpersonal curiosity or the desire to obtain new information about other people. This construct can be further broken down into curiosity about emotions, spying and prying, and snooping (Litman & Pezzo, 2007). In contrast, intrapersonal curiosity, or the desire to know more about one’s inner self, has been shown to include the following factors:  understanding emotions and motives, reflecting on the past and exploring identity and purpose’ (Litman, Robinson & Demetre, 2017).



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relations might be comfortable at times, but they are empty on the long term, can turn toxic and may increase the risk of social segregation. There are, on the other hand, clear benefits to being confronted with difference and otherness for the development of the individual and of community. Key among them, Phillips goes on to argue, is that sociable curiosity – what I  call here wondering about othersiii  – can help us interrogate, unsettle and transform our usual ways of dealing with difference by creating taxonomies. These taxonomies might help us organize and familiarize ourselves with what is essentially a messy, complex and unfamiliar experience. But, in applying existing categories we are, at the same time, doing away with the wonder potential of difference and the new perspectives it can bring us. How can we mitigate these limitations? The way in which we understand and relate to others, including other minds, has been a long-standing philosophical dilemma.8 Since Descartes’ dualistic approach and the separation between mind and world, including the world of others, a common way of solving the problem of how we come to know the minds of others has been to assume that the self uses its own experience to approximate that of other people.iv Put differently, the other can only be grasped by making it more like the self, the only reality we intimately know. As a consequence, when we are curious about others, what we actually do is relate their behaviour with ours and try to understand them based on this comparison, in our terms. Our curiosity is satisfied, then, when we reach a plausible conclusion about why the other behaved like he or she did. This is not, however, the premise of wonder. In order to wonder about others, we in fact need to leave behind the self and our knowledge of it and to accept difference, the strangeness of the other, even when understanding appears to be an impossible task. In Schinkel’s words,

iii Phillips (2016) has an interesting discussion in which he tries to differentiate between curiosity and wonder while keeping the relation between them. Building on particular definitions of wonder, he sees it as grounded in not knowing without necessarily pursuing knowledge. Here wonder is considered to integrate both facets. iv ‘Independent lines of theoretical and empirical work converge on the following conclusion: that the mental processes associated with perspective taking cause an observer’s thoughts and feelings about a target to become, in some sense, more “selflike”. It is our belief that this may occur in part because perspective taking alters the cognitive representation of the target that is held by the observer. In particular, we believe that the target representation constructed by an observer during role taking will more closely resemble the observer’s own self-representation. As a result of role taking, then, the observer’s two cognitive structures (self and target) will come to share more common elements – in short, at the level of mental representation, the effect of active perspective taking will be to create a merging of self and other’ (Davis, Conklin, Smith & Luce, 1996, pp. 713–14).

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The strangeness of the other, the ‘Otherness’ of the other, I  think, does often stimulate us to try and understand her better, despite the fact that ultimately, her otherness will elude our ‘grasp’. Does this mean the attempt to understand is a lost cause and a false quest? I do not think it is, for the goal of the understanding and the effort to understand in this case is not (and should not be) – at least not solely – practical in nature and also not just to satisfy curiosity or a desire to understand. It is, rather, the reverse, namely to keep alive the wonder, the fascinating not-knowing, the mystery – and thereby also the spark that keeps love alive and lively. Just as in intimate relationships love for the other as ‘other’ sustains and deepens itself through an effort to understand the other, so in any relationship to what is ‘other’, deep wonder takes a detour to maintain itself.9

This is a difficult task. Wondering about others – not just being curious about them – asks us to leave behind utilitarian reasons like getting to know or control the other and resist attempts at ‘domesticating’ its unfamiliarity. On the contrary, to wonder about others is to keep them distinct from us in order to have a real and authentic dialogue with them (and not a monologue with an ‘other’ made up in our own image). Making the other strange10 might be a short, fleeing moment, but it is one filled with new possibilities and fresh insights about the world.

7.2  From others to otherness The strangeness of others can ignite wonder, but it most often inspires fear, especially for those whose difference refuses easy appropriation. The greater the difference, the higher the risk of rejection, even violence, and history is full of illustrations of this. But there are many counterexamples also. For instance, the great historian Herodotus is remembered for his descriptions of lands and people from two and a half millennia ago. The ancient Greeks called anyone without Greek ancestry barbaros, or speakers of gibberish. Barbarians were foreigners but, since the late sixteenth century, the word has been used to designate mainly the savage or uncivilized. And yet, interestingly, Herodotus and his contemporaries knew that the others, the barbaros – the Egyptians and Scythians, the Persians and Lydians – were in fact people in their own right. ‘Herodotus himself wrote about Others without contempt or hatred, he tried to get to know and understand them, and often directly demonstrated the many ways in which they were superior to the Greeks.’11 He argued that, in order to know oneself, one needs to know others, an idea that resonates, through the centuries, in the work of George Herbert



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Mead (see Box 7.1). And he criticized xenophobia, the tendency to keep others at bay, as demonstrating one’s inferiority: the fear of seeing oneself in the eyes of the other. This rejection of wondering at and about others has led, historically, to diminishing those different from us and despising their otherness. Otherness is a concept often used to describe the other as a dangerous outsider.v Otherness goes beyond mere difference; it captures the incomprehensible and unbridgeable gap between self and other and places the two in stark opposition. In this process, if the self is human, the other loses his or her humanity. If the self is morally right, the other becomes corrupt and vicious. And if the self is weak in any way, the other must be strong and menacing. Barbarians and savages are to be kept outside of the community, to be conquered and, most of all, never wondered at because wonder implies a certain level of fascination and equality between the wonderer and the object of wonder. And still, otherness has and continues to fascinate us precisely because of the antagonistic qualities we bestow upon it. It even acquires a sense of the exotic. Exoticism might seem like a way of valuing the other by making him or her a topic of interest, but this interest is superficial, stereotypical and intended to leave the self feeling superior and satisfied with its own position and worldview. The nostalgia for the noble savage, the traveller tales of far-away places, the paintings of ‘primitive’ cultures, the avid collection of exotica in the eighteenth century, they all give us a taste of the other without ever confronting us, directly, with its presence. It is a representation of otherness without the risk of it ever contradicting us and our beliefs; a display of curiosity, yes, but no appetite for wonder. And this even when the rhetoric of wonder and wondering has been used, historically, to describe encounters with other people and cultures (see Box 7.2).

Box 7.2  From Colonialism to Orientalism When Christopher Columbus reached the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, he found a world different than the one he had expected. Instead of the East Indies, there was an entirely new continent to be ‘discovered’; yet, unfamiliarity gradually turned familiar when indigenous people started

v ‘A sociology of otherness aims to understand how non-normative statuses and identities are positioned outside of a normative civil order. Otherness signals a condition of systemic symbolic exclusion. Further, because the Other is also represented as a grave social threat, symbolic exclusion is typically accompanied by systemic patterns of social exclusion (for example ethnic and racial apartheids, Jewish, black, and gay ghettos, or refugee camps)’ (Seidman, 2013, p. 6).

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being called Indians. And yet, in order to make this new world appealing for the court of Spain, Columbus had to accentuate its strangeness and make his audiences wonder at it. In his letter to Luis de Santángel, the first news to be widely distributed in Europe about the expedition, he wrote that ‘Hispaniola is marvellous’ and that the ports there could not be believed unless seen.a The discourse of wonder, used by travellers before him, like Marco Polo, invited curiosity and exploration of places, but not exactly openness or respect for their inhabitants. For more than three centuries afterwards, European nations engaged in wide explorations aimed at conquering the globe and subjugating ‘primitive’ others, taking their possessions and robbing them of their status as human beings and, with it, the possibility to be wondered at. ‘The image of the Other that Europeans had when they set out to conquer the planet is of a naked savage, a cannibal and pagan, whose humiliation and oppression is the sacred right and duty of the European – who is white and Christian.’b It wasn’t until the age of Enlightenment and the birth of humanism that the idea that these others are selves in their own right gained prominence. And, even then, colonial practices and mentalities did not disappear but became more subtle. Instead of outright exploitation and, at times, extermination, the other was welcomed as a useful point of contrast – a counterexample of what the West, the Christian or the white man is supposed to be. A good example of this practice is discussed at length by Edward Said in his book on Orientalism.c With this term, Said designated not an academic discipline but a set of discourses that ‘produce’ the Orient as the other of European civilization, an other to be described, settled, ruled over but, ultimately, kept separate. The tragedy of the migration crisis in recent years, described before this chapter, builds on this shameful legacy. See Ferdman (1994). Kapuściński (2008), pp. 37–8. c Said (1978). a

b

The paradox in rejecting the otherness of others is not only that it kills wonder off in the moment12 but that it makes it altogether impossible. As repeatedly argued in this book, wonder grows out of difference and thrives on not knowing, both of which are eliminated by acts of fearing and oppressing others. If wondering puts perspectives in dialogue, then this dialogue requires tension and the resistance that comes from being able to relate to, yet never fully appropriate, the perspective of other people. Others are and remain others for a reason,13 which is not to say that we should not engage with them or try our best to establish mutual understanding. How the latter becomes possible in wondering is the topic of the next section.



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7.3  Openness to difference If curiosity can be satisfied, sometimes easily, wonder persists and dwells in not knowing. And yet, as Aristotle (see Chapter  1) claimed, it does produce knowledge in the process; in the case we are discussing here, knowledge about others and, indirectly, about the self. The main difference between being curious and wondering about others, as I  propose, is that the former typically uses existing schemas and representations that turn the unfamiliarity of the other more familiar, while the latter embraces this unfamiliarity and doesn’t consider it a mystery to be solved. How do we get to know others? There are a range of social and psychological processes we have at our disposal, all of them forged within contexts of communication and interaction. Key among them are the related concepts of perspective-taking, empathy and sympathy (see Box 7.3). As I briefly mentioned in the discussion of the migration crisis before this chapter, there are different ways of taking the perspective of others, some of which lead to narrower rather than wider representations and to more closed rather than open attitudes towards the other. Consequently, any of these processes can be employed as much to wonder about as to classify, familiarize and dominate others.

Box 7.3  Perspective-Taking, Empathy and Sympathy Perspective-taking, empathy and sympathy are related constructs that refer to the channels through which we acquire information about the views and beliefs (perspective-taking), emotions (empathy) and bodily states (sympathy) of other people. While I  tried in the sentence above to create a rather clear demarcation between the three, it is important to note that definitions vary and, oftentimes, one concept is used to cover a large range of meanings. Taking empathy as an example, Batsona noted that the term has been used to answer two different, even if related, questions: (a) how can one know what another person is thinking and feeling? and (b) what leads one person to respond with sensitivity and care to the suffering of another? Reviewing the literature, he identified no less than eight meanings of empathy: 1. knowing another person’s internal state, including his or her thoughts and feelings  – also called state empathy, cognitive empathy or empathic accuracy; 2. adopting the posture or matching the neural responses of an observed other – also referred to as facial empathy, motor mimicry or imitation;

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3. coming to feel as another person feels  – sometimes called sympathy, affective empathy or automatic emotional empathy; 4. intuiting or projecting oneself into another’s situation  – see the German Einfühlung; 5. imagining how another is thinking and feeling – also called psychological empathy, projection or perspective-taking; 6. imagining how one would think and feel in the other’s place – also called role taking, cognitive empathy, projective empathy, simulation, perspectivetaking or decentering; 7. feeling distress at witnessing another person’s suffering  – also called empathic distress or personal distress; 8. feeling for another person who is suffering – also called empathic concern, pity or compassion. This list illustrates, first, how many ways we have at our disposal to get to know the other and, second, how entangled these clearly are. Arguably one can take the perspective of another person cognitively (i.e. understand what he or she is going through) without experiencing empathy (i.e. feeling for the situation of the other), but normally these phenomena tend to either co-occur or, at least, to influence each other. They also might have common roots, for some scholars these being associated precisely with wondering about others.b One reason for this is that empathic explorations tend to suspend closure or the need to obtain final, definitive answers about other people. This openness can only be sustained by phenomena such as wonder. a b

Batson (2009). See Margulies (1984); also Kearns (2015).

Any ‘wondrous openness to alterity’14 cannot be taken for granted. It is not because we want or try to understand the other, by being empathic or sympathetic, that we manage to be, or that we use this experience as a basis for wonder. What perspective-taking, empathy and sympathy about others need to be grounded in for the latter to happen is what a colleague and I have previously called openness to difference.15 This notion designates an orientation towards other people characterized by awareness of, appreciation of and engagement with difference. Conversely to the tendency to ignore, reject or appropriate differences, frequently found in many everyday interactions from family home and school to the workplace, openness to difference looks for, welcomes and tries to act creatively with and on the differences between people. It is, thus, less of a personal trait (like the better known openness to experience) and more of



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an emergent quality of human interactions; as such, we should aim to cultivate contexts that foster such openness rather than train people for it, individually. Openness to difference is also the basis of wondering in society. Curiosity about the position, perspective and experience of the other does not suffice, what is further required are care,16 compassion, gentleness and humility.vi Not all of these are necessarily embedded within the act of wondering but, at least, the openness specific for it does orient us in their direction. After all, there is ‘a close affinity between the attitude of wonder itself  – non-exploitative, nonutilitarian – and attitudes that seek to affirm and to respect other-being’.17 Claims like this one bring wonder very close to the realm of ethics and, in doing so, invite further scrutiny.

7.4  Wonder and ethics Human experience and relations fall, at all times, under the realm of the ethical, and wonder makes no exception in this regard. More than this, though, given that in wondering about others we (temporarily) abandon our own position and perspective and try to inhabit that of an other, wonder has been considered by some to be the very source of the ethical: Wonder defeats routine and tedium also through its being an outward, otherregarding gaze. In wonder, we set aside our concerns with the self: wonder is among other things a momentary self-deferral. We attend to wonder’s object for its sake, not for ours. If wonder’s object is another person, then that person’s ‘sake’ is (whatever else it is) an ethical concern, and it frames the wondering in ethical terms. Of course, wonder is not wholly self-abnegating; the desire to understand returns our attention to ourselves eventually, and our delight in understanding must involve some self-awareness. Yet, although the experience of delight must refer back to the self at some level, it would be corrupted if it became itself the object of attention. This diminishment of the self tends towards humility; in this way, wonder becomes a clear source of the ethical.18 vi ‘A close affinity between wonder and compassion has been acknowledged by various writers. Where a human life is the object of wonder, there can be a poignant realization of both potentiality and fragility. From that point of view of humanity compassion can readily flow. To respect and compassion as moral correlates to wonder, we could add gentleness – concern not to blunder into a damaging manipulation of another. The agent realizes the blinding effects of self-absorption: the misperception of others and others’ needs that can stem from it. From a wondering recognition of forms of value proper to other beings, and a refusal to see them simply in terms of one’s own utilitypurposes, there is only a short step to humility. Humility, like wonder, involves openness to new forms of value: both are opposed to the attitude of “We’ve seen it all!”’ (Hepburn, 1980, p. 15)

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The statement above makes a compelling case for why human relations based on (mutual) wonder tend to enforce a morality of openness and tolerance towards others and otherness. They do so by endowing the wonderer with a kind of humility Socrates also talked about (see Chapter 1) as a result of realizing the limits of one’s knowledge. In wondering about others, we are testing a further, more fundamental limit, the one of our being vis-à-vis the being of others. And it is certainly the case that a lack of wonder and a grounding of human relations in fear lead to excluding others from the ‘morally sanctified civil life of a community’19 in order to more freely oppress them. In this act of oppression, though, it is the morality of the self that is shattered first. But are those who wonder always acting ethically towards themselves and those around them? Putting it differently, can morally corrupt people wonder, and can wonder be used to exclude or oppress others? I would argue that the latter remains a distinct possibility. While the ontological premise of wondering upholds the ethical imperative of treating the perspective of others as intrinsically valuable and can even lead, as discussed above, to a certain humility and abnegation on behalf of the self, this doesn’t mean that, in practice, moments of wonder cannot be experienced as part of activities that end up oppressing others. Columbus, as shown in Box 7.2, professed to have wondered at the new world he had ‘discovered’ and its inhabitants. Are we to conclude that he never experienced wonder (properly) given that the ultimate result of his journeys was the near extermination of indigenous people? Or that other travellers like him did not either? No. What we can say with certainty is that wondering about others stopped the moment their perspective was ignored, denied or used exclusively to promote the self ’s views. Wonder in itself is not the beginning and end of ethics. If the ethics of human relations involves recognizing both the commonalities that bring us together and the differences that set us apart, then wondering certainly contributes more to the latter rather than to the former. By being other-acknowledging,20 wonder prevents us from completely assimilating the other into the self and, in doing so, turning mutual recognition and dialogue into a solipsistic act of self-recognition. At the same time, we need to be able to focus on similarities as an important part of dialogue. This is why authors like Marguerite La Caze argued, going back to Descartes’ account of passions, that wonder needs to be complemented by another passion identified by the French philosopher: generosity.vii Generosity vii In her words: Generosity appears to be the converse of wonder, in the sense that it is regarding others as like ourselves and looking for similarity whereas wonder involves regarding others as very different from ourselves in their needs, desires, and interests. My argument here is that generosity and



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involves ‘the recognition of commonalities between human beings, which undermines inappropriate feelings of superiority’21 and, as such, it balances wonder’s emphasis on difference and its engagement with the other as an other.viii But, as we will see next, wonder doesn’t set people apart. In fact, it can and often does bring them together, in collective acts that change lives, societies and even history.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Kapuściński (2008), p. 111. See Bakhtin (1994). Kearney (2003), p. 3. Kearney (2003), p. 5. Nightingale (2001), p. 29. See Nussbaum (2001). See Phillips (2016). For more details about this, see Sammut, Daanen & Moghaddam (2013). Schinkel (2017), p. 12. Gurevitch (1988). Kapuściński (2008), p. 35. Phillips (2016), p. 8; see also Economides (2016). For a more detailed discussion of this position, defined as allocentrism, see Glăveanu (2019b). 14 Rubenstein (2008), p. 133. 15 See Glăveanu & Beghetto (2017). 16 Phillips (2016), p. 8.

wonder are both needed in the development of an ethics of respect for difference. Generosity and wonder balance each other. First, generosity can both provide the basis for respect and the kind of limit wonder needs. The notion of generosity provides a way to conceptualize the similarity between human beings within the context of the passions. Thus, we should accept the importance of wonder, yet also realize that it cannot replace a respect for what we share with others. Similarities and commonalities form the background against which we can perceive differences, just as familiarity forms the background against which we can respond to objects of wonder. (Caze, 2002, p. 13) In the end, their dynamic is complementary: viii

Generosity and wonder combined also speak to the issue of the two sides of ethical relations:  attitudes to others and attitudes to ourselves. Wonder is a response to others that accepts their differences and could be reflected back in an appreciation of oneself. Generosity involves a basic esteem or respect for oneself that is also extended to others. (Caze, 2002, p. 18)

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Hepburn (1980), p. 15. Evans (2012), p. 130. Seidman (2013), p. 6. Hepburn (1980), p. 14. Lloyd (2018), p. 211.

#Rezist

The end of communism in most of Eastern Europe in 1989, powerfully captured by the image of the fall of the Berlin wall, was an awe-inducing moment. Catching most by surprise – including leaders, participants, victims and observers1 – the string of revolutions that year made the impossible, or at least the unlikely, possible. Benefiting from hindsight, we can now understand how various social, political and economic factors contributed to this radical social transformation, but the fact that it happened so suddenly, it happened that year and it happened in that way continues to trigger, thirty years later, astonishment, admiration and, indeed, wonder. One of the most captivating events at the time took place in Romania. It is not only the case that Romanians had the only bloody revolution in the region,i but it was also the first ever televised one.2 Breaking out on the 15th of December in the Western city of Timișoara, it included the dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and his wife trying to escape by helicopter, being finally apprehended, briefly trialled and speedily executed on the 25th of December. After more than forty years of totalitarianism and the trauma of 1989, it is no surprise that the postcommunist history of Romania was (and, to a large extent, remains) marked by social inequality, corruption and distrust in the political class. For a people who commemorate, year after year, the bravery of the revolutionaries, it is interesting to see that, despite many (legitimate) grievances, there were no more civil protests in the country in the tumultuous period of the 1990s and the 2000s.3 And then things changed. Not overnight, and not in a predictable manner, Romanians moved from being silent spectators of political events to active i Protesters were fired upon by unknown shooters believed to be members of the security police (Securitatea). Nearly a thousand people died in December that year. The identification of the culprits remains a topic of heated national debate to this day, contributing to the many unknowns about the Romanian revolution.

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demonstrators who made international headlines for weeks in early 2017. What prompted this (re)awakening?ii Interestingly, what paved the way was a series of protests in 2013 triggered by ecological concerns that turned into wider discontent about corruption and inefficiency. Following a proposal to allow gold mining in the small village of Roşia Montană, thousands of people got mobilized in protest from September to February – what became called the Romanian Autumn4 – until Parliament finally rejected the project. Another key moment leading to the 2017 demonstrations took place two years prior, when a fire at a nightclub in Bucharest killed over sixty people. This tragedy led to public anger concerning administrative irregularities and, more broadly, the implicit role of the authorities (tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Bucharest and other main cities chanted, among others, ‘corruption kills’5). This series of protests brought down the government at the time. It did not, however, create the kind of social change protesters, mostly young people, wanted to see in politics and in their country. This is the background of public discontent and mobilization against which, on the 31st of January 2017 at 9.30 pm, in a hurry and without abiding by regular procedures, the Romanian government passed the emergency ordinance OUG 13/2017. This ordinance basically decriminalized material damages under 200,000 RON (the equivalent of about 42,000 EUR, which was about a hundred times the wage of a highly skilled worker), including corruption charges under this amount (meaning that people convicted of such crimes in the past would have been able to run for office). Protests were almost immediate and culminated, on the 5th of February, with six hundred thousand demonstrators against corruption, leading to the repeal of the bill.6 However, the grievances of the people ran deeper than that – as one would expect in a country where proposing such a law to begin with was even conceivable  – and the protests continued until 2018. Change was created, but it was not enough. And this resulted in a long-standing civic movement under the banner Rezist (resist) and Rezistența (the resistance). The largest protests since 1989 showed the world a different Romania and also showed it to Romanians themselves.iii The role of social media and the power to self-organize are red threads running through this series of recent demonstrations. At its peak, in 2017, tens ii Incidentally, the Romanian anthem, written and published during the 1848 revolution, and turned into national anthem after the 1989 one, is called ‘Awaken thee, Romanian!’ (‘Deșteaptă-te, române!’). iii ‘At times when democracy shows signs of erosion, Romania gave the world, and most importantly, it gave itself, an inspiring new approach to political injustice, making use of its digital activists to design a fine-tuned, highly dynamic means of dissidence and self-representation’ (Tompea, 2018, p. 2).

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of thousands occupied Victory Square at night, in front of the government building, used lantern or phone lights to create spectacular images, including to recreate the colours of the Romanian flag in the crowd,7 had laser projections on the government and other building saying ‘We’ve woken up’ (Ne-am trezit), ‘Resignation’ (Demisia), and ‘We can see you’ (Vă vedem), sang the national anthem and chanted slogans such as ‘Shame on you’ (Ruşine să vă fie), ‘During the night like thieves’ (Noaptea ca hoţii) and ‘PSD, the red plague’ (PSD, ciuma roşie), the last referring to the ruling party and its colour. The creativity of the crowd was especially captured by the use of humoristic and political slogans (Figure  10)8 as well as trumpets, vuvuzelas, puppets, drums, masks, music ensembles. And all of this during winter nights with temperatures down to −10 degrees Celsius. In the end, the government did not resign, only the justice minister did. But the unprecedented demonstrations showed that the civil society is powerful, that other ways of doing politics are possible and that they had to be acted upon. The joy, jokes, songs, dance, anger, laughs and tears of demonstrators captured a common mood and that mood was one of hope. A kind of hope that invites and thrives on wondering, not of a single person but of the collective: I found another Romania. I made a different sign every night – one with three rats instead of the three PSD roses, I’d written ‘Filter politicians’ on a carton of Marlboro unfiltered cigarettes. Everyone was looking at the others’ signs and talking about them. It was civilized. No one was littering. I would shovel snow, collect any garbage around. I know I’ll be coming back once my girl finishes 1st grade. I’m hopeful.9

This feeling of hopefulness and the capacity to wonder, together, about a different future nurtured the Rezist movement for many months and continues to mark public consciousness. In the short term, it gave the anti-corruption agency the impetus to investigate thousands of abuse in office cases. A first #Rezist book was published by Curtea Veche, gathering the most stunning snapshots from the streets during the protests taken by a variety of photographers, journalists, leaders and artists from the country and from abroad.10 All profits from selling this book are donated to a NGO, Funky Citizens, which runs the factual.ro website, a project aimed at checking public policies and statements made by politicians and raising public awareness.11 Romanians did not radically change the(ir) world during those months, but they did take steps that can never be denied or taken back. They wondered out loud about what is wrong in their society and talked about it, shared, shouted,

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Figure 10  Slogans Used by Romanian Protesters in 2017. Photos taken by Beatrice Popescu Ghigeanu and reproduced with permission. The top left one makes reference to Rahova, a famous prison in Romania. The top right one says ‘PSD, the vote is not a blank cheque’, referring to how the ruling party, PSD, should not consider being democratically elected as an excuse to be above the law. The bottom left one writes ‘It’s so serious that even introverts came out’ (to protest), and the bottom right image includes two slogans with historical resonance: ‘In ’89 I was not born but now I am here’ (alluding to the anti-communist revolution) and ‘Ceaușescu did not die, he is Dragnea in desguise’ (comparing the PSD leader to the dictator).

wrote and sympathized with fellow citizens.iv They experienced doubt, joy, rage. And they continued. And would do it again next time: iv ‘The meanings and significances of these movements are not limited to its outcomes in the institutional policies arena. The emergence of social actors, the construction of activist networks, the

#Rezist 145 At one point, I could no longer follow the debate. It was too much. I was happy it was repealed. But was it enough? Are we still going to shout ‘Resign?’ What is it we really want? Why are we making a human flag? Are we aware of the extremes? Is there still a small, legal loophole that would allow OUG13 to take effect? … I don’t feel the protests had any result yet, but I think I managed to answer the most important question these days: I go out in the street because I want to wake up one morning, turn on the television and be shocked by the news that one of the country’s leaders is corrupt. For now, these kind of news stories are the norm. I’m tired of this norm, and I can’t wait for our version of normal to come. And I’m willing to keep going out in the streets until then.12

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

10

See Kuran (1991). For more details, see Siani-Davies (2005). Abăseacă & Pleyers (2019), p. 155. For more details, see Margarit (2016). More about this crisis and the role played by social media in shaping it can be found in Cmeciu & Coman (2018). For a detailed description of and commentary on these protests see Adi and Lilleker’s (2017) edited work #rezist – Romania’s 2017 anti-corruption protests: Causes, development and implications. See, for example, the Guardian article Romania protests enter 13th day with calls for government of ‘thieves’ to resign, available at https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2017/feb/13/romania-protests-enter-13th-day-with-calls-for-governmentof-thieves-to-resign.Accessed 23 January 2020. For many more fantastic illustrations of humour in the February 2017 protests see Armanca (2017). A quote from Adrian Tudorache, participant at the protest, reproduced in Tacu, Stănescu, Burtea, Bădescu, Ciobanu, Piturlea, Vrabie, Lunguţi, Stan & Brăduţ (2017, p. 59). The book is called #rezist. Proteste împotriva OUG 13/2017. For more details, see https://www.curteaveche.ro/p/rezist-proteste-impotriva-oug-13-2017. Accessed 23 January 2020.

transformation of personal subjectivities and relationship to politics, the redefinition of citizenship and democracy as well as the proliferation of alternative spaces are just as important outcomes. Throughout Romania, forms of resistance that foster social relations and support communities have strengthened’ (Abăseacă & Pleyers, 2019, p. 168).

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11 More details in Tompea (2018). 12 A quote from Ioan Maxim, 30, participant at the protest, reproduced in Tacu, Stănescu, Burtea, Bădescu, Ciobanu, Piţurlea, Vrabie, Lunguţi, Stan & Brăduţ (2017, pp. 60–1).

8

Collective Wonder

Until now I  discussed the experience of wonder in the case of individuals, even when acknowledging that people often wonder together (for more details, revisit Section 6.3). In the previous chapter, the notion of wonder as a deeply social experience, grounded in self–other relations and exchanges of positions and perspective, has been outlined. Here I will take this idea further by exploring the phenomenon of collective wonder which designates shared experiences of wondering.1 Through this notion, I  don’t mean to postulate the existence of a supra-individual or group mind that has the property of wondering; what I claim is that we can be attuned to the wondering of others and, though this, participate in the experience of other people while, in turn, opening ourselves to them. Wonder as a phenomenon, I  would argue, is particularly amenable to such attunement given that it connects us to the possible by engaging with other perspectives / the perspectives of others both as individual and as collectives. This kind of views have been formulated before, even if not fully theorized, for example, in relation to the practice of inquiry in organizations: Wonder is an engagement to share and is enlarged in the sharing. Contrary to what might be deduced from the descriptions of some of the scholars …, wonder is not only an individual experience but is typically a dialogical and communal one, especially in organizational inquiry, where it addresses the lives of people at work. Virtually all stories of wonder in this article were of accounts in which people shared their fascinations with others: researchers enjoy sparkling conversations and are enchanted when entering worlds of others, a parent shows a son the beauty of fossils, a journalist captivates a reader in a magazine essay, and a father listens in awe to a daughter’s philosophical questions.2

Carlsen and Sandelands note, further, that researchers of wonder within as well as outside organizations shouldn’t only wonder at and about the field, but wonder with people in the field. And, given that wonder designates an

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interest that goes beyond the self, shared wonder might be, in fact, the key to successful collaborative research. The same applies in education, in particular, in those classes based on open reflection and the cultivation of open, reflective attitudes that welcome multiplicity. Lindahl describes, in this context, the Wondering Together project based on the practice of philosophy with and for children (see also Section 5.3). As part of this project, preschool and primary schoolchildren and teachers were invited to a dialogue about scientific and philosophical questions, to engage in mutual wondering about the world and their joint exploration of it. Such practices are transformative precisely because they open up new possibilities; and they involve the possible precisely because they bring together different participants with their own positions, perspectives, experiences and understandings of the world.i Wondering is here done not only together with others but because of others: The mutual wondering when children philosophise with adults or amongst each other is created in relation to the Other. The views and words of the other, digressions introduced by the other from the original question, become central in this perspective. Those aspects can be crucial to whether the dialogue will lead to ‘difference’ or instead stop at the recreation of predetermined, ‘correct’ answers to all questions3.

Others are crucial for wondering because they stand for the kind of encountering of difference that triggers wonder, excites wonderers and is explored further by them. Lindahl postulates that, in the process of wondering together, what is developed is a form of situational sensitivity which is all about ‘daring to trust, trying to be secure in the uncertainty, and daring to be open when facing the unknown; this is a basis for being able to meet the other as “absolutely new” ’.4 This kind of sensitivity is essential for what I  call here collective wonder. Its mixture of security and uncertainty when facing alterity is exactly what makes us wonder with and about others. A wonder that precludes preconceived ideas about the other, that welcomes its otherness.

i ‘In the Wondering Together project, we attempted, through philosophical exploration, to attend to the children’s own questions, pose new questions, and open up to looking at things in a new light. In the project, children wondered about why the sun shines during daytime, whether we have to tell the truth, why we must know things, where the sound goes when we talk on a mobile telephone, and what constitutes justice. In listening to children and showing an interest in what they say, the inclination may arise to draw the reasoning to a final conclusion. The naive questions of children, however, have much in common with philosophy, in that they question everything. If one, as an adult, is prepared to follow children in their wondering, new explorations can be undertaken, and new hypothesis can be tested. Everything is possible; anything can happen’ (Lindahl, 2015, p. 61).



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This is the basis for what Hansen theorized as communities of wonder.5 For him, these are groups that come together, in educational or professional settings, to engage in Socratic dialogues and philosophical counselling practices born out of wonder (see also Chapter 1). Such communities do not follow preset rules or techniques. In order to participate in these collectives, ‘you have to be in a state of surrender and vulnerability and in a fundamental not-knowing mode, as well as in an openness and a listening to something that calls on you in a way where you have to give a personal response’.6 In such groups, facilitation is essential, but the facilitator must not stand aside. He or she is to be caught by wonder and wonderment, sharing into the state of the other participants. This implies recognizing the equality of each member and the deep openness to the experience of the other that makes up such communities. However, Hansen’s phenomenological focus remains largely on the individual within the collective.ii What I will try to do, as follows, is to go beyond wondering together and towards the togetherness of wondering. Can and does wonder take place in-between rather than within people? And, if so, what does this tell us about politics and social change? Before answering these questions, though, we need to understand why many are (still) reluctant to place wonder within the collective. And it all has to do with how we think and feel about the collective itself.

8.1  Who’s afraid of the big, bad crowd? The collective goes by many names. Group, team, community, crowd, mob, the masses, society and civil society, among others. We can notice just from this brief list that we ‘feel’ differently about each of these terms. Groups might be neutral, but mobs and crowds inspire fear, while being part of civil society tends to be worn as a badge of honour within democratic regimes. In this section, I will focus on crowds for a historical reason, that is that they have been much talked about and strongly reacted to from the nineteenth century onwards.7 Today we have a resurgence of interest in crowds, from revolutionary gatherings (like the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Arab Spring and the Romanian

ii The five momentums proposed by Hansen (2015, p. 227) include ‘1) a lived experience, 2) a personal wonderment, 3) the other and the otherness through authentic dialogues, 4) an existential grounding and understanding and 5) the practical wisdom and call of the situation in the midst of our daily and practical lives’ (p. 227). The other’s experience is an integral part of the process, but does not fully define it.

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protests discussed just before this chapter) to sports and online crowds, coming together to protest, support, comment and generally promote various agendas.8 What is important to note from the start is that the relation between individual and society has been a topic of philosophical debates for centuries. And the role of society, crowds and groups vis-à-vis individuals has often been approached with ambivalence, to say the least. Take, for example, Godwin’s reflections from the end of the eighteenth century on this issue: It is a curious subject to enquire into the due medium between individuality and concert. On the one hand, it is to be observed that human beings are formed for society. Without society, we shall probably be deprived of the most eminent enjoyments of which our nature is susceptible. In society, no man possessing the genuine marks of a man can stand alone … On the other hand, individuality is of the very essence of intellectual excellence. He that resigns himself wholly to sympathy and imitation can possess little of mental strength or accuracy.9

Unfortunately, future generations of scholars were guided more by the last part of this reflection, repeatedly emphasizing the negative consequences that being part of a crowd has on the individual’s intellect and morality. The French Revolution and the other revolutions that followed it shook Europe to its core. During these events, the crowds not only threatened to take over but often did so, turning the social order upside down. For the authorities, from royals to today’s governments, these episodes are a reminder of the tremendous power of crowds and the fact that this power escapes – and in fact rebels against – their control. As such, crowds had to be violent, irrational, primitive, immoral and dangerous; and to make every individual, even the most rational and restrained ones, the same way.10 This fear of the crowd, mixed with considerable fascination, was only exacerbated in the nineteenth century by rapid industrialization and the creation of a mass society that became much more difficult to know and almost impossible to predict. The one who cemented the crowd’s largely negative image was the French polymath Gustave Le Bon (see Box 8.1). While documenting how people give up control and their intellectual abilities in a crowd, he also explained this phenomenon by claiming that the individual is mesmerized in the presence of others – a popular explanation at the time – and loses his or her sense of self. In other words, the person becomes less of a person, completely open to the influence or outright manipulation of leaders, for better or worse (but mostly for the worse).



Collective Wonder

Box 8.1  Le Bon’s Crowd Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, first published in 1895, brought him international fame, even if not always appreciation. His well-known premise was that, within the crowd, the individual is transformed often beyond recognition. Individuals come to acquire a ‘collective mind’ that makes them think, feel and act differently. More specifically, ideas become fixed and rigid, personality and brain activity ‘disappear’ (!), intelligence is lowered and people are dominated almost entirely by the unconscious. They don’t follow the truth or reason anymore; they simply follow each other and their leaders. In Le Bon’s own words, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian  – that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images – which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd – and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will. (Le Bon, 1986, p. 36) Interestingly, Le Bon also thought that crowds think in images and are especially impressed by the marvellous. They are, in other words, disposed towards wondering. But this is not the Socratic or Aristotelian wonder based on doubt or the desire to know. No, Le Bon had in mind here Descartes’ consideration of wonder as a passion and, as such, as potentially opposed to reason  – the wonder that leads to stupefaction or astonishment, the one that blinds rather than awakens. Those who can manipulate images and the imagination of crowds in ways that make them marvel will ultimately control them. For the French author, this control can make crowds heroic or criminal, yet most of his examples point to the latter. Le Bon’s thinking inspired, in this regard, the fascist governments of the twentieth century who found in it the means to manipulate the population and the rhetoric needed to govern in a totalitarian manner. His scholarship has been heavily criticized, however, for being factually incorrect, demonizing crowds for political purposes, legitimizing repression and ignoring completely what crowds respond to

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through their action – which is often inequality and oppression – and what they call for – social change.a a

For a detailed and well-informed critique, see Reicher (2012). For example, by removing the ‘establishment’ from view (and hence from scrutiny), it represents the pursuit of an alternative to an unfair and unjust society as both anti-social and asocial action. It represents action which violates dominant limits on acceptability and civility as action which is purely irrational and unlimited. It represents the behaviours of those who act in terms of a politicised subject position (as miners, as workers, as citizens) as the behaviours of those who have lost all subjectivity. (p. 73)

Can crowds wonder? Given the largely negative account of what it means to be in a crowd, including lowered critical abilities, one would conclude this is not the case. Being hypnotized, in Le Bon’s terms, could never offer the distantiation and reflection that enable wonder; on the contrary, it enslaves the person to a single perspective, that of the group. And yet, there is another story to be told about crowds, one that rejects easy and propagandistic assumptions and recognizes the fact that people in a crowd might think, feel and act differently, which doesn’t mean they do so ‘less’ or ‘wrongly’. This account claims that crowds are agentic in shaping the social world, experience a new sense of possibility and feel excited and empowered by it.11 My argument is that they could not be able to do this – that is, engage the possible and be excited by this engagement – in the absence of wondering and, more than this, that their wonder is collective in nature. Wonder, in this case, is grounded in the same dialogue of perspective, just that in a crowd these dialogues become shared and of mutual concern. Hence the feeling of belonging and the joy associated with wondering and acting together, in solidarity. And, when this happens, it is not only personal histories that are rewritten but societal ones as well.iii

8.2  Wonder and politics The discussion of crowds above raises a number of important questions about wonder and politics. If crowds deindividualize the person, they reduce his or iii In the words of social activity Rebecca Solnit (2016, p. xxv): ‘The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies. We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.’



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her wonder to astonishment and, as such, to participating in political life in rash, violent, mindless ways. If, however, being in crowds means that people get to collectively envision multiple perspectives on the future and wonder about them, together, then the act of wondering itself becomes central for politics. This, once more, has been the topic of considerable historical debate and reflection. Is wonder supposed to enhance or inhibit our political awareness? We can become perplexed, and thus inactive, when faced with the unknown and the incomprehensible. But if this is the only state the individual or collective experiences, then it cannot be called wonder. Plato and Socrates both believed that wondering is not simply made to offer (or look for) theoretical knowledge, but it is at all times oriented towards social critique and the pursuit of the collective good.12 This might sound like an idealistic notion, but we have to remember here that Socrates gave his life for this ideal (see Chapter 1). Accused of corrupting the minds of youth, he held on to the position that the role of the philosopher was to be the gadfly of society, the one to bite this great, noble but sluggish horse out of its intellectual drowsy. Wondering is, here, indispensable for a healthy social and political life because it makes people really engage, perhaps for the first time, with the world of possibilities surrounding them. Other political philosophers, including Hobbes, added an interesting dimension to this discussion when specifying wonder as the glue that keeps citizens together and united. From the individual gadfly of society to collective wondering about law and state, this phenomenon seems to serve multiple political purposes.iv The same themes were picked up in the twentieth century by philosophers like Hannah Arendt (see Box 8.2). Aware of both the limits and possibilities of wonder when it came to political awareness and participation, Arendt developed a complex account of this phenomenon on the background of the striking lack of wondering that contributed to atrocities like the Holocaust.

Box 8.2  Hannah Arendt’s Engaged Thinking Most of Arendt’s reflections about wonder and its relation to politics can be found in the essay she wrote for Heidegger’s eightieth birthday.a In fact, her observations were prompted by the inexplicable fact of having one of the iv Wonder and admiration were objects of concern for Hobbes over nearly his entire writing career, appearing as early as his 1627 poem De Mirabilibus Pecci and as late as the Latin translation of Leviathan in 1668. For Hobbes, fear, the ‘anticipation of future evil,’ may direct men’s actions toward the formation of the state and away from breaking the law, but it is wonder and awe that keep the citizens of the commonwealth united and held together under the sovereign. (Barker, 2017, p. 3)

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greatest minds of the century – and a philosopher who talked extensively about wonder and wondering! – be so oblivious to the dangers of the Nazi ideology and accept to have benefited from that hideous regime. Was it perhaps because he was engaged in too much wondering that Heidegger disengaged from the social and political world around him? Is it the case that wonder presents the mind with so many perspectives that it renders it incapable, at times, of forming clear opinions and taking decisions? If so, Arendt notes, then wondering can actually be co-opted by totalitarian forms of education, the aim of which ‘has never been to install convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any’.b But this, she soon agrees, is not the actual nature of Socrates’ thaumazein but a perversion of it common in regimes of total terror that prey on the mind’s capacity for incessant questioning and turn it into unquestioning obedience. As Rubenstein also notes in relation to Heidegger, any unquestioning capitulation to ideology ‘is a matter not of too much wonder, but rather of too little’.c For Arendt, our capacity to wonder is closely related to that for engaged, responsible thinking, which is a precondition for building democratic societies and critical citizens. Either way, wondering greatly impacts politics and should be recognized as political by implication.d See Arendt (1978). In Rubenstein (2008), p. 21. c Rubenstein (2008), p. 23. d Lloyd (2018), p. 136. a

b

Recovering Arendt’s view of wonder as political, there is currently renewed interest for reclaiming this phenomenon as part of a wider set of strategies for resistance and social engagement.13 Some authors go even further and propose a politics of wonder, raising the timely question of what would happen if we took such an approach seriously. Their answer: A politics of wonder asks us to temporarily transcend our position in the world, even as we dwell more fully and thoroughly within it. A politics of wonder calls us to occupy another vantage point and to send our roots questing more deeply and broadly into unknown realms. It is truly a radical practice. To wonder is to contemplate and to surrender our expectations about how things should be. It is about meeting, dwelling with, and occupying our roots. It is about mingling receptively alongside our own fluid edges, where tidings of wonderment soak us in their rippling revelations.14

The politics of wonder is radical politics because it questions all the taken-forgranted foundations of society and opens it up to the possible and to the future.



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This is certainly not an easy task and, oftentimes, not a pleasant one either. Individually and collectively, such acts of wondering would have us accept the state of not knowing and of living with uncertainty (see also the Epilogue). In the words of Contessa and Hiles, this politics exposes our vulnerability,v and vulnerabilities are difficult to admit and even more difficult to embrace. It is much easier, on the contrary, to consent to already existing definitions of how the world is and where it is going. The unquestioned acceptance of a neoliberal, consumerist and environmentally wreaking order as the only world possible is, for example, a symptom of a collective failure of the imagination15 and, I would specify, a failure of collective wondering. When we surrender our capacity to wonder, we give up our greatest tool available to shape out politics, society and our future. Luckily, this surrender is by no means universal but seriously shaken, as we shall see, by activist politics.

8.3  Activism, art and wonder To regain optimism about the role of wonder, particularly collective wonder, in politics and in driving social change, we need to revisit the lessons learnt from the Romanian protests described before and then look even further. The beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, following the economic crises of the years before, made people around the world conscious of the inequality, corruption, environmental destruction and injustice around them. The Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, the climate march, Black Lives Matter and the Me Too movement are only a few examples of a wave of protests and revolutions that took place in many parts of the world, firing up the imagination of young generations especially. It is not surprising, then, to find the Protester declared person of the year 2011 by Time magazine. And the story of these new forms of activism has just begun. Who are the new activists? Considering this question, Curtin and McGarty concluded that this category is more like a fuzzy set than a clearly defined group.16 Activists generally are those people who pursue social and political causes and encourage others to support them as well. They can belong to all sides v ‘To be vulnerable is to yield  – at least momentarily  – to what we might not already understand. It is about acknowledging our finitudes and shortfalls. It is about giving wide-open ways for our unknowns to court us, to inform us, and to teach us. It is about listening astutely, taking our next steps in a balanced way, and making our choices in a more thoroughly integrated way’ (Contessa & Hiles, 2018, pp. 261–2).

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of the political spectrum,vi be part of grassroots movements and governmental or non-governmental organizations, represent all genders, ages and ethnicities. They can act on the streets, organizing meetings and preparing demonstrations, or work from behind the scenes, in dialogue with educators and policy makers, including being very active online. Most of them opt, today, for creative activism broadly understood as a kind of meta-activism that tries to facilitate critical and creative dialogue in-between traditional divides and actors, and as such functions as a priming pump for the political imagination if and when it manages to push the boundaries of the known repertoire of contention in its attempt to get the individual citizen to reflect on her responsibility in moving humanity further. Creative activists critique and sometimes point to solutions, but whether they make invisible theatre, do a hoax, infiltrate, go naked, turn the tables, reclaim or make prefigurative interventions – their finest task is to pose questions that open up the political.17

Harrebye’s description above applies well to the various forms of creative activism,vii capturing their ultimate goal: to pose questions, to make people think and wonder. While not reducible to art, creative activism does often blurry the lines between the artistic and the political, with the aim of revitalizing our political imagination. And we do live in a context in which we are witnessing a dramatic increase in socially engaged art that is public, participative, performative and interactive.18 These kinds of works, both in museums and on the street, carry political messages, implicitly or explicitly, trying to involve the passers-by and initiate change. While it can be argued that art is, at all times, political to some extent,19 it is the phenomenon of artivism that made the most out of the social mission of art and the social role of artists (see Box 8.3).

vi Even if we are often tempted to think of activists as coming from the left, promoting social inclusion, equality, tolerance and the protection of the environment, we need to keep in mind that there are also right-wing activists, including far right activists, who are actually impactful at spreading their agenda, especially on social media. vii For more on this: Creative activism includes many different kinds of pranks and protests, as well as participation in various happenings, street art, tactical media, social utopian experiments, viral campaigns, flash mobs, subvertisement, the-emperor-has-no-clothes disruption, invisible theater, and minor additions or twists to the already known traditional repertoire of demonstrations, sitins, strikes, barricades, lobbyism, information campaigns, boycotts, mass petitions, the urban insurrection, etc. (Harrebye, 2016, p. 4)



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Box 8.3  Artivism Starting from early twenty-first century, artivism – a combination of art and activism  – became a global phenomenon.a Beyond graffiti and street art, artivism found new spaces and forms of expression to spread its message. Building on the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, it went on to explore the domains of performance, happening, body and video art, among others, and their potential for immediate social action. Playing with meanings and deconstructing the social function of objects, rituals and institutions, artivists reach out to a variety of audiences in an attempt to engage them, to make them wonder and lead them to action. Occupying unexpected spaces (e.g. crowded urban areas, public transport, abandoned factories) and making the most of the power to surprise, they gradually built a form of art that might be ephemeral, but it is, at the same time, participative, dynamic and collective. They work with humour and irony, alternative meanings and images, metaphors and analogies, to re-present the reality of the world, in particular its negative aspects. In this way, the strength of artivism lies not merely in its aesthetic avant-garde, but in its catalytic power to point out injustice, inequality or emptiness in human development. … Artivists generate events because they break the structure of conventional communication, erupting into the social space to attract attention and inoculate thought in their recipients.b In other words, they foster wonder and wondering in those who witness, participate in and also initiate artivist works or happenings. Whether this wonder succeeds in creating social change is another question. But it certainly plants the seeds by helping activists and audiences reimagine the world and be empowered, collectively, by this kind of imagination.c For more details on this, see Aladro-Vico, Jivkova-Semova & Bailey (2018). Aladro-Vico, Jivkova-Semova & Bailey (2018, p. 12). c As Boros (2012, p. 9) explains, a

b

When we create or encounter art, we may momentarily breathe free from the needs of our daily lives and from accepted reality, as we are able to reimagine the way that we perceive the world around us. This is what makes art inherently political. It affords us the ability to wield power over that which we otherwise have little or no control. In the realm of art, we can see the world as we would like it to be, and we can show others new possibilities through art.

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Artivism and creative forms of activism more generally cultivate collective wonder. This is partially because they use artistic means that go beyond the simple beautification of public spaces and even the formulation of overt political messages. What art demonstrates are imaginative ways of seeing the world and our everyday lives by restructuring both.20 In a wonder-inducing manner, artivism makes the familiar unfamiliar for us (see Chapter 5) and makes us aware of the fact that a new type of society is possible. It carries, thus, ‘the potential to interrupt our habits of seeing and to challenge and alter what and how we know, … undoing dominant and oppressive ways of knowing and instigating acts of resistance’.21 The inner dynamic of artivism is, in many ways, that of wonder itself. Both of them are based on the formulation of new perspectives on otherwise everyday realities and, most importantly, the cultivation of alternatives – even radically different perspectives  – that transform these realities for us.22 They are fundamentally grounded in multiplicity and the possibility of reflecting on the world from the perspective of others.viii The question to raise, in the end, is whether this ‘wonder-full’ activism does indeed deliver social change.

8.4  Wondering about change Social change comes in many forms and guises,ix some of them mundane, even predictable, others unexpected and revolutionary. All of them, I  argue here, are fuelled to some extent by wonder because all of them present us with new perspectives on ourselves, our society and the future, perspectives we are meant to become aware of, to be excited or motivated about and to explore. And these processes take place at a collective rather than individual level (alone). This is because true social change can never be initiated by a single person or come out of a single person’s perspectival dialogue. Social change is based on kinds of mobilization in which people share an identity, develop bonds of solidarity, are in pursuit of a common, identifiable cause and consistently advocate their ideas over time;23 and it is also used to wonder together.

viii For this theoretical model of creative artivism  – the mirror effect and critical reflection  – see Harrebye (2016). ix According to Subašić, Reynolds, Reicher and Klandermans (2012, p. 62), social change ‘takes place as a result of human agency and intention to affect a given social environment based on the view that existing social conditions or relations are untenable’.



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Wonder is at the heart of social change inasmuch as the latter emerges from the social critique of widely accepted ideas or perspectives. This is because to wonder means to take distance from received wisdom and trouble it, including wisdom related to the way society works or should be working.x By inviting people to take the perspective of others, wondering goes beyond ‘acknowledging what may be plausible in an actual rival point of view. It involves shifting to a shared space of detachment where other possible perspectives can be taken into account.’24 It is through collective wonder that utopian visions of society are constantly created and recreated. This might be a controversial claim for those who believe that utopian dreams are based on a rejection of difference, that is, that utopias are always singular, closed, normative. As Wagner-Lawlor reminds us though, these are actually dystopias or utopias on the verge of turning dystopic. She relates utopias with wonder and also with the act of wanting to shape perspectives we didn’t know were even possible. Oftentimes, these perspectives will never come true  – in the end, the etymology of utopia leads us to the concept of ‘nowhere’. Other times they end up having disastrous consequences, for example, the realization of communism within a series of brutal, totalitarian regimes.25 And yet other times, still, they end in disappointment. Even the protests in Romania discussed before achieved their immediate aims but, arguably, did not yet lead to the radical social transformation dreamt about by the protesters. Most of the Arab Spring uprisings ended in failure. The Occupy movement did not end capitalist greed. Is this a sign that utopias are dead or they should be replaced with more realistic visions of our collective dreams?xi To reach this conclusion means to ignore the transformative power of collective wondering. Even when the transformation is not materialized in reality, or at least not in the short term, to wonder with others with the goal of achieving social change means to experience doubt about how the world is, excitement about how it could be and hope that it will be so one day. Wondering expands the space of what is possible for our thinking and for our collective action. Once accomplished, this expansion of the thinkable and the doable in

x Wonder ‘does involve stepping back stepping back from apparent certainties in order to think in a different space – the space of judgement’ (Lloyd, 2018, p. 175). xi For an ample and persuasive discussion of ‘real utopias’ see Wright (2010); ‘utopian ideals that are grounded in the real potentials of humanity, utopian destinations that have accessible waystations, utopian designs of institutions that can inform our practical tasks of navigating a world of imperfect conditions for social change’ (p. 4).

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society cannot be undone even by the most repressive regimes and the harshest of life conditions.xii Hope lingers for much longer than wonder itself, with which it shares the common root of embracing the unknown and acting upon it. In the inspired and inspirational words of Rebecca Solnit, Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. … It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.26

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

See also Glăveanu (2017a). Carlsen & Sandelands (2014), p. 38. Lindahl (2015), p. 63. Lindahl (2015), p. 65. See Hansen (2015). Hansen (2015), p. 218. Classics in this area are Le Bon’s (1896) The crowd: A study of the popular mind, Tarde’s (1969; originally published in 1901) The public and the crowd, and Freud’s (1922) Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Borch & Knudsen (2013), p. 109. Godwin (1976), pp. 756–7 (original from the 1790s). For lengthy discussions of crowds and their representation, see Reicher (2011) and McPhail (2017). For more details, see Drury & Reicher (2009). Lloyd (2018), p. 18. See Lloyd (2018) for an entire chapter dedicated to this issue. Contessa & Hiles (2018), p. 261. See also Bottici & Challand (2011). Curtin & McGarty (2016), p. 228.

xii ‘Disordering or reordering, even if such rearrangement fails to achieve its purpose, whatever that may be, or is deemed a “failure” (by an audience or by the market), is much like a “failed” revolt that ultimately inspires successful political change: it has nonetheless expanded the imagination of the collective consciousness, which lays open the possibility for change’ (Harrebye, 2016, p. 12).

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Collective Wonder Harrebye (2016), p. 220. See Boros (2012). For a broader discussion of this idea, see Edelman (1995). Boros (2012), p. 15. Capous-Desyllas & Morgaine (2018), pp. xv–xvi. This argument is made in the case of art and politics by Edelman (1995), p. 6. Harrebye (2016), p. 47. Lloyd (2018), p. 176. See Thies (2017). Solnit (2016), p. xiv.

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Children’s Questions Where does ink come from? How do magnets work? Why is it so hard to find a cure for AIDS? How is a rainbow formed? Why are some people right-handed and some left-handed? Why are yawns contagious? Why do babies cry? How is a pencil made? How do they make two-way mirrors? Why are some people ticklish? Why do old people lose their teeth? Why is spinach green? What happened to Amelia Earhart? Why can’t people fly? How does a telephone work? What happens when we sleep? How do rotary engines work? Why is fire hot? Why do old people smell bad? Who invented cheese? Why do we only remember about 10 percent of what we learn? Where did swear words come from? Why do we get a reflection in the water?1 Anyone who was been hanging around children or teenagers is probably familiar with most of the questions above (and morei). Adults think about these things as

i For more fantastic examples of children or young people’s questions see the archived Reddit tread on ‘What is the best question you’ve ever heard a child ask?’ that received 7.7k comments. The original post by u/Bucky_Ohare seven years ago offers an excellent example of shared wonder: ‘I was walking to my car today, done with work and heading home, when I found myself in “traffic.” I ended up stuck

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well but are, on the whole, less inclined to ask each other questions that, because are commonly raised by children, are wrongly labelled as childish. Are these children ‘really’ wondering or being curious or simply asking questions? As always, it is difficult to know what phenomenon we are talking about without more notions about the context of each question. What we can agree on is the fact that (a) questions are one of the main ways in which children express their wonder (even if not the only one) and (b) not every question signals wondering per se, in most cases we are talking probably about curiosity. For Engel, curiosity is the desire to know more.2 As we saw in this book, wonder is motivated by a desire to understand which includes, and actually invites, not knowing. In other words, any one of the questions above could express and/or evoke wonder if and when it is posed to continuously marvel at the world rather than grasp it once and for all.ii Children’s questions have been a topic of research for a long time, with the first papers investigating them being published in the 1920s.3 Their questions have been considered, however, much more as an illustration of curiosity than wonder. Berlyne, for example, famously wrote about epistemic behaviours and curiosity, the latter conceived as a state of high drive or arousal induced by conceptual conflict (taking the form of novelty, surprise, complexity, incongruity, etc.).4 This information processing perspective on curiosity and questioning continues to be used today, with questions being considered, for instance, to express an information requesting mechanism that allows the ones asking them to update their knowledge structures and make them more adultlike.5 There is much to critique in these purely cognitive accounts, among others the fact that they undermine the possibility of wonder by focusing on knowing as the ultimate standard in cognitive development. They also tend to pay little attention to the context of formulating and answering questions, which differs between home, school and the workplace.

behind a slow-moving caravan of a mom and her three kids, one in a stroller. Everything’s strangely quiet, the kids are carrying their mcdonald’s drinks and the mom is checking her phone. Then, out of the blue, the littlest boy turns to his mother and asks… ‘Why am I right handed?’ It totally floored me. Holy s***, why am I  right handed?! I  found myself momentarily stuck thinking about every possibility. The mother was flustered and said ‘that’s just what you are,’ after a few moments of pause. It was a total mindf*** for a complete moment. There was no warning, nothing out of the ordinary. He just turned to her and asked that. I think it’s freaking awesome that kid is contemplating that idea randomly.’ ii This might look like a subtle difference, but it is a fundamental one. A key behavioural indicator to differentiate between the two is this one: does the child stop asking questions once he or she gets to know the answer or actively continues to do so? The first response is specific for curiosity, the second one for wonder, at least in the way I theorize them here (see also Chapters 1 and 2).



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Some of the first addressees of children’s questions are certainly the parents or caregivers, who are typically bombarded, especially, by ‘why’ questions soon after children acquire language. It takes a particularly patient (curious and wonder-prone) parent to engage with each one of them fully and openly and not fall back on the counterproductive ‘Because I said so!’6 Granted, children can ask difficult questions. A qualitative study conducted by Sak in 2015 with parents of children attending preschool7 revealed five main categories children’s questions fall under:  religion (e.g. the gender of God, when God was born, why He doesn’t destroy evil), science and nature (e.g. why stars don’t fall, why the sea is salty, how people fly in space), sex and fertility (e.g. how they came into the world, how the foetus breathes in the womb, how they can become parents), daily life (e.g. why people have mobile phones, why parents go to work) and miscellaneous (e.g. the meaning of love). To these questions, the same study showed, parents respond by giving realistic answers (with or without examples), giving wrong or insufficient answers, resorting to purely religious explanations (e.g. it’s God’s will), leaving questions unanswered or glossing over them and, sometimes, threatening or exhorting the child. Needless to say, the last types of answers are surely not conducive for curiosity or wonder.iii Much more research attention has been paid to understanding what happens to children’s sense of curiosity and wonder at school. In principle, given the explicit educational mission of school environments, one would expect the former would receive a considerable boost, even by comparison to home. Unfortunately, though, there seems to be relatively little room for questions at school, especially open or exploratory ones. This is because teachers often prefer to ask closed, factual questions and, at the same time, fear not knowing how to handle students’ open questions.8 Researchers like Susan Engel specifically deplore the fact that children’s natural curiosity is either stifled or, at best, not made a priority in today’s education even if, by all standards, it is a vital resource for learning.iv There are multiple reasons for this situation, from the

iii There are many ways in which parents can get help on how to answer their children’s difficult questions. One online website, kids-ask.org, proposed, for instance, five responses:  validate your child, clarify or confirm the question if needed, share a fact (an accurate one), share a feeling (when it feels right) and share a value (sharing one’s beliefs). iv ‘In telling my developmental story, I will argue that what begins as a robust characteristic, possessed by all normally developing babies, becomes more fragile, and begins to show the fingerprint of a child’s experiences – with her parents, in her home, and at school. This developmental account, in other words, helps explain why a quality that is ubiquitous in toddlers is hard to find at all by the time children are in elementary school. Yet, ironically, it is clearer than ever that curiosity is the linchpin of intellectual achievement. People who are curious learn more than people who are not, and people learn more when they are curious than when they are not. The fact that these two statements are different, and both true, makes it even more important to figure out what prevents schools from encouraging curiosity, and what we might do about it’ (Engel, 2015, pp. 2–3).

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Figure 11  Children in Front of a Jellyfish Tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

current obsession with standardized testing (and teaching to the test) to giving students a lot of opportunities to explore objects but not to ask questions or talk to each other. In order to understand the role played by questioning in education, we would need to reflect for a moment on different types of questions. Typologies abound in this regard. In the early 1960s, Gallagher and Ascher distinguished between memory-based, convergent thinking, divergent thinking and evaluative thinking questions.9 Closer to our time, Elstgeest made the difference between attention-focusing questions, comparison questions, measuring and counting questions, action questions and problem-posing questions.10 Very recently, Newton discussed the need for using focused questions that foster productive (and creative) thought, such as: why? what? how? who with? what alternatives? and what next?11 In each case, there is a transition proposed from ‘lower’ level to ‘higher’ level questions with the implication that the last ones, in particular, are much better placed to trigger curiosity. But is this the case also for wonder? I would argue, perhaps counterintuitively, that there are no specific wonderevoking questions because wonder has to do with much more than the questions themselves. It is fundamentally grounded in the relation between questions and answers and the way in which the latter are used to invite new lines of



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questioning. This is, in the end, the hallmark of Socratic types of inquiry.v Wonder flourishes in those environments in which interlocutors (e.g. teachers) don’t have preset answers in mind but are genuinely open (and curious) about what emerges in and through the conversation. In both families and schools, this requires taking children’s questions seriously12 in the sense of valuing them for what they are: efforts to grasp the complex, messy, terrifying yet certainly marvellous world around them (see Figure 11).

Notes 1 This is a list of questions formulated by high school juniors and reported by Teitelbaum (2006, p. 31). 2 Engel (2011), p. 627. 3 See Thompson (1924). 4 See Berlyne (1965). 5 See Chouinard (2007). 6 See Teitelbaum (2006). 7 See Sak (2015). 8 Harlen & Qualter (2004). 9 Gallagher & Ascher (1963). 10 Elstgeest (2001). 11 Newton (2017). 12 See also Olsson (2013).

v ‘Questions define tasks, express problems, and delineate issues. Answers on the other hand often signal a full stop in thought. Only when an answer generates a further question does thought continue its life as such’ (Paul & Elder, 2007, p. 62).

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(Re)learning Wonder

Is it the case that we learn to wonder or does this experience come ‘naturally’? Many scholars believe the latter and argue for the universality and cross-cultural and cross-historical nature of wondering.i Others make the same point about curiosity, a related phenomenon – that it is something children are born with and express since birth.ii But is this really the case for wonder? As I proposed in this book (see Chapters 2 and 3), wonder is fundamentally grounded in our capacity to conceive of the world, as well as our own knowledge and understanding, as perspectival. Becoming aware of our own perspective – the birth of self-consciousness – is a developmental achievement occurring during the first two years of life. With time, episodes of wonder grow in complexity as more and more perspectives are added to the dialogue through social and material forms of interaction. So, while the capacity to wonder is not learnt per se, but a natural development of our understanding of self and the world, the ‘quality’ and frequency of our wondering depend on a favourable environment and specific forms of education. As I will show in this final chapter, wonder can be cultivated just as much as it can be hindered, and there is a strong argument to be made for relearning or reconnecting with our natural inclinations for it. There are heated discussions going on nowadays (and for the past few decades, in fact) about what schools are doing to children’s creativity, independent and critical thinking, curiosity and wonder. As spaces of learning and interaction, one would expect schooling to be one of the key promoters of wonder and i ‘On the face of it, awe and wonder are experiences that transcend religion, culture, politics, and just about every other “contextualizing” feature of human existence that one could imagine’ (Gallagher, Reinerman-Jones, Janz, Bockelman & Trempler, 2015, p. 2); see also Fisher, 1998. ii ‘But all children, when they are young, are eager to learn more about the unfamiliar. Anybody who has ever watched toddlers has seen the way in which they tirelessly explore the physical world around them. They put things in their mouths, open lids, peer inside spaces, take things apart, and put things together. Many of their gestures seem aimed at gaining information about the physical world around them. A closer look reveals just how powerful and formative these explorations are in shaping a child’s early acquisition of knowledge’ (Engel, 2011, p. 628).

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wondering practices. While this might be an agreed upon ideal, the reality on the ground is a bit different1 for a variety of reasons (see also the preceding discussion about children’s questions). However, there are many advocates for developing forms of education for wonder,2 and some go as far as to claim that ‘it is a moral imperative to encourage wonder in our classrooms and to do so in an authentic way’.3 Empirical evidence is also accumulating that wonder makes a positive contribution to the learning process by increasing student involvement.4 And yet, not everyone would agree with the claims and objectives stated above. The arguments brought by this side of the debate are historical and philosophical. For example, Plato and Socrates believed that philosophy begins in wonder but associated it also with a state of puzzlement (or aporia which, etymologically, means lacking a path or way). In other words, those who wonder will necessarily experience, at some point, being perplexed or lost. Are these experiences useful or desirable in education? Even if neither of these philosophers saw wondering as debilitating, there is a clear concern that ‘too much puzzlement could lead to an overwhelmed and frustrated feeling bordering on relativism’.5 This kind of suspicion about the dark sides of wondering continued through the centuries. Francis Bacon, for instance, took it as important for the acquisition of knowledge, but, because it is insufficient epistemologically, he termed its final state one of ‘broken knowledge’.6 There is even a long and interesting historical connection between wonder and stupidity explored more at length in Box 9.1.

Box 9.1  Wonder and Stupidity ‘To draw connections between wonder and stupidity may seem far-fetched. Yet its associations with states of stupor or stupefaction are not just accidents of terminology. Wonder and stupidity can seem like very different states. Yet their paths have crossed throughout the history of philosophy, and that history has left its residue in modern attitudes to knowledge.’a The perplexity often associated with states of wonder, especially those bordering awe, historically led to the idea that wondering might, in fact, impede thinking, at least temporarily. And yet, the notion of stupidity itself, that several authors connected to wonder, needs to be understood in a nuanced manner. For example, Flaubert was fascinated by a kind of stupidity that is not synonymous with ignorance or lack of intelligence, but is a precondition for thought. In his posthumous, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pecuchet,b the celebrated French novelist told of the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks in search of intellectual stimulation. However, every project they start ends in ruin because of their incapacity to distinguish symbols from reality, often with



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comical effects. Running through the book is the theme of questioning what is knowable and ridiculing attempts at systematizing all knowledge (Flaubert intended to publish a massive encyclopaedia of commonplace notions from what the two of them copied out). Some of these reflections have been picked up, more recently, by Derrida in his seminars on The beast and the sovereignc in which he discussed the singularity of aporia and the relation between stupidity and philosophy. His rather provocative claim was that the philosopher’s persistence in asking questions, going back to the Socratic method of stimulating wonder, is susceptible to a form of stupidity (bêtise in French). Wisdom and stupidity, wonder and stupor, knowing and not knowing stand, as they always did, in close proximity to each other. Lloyd (2018), p. 8. See Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet (1979, originally published in 1881). c See Derrida’s The beast and the sovereign (2009; a seminar from 2001–2). a

b

So, what are we to make of wonder’s role and place in education? It is part of the main argument of this book that wondering has important (and positive) developmental consequences at both an individual and collective level. As such, it should be a quality and a process highly praised in the school context. However, because of wonder’s emphasis on questioning, doubt, uncertainty and not knowing, schools and teachers are at best ambivalent about cultivating such experiences to the point of preventing their students from wondering (or wondering ‘too much’). It is the latter that should make us seriously reflect on the aims and practices of our educational systems and stress the need for ‘relearning’ wonder in the case of students and teachers alike.iii

9.1  Pedagogies for/of wonder It is undeniable that current pedagogies focused on standardized assessment and, as such, on getting the one right or correct answer are antithetical to wondering. Even if they may have other virtues, for example, comparability of outcomes, these fade in comparison to the greater damage such pedagogical iii More specifically, we need to ask: ‘how wonder can be integrated more frequently in the curriculum, how teachers can evoke students’ sense of wonder with different curricular content, and how schools can nurture and utilize the capacity of students to sense wonder in the world’ (Egan, Cant & Judson, 2014, n.a.).

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systems produce – inhibiting students’ natural inclination to wonder, by which I mean to question, to doubt and to thrive when faced with uncertainty. The ‘real world’ beyond the walls of the school, complex, fast-paced and unpredictable, requires all of the above. There are, in this context, many hard criticisms of schooling, a system accused of acting more like a prison house than as a space in which inquiry and wonderbased learning flourish: We have been trained to seek out quick explanations to our wonders and then, upon hearing an answer, assume that we have nothing left to learn. Not surprisingly, learning has become boring for many students because we present the world as almost fully known; we have removed the mystery and turned the puzzles into simple ones that can be solved in a few neat steps. There is a neat and tidy path of learning. It is rare that we collectively wander in thought anymore and so it becomes rare to wonder.7

The quote above captures something essential  – and troubling  – when it comes to current pedagogical approaches and their long-term effects. It is not only the case that learning at school risks becoming a boring, unexciting affair, but this mindset is carried by students into their adult lives. Acquiring knowledge is a straightforward, effortful and joyless process because knowledge, in this paradigm, is represented only by dominant, conventional perspectives. Wondering about alternatives is either discouraged or seen as a hobby done in one’s spare time. Of course, there are many challenges to this way of seeing things. In recent years, more and more voices have advocated explicitly for adopting a ‘pedagogy of wonder’ inside and outside the classroom. What does this pedagogy consist of? Forging a pedagogy of wonder demands connection to the emotive embodiment of science as a uniquely human process that nurtures our intense need to know. … The process involves a focus on phenomena, posing questions that direct attention to key attributes, and then inviting children to engage in open wondering. This wondering includes the strange, confusing, and amazing things students might be noticing without worries of being ‘correct’ or trying to know the answer before the investigations begin. This process helps the teacher to evoke the students’ internal thinking and emotional connection to the content and often provides meaningful insights as a tool for pre- and formative assessment.8

In other words, it is a pedagogy open to the possible in human experience. It is an approach that does away with the anxiety and dread many students



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(and sometimes teachers) undergo in educational environments obsessed with performance outcomes alone. Pedagogies for and of wonder are neither student nor teacher centred, but dialogue driven. They cultivate questioning, inquiry, debate, collective wonder and problem solving. It is an approach that makes learning meaningful for both students and teachers who thus become co-participants in the process of education. Its adoption is, in the end, an act of pedagogical courage, the courage to open up the possible without trying to immediately assimilate or contain it. These principles tend to be applied more commonly in the arts and humanities. There is, in this regard, a widespread belief that ‘the arts help us wonder, cultivate our moral imaginations, help promote empathy, expand our appreciation and understanding’.9 But, of course, pedagogies of wonder should not be reduced to the arts, as they have equally much to offer science education, in particular learning about nature and its wonders (see Box 9.2).

Box 9.2  Wonder in the Science Classroom  While popular imagination tends to associate wonder (just like creativity) with the arts, there is a vital role played by this phenomenon (in collaboration with curiosity) in the sciences, including in mathematics. In fact, studies show that wonder in mathematics is expressed both in the desire to understand and/or prove an observed relationship and in the desire to test extensions, variations and find possible generalizations.a They also identify surprise at the unexpected and unexplained as the true engine of wonder in mathematics, creating a bridge between ‘wondering at’ and ‘wondering why’ – an essential transition in all science education. There is considerable research today on how a sense of wonder can be fostered in the science classroom.b The focus of these studies tends to be on practices of science teachers (which, while valuable, obscure the fact that wonder is a relational phenomenon), including the way in which their own life experiences led them to employ scientific explanations for events. Stolberg, for instance, surveyed 140 pre-service primary teachers and compiled a list of 240 events or occasions that evoked, for them, a heightened sense of wonder.c These episodes included physical, personal and metaphysical types of wondering. The first one is close to the feelings of awe or sublime when experiencing nature. The second relates to intimate events that mark one’s lifecourse. Finally, what sets metaphysical wonder apart is the fact that it ‘appears to lead to a shift in perspective as one partakes in a broader reflection on the experience, to its integration with other experiences, leading the individual to ask more searching types of questions’.d Overall, a key conclusion was that

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teachers of science  – and I  would expand this to all teachers  – should pay attention to their own experiences of wonder in order to be able to identify and cultivate them in their students, often by wondering together with them. Zazkis & R. Zazkis (2014), p. 185. See, for example, Hadzigeorgiou (2012). c For more details, see Stolberg (2008). d Stolberg (2008), p. 1962. a

b

Whether applied to the natural or social sciences, arts or humanities, or simply at home or in other everyday contexts, pedagogies for and of wonder bring with them different types of awareness: that one’s knowledge is incomplete or mistaken, that there is more to be learned, that some phenomena exist at all, that there are unexpected connections between phenomena and ideas10 and so on. Most of all, they make teachers and students jointly aware of the universe of possibilities surrounding them, an act as liberating as it is frightful for traditional education.

9.2  Wondering fully One of the biggest difficulties faced when cultivating wonder in education has to do with the fact that only certain facets of it tend to be fostered, often at the expense of others. If we take the common distinction between wondering at and wondering about, for instance (for a reminder, revisit Box 2.1), we can easily notice that some teachers favour the former while others the latter. In the first category we find those who like to use all sorts of materials to surprise students and make them curious. This is how, for example, unexpected facts can be brought up at the start of the lesson, ambiguous objects can be used for demonstrations or amusing videos shown in order to lighten the mood. Each one of these could potentially make students pay attention and have an emotional reaction to what is being presented. And yet, these pedagogical acts alone can never ensure learning. Nor would the ‘opposite’ approach: focusing on giving students the proper and most accurate tools (e.g. concepts, handouts, textbooks, explanations and so on) to explore a certain object, problem or situation. Wondering about is stimulated by these kinds of support but, without the spark of motivation and



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emotion offered by wondering at, interest can soon dry out. Just the same, using surprising or awe-inducing stimuli in the classroom to astonish students is wasted without giving them the proper tools to examine the objects of their astonishment. There are, however, authors who promote the value of wondering at above and beyond wondering about. Schinkel, in this context, made the difference between what he called active wondering and deep or contemplative wonder.11 Active wonder entails a drive to explore, find out and explain. Deep wonder is not inherently inquisitive but leaves us lost for words, facing the mysterious or inexplicable. In many ways, then, active wonder is what most educators consider when it comes to their work, the equivalent of wondering about. Yet Schinkel makes the argument that deep wonder is not to be avoided and that it plays a particularly important educational role. ‘This importance is found to lie, not just in its motivational effects – real though they are – but in making us attend to the world for its own sake, and making us aware of the limits of our understanding.’12 As such, deep wonder or wondering at should be promoted in its own right and not only as the starting point for more active forms of wondering. And then there are counterarguments to this general position: What needs to be stressed here is that surprise – a ‘wow’ exclamation (i.e., the emotional component)  – without awareness should not  – and cannot  – be considered an appropriate source of wonder that have the potential to contribute to understanding. Apparently, flashy demonstrations, which leave children dumbfounded, without awareness of what really happens, or of what those demonstrations mean, cannot be considered appropriate science activities.13

Of course, one can argue that deep wonder has nothing to do with simple ‘wow’ exclamations in the classroom. And yet, what we have here are two different positions on education and wonder clashing with each other: for one, astonishment shapes learning; for the other, it is an insufficient form of wanting to get students’ attention. The same debate can and has been formulated in a variety of different terms. Kareem, for instance, preferred to talk about engrossment and detachment in wondering, two facets that bear similarities with wondering at and wondering about, respectively.14 Adopting a historical perspective, she considered the negative side of wondering in terms of ‘excessive wonder’ which can come out of two causes: paying too much attention to undeserving objects (i.e. becoming engrossed with them while wondering at or wondering deeply) and failing to pay attention to deserving objects (in other words, reflecting indiscriminately at everything in misplaced acts of active wonder or wondering

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about). The solution, for her, is not to cultivate one or the other facet of wonder but to consider more carefully what constitutes one’s object of wonder. In order to achieve this, Kareem believes, we need to balance novelty and familiarity better.iv In my view, the balancing act should take place at the level of process, not (only) object. In the dynamic model of wondering proposed here (see Chapter 3), the experience of wonder requires awareness, excitement and exploration of the possible. Without any of these  – captured by wondering at and about, deep and active wonder, engrossment and detachment – we not only miss the full transformative potential of wondering but might also change it altogether. Wondering at or wondering deeply easily turns into awe, astonishment, contemplation, even the sublime. Wondering about, actively, can become mere curiosity or pondering. To wonder fully requires the interrelation between these different aspects. This is much easier said than done given that some teachers (and even students) could prefer or be better at using one dimension alone. How these preferences can be educated and what the role of teachers might be in this regard are issues explored as follows.

9.3  Wonder-full teachers While wonder is a relational, intersubjective phenomenon, the role of facilitating it falls primarily on teachers, at least when it comes to formal education. It is not only the case that teachers orchestrate the dynamic of the class, but they also bring to it their own philosophy and practice that might be more or less open to the wondering of others, including their own. Indeed, an argument can be made that teachers who don’t wonder themselves rarely inspire their students to embrace this process.v Given that a lot of what is transmitted in education is based on modelling, a teacher’s excitement about the possible, development of

iv ‘How, then, might wonder be regulated so as to maximize attention  – to promote an attention that is at once heightened and disinterested – without causing either credulous engrossment or a radically shortened attention span? Tempering novelty with familiarity maximizes critical attention by keeping the mind at the perfect tipping point between dullness and stupor. The familiar tempers novelty precisely because it does not evoke wonder, thereby preventing the mind from becoming consumed with the excessive wonder associated with astonishment or stupor’ (Kareem, 2014, p. 41). v ‘This is extremely problematic because, as Rachel Carson points out, “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in” (1965, p. 45). How can we foster this type of learning if as teachers we have forgotten how to find excitement in a blade of grass or inspiration in a handful of soil’ (Piersol, 2013, p. 4).



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new lines of questioning and appreciation for doubt, including applied to one’s own conclusions, are all essential. But who are those wonder-full teachers, ready to relinquish their aura of certainty and control over the topic (and, indirectly, the class) and embrace the unknown and unpredictable within classroom conversations? Like everywhere else, such teachers are not born but made: If we are to teach children to expand on their intrinsic curiosity and make it a centerpiece of educational achievement, we will need to change the way we prepare teachers as well. In order to cultivate children’s curiosity, teacher preparation might emphasize techniques for guiding investigation and scaffolding conversations. Teachers also need to learn how important it is to create time in the day for children to explore. But just as importantly, in graduate school, teachers need the time and encouragement to feel curious themselves and the chance to see what it’s like to follow the answer to a question, wherever it may lead them. Developing their own capacity to be curious and to act on that curiosity is one of the most substantive and useful skills teachers can acquire.15

And the same applies for wonder. Teacher training is, in all cases, an important resource for stimulating wonder and curiosity-based educational mindsets, and yet a teacher’s own education doesn’t begin and end with it. Most of the skills and values teachers get to acquire are ultimately shaped within classrooms, in dialogue with their students. What are a few requirements for these dialogues to lead to more rather than less wondering in the classroom? 1. Key among them is openness, the sensitivity of the teacher towards all those moments in which differences of perspective (between students and teacher or between students) come to the fore and can be used as learning opportunities for everyone. Embracing this kind of openness means allowing the unexpected and surprising to enter one’s teaching routine. It means making room for ‘creative openings’ in teaching or those ‘unexpected breaks in otherwise planned teaching interactions that result in new and meaningful insights, perspectives and understandings’.16 2. This kind of openness is achieved best by asking unknown questions or questions ‘whose answers are not known by the teacher, even though the teacher may have posed the questions’.17 This practice allows an authentic, joint exploration of issues and invites wonder and wondering. Since these are questions for which the teacher cannot provide the ‘correct answer’ – and often there is no correct answer for them at all – they are best placed to stimulate deep thinking on behalf of students and teachers alike.

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3. Another classroom aspect that wonder-focused teachers would want to cultivate is participation. Given the fact that we often wonder at, about and with others (see also Chapter 8), collaboration itself becomes a fundamental engine of creativity inside the school and beyond school walls.18 But not all exchanges count as participative, only those grounded in respect, openness and curiosity19 about the perspectives of other people, exchanges that open up spaces of possibility and emergence for all those involved. 4. Another important characteristic of ‘wonderful’ teachers is humbleness, cultivated by the act of wondering itself. As Socrates told young Theaetetus (see Chapter 1), his method of philosophizing, based on wonder, might not bring him knowledge, or at least knowledge that is certain, but it will teach him the humility of understanding his limits. It is rare to find a teacher who openly accepts that he or she does not know something and even more rare for the teacher to welcome this as an authentic opportunity to learn (together).vi 5. Last but not least, teachers should foster in their students a sense of wonder about not only the world but also themselves and human beings in general. Piersol called this meta-wonder and defined it as moments when ‘we wonder at ourselves as wondering beings’.20 This exercise should not lead to more self-absorption though, but help us bridge our experience with that of others, wondering beings as much as we are. Wonder-full teachers and wonder-full education more broadly are not reduced to the above, and yet the features listed here are a good starting point. They can help education move beyond its current fixation with certainty, standardization and outcomes towards a focus on openness, diversity and processes. Key among the latter are processes of wondering that are shared between teachers and students, or at least that should be. It is not only teachers who trigger and ‘guide’ wondering; students have a fundamental part to play in this dynamic, and understanding and welcoming their role is what sets apart wonderful teachers the most.

vi ‘As teachers we also need to embody humility ourselves. This does not mean claiming not to know anything and leaving the learners to flounder on their own. Instead, we can approach subjects as topics full of mysteries that we ourselves find fascinating .… I have also found that “It depends …” as an answer is a great way to draw out possibilities for linking the wonder at hand to its nest of contingent relationships’ (Piersol, 2013, pp. 12–13).



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9.4  Why wonder? Why now? There are many reasons why we should prioritize (re)learning wonder in education and practice it more in our everyday life, several of them outlined in this chapter and throughout the book. One last question should be raised, though, before concluding: why now? To answer this, we need to look beyond the classroom and at the state of the world today. We arguably live in a wonderful century in which (large parts of) humanity achieved a length and quality of living that are unprecedented in history. And yet, challenges abound. The climate crisis is looming; poverty, corruption and inequality still plague societies worldwide; and nationalism and populism are on the rise, making many worry that the horrors of the twentieth century might not be truly behind us.21 There are a multitude of causes for this state of affairs, which are well beyond the scope of this book, just as there are many possible solutions for them. What I want to propose here, in the end, is that wonder needs to be part of the latter, not the former. Did wondering contribute to the multiple crises we are facing today? This phenomenon should certainly not be romanticized. Wonder, just like creativity and curiosity, can be part of activities that lead to exclusion, oppression, violence or exploitation (see also Section 7.4 on wonder and ethics). But, more often than not, it was a lack of wonder that led to the outcomes above. This is because, as explained from the start, wondering means being open to the other and to whatever might come from interacting with others and their perspectives. Oppression and exploitation are closed, predetermined goals, even when they are not expressed in these terms (but, rather, hidden behind the benevolent language of protection, help or enlightened intervention). There is no respect for otherness in acts that reduce people to instruments for achieving one’s aims or consider them expendable or unimportant. One might be curious about what can be done within this paradigm but would not wonder about the possible in the ways described in this book. Even when the negative consequences are unintended, we cannot say they are the direct result of the wondering of their initiators. My claim, thus, is that wonder can and should be part of the solution, not the problem, precisely because it teaches us to accept difference, to live with uncertainty and to embrace the unknown. The latter is not a defeatist or cynical attitude. It does not replace the dangers of the ‘know it all’ mentality, which contributed to much of today’s environmental and societal havoc,vii with those vii See Cohen (2017) for a brilliant analysis of the rise of the Silicon Valley and the negative consequences of its ‘move fast and break things’ mantra.

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of the ‘know nothing’ one, encouraged by people who spread misinformation in order to manipulate public opinion.22 On the contrary, wonder is the antidote against both these extremes.23 This is so because wondering is meant to make us more open, hopeful and humble. Humbleness helps us recognize the limits of our knowledge. Openness encourages us to reach out to others and their perspectives. Hopefulness is what makes us spring into action, overcoming the passivity we would otherwise be condemned to by defeatism and cynicism. Wondering is not a panacea, that is certain, and it needs to be complemented by a series of other processes, individual and collective. But being able to wonder fully, as described before, is a good marker of the fact that an atmosphere of trust, openness and tolerance has been built and, on this basis, many positive things can grow. To be sure, this is not a call to wonder for wonder’s sake.24 In fact, we would probably not have the cognitive and emotional resources to wonder constantly, and if we did, this experience would be detrimental to both our personal and social life (like any form of excess). What a call to wonder, for instance, in education (see Box 9.3), aims to achieve is an increased awareness of the fact that other ways of being and other worlds are, indeed, possible; that they are ‘thinkable’ and, in some cases, ‘doable’. And that achieving them is impossible without being able to envision them first.

Box 9.3  Call to Wonder Consider the following proposal from Niedermeyer: Our classrooms should be a place for students to wonder and ponder about the curriculum but not worry about whether their thoughts are going to be valued by an international examiner. Teachers should be taught and encouraged to use inquiry as the basis for their instruction and not feel as if they are taking some kind of significant risk. Students should feel emboldened to learn from their ignorance, not shamed into silence by it.a There are many calls to wonder in and about education formulated nowadays, similar to the one above. What lies behind them is the recognized importance of gaining a new interest in the world we all share and, more than this, being interested in it for its own sake.b This means learning to reach outside of oneself in order to grasp the positions and perspectives of others and, in doing so, making the world more complex, more exciting and more worthy of our engagement.c



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There is nothing more dangerous than apathy in today’s age of relative comfort and impending global catastrophe, environmental and political. Wonder, when cultivated from early on in education, forms us as human beings able to demonstrate Dewey’s four main moral traits of open-mindedness, whole-heartedness, responsibility and directness.d It is a process that inoculates us against prejudgements and predetermined outcomes, closed encounters and the need to control or dominate the other. We can only wonder about those we treat as ‘equals’, not those we fear or oppress. And the same applies to our encounter with the world and its problems. Fear the challenges, and they overwhelm you with terror; minimize them, and they will continue to grow undisturbed. Wonder about them, and they might not be solved, but they will become different, and in this difference lie endless possibilities of resolution. Niedermeyer (2018), p. 421. Schinkel (2017), p. 13. c And even of our love, according to Schinkel. d In Doddington (2014), p. 1264. a

b

If we are to tackle the many ills of our societies and do it now, once we still can, we have to learn (or, rather, relearn) the lessons taught to us by wondering as children, as adults, as students and teachers, and as entire communities.

Notes 1 See, for example, Sir Ken Robinson’s popular TED talk Do schools kill creativity? at https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_ creativity?language=en. Accessed 23 January 2020. 2 See Washington (2018). 3 Niedermeyer (2018), p. 416. 4 See Hadzigeorgiou (2012), p. 1003. 5 Piersol (2013), p. 5. 6 In Kareem (2014), p. 36. 7 Piersol (2013), p. 12. 8 Gilbert & Byers (2017), p. 9. 9 Kearns (2015), p. 115. 10 Hadzigeorgiou (2012), p. 989. 11 See Schinkel (2017).

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Schinkel (2017), p. 538. Hadzigeorgiou (2012), p. 989. See Kareem (2014). Engel (2011), p. 643. Beghetto (2016), p. 261. Miyazaki (2013), p. 110. See Clapp (2016). Ness & Riese (2015). Piersol (2013), p. 14. For a review of the crises faced by humanity this century and the global failures of leadership, see Gill (2011). 22 See Cooke (2017), on post-truth, truthiness and alternative facts. 23 See also Piersol (2013), p. 14. 24 A warning about the risks of fetishizing wonder can be found in Hansen (2015), p. 238.

Epilogue: Living with Uncertainty

This book was dedicated to an exploration of the transformative power of wonder as an everyday experience. Before concluding, let’s reflect for a moment on what ‘everyday experience’ means in this context. While some might see it as synonymous with the mundane or the ordinary, in a rather pejorative sense, I take everyday experiences to be the very basis of human existence. In the end, even the most extraordinary events take place in the everyday. And yet, if this notion is employed to encompass the whole of (human) life, doesn’t it make the category itself redundant? Not if we use it, as I  try to do here, as a reminder of the fact that we live lives that are, at all times, social, embodied and temporal.i This expression is also used as a reminder that human existence is defined, in the everyday, by our encounter with the world, including the world of others. And it is within this encounter that wonder is born and that it dwells. It is precisely the rather paradoxical nature of wondering – active and passive at the same time, immersed and detached (see Chapter 3) – that gives it a distinctive transformative power. From all the other experiences of our everyday, of friendship, love, beauty or the sacred, to name just a few, wonder stands out for its capacity to engage us with the possible.1 Without any possibilities, there is nothing to wonder about. Conversely, without the ability to wonder, our awareness and exploration of the possible remain limited, constrained by our unchecked need for knowledge and certainty. It is wonder and wonder alone that can help us strike a new balance between self and other, known and unknown, certainty and uncertainty. Uncertainty in fact is what I  would like to focus on in this epilogue. The reason for this is simple: I consider wonder’s power to open up the possible in our lives as emerging from it helping us live and thrive under conditions of uncertainty and not knowing. Most of us live in worlds that prize certainty and knowing above all else. Knowledge is power, the saying goes. And a bird in the hand is i See also Dewey’s (1934) notion of experience in this regard.

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worth two in the bush. What we have and control is superior to what might come but we are not certain of. Moreover, the technological age of today tries to model (and then shape) our existence based on simple algorithms. Needless to say, such mentalities are the very opposite of wondering. This is not because wonder itself is opposed to knowledge but because the act of attaining certain and final knowledge closes rather than maintains possibly. I am not alone in making this observation. Lloyd eloquently expressed it as follows: My discussions of wonder … highlighted one of its less obvious features:  the ways in which it challenges ideals centred on certainty. Wonder, in its many forms, has provided an intellectual space – a temporary pause – which fosters the renewal of active, imaginative, emotionally engaged thinking. It depends but also thrives on the absence of certainty. It has often been associated with explicitly celebrated forms of ‘not-knowing’, which can make wonder suspect in the many contemporary contexts where certainty is extolled as a value – even as a universal human need. Understanding wonder better can alert us to the contingency, and the inadequacies, of that privileging of certainty.2

The value associated with wonder is not uncertainty or, rather, not uncertainty for its own sake. The value this phenomenon stands for is openness. Openness to difference, to strangeness, to the unknown. The person who wonders is keen not to assimilate difference or to domesticate strangeness but to continue learning from them, for as difficult or uncomfortable as this process might be at times. Rubenstein notes, poetically, that ‘just as a wound ceases to be itself when it heals, wonder is only wonder when it remains open’.3 This intense and unsettling state might not be maintained for long, but its reward is a new, deeper appreciation of the world. In the end, it is precisely by keeping our propositions provisional, open-ended and incomplete4 that we can reach a superior, fuller understanding of our own existence as thinking beings. While our societies and educational systems might push us strongly towards certainty rather than uncertainty, the study of wonder is witnessing an exponential increase in recent years.ii But it does not go uncontested. Its critics point, as we have seen in this book, to the fact that wondering might disconnect us from our immediate reality, that it might make us indecisive by presenting too many possibilities at once, that it can lead to existential angst because of

ii And in a variety of fields, from medical practice (Barondess, 2005) to art appreciation (Fingerhut & Prinz, 2018).

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its accompanying uncertainty and even to nihilism.5 Arguments have been put forward as to why these assumed ‘dark sides’ of wondering do not represent the whole of it, even when they point to some possible perversions of this phenomenon, and I will not reiterate them here. Suffice it to say that, by opening up the possible, wonder exposes us to both the risks and the benefits of engaging with it. But if the risks can be managed or, at least, reflected upon, it is difficult to imagine a world without wonder, one that is still populated by human beings and not by machines. In fact, the ‘end of wonder’ has been wrongly anticipated many times before. One of the most notable ones took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when a growing concern for reason, science and organizing nature led to the emergence of cabinets of curiosities aimed at orchestrating – and thus somehow containing – wonder (see also Chapter 1 for more historical details). As Daston and Park noticed, a radical change came about at the end of this period, when the natural and moral came together, and the latter imposed a rejection of what was considered facile or vulgar wonder by the elites.6 Links between wonder and ignorance, even stupidity, were strongly forged at the time (see also Box 9.1). If wonder is what children engage in, then it is childish and should be eradicated from the life of adults and from adult society. These conceptions echo today in the classroom, for instance, in some teachers’ eagerness to stop the ‘random’ questioning of students and stem their ‘wild’ curiosity. If wonder is part of our nature, then culture needs to step in and recreate wonderers in its own image. But, of course, wonder is deeply cultural from the start. Without culture and the system of meanings it enables we would not be able to construct or exchange perspectives. In other words, we wouldn’t be able to take the necessary reflective distance from reality in order to grasp and wonder at it. The essence of wonder and its transformative power rest precisely in this: our capacity to understand our own perspective as a perspective and, consequently, to become aware of the fact that other perspectives are always possible. Indeed, that they are readily available through dialogue, embodied and imaginative, with the position of others in the world. Both these positions and their associated perspectives are multiple and relative, however, and this contributes to the feeling of uncertainty that surrounds the possible and our dwelling in it. The end of wonder would mean the end of our experience of emergent or productive uncertainty, an impossibility in worlds that are open, complex and systemic.7 For as long as differences in perspective exist in the world and we are made aware of them, get excited about them and try to explore their implications,

186

Wonder

wondering will take place.iii And, for just as long, the experience of uncertainty will accompany us. Wonder, in the end, is about not explaining things away, but taking on their surprise and letting it linger.8 This ideal state might not be possible at all times and in all contexts. Instead of Wonder with capital W, embodying all these characteristics at once with a high degree of intensity, we might experience lower case wonder, and this is perfectly fine. As explained in Chapter  2, our experiences are dynamic and holistic to the point where making too many or too sharp analytical distinctions risks distracting from rather than focusing on our phenomenon of interest. Between Wonder and wonder there are many nuanced forms of expression and several possible connections with related processes such as curiosity, contemplation, pondering or awe. But what sets wonder apart, no matter its level or intensity, is the power that comes from realizing that, if the world is indeed open to multiple interpretations and actions, then we need at least to consider them and, sometimes, change the way we think, act and live. Wonder is, in this way, both ordinary or commonplace and extraordinary or life-changing. And, even when moments of wonder don’t occur often and, when they do, can leave us feeling tense and anxious rather than empowered and confident, it is the mundane experiences of wondering at the unexpected or of deconstructing the familiar that produce the most pervasive and long-lasting changes of all. Wondering in and at the everyday transforms, little by little, the way we understand the world, other people and our own self. It offers few to no certainties except this: that things will feel and look different once we start to wonder about them. But we will never know how exactly beforehand. This is the promise of wondering and, if we accept its challenge, we will become able to derive possibility from life’s uncertainties, big and small.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

See Glăveanu (2018). Lloyd (2018), pp. 214–15. Rubenstein (2008), p. 10. Rubenstein (2008), p. 8. See also Nightingale (2001), p. 53.

iii And, with it, creativity as well (see Glăveanu & Gillespie, 2015).

Epilogue 6 For more details, see Daston and Park’s (1998), Wonders and the order of nature, 1150–1750. 7 See Valsiner (2014). 8 Alberti (2016), p. 143.

187

188

Glossary Accident Admiration

Awe

Chance

Contemplation

Creativity

Curiosity

Experience

Fancy/fantasy Imagination

Inquiry

An unexpected event, positive or negative, that either happens by chance or doesn’t have a deliberate cause. Today defined generally as a feeling of respect and approval, the term admiration has been historically used as a synonym for marvelling or wondering. An intense emotional experience of being amazed or astonished by something, often associated with feeling insignificant in front of it. Considered a passive and immersed experience in the structural model proposed in this book. The unknown and unpredictable, mysterious and, at times, feared force behind current events, both positive (the lucky strike) and negative (risk or hazard). A state of deep, reflective thought. Considered a passive and detached experience in the structural model proposed in this book. The process leading to the emergence of novel and meaningful outcomes such as ideas and objects but also performances, norms and even institutions. An intellectual emotion associated with a strong desire to know or to learn something. Considered an active and immersed experience in the structural model proposed in this book. The basic building blocks of our psychological life, experiences are not purely internal states but phenomena emerging from the interaction between person and world. The most freeing part of our imagination typically used to explore the impossible or improbable. The psychological process that expands our experience of the here and now with images and events from the past, the future or the realm of possibility. The act of reflecting or questioning. Inquiry-based forms of education advocate the active use of wonder, curiosity and imagination in the classroom.

190 Openness to difference

Glossary

An orientation towards other people characterized by awareness of, appreciation of and engagement with difference. Perspective An action orientation that guides our thinking, feeling and behaviour and marks the type of relationship we establish with the world at a given time. Pondering The careful consideration of things before taking a decision. Considered an active and detached experience in the structural model proposed in this book. Possible The ever-present companion of the actual or real, the possible designates all those experiences that go beyond the here and now and enrich our lives. Randomness The quality of something that has no specific pattern, purpose or objective, that is unsystematic. Serendipity The capacity to make fortunate discoveries due to both accidents and sagacity (perceptiveness, knowledge and even wisdom). Sublime A concept with deep roots in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the sublime designates those overwhelming experiences, typically of landscapes, scenes or the divine, that leave us both terrified and delighted. Uncertainty The state of not knowing or not possessing certain or definitive knowledge. Wander An exercise in moving away from the known either physically or mentally (in which case it becomes mind-wandering). What/how else thinking The act of imagining what else is possible or how else things can be done or thought about. It is related with but different from as-if thinking. Wonder A particular type of experience whereby the person becomes aware of an expanded field of possibility for thought and/or action and engages in exploring this field. According to the structural model proposed in this book, the experience of wonder is paradoxical, at once passive and active, immersed and detached. According to the dynamic model, wondering involves the interplay between awareness of, excitement for and exploration of the possible.

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Index accidents 63, 66, 69–81 activism 155–158 Adelard of Bath 18 admiration 13, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 29, 35, 39, 41, 74, 141, 153 aesthetics 3, 10, 20, 22, 35, 92, 93 agency 56, 80, 81, 123, 129, 158 Albert the Great 18 ambiguity 4, 14, 97, 119 animal 1, 33,45–49 antiquity 3, 19, 20, 27, 70 Arab Spring 149, 155, 159 Arendt, Hannah 3, 23, 69, 153–154 Aristotle 15, 17, 19, 22, 31, 38, 51, 135 art 83–87, 155–158 Art Brut 83–85 artivism 156, 157, 158 as-if thinking 53 astonishment 19–24, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 52, 60, 92, 141, 151, 153, 175, 176 astronauts 24 attunement 147 Augustine 18 awe 1, 2, 4, 20–24, 28–31, 35–43, 48, 51, 60, 72, 79, 94, 104, 169, 170, 175, 176 Bacon, Francis 18, 170 beautiful 14, 20, 40, 57 bricoleur 114, 115 Burke, Edmund 20, 21, 22, 36, 42, 93 cabinet of curiosities 18, 66, 185 caregivers 116, 165 certainty 15, 17, 66, 73, 97, 98, 160, 177, 183–184 chance 79–82, 90, 109, 113, 177 children 4, 18, 29, 30, 34, 55, 65, 94, 96, 97, 98, 109, 110, 111, 114, 117, 148, 163–166, 169, 172, 175, 177, 181, 185 Christianity 66 Ciocănești 67–68, 77, 146

classroom 54, 58, 97, 98, 170, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178–180, 185 cognition 22, 43, 48, 58, 77, 121, 137–139, 151 collective wonder 63, 147–161, 173 Columbus, Christopher 75, 133, 134, 138 communities of wonder 149 compassion 130, 136, 137 contemplation 1, 31, 35, 36, 39, 41–43, 59, 76, 176, 186 conventional culture 84, 90, 91, 93, 112, 157, 172 corruption 142–145, 155, 179 creativity 2, 4, 37, 42, 44, 56, 59, 6, 72, 73, 76, 79, 84, 86, 87, 99, 110, 143, 169, 177–181 critical thinking 31, 98, 125, 152, 169 crowd 143, 149–153, 160 culture 27, 29, 33, 35, 55, 70, 83, 84, 91, 100, 115, 120, 125, 133, 185 curiosity 1, 2, 4, 5, 15, 20–22, 24, 28–33, 35–43, 45, 48, 52, 61, 74, 89, 91, 103, 106, 123, 130–135, 137, 164–165, 173, 177, 178, 179, 185, 186 Dadaism 80, 84 Darwin, Charles 27–29 defamiliarization 89, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 112 deindividualize 152 democratic citizens 98, 115, 144, 149, 154 Descartes, Rene 18–22, 41, 47, 51, 79, 95, 131, 138, 151 Derrida, Jacques 171 detachment 2, 40–43, 57, 63, 159, 175 Dewey, John 51, 54, 98, 110, 121, 129, 181, 183 difference, openness to 135–137 discovery 23, 70–72, 74, 75, 93, 95, 106 distantiation 118, 129, 152 doubt 16, 30, 31, 34, 39, 52, 91, 130, 144, 151, 159, 171, 172, 177

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Dragon 7–11, 13, 34, 112 Dubuffet, Jean 83, 85 Duchamp, Marcel 80, 92 dwelling 23, 36, 51, 53, 90, 154, 185 Easter eggs 67 Edison, Thomas 119, 122 education 3, 5, 90, 96–97, 98, 113, 116, 119, 121, 148, 154, 165, 170–181 emotion 19, 20, 22, 29, 36, 37, 41, 43, 51, 60, 125, 175 empathy 124, 135–136, 173 empowerment 152, 157, 186 engineer 114 engrossment 41, 42, 62, 175–176 enlightenment 5, 20, 22, 134 ethics 137, 138, 139, 179 European refugee crisis 123 exchanging positions 54, 55 experience 1–6, 21, 24, 34–39, 43, 45, 51–61, 75, 77, 89, 91, 112, 124–125, 127–131, 137, 147–152, 170, 178, 183 experimental study 114 exploration 9, 10, 14, 34, 38, 39, 45, 48, 49, 53, 56, 59, 60–63, 75, 77, 79, 97, 100, 105, 109–119, 134, 136, 148, 169, 176, 177, 183 exoticism 133

harpies 13–14 Heidegger, Martin 22, 23, 42, 51, 53, 69, 90, 153, 154 Hermes 71, 79 Herodotus 132 Hirst, Damien 78, 79 history 3, 14, 15, 22, 24, 34, 38, 42, 47, 58, 74, 77, 79, 92, 94, 111, 126, 132, 139, 141, 152, 170, 179 hope 53, 96, 97, 143, 159, 160 humbleness 178, 180 humility 18, 137–138, 178 humor 110 Husserl, Edmund 52 ideas 65–68 ignorance 10, 14, 22, 170, 180, 185 imagination 9–10, 21, 41, 53, 54, 61, 63, 87, 95, 103, 110–113, 118, 123, 125, 155, 156, 160, 173 immersion 2, 40, 41, 43, 57, 63, 118 impossible 53, 78, 111, 116, 131, 134, 141, 150, 180 innovation 66, 120, 121 inquiry 18, 38, 96–98 inspiration 67, 77–81, 99, 103, 118, 160, 176 intelligent fast failure 120–121 invisible 94–96, 156

facial expression 27, 29, 30, 35 failure 118–121 familiar 89–100 fantasy 9, 10, 111–113 fear 10, 21, 37, 123–126 Fellini, Federico 60–61 Feynman, Richard 103–107, 111, 112, 113 fiction 3, 5, 9, 41, 90, 91 Flaubert, Gustave 170–171 Fleming, Alexander 70, 72, 75 flow 40, 48, 137 fortune 69, 70, 71, 74, 79 found object 74, 91–94 Freire, Paulo 96–97 Freud, Sigmund 91

learning 59, 64, 68, 96–97, 104, 115, 118, 120, 169–11 Le Bon, Gustave 150–152 Levi-Strauss, Claude 114–115 life-course 34, 54, 110 literature 3, 40, 75, 99, 135 luck 66, 69–72, 74–79, 155

game 55, 110, 113, 117, 118 generosity 138–139 God 13, 18, 71, 79, 91, 95, 97, 165 Greek 13–15, 23, 52, 58, 68, 69, 74, 79, 90, 100, 128, 132

make-believe 117 maker movement 115–116 makerspace 115–116 map 7, 9, 10 Martin, Jack 120

joy 18, 38, 93, 97, 110, 143, 44, 152, 176 Kant, Immanuel 20, 21, 22 knowledge 3, 4, 7, 10, 14, 15–19, 22, 24, 59, 76, 95, 97, 100, 104, 119, 128, 131, 135, 153, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 178

Index marvel 7, 18, 35, 43, 68, 91, 94, 109, 134, 151, 164 Mead, George Herbert 24, 128, 129, 133 meaning-making 80 mental illness 99 meta-position 57–60, 63, 70, 78, 93, 110, 118 microscope 94–95 middle ages 3, 18, 19 migrant 123–126 mind-wandering 99–100, 113 miracle 13, 18, 111 modernity 3, 9 monster 7, 9, 18 moral 3, 22, 133, 137, 138, 150, 170, 173, 181, 185 multi-vocality 121 mystery 7, 9, 14, 87, 104, 130, 132, 135, 172, 176 Nazi 26, 69, 154 nihilism 185 Nobel Prize 103–106 not knowing 3, 4, 7, 10, 11, 15, 17, 21, 24, 38, 61, 164, 165 obstacle 34, 87 occupy movement 155, 159 openness to difference 135–137 orientalism 133–134 otherness 125–128, 130-131, 132–134 outsider art 84–87 participation 153, 156, 178 passion 8, 19, 22, 51, 85, 95, 97, 116, 138, 151 patent 82, 119 pedagogies of failure 121 pedagogies of wonder 173 perspectival world 53, 59, 62, 64, 71, 90, 127, 129, 158, 159 perspectives 4–5, 54–63, 70, 71, 78, 90, 93, 94, 97, 109, 111, 117, 118, 121, 124– 129, 134, 147, 148, 153, 158, 159, 172 perspective-taking 98, 124, 125, 135–136 phenomenology 31, 45, 52, 129 philosophy 15–18, 24, 33, 34, 90, 95, 98, 103, 111, 129, 148, 170, 171 physics 79, 103, 105 Picasso, Pablo 73–75

209

Plato 15–17, 40, 51, 69, 153, 170 play 106, 110, 116 playfulness 106, 109–121 pluralism 97 Poincaré, Henri 72, 73 politics of wonder 154 pondering 4, 31, 35, 41, 42, 43, 59, 176, 186 positions 54–61, 71, 100, 117, 118, 125, 127, 148, 175, 180, 184, 185 possibility 4, 14, 15, 37, 52, 56, 57, 63, 69, 90, 93, 105, 109, 112, 113, 126–128, 130, 134, 164, 174, 186 possibility thinking 109 possible awareness of the possible 14, 60, 62, 109 excitement for the possible 63, 77, 105, 176 exploration of the possible 56, 61, 63, 105, 176 pragmatism 129 problem solving 99, 115, 173 protest 142, 144, 150 psychology 4, 23, 27, 35, 54, 129 Question 1, 9, 17, 23–24, 29–37, 60, 63, 81, 85–86, 104, 147–149, 152, 154, 158, 163–167, 170, 173, 177 racism 126, 141–146 randomness 66, 69, 70, 72, 79–81 reality 3, 24, 47, 53, 59, 109, 110–113, 117, 118, 126, 131, 157, 159, 170 refugees 123, 125, 126 relativism 170 renaissance 3, 5, 84 resistance 134, 142, 145, 154, 158 responsibility 130, 156, 181 revolution 141, 142, 144, 150, 155 Richter, Gerhard 80 risk 18, 33, 47, 66, 70, 73, 114, 120, 132– 133, 185, 186 role authorities 142 education 3 imagination in geography 10 midwifery 16 social media 142 society 150 teachers 176

210 wonder in society 63, 112, 117, 118, 155, 171 wondering in thinking 22 Romania 66, 67, 77, 141–145, 159 romanticism 20, 22, 84 schooling 96, 97, 121, 169, 172 science classroom 173 Scott, Judith 85, 86 self 129 self-consciousness 169 serendipity 60, 63, 69, 70–75, 82, 89, 96, 109 siren 9–10 social change 142, 152, 155–159 social representation 29, 31 society 4, 5, 17, 54, 55, 63, 71, 83, 84, 92, 94, 96, 113, 114, 117, 118, 129, 137, 143, 149, 150, 152, 154, 158, 160 Socrates 15–19, 21, 22, 38, 51, 89, 96, 99, 138, 153, 154, 178 Spinoza 19, 20, 22 spirituality 4, 48 stranger 128 stupidity 170–171, 185 sublime 20–22 surprise 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 24, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 38, 42, 52, 57, 60, 66, 68, 70, 74, 85, 89, 93, 100, 109, 111, 141 surrealism 84 sympathy 135–136, 150 taxonomy 131 teaching 97–98, 120, 166, 177 telescope 75, 94, 95 Terrae Incognitae 9–10 terror 9, 14, 21, 35, 91, 154 Thales 23, 69 Thaumas 13, 16

Index Thaumazein 13. 36, 154 Theaetetus 15, 16, 17, 23, 40, 79, 96, 99, 178 theory 22, 40, 47, 54, 59, 70, 71, 72, 79, 81, 127–128, 129 thinking 62–64, 153–155 tinkering 113–116, 118, 119 transcendence 13, 14, 48 travelling 74, 100, 125 uncanny 91 uncertainty 30, 36, 38, 39, 69, 70, 80, 97, 148, 155, 160, 171, 172, 183–186 unfamiliar 14, 20, 23, 37, 38, 59, 60, 81, 89–101 unknown 1, 7, 9, 10, 14, 33, 36, 37, 63, 70, 98, 112, 148, 153–155, 160, 177, 179, 183 visible 4, 58, 94–96 Walpole, Horace 74 wander 7, 98–100 what else thinking 62–64 what if thinking 63, 79, 93 wisdom 16, 17, 75, 95, 149, 159, 171 wonder dark side of wonder 170, 185 definition 1–2 dynamic model 15, 53, 59–62 lack of wonder 138, 153, 179 structural model 35, 40–42 triggers of wonder 23, 95, 109 wondering about others 126, 130–132, 135–138 wondering at 38–39 wondering about 38–39 wonderment 124, 149, 154 Wonderstruck 13, 19, 21, 70, 99 Wordsworth 34