Wonder

The Extraordinary Power of an Ordinary Experience

Vlad P. Glaveanu

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350193178
• eBook ISBN: 9781350085176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

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.

1

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.

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 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 centuries-long 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 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 movem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Also available from Bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Boxes
• Introduction: The Power of Everyday Experience
• Here be Dragons
• 1 Wondering about Wonder
• The Face of Wonder
• 2 The Wondering Mind
• Wonder in the Wild
• 3 How Do We Wonder?
• When Ideas Hatch
• 4 Accidents Will Happen
• Is This Art?
• 5 Making the Familiar Unfamiliar
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!i
• 6 In Praise of Playfulness
• On Fear
• 7 Wonder and the Other
• #Rezist
• 8 Collective Wonder
• Children’s Questions
• 9 (Re)learning Wonder
• Epilogue: Living with Uncertainty
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• Copyright