A Short Piece
What happened?
It is a famous notion that philosophy starts in wonder, a moment of awe in which the world itself hits us with a newness and quality that we can’t easily put into words. It could be “a strike of beauty.” It could be a moment of peace. It could be a moment of joy. “Wonder” and “philosophy” share a long history, and if philosophy is “the love of wisdom,” we might say “philosophy is the love of wonder” and/or “the learning of how to wonder,” which requires learning what it is, why it happens, and the like.
Often, an experience of wonder comes out of nowhere, seems mysterious, and then vanishes just as quickly. We don’t seem to have much say over it, which is one reason why it can be so precious to us. How can we get better at experiencing the evanescent and uncontrollable? We could spend a lifetime asking about that, a topic which brings us to “glimmers” and “beauty,” as discussed and taught on well by Thomas Jockin.
I agree that philosophy starts where there is an odd “break” in our everydayness, where our expectations encounter a prediction error (to allude to Alex Ebert’s thinking), and this can occur in moments of beauty. However, disaster also “breaks” our everyday life, and in this we can see that philosophy can also start in devastation — but I think a particular kind of devastation: something goes wrong, and we don’t know how it went wrong. If we knew, the problem would be a more technical problem versus a philosophical one, and not cause the same kind of prediction error (for the error could be more temporarily experienced as “not understandable,” at least, and quickly “fall back” into a notion of what we need to do). Philosophy comes in where we sense something went wrong and we don’t know how or why the bad thing happened (which means we ca be “stuck” considering the error, whereas if a screw is stripped, even if we don’t solve the problem today, we’re not “stuck wondering” about it). The error/solution is not “given” to us by our facticity, immediate experience, or the like. The answer is not obvious. In fact, the proper address could actually be what would on the face seem to make things worse — a possibly world-shattering realization.
We have often discussed at O.G. Rose that philosophy is in the business of self-defense, as elaborated on with Jacob Kishere at Sensespace, and the quick point I’m making here can be aligned with that discussion. Also relevant, we recently discussed the connection between philosophy and relationships (Ep #200), and that discussion is one I would also associate with numerous Net sessions (say the series on anger). Cadell Last also thinks philosophy, psychoanalysis, and “breaks” together, which is another move that I think is fitting (as highlighted in a recent conversation with Quinn Whelehan).
My point is this: when we say that philosophy “starts in wonder,” that also could mean “philosophy starts in wondering how things went wrong.” We are often doing our best, trying to genuinely be a good person — and yet we find ourselves hurting people. We find loved ones withdrawing. We find good intention paving a road to somewhere we don’t want to go. How? How is it possible that humans keep ending up in irony? As we’ve discussed, irony is when we do x for y and x is precisely why we don’t get y: we love a person precisely so that they feel loved, and that is precisely why we end up in a situation where they don’t feel love. That doesn’t make any sense. How can our effort to make the world a better place make it worse? How is it that what we believe is the case can be so radically wrong and yet we at the same time genuinely believed in our understanding? Humans mustn’t be what we think they are…
For me, some major topics of philosophy are self-deception, unintended consequences, irony, misunderstanding, and other topics that I often associate with literature (the link between “philosophy” and “literature” is deep). These are problems that cannot be addressed simply according to what is “given” to us by our immediacy, because otherwise we could face these problems with simple linear thinking or engineering. No, philosophy is in the business of trying to remember and keep in mind an invisible “nebulas pattern” that’s very hard to keep in front of us (like a model) — as Philip Shinn discussed in “The Net #130.” We’re trying to remember patterns and previous examples that we can only incorporate into our thinking if we remember them and if we don’t forget the pattern, and if we forget the pattern, we’re likely also forget we forgot (which brings to mind Dante). Are we “lost” then? Perhaps, suggesting the stakes of philosophy (which invites further wonder in us then wondering how reality could be such a place where this kind of “lostness” is possible…)?
“I don’t know how not to mess-up” — so can start wonder, in a moment of amazement of how reality could be so strange. Beauty invites this revelation, but so does “the surprise” (necessarily) that good intention can lead to trouble, how the closer people are the more they can be “shocked by difference” (as we’ve discussed with Leibniz at Philosophy Portal), how the more we gain everything we wanted in life the more we can find it empty, and so on. If our problems were simply a result of trying to do something bad or a lack of knowledge, again, we would not need philosophy, and indeed much of life can be addressed without it. But then we encounter problems that are a result of us doing our best, trying to be good…And is the solution then to not trying our best, to not act out of love…? No, though that can be the temptation (our problems would be a lot easier); instead, we must seek understanding that is not self-evident or obvious. We must learn patterns. We must remember our experiences. We must understand metrics that are not obviously metrics. We must learn to keep much in our minds that we can refer to without at the same time getting lost in our heads. How is that possible? Is it possible? Philosophy starts in wonder…
Beauty. Breaking. Both of these can break-up our “everydayness” and make us think about thinking itself. But not necessarily: if we’re not careful, emphasizing “wonder as beauty” can lead us to seek an oceanic feeling in which there doesn’t seem to be a need for philosophy, while emphasizing “wonder at devastation” can lead us into losing faith in the possibility of beauty. We need both, and in this way “wonder” as a notion might be inherently dialectic if it is to be speculatively fruitful at all. If we know too clearly what we mean when we discuss “wonder,” we’re not “wondering about wonder,” and any philosophy that may have started will be done.
“What happened?” — this can be a question of beauty, devastation, and/or even phenomenology, inquiring into the conditions of reality itself to so make this “happening” possible. Such a question can be an endless source of anxiety and mental difficulty, which we might wonder why we must face. Indeed, “wonder”…has the break “always already” happened (for most today)? We find ourselves wondering about the point of wondering, but perhaps in this consideration we might see a possibility in this risk for a form and height of life that otherwise would not be possible? Perhaps not. The address isn’t obvious. Shall we wonder about it? Shall we begin?
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