Notes on Wonder: Shock, Moderation, Transcendence

Abstract: I provide some general reflections on the nature of “wonder,” arguing for a form of moderation that sees “wonder” as the foundation of certain political and scientific discourses.

While the general relationship between wonder and philosophy has always concerned me, I want to explore in greater detail the relation wonder retains to other phenomena—primarily shock/disgust on the one hand, and abstraction on the other. For an interesting example of shock, Stephen King’s novella A Good marriage (an adaptation of the BTK murder narrative) offers it in the character of Darcy Anderson and her relation to her serial-killer husband, Bob. For disgust, look at Drew Westen’s The Political Brain, Rick Shenkman’s Political Animals or Weeden and Kurzban’s The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind—further, the whole aesthetic of the “grotesque.” As to abstraction, I think the relationship is a bit more complicated: that is, wonder is what makes possible abstraction, but it is abstraction which disenchants and assuages wonder. Two problems follow: 1. That wonder and abstraction ought to be seen as complimentary forces that operate in sequence, thus leading me to associate wonder with the process of (re)foundation and abstraction with the production upon that foundation.[1] In this manner, wonder is taken as that which may break down the solidity and stability of abstractions.[2] And 2.: that there exists a spectrum of wonder, that wonder effectuale is really wonder in moderation, that wonder at its most negative (and least likely to compel conversion) is: shock, disgust; at its most positive: free transcendence, play.[3]

In between these poles is constituted the most daily experience of wonder: minor enjoyments, curiosities and upliftings.[4] But, more on this moderate, effectual, conversional wonder: this wonder, contrary to abstraction, exists alongside a hyper-pluralism, where things scream their uniquity and identities remain irreducible, determined as sui generis.[5] Hence it is that wonder holds special relation to 1. The concept of the “deep” (see blog-post #38); and 2. with madness. Indeed, either end of the spectrum—total shock or ultimate transcendence—may tilt in the direction of insanity.[6]  More on this moderate[7], “pure” wonder: models of it might include the character child of Alex Torrey in Rob Proehl’s A Hundred-Thousand Worlds; Proust and Knausgaard’s general temporal/mnemonic methodologies in À la recherche du temps perdu and My Struggle, respectively. What I am looking at is less the introduction of a Platonic “ideal type” of wonder, and more an interrogation as to what a pure form of criticism, or a critical form of wonder, is/ought to look like. I would add: what is the relation between narrative and abstraction? I would say: narrative is a vehicle of wonder, and complicates abstraction; narrative is the combination of verticality and horizontality[8], but abstraction is chained exclusively to the horizontal. Or: opening up the poetic moment (exploring verticality) is a different art than abstracting it/from it; if abstraction broadens, enlarges the picture/frame, cools, then narrative magnifies, intensifies, burns.[9]

A tangential note concerns the nature of abstraction, and particularly its relation to parsimony. The principle of parsimony, idealized in the notion of “Occam’s razor,” dominates much of the social-scientific research to which I have been exposed; we cut through the chaos to find the pattern, the “signal in the noise,”[10] the simple black pearl—and yet, when we have done so, the echo of voices claiming we have missed this, omitted that variable, etc.—essentially, that the chaos looms beyond our abstraction, and haunts its claim to completion—is striking. We abstract toward parsimony, reach an analytic zenith, then are dragged back to the chaos by the interrogative enterprise of “criticism.” Or, critical engagements with social-scientific research usually have the air of James about them: they demand we recognize the pluralistic elements left out of our push toward monistic parsimony[11]—we turn away from the chaos viz. abstracted parsimony only to turn back once more.[12] In this sense, the great dialectic of disciplinary academic enterprise might be this: to first abstract, compartmentalize and parsimonize the world; to accept the criticism of other authors, pursuing their own ends, who shout “don’t forget about this aspect!” or “leave the door open for what’s left out” or, most generally, “there are more things in heaven and earth…” Most of critical academic work does not directly refute the hypothesis in question, but rather announces something like: “that point is too simple—things are far more complex; we lose much when we leave this out.” We turn away to turn back, again and again, to the world as it is.[13]

To this end, and in an attempt to link up someone like Edward Shils with Kuhn and Randal Collins’s work, I want to examine what a “center” vs. “periphery” reading of scientific discovery might look like, or what “core” vs “peripheral” or “avant-garde” theories of a given discipline present themselves as. How do certain theories or modes of experimentation relate to “fringe” or “controversial” discourses? How does “normal” science relate to more accepted, sanctioned, “central” standards? Further, how does this center-periphery matrix relate to monism or pluralism? My inclination is to argue that the core is usually monistic—that the center usually privileges a monistic attitude and usually evangelizes a monistic standard. We carve up, parismonize, only to then re-complicate and messify—a type-of cosmic ebb and flow, rise and fall.[14] Relatedly, I would argue that charismatic figures, in the sciences as elsewhere, tend to privilege and are privileged by monistic worldviews—or, rather, it is easier to orbit the charismatic-monist than the charismatic-pluralist. One is drawn to the gravity of the charismatic-monist over and above the charismatic-pluralistic; or, rather, it is more difficult to become truly “charismatic” as a committed pluralist than it is a monist.

In a similar vein, we ought to investigate and diverge ourselves of the toxic historical tendency to compartmentalize the thought of previous authors; that we seem study Newton’s natural/scientific materialism at the expense of his occultism, or partition the former off as somehow untainted by the latter, is testament to this form of myth-making. Like Foucault’s investigations into what constitutes the “author,” we demand of thinkers a type of consistency they rarely possess; in reality, geniuses of a certain caliber usually harbor the type of circulating contradictions that make them deep and interesting—I think of Walt Whitman on the nature of self-contradiction, and its foundation-as-art.[15]

Abstraction and parsimony hold a further, privileged relation to Lovejoy’s notion of otherworldliness. The underlying idea might be: chaos is illusion, blindness; to see order is first to see at all. On a meta-theoretical level, the question of drawing analytics regarding the sublime/wonder is ironic, since it attempts to parsimonize structures of experience that dwell on, and draw from, frames of chaos, the ineffable, the overwhelming, and so forth; to abstract from the sublime is to achieve—what?—wonder? No, but neither does it enable the type of analytics that one might find in abstracting principles of scientific data.[16]

[1] I am here thinking primarily of Derrida’s “Force of Law” essay.

[2] See Thomas Kuhn, wonder and the encounter of “crises”; see how wonder and the optical sublime interact with abstraction for someone like Burke, and how his treatment of wonder alters pre- to post-Revolution.

[3] Kant, Schiller and Otto all take up relevant positions here—Otto less explicitly, though his notion of the “sacred” is explicitly linked to Kant and lends itself to theorizing along the axis of the play-drive; see, too, Nietzsche; Winnicott, Piaget.

[4] See Charles Taylor, Auerbach, Thiel and Seigel on the emergence of the “everyday” as a subset-category of modernism. See, also, Woolf’s artistic elevation/celebration of the quotidian; Lefebvre on the everyday; Jane Bennett on the re-enchantment of the daily.

[5] See James’s A Pluralistic Universe; see, further, the figure of Pynchon’s Oedipa Mas, searching, and finding, the signature of the Trystero written over the landscape of culture.

[6] We might consider, too, how shock and transcendence relates to Burke’s idea of the sequence between fear and relief/happiness viz. the sublime.

[7] I ought to relater back to Aristotle: not only in this idea of “moderation” viz. virtue, but also in Aristotle’s locating the origin of philosophizing in the experience of wonder itself. For Aristotle, it seems, the right type of wonder is what inspires philosophy and reflection.

[8] See Bachelard’s take here.

[9] For a political uptake of this structural condition, see Arash Abizadeh’s work on the “philosophy/rhetoric” binary in Habermas’s work.

[10] See Nate Silver.

[11] See Berlin on negative/positive liberty, Nietzsche on will-to-knowledge.

[12] See Burke and Michelet’s criticisms of the abstractions of the revolution; see Koestler on abstract illusions in the Soviet Union. What we end up with in politically monistic forms of parsimony is: a diluted and economic vision of “man.”

[13] See Beckett; the idea of artistic self-erasure we find in Woolf. Cavell on the “swirl” of a lifeworld; Winch and Wittgenstein.

[14] See James on the “intellect” vs. “intellectualism.”

[15] See also: James and Hesse. Arendt and the problem of the daemon also comes to the fore here.

[16] The problem here opens back up to “myth” and attempts to subsume it: Adorno and Horkheimer; Rudolf Otto.