Leaving Us to Wonder: An Essay on the Questions Science Can't Ask

Chapter One: A Place to Begin

1 Chapter One A Place to Begin The person asking questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him (in serious dialogue): to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. —Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations” Curiosity and Wonder Ultimately, are not wonder and curiosity poles apart? —Henry Bugbee Always, no matter how much or how often we satisfy our never-ending curiosity with facts, something profound remains untouched. That which remains—something far apart from curiosity—is the experience of wonder. We might call our experience of this, and thus harken back to the ancient Greeks, suffering wonder. We are persuaded when it comes to asking how we ought to make a way of life together no 1 2 Leaving Us to Wonder number of facts can provide a risk-free blueprint for living well. This is not to say, of course, that we should be done with curiosity and facts or with the practices and the institutions of science that produce the vast majority of our factual knowledge. To the contrary, we may never have enough facts for our curiosity, and yet curiosity and facts are never and never will be enough to answer all our pressing questions . The practice called philosophy understood in its broadest and least professional sense can provide, albeit without any guarantees, the risky and responsibility-laden understandings that we turn toward these perennial questions surrounding our attempts at living well. This way of wonder is, thankfully, open to all because each of us, as we move through the world, already has and expresses a philosophy. However, to have a philosophy does not necessarily mean one has chosen it. Many of us find ourselves with philosophies, and they remain in a strange sense both ours and unknown to us. This situation can be overcome, we believe, by engaging in various and varied philosophical exercises. Briefly stated, the practice of philosophy advocated herein sets itself on the path of continual attempts to reflect on the form, content, and consequences of the philosophies we choose to hold. We shall pay special attention to those positions that in this techno-scientific age, with all its supporting structures from education to popular culture, are disseminated everywhere and always. Engaging in philosophy will be seen as a radically important endeavor as we realize that when they remain uninterrogated, the philosophies we currently hold can have a cruel hold on us. The story is a long and complicated one so much so that there are many possible versions of it. It is a story abundant in detail as well as one filled with numerous contestations and conflicts. In light of this, we shall tell but one version of this rich narrative. Because the practices of science are the foremost producers of facts, we tell our version in a manner that focuses on a certain type of Western scientific thinking. All the while, of course, we have our eyes 3 A Place to Begin on a path that leads to an understanding of the essential place philosophy broadly thought might be said to have still in a techno-scientific age. A Place to Begin By the mid-eighteenth century, The Royal Society of England, that great institution of modern science, was already firmly established. It was an exciting time for European science. Physicists and chemists were discovering the laws that govern the behavior of gasses and the composition of bodies. Rigorous experimentation coupled with elegant mathematical equations were changing our notions about nature and giving us an unprecedented control over its secrets. It was during this time that the British artist Wright of Derby painted The Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, illustrated here. The traveling representative of science, half in light, half in shadow, has put a white-feathered bird into the glass globe of the air pump. Upon the evacuation of the air from the globe, the bird will die, thus illustrating the thenstill novel phenomenon of the vacuum. The child and her family are strongly illuminated; she has a stricken look, her mother cannot bear to watch, and her father patiently explains the theory of the vacuum. The other onlookers are curious, thoughtful, yet the two lovers turn their interests and thoughts toward one another. We can see the four most...