Wonder

“Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.” - José Ortega y Gasset.

“A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.” - Lord Dunsany.

An excerpt from, “How wonder works” by Jesse Prinz, aeon, June 21, 2013:

Wonder is sometimes said to be a childish emotion, one that we grow out of. But that is surely wrong. As adults, we might experience it when gaping at grand vistas. I was dumbstruck when I first saw a sunset over the Serengeti. We also experience wonder when we discover extraordinary facts. I was enthralled to learn that, when arranged in a line, the neurons in a human brain would stretch the 700 miles from London to Berlin. But why? What purpose could this wide-eyed, slack-jawed feeling serve? It’s difficult to determine the biological function of any affect, but whatever it evolved for (and I’ll come to that), wonder might be humanity’s most important emotion.

First, let’s be clear what we’re talking about. My favourite definition of wonder comes from the 18th-century Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith, better known for first articulating the tenets of capitalism. He wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance’. Smith associated this quality of experience with a distinctive bodily feeling — ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’.

An excerpt from, “A Study of Wonder” By Neel Burton, Psychology Today, June 24, 2024:

If the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas are correct in attributing philosophy—and, by extension, science, religion, art, and all else that transcends the mundane—to wonder, then it behoves us to ask, what exactly is wonder?

Wonder is a complex emotion involving elements of surprise, curiosity, contemplation, and joy. It can be thought of as a heightened state of consciousness and emotion brought about by something unusually beautiful, rare, or unexpected—that is, by a marvel.

‘Marvel’ derives from the Latin mirus [wonder] via mirabilia [‘wonderful things’]. ‘Admire’ shares the same root and originally meant ‘to wonder at’, although, since the sixteenth century, this sense has been steadily eroded—along, some might say, with wonder itself.

Aquinas spoke of philosophers and poets in the same breath because both are moved by marvels, with the purpose of poetry being, broadly, to record and in some sense recreate marvels, to inspire wonder.

An excerpt from, “A Philosophy of Wonder” by Howard L. Parsons, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1969:

The Latin word mirari means to wonder or marvel at, and miraculum was used in the Latin translation of the Greek New Testament to indicate “anything wonderful, beyond human power, and deviating from the common action of nature, a supernatural event.” With a gradual shift in metaphysical viewpoint, stimulated by the rise of natural science, a cognate, admirari (and then admiration), appears to have gradually acquired the meaning of purely natural wonder. In antiquity the spectacular in nature (plagues, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, disasters in the heavens), dramatic healing, the rare intuitions of sages and artists, the penetrating visions of prophets, were considered miraculous. As knowledge advanced, however, drawing some of these events down into the orbit of man’s understanding, man still wondered at them, though in a naturalistic, admiring way; while the word miraculous remained to signify a wonderful, deviant event, supernatural and divine in origin. With the advance of natural science from the Renaissance onward, this usage of admiration spread. And the corresponding advance of humanism made man, the wonderer, more and more a natural object of admiration. Of him, Shakespeare cried out: “What a piece of work is man!… In form and moving how express and admirable!” Today we admire mainly men; but while that means to wonder at, in most cases it means to regard with pleasure, approval, respect, and esteem. The history of these words reflects the history of the European mind in its attitude of wonder: the direction of wonder has passed from God, to nature, to man, and the emotion has become attenuated. If wonder is important to man, as I shall maintain, then this history indicates a problem.

Our English wonder, lying relatively close to its primitive roots, retains the more powerful force of miracle; and although it is liberally used in English translations of Biblical terms that carry supernatural connotations, it is by no means an equivalent. Wonder, from the Old English wundor, might be cognate with the German Wunde or wound. It would thus suggest a breach in the membrane of awareness, a sudden opening in a man’s system of established and expected meanings, a blow as if one were struck or stunned. To be wonderstruck is to be wounded by the sword of the strange event, to be stabbed awake by the striking.