Philosophy Begins in Wonder

An Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Theology, and Science

Michael Funk Deckard, Péter Losonczi, Deckard, Losonczi

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781556357824
  9781498251150
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630877019
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy begins with wonder, according to Plato and Aristotle. Yet Plato and Aristotle did not expand a great deal on what precisely wonder is. Does this fact alone not raise curiosity in us as to why this passion or concept is important? What is wonder's role in science, philosophy, or theology except to end thinking or theorizing as soon as one begins? The primary purpose of this book is to show how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in natural theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science resulted in a complex history of the passion of wonder-a history in which the elements of continuation, criticism, and reformulation are equally present. Philosophy Begins in Wonder provides the first historical overview of wonder and changes the way we see early modern Europe. It is intended for readers who are curious-who wonder-about how modern philosophy and science were born. The book is for scholars and educated readers alike.

part one

Historical, Scientific, and Religious Contexts

1

Wonder and Wondering in the Renaissance

Elisabeth Blum and Paul Richard Blum

Wondering was identified—however ironically—to be the moving force of philosophy by Plato in his Theaetetus (155d). So it doesn’t come as a surprise, if wondering, the possibility of an incapacity to resolve mysteries, admiration as the motivation for philosophical quest, the secrecy of the divine, and the like are treated in early modern times prevalently by Renaissance Platonists. Heirs to late ancient and medieval Christianity, they began to stress the epistemological or ontological status of miracles, thus exploring the cognitive side of amazement and the metaphysical side of any sort of spiritual intervention.

Clearly, miracles must have an ontological status that describes them as extraordinary occurrences within or without the order of nature; on the other hand, the bewilderment that necessarily accompanies the assessment of miracles, and anything else that goes beyond the normal run of things, has the epistemological status of wonder. Wonder (in Latin: mirabilia) is indeed the catchword used by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) to describe this twofold position of miracles. In his commentary on the fifth book of Plato’s Laws, before entering the matter itself, he felt compelled to meditate about wonder. This fifth book is known to be the introduction to the legislation proper suggested by Plato, but Ficino here begins with some ethical norms concerning human perfection and imperfection. It is at this point that in his summary Ficino explains the meaning of wonders.

Miracles, he states, occur daily, for instance in magnetism, and generally in all nature as well as in artifacts. “We do not know the causes, and nonetheless for ignorance of the causes do we not deny the effects that we see.”1 And again, he insists that “stunning” achievements are made by the soul and mind that cannot be denied, although we do not know how they came about. So far he does not venture to assign any status to miracles; but immediately after this, he draws an analogy typical of his cosmology: fire, the more it likens itself to the heavens the more wonderfully it works; namely, it draws into its own form what other elements can never do. Also it never undergoes mixture, and when it seems to be divided, it actually divides other things, and it extends its own effect instantaneously as far as light reaches. Obviously the light of the sky is a case in point, which leads to the simile of a mirror: as we see the light in a mirror, so we speculate in the soul the divine things. The analogy is this: in the same way as fire is more efficient than other elements, and heaven is more efficient than fire, in the same way more efficient than the heavens are the spirits that enliven or move the heavens. Ficino concludes that superior spirits operate in our spirits, which are cognate to them, as sight does in a mirror; and in so doing we shape our spirits, i.e., our soul, so that in the end our soul operates like a celestial spirit.

We need not follow up further classifications of the workings of spirit and speculation, because Ficino’s approach is obvious: the epistemic riddle of miracles needs to be transformed into a cosmological analogy between the human soul and divine spirits, so that wonder about the wonderful turns into the self-referentiality of the cognizing soul. Human souls are open to the numinous because they are equally intellectual natures, and thus the numinous is rooted in doubtless belief; by means of the will, our souls transform themselves into it, while memory contains hope. As long as the soul is embodied, she is attuned like the strings of a lyre.2 This is, according to Ficino, the origin of prodigies, dreams, soothsaying, and oracles.

In this context Ficino refers to his Platonic Theology (1482). Book 13 is dedicated to the dominance of the soul over the body, of which chapter 2 debates reason; and within this chapter, Ficino analyzes seven ways of “emptiness” or “release” (vacatio) as preconditions to open the mind for the influence of higher spirits. Wonder is one of the seven ways: The ancient priests “thought about the divinity’s majesty with such overwhelming awe and veneration that their senses, phantasy, and reason instantly intermitted their activities. At that time the mind, exposed as it was to the divinity alone whether god or demon, perceived the divine commands, and especially those which concerned the affairs they had just been considering.”3 The question is, does emptying open the mind for the divine commands, or is wonder equivalent with it as a perception of the numinous? It is not excluded that Ficino is trying to describe the phenomenology of a circular movement of the soul, in so far as the divine majesty exacts awe, which presupposes its presence before its effect. However, the commanding presence cannot be perceived if the human mind is distracted by sensual, imaginative, or discursive thinking.

In Ficino’s epistemology, senses and fantasy are bodily qualities of the soul that may be subject to corporeal exigencies, which therefore must and can be suppressed in favor of the higher powers of the soul. It should be noted that release and emptiness (vacatio; in German: Gelassenheit) are basic terms of mysticism. It seems, however, that Ficino is not addressing mystical experience, something that cannot be required and is therefore not apt to form a phenomenological argument for the natural predominance of the spiritual over the corporeal. He is rather referring to a power of the soul that can be enacted and performed by means of reasoning and will, as mentioned in the commentary on Laws. In the Platonic Theology we learn that the soul by referring to itself is able to vacate itself of corporeal contingencies, prompted by, or opening for, the wonderful, so that this self-opening of the soul toward the influx of pure spirits is equivalent to awe, which, as an act, can be called wonder. The commentary on Plato’s Laws goes one step further and declares this specific capacity of the soul to be grounded in the ontological familiarity of the soul with transcendent objects.4

Does it make sense at all to “inquire into the reasons behind miracles”? Ficino himself asked that question in the fourth chapter of book 13, which is dedicated to miracles as evidence for the governance of reason over matter.5 Here he recapitulates his spiritual cosmology according to which the soul is “a third essence under the angel but above the whole matter of the world, an essence which is formed by the divinity but itself forms matter, and which receives spiritual forms from the divinity (a numine) but gives corporeal forms to matter.”6 Therefore, the soul does not admire miracles but performs them: “not only in the forming and shaping matter through the rational principle of art . . . does the human mind appropriate for itself the divine right (ius divinum); it also does so through its sovereignty and transmuting the species of things. The resulting work is called a miracle, not because it is the supernatural work of our soul when it becomes God’s instrument, but because it induces wonder (admirationem), being a mighty event and one that happens rarely.”7 There seems to be nothing to wonder at about supernatural works, unless they are huge and rare, though not impossible. Therefore the essential question is much simpler: is it possible that spirits like the soul can have an impact on matter? Of course they do; this can be seen in the “complexion of the four humors and our face,” which are obviously shaped by the soul. But even more, “the soul raises a heavy body upwards, contrary to its nature, and prevails in turn over the four opposing elements; and no one is amazed at this miracle...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Contexts
• Chapter 1: Wonder and Wondering in the Renaissance
• Chapter 2: Wonder, Magic, and Natural Philosophy
• Chapter 3: Religious Awe at the Origin of Eighteenth-Century Physico-Theology
• Part Two: Wonder in Seventeenth-Century Europe
• Chapter 4: Descartes on the Excellent Use of Admiration
• Chapter 5: Admiration, Fear, and Infinity in Pascal's Thinking
• Chapter 6: On Thomas Hobbes’s Concept of Wonder
• Chapter 7: “Straight toward Heaven”
• Chapter 8: Malebranche on Restlessness and Curiosity
• Chapter 9: Wonder in the Age of the Saeculum
• Part Three: Wonder in Eighteenth-Century Europe
• Chapter 10: Berkeley’s Wonderful Divine Language
• Chapter 11: “Of Curiosity, or the Love of Truth”
• Chapter 12: A Risk of Testimony
• Chapter 13: Two Sources of Wonder in Early Modern Judaism
• Chapter 14: Kant and the End of Wonder
• Chapter 15: Ways of Wondering
• Contributors