The notion of wonder
I’m reading Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder. I read the first chapter, on Joseph Banks in Tahiti, this morning – it’s enthralling, and rather inspiring.
I was struck by something Holmes said in the prologue.
Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so. In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons.
Yes exactly – and the scientists I’m familiar with are of that kind.
A sense of the gnuminous?
Ha! Funny you should ask – I’ve just read a new book by Karen Armstrong and I was having some success at finding the good side, the benign, the harmless, the not so terrible – until I got to the chapter on “How Little We Know” and bogged down in a sea of transcendents and…numinouses. She LOVES that word. It makes me gag.
A friend of mine kept reading books by Karen Armstrong but had to stop as he was going blind from it. Once he stopped reading KA his sight returned. However the hair on the palms of his hands is taking longer to go away. Please be careful.
Too much posting on CIF has the same effect I’ve noticed.
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Is it possible to watch those videos of Carl Sagan, and not appreciate the romanticism?
Scientific research papers tend to be unemotional and precise. But it does not follow that the scientists are dry boring folk.
Heh. Yes I wasn’t reading the book at my own instigation; I reviewed it for the New Humanist. I’m thinking they might reject it, because it really is quite…unfavorable.
Exactly, about Sagan, and you get the same thing from Dawkins and Jerry Coyne and PZ.
The notion of wonder, in my experience, is one of the strongest arguments against religion, and directly defeats the last remaining argument of religionists, the Argument from Religious Experience.
The Argument from Wondrous Experience (to coin a phrase) basically says that all humans can experience the sense of wonder, including atheists and especially science-minded people, and that so-called ‘religious experience’ is nothing more (and nothing less!) than natural, human ‘wondrous experience’. Religion does not even have a monopoly on ‘religious experience’. Anyone who’s heard a quote from Sagan’s ‘Pale Blue Dot’, or watched a video like this one from PhilHellenes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6w2M50_Xdk ), can experience the sense of wonder. The whole genre of science fiction is based on it! (Religions are just primitive speculative fiction, believed as real.)
Not only that, but the argument goes on to claim that the sense of wonder we can experience grows the more we learn about reality (via science), and this experience is far more satisfying than the shallow and brittle ‘religious’ experiences peddled by the primitive religious myths. Give me the wonder of supernovae, antibiotics, and neuroscience over creationism, faith-healing, and disembodied souls any day!
I’ve found this argument to leave religionists pretty much without any reply whatsoever. They may not convert on the spot, but they leave the conversation with a huge dose of cognitive dissonance.
Wonderism (hence my username) is based on taking this idea seriously, for the purpose of advancing science and reason, and countering fear-based dogmas such as religion, nationalism, etc. I tried to expand on this description here: http://www.atheistnexus.org/group/wonderism/forum/topics/what-is-wonderism
“They may not convert on the spot,”
Pardon me, I meant ‘deconvert’. Silly spell-check.
The sense of wonder about science is why I paint what I paint.
I seem to remember the BBC series from the 70s The Voyage of Charles Darwin capturing this this sense of science as romanticism particularly well. I could be wrong though – I was a kid at the time and the BBC apparently have never seen fit to release it on video.
I remember thinking, while reading a review of the book, that it made no sense to neglect Continental romantics, Goethe in particular with his theory of color. The romantics perhaps systematically erred in critiquing reductionism and favoring holism, but at least they embraced the promise of science and progress.
Romanticism was a child of the Enlightenment and by no means its complete rejection, since it wouldn’t have been possible or meaningful without it. Moreover, when it comes to science, it’s difficult to align discovery with intellectual fashions. People like Joseph Henry and Michael Faraday are doomed to sit athwart any grander narrative, because their work was as much constrained by what was known before they came on the scene and the means at their disposal as by their philosophical proclivities.
Science Fiction is what happens when romanticism and science meet. Wynwood Reade, Olaf Stapledon, H G Wells, and Arthur C Clarke are on a continuum that extends into the present day with Stephen Baxter and Greg Egan.
I’m thinking that sense of wonder is what some people mistake for the presence of a deity……..I used to get it strongest when seeing the aurora in a sub-arctic night sky. Wow! So numinous – and luminous!
I find science a source of constant wonder and some comfort.
Particularly when it contradicts the more oppressive and psychologically damaging fictions of religion.
Francis – there’s a nice book though, Alan Moorhead’s lavishly illustrated Darwin and the Beagle.
Part of what makes the Banks chapter so exhilarating is the resonance with Darwin’s voyage. Another part is what an impressive guy Banks was. He was there as naturalist and botanist, but once they got to Tahiti he also (as Holmes puts it) became an ethnographer. He was much less of the stereotypical Eurocentric 18th century imperialist than one might expect.