Practices of Wonder

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Vasalou

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621899181
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Wonder has often occupied a place of unique importance across a variety of human practices and intellectual activities. At different times and historical periods, it has been hailed as the beginning of philosophy and as the end that philosophy should aspire to pursue; as the motive force of scientific quests and their fruit; as the aim of art and the means art uses to accomplish its aims; and as the religious experience par excellence and the hallmark of a deeper spiritual life. Yet despite the special relationship it has borne to many of our most highly valued intellectual and spiritual practices, wonder remains a neglected and understudied notion. This volume aims to redress this neglect, bringing together a collection of essays drawn from different disciplines to consider the sense of wonder from a number of complementary perspectives. What is wonder? What role has it historically played in philosophy, science, art and aesthetics, and the religious or spiritual life? Can wonder be dangerous? Is wonder an experience in which we should, or indeed could, aspire to dwell? Why, among human experiences, should it be prized?Contributors: Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Stephen Mulhall, Sylvana Chrysakopoulou, Derek Matravers, Michel Hulin, Alexander Rueger, Robert Fuller, David Burrell, Claude-Olivier Doron & Sophia Vasalou.

1

Wonder

Toward a Grammar

Sophia Vasalou

Since every reflection needs a stimulus, and every quest a beginning, even a quest for the wonder that often supplies beginnings to reflective quests, and since to think deep one must peer close, let me propose to take the following definition of wonder as the axis of our concern. “Wonder: a sudden experience of an extraordinary object that produces delight.”1 Not a dictionary definition, but for all that we may peer close to locate the joints:

With SUDDEN we might ask: and does wonder always strike or might not wonder also need to be hunted? With EXTRAORDINARY we might ask: and is the extraordinary something that always reveals itself or something that may also need to be dis-covered? And if we twice converge on the notion of a hunt, or quest, aren’t we also querying whether wonder PRODUCES or whether it may not also demand to be produced? And that, in the same breath, is to consider: what would be the OBJECT—in the double sense of content and intent—of such wonder? Would DELIGHT offer the self-sufficient answer? And what, finally, probing deeper into the unobtrusiveness of grammar, is the meaning of that present tense which relates delight to wonder as its cause (producES) with all the stability of the eternal that grammar places at its disposal?

Even with these questions braking our words, this is already moving too quickly, and too far, with a momentum whose movement our present stage would not be large enough to exhaust. So let us here pause over two of the main joints we have picked out—wonder’s SUDDENness and wonder’s DELIGHT—to consider more closely: What is wonder?

SUDDEN: On Being Struck; Or: An Emotion Unlike Others?

It has been hailed as the beginning of philosophy, as the end philosophy tends to, and a state philosophy aims to expunge by explanation; as the essence of art, as the aim of art, and as the means that art uses to accomplish its aims; as the origin of scientific quests; as the result of scientific quests; as the religious experience par excellence, the only proper response to a created world, and the only possible response of those whose eyes have been opened to see the glory of God in a blade of grass and every created being. It has been acclaimed as a form of redemption, and identified with consciousness itself. Inflected as awe; cadenced as bewitchment; transfigured as the sublime—a sense of wonder has claimed a key presence in a variety of practices of knowledge, activities and pursuits.

Yet for an emotion fêted so widely across a broad range of human practices, wonder appears to register as a rather elusive presence to those who would seek to understand it. This elusiveness, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, expounding Heidegger, suggests to us, may possess a special kind of inevitability—the elusiveness of an investigation whose subject is the very ground that sets it into motion, or, otherwise put, the special difficulty attaching to the self-defeating project of “thinking the condition of thinking’s own possibility.” For to ask “what is wonder?” is only possible once wonder has already set up the question as an object of (wondering) reflection. So how, she asks, “is philosophy to go about seeking the very wonder that sets it into motion?”2 And we might say the same about any inquiry that claims wonder as the origin of its motion.

This deeper difficulty may lie in the shadows; but in the daylight lies something simpler to remark, yet no less surprising for that, and that is the widespread neglect of wonder in contemporary research on the emotions. It is a neglect that appears to unite psychologists and philosophers of the emotions otherwise divided by important methodological and philosophical differences, on questions such as what emotions are, how the respective roles of cognition and physiology should be understood, what the respective roles of culture and biology consist in, or what to name as the basic or primary emotions (and on what grounds). And it is one that extends, not only to wonder, but also to related members of the emotion family to which it belongs, such as awe.3

Why might that be? Remarking the neglect of wonder in his pioneering book-length account of it, Robert Fuller named one reason for it by pointing to an important feature of contemporary theories of emotion: their preoccupation with an evolutionary paradigm for the study of emotion and with the adaptive significance of emotions considered as biological phenomena. It is true that evolutionary psychologists have warned that this preoccupation should not be understood too narrowly—in terms, for example, of a concern with immediate physical survival.4 Yet it is clear that some emotions lend themselves to rewarding analysis more readily within this frame than others, and it is not surprising that, within the terms of this paradigm, biologists and psychologists have tended “to emphasize those emotions that lead to the performance of adaptive behaviors such as withdrawal, avoidance, mating, or aggression.”5 More generally, Fuller argues, the focus cultivated by this framework has fallen on emotions that are short-lived; that orient people to concrete aspects of the immediate physical environment; and that are associated with specific facial expressions or gestures. Emotions such as fear and anger—which can easily be tied to behaviors with strategic adaptive importance—are perhaps the strongest exemplars of the analytical promise of such a scheme. By contrast, and unsurprisingly, wonder presents itself as a more awkward fit.

The problem of fit, as one of the elements of Fuller’s argument intimates, begins from the moment wonder is sought in the body. It is significant, in this connection, that those working from within an evolutionary or biological paradigm who have joined in the neglect of wonder have included the heirs of the particular evolutionary perspective on emotions developed in Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This work, which studied the regularities of human expressive behavior and their biological roots, has become the starting point in recent decades for an investigation of the universality of facial expressions corresponding to basic emotions. Notwithstanding the promise held out by Darwin’s remarks on admiration in his work, wonder has failed to figure among the emotions which this tradition has concerned itself with; it is excluded, for example, in the list of basic emotions produced by Paul Ekman—one of the best-known exponents of this view— which includes sadness, happiness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise.6 This exclusion must be taken in part as an avowal of the difficulty of pinning an unambiguous expressive profile to wonder, which might help restate the difficulty with wonder as one that concerns the elusiveness of its embodiment.7 Among emotion researchers, in fact, those who have included wonder among primary or basic emotions have represented a quaint minority, and even those who have accorded it a place in their taxonomies, such as the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda (whose work was clearly located in the Darwinian tradition) and the early British psychologist William McDougall, have not always done so in a way that seems sufficiently mindful of the differences—subtle yet not to be dismissed in advance—between related emotional concepts (such as surprise and wonder, or wonder and curiosity) in ordinary language.8 (A point, of course, which suggests that the issue raised here could not be tackled without addressing the fractious question of our ability to identify and individuate emotions.)

These two aspects—the relative obscurity of the adaptive value of wonder and the relative indeterminacy of its expression—are not unconnected, and together they point to a further reason—linked with other methodological tendencies of current emotion research—for this programmatic neglect of wonder. For both difficulties in turn reveal an underlying embarrassment in producing distinct statements about what, falling into line with recent terminology, we would call the action tendencies of wonder, the inbuilt motion of this emotion—or, put more simply still, what wonder makes us do. For if fear makes us freeze or fight or flee, if anger makes us rear for confrontation, if envy prepares us for a bitter revenge, if love makes us seek out, and contempt eschew—action tendencies that can be used to build theories about the adaptive value of these emotions in human history, and that are directly related to the repertory of expressive behavior associated with them—what might one say of wonder that would hold with equal force?9

For wonder, it seems, can make us do everything or nothing. Even our doing, as this has often been understood (in the history of philosophy, certainly, but not only) has been a species of non-doing, or whatever else we might understand by contemplation. It is striking, for example, and of direct relevance to this point, that some of the emotion researchers who have given their attention to wonder and committed themselves to placing it within their taxonomies have presented a picture of wonder whose most remarkable feature is that of passivity. In Frijda’s account, this passivity is manifested both on the level of physiology—marked by suspension of breathing and general loss of muscle tone, which “causes the mouth to fall open, and may make the subject stagger or force him to sit down”—and of expressive behavior more narrowly defined—open eyes, raised eyebrows, open mouth, a forgetful relaxation of the body. This passivity—to which Frijda relates the functional significance or meaning of the family of emotions comprising amazement, surprise and wonder, which would appear to consist in the enhancement of contact—is more broadly reflected in “the arrest of locomotion and instrumental action.”10

And it is precisely this accent on instrumentality, or its lack, that we need in order to give yet a deeper account of the occlusion of wonder we have been trying to track, and perhaps the most accurate diagnosis yet of the difficulty that has made of wonder such a conspicuous absentee from contempora...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Wonder
• Chapter 2: From Biology to Spirituality
• Chapter 3: Wonder and the Beginning of Philosophy in Plato
• Chapter 4: Wonder, Perplexity, Sublimity
• Chapter 5: Heidegger’s Caves
• Chapter 6: Wonder and Cognition
• Chapter 7: The Microscopic Glance
• Chapter 8: Literary Wonder in the Seventeenth Century and the Origins of “Aesthetic Experience”
• Chapter 9: The Conception of Camatkâra in Indian Aesthetics
• Chapter 10: Wonderment Today in the Abrahamic Traditions