In Awe of Wonder

Josh Landy
Where does our sense of wonder come from?

Ray Briggs
Does wonder have a purpose, or is it gloriously useless?

Josh Landy
How can we pay more attention to marvelous things?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re standing in awe of wonder.

Josh Landy
Wonder is such a cool emotion, and we can feel it towards so many things: the stars above us, the beauty of nature all around us, the artistic feats that human beings are capable of.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, and not just big things, either. Watching a hummingbird in your garden, hearing a beautiful guitar solo or feeling the sand underneath your feet at the beach. Those things can fill you with wonder too.

Josh Landy
Right,and these experiences are always inspiring. They comfort us, they motivate us, they they add to the richness of life. It’s like Rachel Carson said: if you have a sense of wonder, you’re never really alone.

Ray Briggs
I don’t know about that always inspiring part, Josh. The cosmos is wonderful. But think about what Blaise Pascal said: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” I’m not convinced that experiences of wonder are alwas so positive.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s a fair point. I mean, sometimes we can get overwhelmed by stuff we don’t understand. But still a lot of the time, wonder feels miraculous. Plus, it’s also useful.

Ray Briggs
Useful? How is it useful to sit in your garden staring at a hummingbird for two hours?

Josh Landy
Because it motivates us to get curious, you know, to find stuff out about the world. Remember what Socrates says in Plato’s “Theaetetus”: Wonder is the origin of philosophy.

Ray Briggs
I’m not so sure about that. Look, when I was 14, I had this friend with a ouija board. And that seemed pretty mysterious, and it filled us with wonder. We read a whole bunch of books about ghosts and spirits. That was fun, but I wouldn’t exactly call it knowledge.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I guess I wouldn’t either. So it turned out in your case, they weren’t any actual ghosts. But I don’t know, I still think that we Jabril would probably did something useful for you it, it keeps your mind open to new possibilities. Not all strange things turn out to be true, but some do. And it’s good to be on the lookout for when that happens.

Ray Briggs
No, it’s only good to be on the lookout for strange possibilities if you’re right more often than you’re wrong. And most of the time, the world is pretty mundane.

Josh Landy
Most of the time it’s mundane? What about black holes? What about dark matter? Quantum entanglement? Or the fact that the universe had a beginning—or didn’t have a beginning? I think the universe is so wild and wacky place and wonder fills us with respect for that wildness and wackiness.

Ray Briggs
You know, your problem is that you think that wonder has to have a point. You say it fills us with respect, it keeps us open to new possibilities. It sets us on the path to knowledge. Why not just relax and enjoy the ride?

Josh Landy
Why can’t we do both? I mean, I love disappearing into an experience of wonder as much as the next person. I love letting that time drift away while I sit staring at a Rothko painting. But once I’m done staring, I often feel like going to the library and checking out a bunch of art history books.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I still think looking at it that way makes you miss out your intellectualizing your feelings, you’re acting like they have to be about something. Why can’t you get out of your head and into your heart?

Josh Landy
But feelings are always about something. I mean, if I feel afraid, it’s because there’s something scary out there. If I feel angry, it’s because somebody hurt me. And if I feel wonder, it’s because I’m seeing something surprising and unexplained. Your head is involved in all of these emotions, whether you like it or not.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, you’re saying that the whole point of wonder is that it motivates you to explain In things, and that just can’t be right. Finding explanations encourages your sense of wonder it doesn’t make it go away. If your sense of wonder went away every time you found an explanation that would be tragic.

Josh Landy
Who says the world isn’t tragic? Maybe it’s like Proust says: Once you understand a piece of music, there’s one more bit of knowledge in the world and one less bit of beauty.

Ray Briggs
I hope not. Maybe our guest will be able to set both of our minds at ease. It’s Helen De Cruz, author of “Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.”

Josh Landy
Speaking of being Wonderstruck, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to talk to people who find wandering all kinds of things from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to incredibly close confines. She filed this report

Holly McDede
Ooh, mmm, ouch, yum yum. Those are all examples of vocal bursts. And then there’s ‘whoa’. Dacher Keltner examines whoas in his book, “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” Keltner is a psychology professor and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. He writes that ‘whoa’ is one of the most universal human sounds and it conveys the emotion we call awe.

Dacher Keltner
It was really the birth of my first daughter, Natalie, where I was just blown away and awestruck. And I felt like my life had been transformed.

Holly McDede
His team was struggling with how to study awe. They gathered stories from 26 different countries, asking people to tell a story of an experience with awe. One of the stories from his book comes from a cellist named Yumi Kendall, who plays for the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Dacher Keltner
She said, well you know, when I start playing music, and I think about the notes I play, I realize like I’m part of this human tradition of music that’s thousands of years old—it’s probably 80,000 years old.

Holly McDede
The vibrations coming out of the cello produce sound that flow into space.

Dacher Keltner
She’s like, god it—the notes vibrate in my body, and then I’m part of the symphony and we’re part of producing these sounds and I understand the meaning. It feels like a cashmere blanket of sound.

Holly McDede
Kendall talks about playing Mozart’s “Requiem” in The Science of Happiness podcast, a requiem is a mask for the dead and she thought of her grandfather.

Yumi Kendall
Then… it suddenly changes like 20 seconds in to this angelic, like bright white light like the heavens opened, and super peaceful soprano singing angels, angel voices kind of feeling. And I got goosebumps, I felt like grandfather was listening.

Holly McDede
Keltner says answering the question of why music is so powerful, maybe one of his last acts in the world of awe. With questions comes wonder.

Elizabeth Kessler
In science ,wonder seems like a developmental stage that you go through to get to knowledge. And it’s a kind of temporary states where the questions are popping everywhere. And then you figured it out. And you know things.

Holly McDede
That’s Elizabeth Kessler, a lecturer in American Studies at Stanford and author of “Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime.

Carl Sagan
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that fot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

Holly McDede
Before the astronomical sublime got to her, Kessler was interested in romanticism and landscape paintings.

Elizabeth Kessler
But I started seeing a lot of the astronomical images that were online whether it was the use from very early Mars rovers to the then early Hubble Space Telescope images, and it struck me that many of them looked like romantic landscape paintings and photographs.

Holly McDede
For instance, the Pillars of Creation.

Elizabeth Kessler
The choice of colors—they’re indicating scientific information, they speak to the relative wavelengths of the difference observations that were made there. But it also ends up creating a scene with a blue background and these clouds of gas and dust look kind of yellowish orange is brownish, so it looks like a kind of landscape.

Holly McDede
She says images from the cosmos help us think of possibilities and potential in times of catastrophe. Like in 2022 when NASA released the first images from Hubble’s  successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.

Joe Biden
Light where stars were born, and from where they die. Light from the oldest galaxies, the oldest documented light in the history of the universe.

Elizabeth Kessler
In a moment where we often feel weighted down, whether pandemic, climate change catastrophe after catastrophe—to have a glimpse of something, even inadequate that speaks to or that speaks to wonder, that speaks to the potential for transcendence gives us some other way forward.

Holly McDede
And we sure could use fewer reasons to murmur “ohh” or “uhh” or “eek,’ and more reasons to go “whoa.” For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thank you for that wonderous report Holly. I’m Josh Landy and with me as my Stanford colleague, Ray Briggs. Today, we’re thinking about the philosophy of wonder.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Helen de Cruz. She’s a professor of philosophy at St. Louis University and author of a forthcoming book titled “Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.” Helen, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Helen De Cruz
Hi, Ray.

Josh Landy
So Helen, I know you’ve been thinking about wonder for many years now, can you tell us about an early experience that got you thinking about it?

Helen De Cruz
I think the first time that I seriously got to think about wonder, was when I was about 12 years old, and I just enrolled in the local library. And I come from a very blue collar family. So we have like, the main books we have at home, or like cooking books and books on how to fix things. And I was in the library, and I wandered off to the section on art history. And I found this book with sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. So there was almost no text, it was just his sketches. And I was so astounded at somebody thinking that we add both the art and the scientific stuff. Like I was amazed. I mean, everybody at the time was really into Leonardo DiCaprio, but I, you know, said to Leonardo da Vinci.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I kind of feel the same way about DaVinci. His drawings, they’re so cool. So I’ve also been kind of wondering about wonder, as an emotion, lots of emotions are useful for day to day survival. But why do we do things like stand in front of a beautiful painting or drawing and just stare at it for hours? Does that have any kind of evolutionary advantage?

Helen De Cruz
My view is that yes, we it does have an evolutionary advantage. And the problem with evolutionary explanations, particularly of sort of the evolutionary psychological kind, is that they look at function very narrowly, something like if it doesn’t have any immediate material benefits, then it’s not evolutionarily speaking, useful. But there are so many situations in which it is important to expand your mind, it’s important to, you know, have a restful soul. Like that sounds very poetic, right. But it’s important to, you know, to nourish your mind as well as your body. And I think in that respect, wonder is very useful. It’s something that helps you to find out about your environment to find out things that you didn’t know, it opens up things that you didn’t know, it makes you aware of them. And it helps you to really look at those things with a sense of like, I’ve never seen this before, what could this be and take it on its own terms, it sort of helps you to get out of your head. And that I think, is evolutionarily speaking, very, very useful.

Ray Briggs
Oh, wow. So that’s actually two things that you said there. First of all, that it makes me kind of curious and interested in exploring my environment. And second of all, that it’s restful, I don’t usually think of those things as going together, do they? Do they in the case of wonder?

Helen De Cruz
I think so. I think you need a bit of space, a bit of headspace to experience wonder, like, I noticed that I find it difficult, I find it a struggle to some find enough time in my life for wander. So you need a bit of headspace. And then once you have that, it, the nice thing is you can sort of let go of all those immediate concerns in your mind and really take an object at its own terms, like for example, a Rothko. So a Rothko is something like radically other it’s a beautiful painting that you can really sort of explore and, you know, feel into without having to worry about your immediate worries. And that I think, is something that gives a kind of, of restfulness that I think is is important in wonder.

Josh Landy
Oh, I agree so deeply with you, Helen, thank you so much for saying it so beautifully. The only question we have is it’s kind of a general question about evolutionary psychology. We can say that that’s important in life very valuable, maybe even useful, but why should we think that it’s have, you know an adaptation that we’ve sort of evolved to have a sense of wonder?

Helen De Cruz
I think that wonder is adaptive, but I’m not sure if it’s an adaptation. So adaptations are things that directly evolve in response to certain certain problems in our environment. Whereas things that are adaptive are a lot broader. Like, for example, we build houses, having houses is certainly adaptive. But it’s not an adaptation to build houses. And I think actually wonder, like other complex emotions is like that. So wonder does build on our ability to feel surprised and the sort of like more primitive, more basic emotions, but it is also a cultural emotion. So it’s maybe an exaggeration to say that, when we, at least in the West in the 16th 17th 18th century, engaged in things like magic and things like the sublime that our sense of wonder, sort of got that kind of cultural filling in right with like, for example, things like gothic novels of anrich, Radcliffe and other people like that. So it is adaptive. But I’m not convinced that it is like a direct adaptation in the sense that, for example, I don’t know teeth are a direct adaptation.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about wonder with Helen De Cruz from St. Louis University.

Ray Briggs
What’s the last thing that filled you with wonder? Did it motivate you to learn more about the world around you? Or did it fill you with reverence for the unknown?

Josh Landy
How to illuminate the world with magic—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues?

Lou Reed
Oh such a perfect day, you just keep me hanging on.

Josh Landy
Could a simple, mundane, but perfect day, fill your heart with wonder? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about wonder with Helen de Cruz, author of “Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.”

Josh Landy
What do you wonder about wonder? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and wander through our library have nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Helen, we were talking earlier about how even if Wonder isn’t an adaptation in an evolutionary sense, it’s still adaptive. But I can imagine somebody objecting, you know, why should wonder have to be useful for anything at all? Shouldn’t we just say that it’s a beautiful thing with no use? What would you say to that?

Helen De Cruz
I think that there is a kind of dichotomy that we make between the useful and useless, a dichotomy that I reject. So I think that actually, a lot of the things that give value and meaning to our lives are useful to us. So William James, he had this critique a long time ago against the very sort of early version of evolutionary psychology, where he said, you know, if Spencer is right, what about the things that really matter to us? What about the things that make life worth living? Yeah, it’s survival of the fittest. But what is that life a life worth living? And I see wandering that respect, it’s very useful to us, but precisely because it isn’t immediately useful to us in a sort of straightforward, utilitarian sense.

Ray Briggs
So I can kind of see two different questions here, where one is what is good about wonder. And it just seems like citing the downstream benefits of Wonder is kind of missing the point, even if there are downstream benefits. And there’s this other kind of evolutionary question like, What is the cause of how we’re able to feel wonder? So have we been just answering the What is good about wonder question, or the causal question? Or somehow both?

Helen De Cruz
Yeah. So in terms of the causes of wonder, I’m on board with what a lot of contemporary emotion researchers say. And that is that emotions are actually things we have that help us to respond to our environment in a very flexible way. So for example, if you have been pain is a feeling but it’s not an emotion, then you have to react to the pain. It’s very, very difficult to ignore. But emotions are a lot more flexible. For example, you can become really angry, but you can try to suppress the anger in a way that’s easier in a sense than suppressing pain unless like the pain is very light and the anger is very big. And in that respect, I think that wonder is similar. So wonder is an emotion that helps you to become aware of your environment. Meant to become to sort of step out of yourself. It’s a self transcendent emotion. And it helps you to obtain knowledge about the world.

Josh Landy
So it seems like there’s a kind of a bundle of advantages of feeling wonder. So it’s, as you say, helps you to learn about the world. It overcomes itself transcended overcomes your obsessive focus on yourself. I know you’ve also talked about how it can break our categories, right can kind of move us out of whatever conceptual scheme we’re currently trapped in. And then there’s the thing that I might maybe like the most, which is restoring a sense of Marvell, beauty, excitement about the world. It reminds me of something. Susan Sontag said, she wrote that the conditions of modern life conjoined to dull our sensory faculties, what is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more to hear more to feel more. And wonder, does that right? I mean, it, you know, it breaks the hold of our habits of, of seeing and thinking, and allows us to have a fresh gaze upon the world. Does that seem right to you?

Helen De Cruz
So I think definitely, the problem is that we fall into ruts. So some of the great major theorists about wonder, Abraham Heschel, and Mel Maurice Merleau. Ponty. I’ll just briefly mention hash also hash Hill says, the problem is eventually you just sort of get into these ruts where you take things for granted. Even really marvelous things like science and a product of science, like you eat food, the food comes onto your plate, due to this really complex chain of all sorts of technological innovations. That’s how you can eat food from all over the world. But you just don’t realize it anymore. You so you get in a sense blunted. And what wonder helps you to do is to try to recover. That sense of this is really amazing. And call, this is something special. And so Herschel was really concerned with trying to recover this so that we wouldn’t, in fact, sort of take things for granted and just sort of sleepwalk through life.

Ray Briggs
This actually helps me with a question that Josh and I were talking about earlier, about how you can learn things and be not less filled with wonder and more filled with wonder. So if the things that you’re learning are surprising, and make the subject that you’re studying, seems surprising, where before you were just like, oh, that’s a boring feature of my life. Like that does seem like a way to cultivate wonder.

Helen De Cruz
That is definitely right. So it has been a long discussion in the 18th century about whether you have to be ignorant to wander. And the upside I come down on is Adam Smith, Adam Smith thinks that actually, even though a scientist, so he talks about astronomy, and a book has a history of astronomy, even though you try to find out about things like comets and things like eclipses, things that fill you with wonder, and then you realize how does this eclipse happen? And you lose that sense of wonder? Because you say, Oh, yes because of that. But once you know more new questions start coming, you know what scientists or philosophers of science call anomalies, and then you become open to that. But in order to understand these anomalies, or to see them, you have to have a framework, so you have to have already know something. So I think in that sense, wonder, at least in science is self perpetuating, because you learn more and more things. And that makes you open to more and more strange and wondrous things.

Josh Landy
That actually connects to an email question that we got from Hannah and Connecticut. Hannah asks this wonder often is a catalyst for further inquiry, which then leads to discoveries that explain or debunk the very phenomena that inspired wonder in the first place. In this way, wonder almost seems to be self annihilating. Especially in our modern world that’s obsessed with knowing, isn’t there something to be said for remaining in that state of wonder at all, rather than trying to transcend it? What do you think, Helen?

Helen De Cruz
I love this question. So I think that yes, there is something in science that is a bit of a paradox in debt scientists, indeed, try to lessen their sense of wonder. They don’t want to wander so so as as Adam Smith says about the history of astronomy, you have to early astronomers and they look at these eclipses and they say they don’t say oh, wow, an eclipse how wonderful or Wow, a comet How great? No, they want to understand like, what is this? What is a comment? What is an eclipse? How does it cope? How can I find out when a new Eclipse comes? And then their sense of wonder dissipates, however, there’s always new things to discover. So I think when you become aware of your limitations, which wander helps you to become aware of there is always new things to discover. That’s why I’m on the side of not seeing ignorant and and just going for it. That’s all Wish new and marvelous things that we can find out.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about wonder with Helena Cruz from St. Louis University. Helen, this kind of brings up a question for me about the appropriate role of aesthetic feelings in science, like Wonder is kind of an aesthetic feeling. It’s an appreciation of beauty. And so some of the scientists that you were citing might think that there’s no room for aesthetic feelings that science is supposed to be objective. Is that right? What do you think?

Helen De Cruz
Oh, that’s so cool. Yeah, I think that scientists like maybe this has goes back to the idea of the context of justification and the context of discovery that people like Papa, other philosophers of science talk about. And I think, actually, there’s something to that. So I think that you can, as a scientist have the craziest ideas, the weirdest thoughts about how do I come to this thing, like it could be something completely idiosyncratic. But then once you begin, you do have to try to do your best to be objective, you have to really subject your theories to rigorous testing. But I think in those early processes of discovery, and of just thinking around it, that it’s very important to let your emotions guide you because our emotions are useful. And as I’ve said earlier, our emotions are the sorts of things that help us to learn about the world. So scientists should use those emotions and aesthetic emotions, you know, of beauty of all finding something marvelous and intricate, are very important in their work.

Josh Landy
That seems right, because there is that long tradition starting with people like John Keats, the poet, you know, complaining about science unweaving, the rainbow, disenchanting the well, taking all the mystery out of things, but you have a bunch of scientists saying, Actually, my world is greatly enchanted, precisely because of all the things that I’ve learned about it. And it makes me think maybe there are two ways of thinking about this. So one is what you were saying a moment ago, which is, even when you understand a bunch of stuff, there’s still stuff to be understood. And you’re discovering new areas of your own ignorance, which is, in some ways, enchanting. Another is the very knowledge that you come up with, can itself be beautiful, interesting. I think that that line from Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Right? And so maybe it doesn’t the mystery, and the enchantment doesn’t last forever. But surely, you know, these incredible pictures, for example that we’re seeing from the Webb telescope that we were hearing about earlier. These are enchanting, right? These are these are wonder inducing. So isn’t it? I mean, I guess the point I’m trying to make is, is can’t we have wonder from knowledge, and not just from ignorance?

Helen De Cruz
I think that we can, this was actually a big discussion in the 18th century, Immanuel Kant thought that the sublime and the sublime is sort of like this sense of wonder and awe that you get at like, really deep valleys and like storms. And you know, that Pasteur was sees, so pumped thought that you needed to have a sense of safety, and that you need to have a basically be ignorant, but herder thoughts that actually we can find. Also wonder in what we know, it’s sort of like, it opens up the sense of like, wow, the scope of this is enormous. And the only way in which you can learn about the scope of, for example, takes a particle physics, to not take an 18th century example. Thinking about those different particles and how they might relate. And now did the theory with the fields, all these particles are in different fields. It’s amazing right? To think that reality is fundamentally or might be fundamentally like that. So there you find wonder within the knowledge, and not just merely in the fact that we don’t know everything there is to know or what, whether there’s dark matter and things like that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and it’s so interesting to see some of these philosophers, Adam Smith, saying, Hey, we should get rid of that wonder that uncertainty and anxious curiosity. We’re kind of reminds me of some of the ancient skeptics, but I’m kind of temperamentally disposed towards the beauty and the wonder of wonder. But I sometimes think about the the dark side, right. So I mean, we heard from Ray earlier Pascal’s line about the terrifying immensity of space. And we could think about the Ouija board. We could think about cases where wonder leads you astray. And we could think about, you know, the danger of following charismatic leaders or falling down conspiracy theory, rabbit holes. How dangerous could a sense of wonder be?

Helen De Cruz
I think that wonder can be dangerous. I’m using Dec acts as a guideline. where he actually says that once you’ve known once you learn something, he says, well, it’s altogether better to stop wandering. So once you’ve acquired knowledge, you just stop wandering, because his worry is if you continue wandering, then you just fall into a rabbit hole. Like imagine that you watch, like flat Earth videos, these were really cool. And while not cool, they were horrible. But a few years ago, my students showed me like flat Earth videos, and they were like three hour video essays on YouTube. And they just, they were so filled with wonder, it was just impossible. Like, do you think the earth is really round? Do you see that imagery? Well, it’s all fake. And I thought this is where indeed the cactus right, there is a certain unhealthy way to engage the emotional fonder, just like other emotions can become unhealthy. So we do have to regulate our habits, at least in such a way that our sense of wonder remains healthy.

Ray Briggs
I think you’ve mentioned a couple of instances of people wandering at things that just aren’t true. Like, I can’t wonder at the flatness of the Earth, if the Earth isn’t flat, or I shouldn’t maybe I’m kind of wondering how this fits in with some of the things that you say in the book about magic. So stage magic is all about creating illusions for people to wonder at. Is that all right? Or is it just kind of seducing them with with lies?

Helen De Cruz
It depends a bit how you do it. So many stage magicians, like Dan Brown, for example, say that we shouldn’t give people the impression that we are really working wonders, or that we are really communing with the dead, that particularly is really awful. So people they want to talk to their dead loved ones. And, you know, you have lots of magicians who who sort of do that. But it’s totally okay as a performance art. And so the way I conceive of it in the book is as a performance art, where you create an effect of impossibility. So the audience knows that the assistant of the magician is not really being sawed in half. The audience knows that that that pigeon didn’t just come out of that hat. So then the question that didn’t just materialize there, well, it did come out of that. But then the question is like, Okay, this is impossible. And yet I see it happens. So how did it happen? So, the main thing about it is the how but that’s not the only thing. The whole thing is a magic show also has to be beautiful, has to tell a story. It has to be interesting. And all those things, I think make it more than just like wandering at the impossible.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, one of my favorite historical figures, is a 19th century French magician called Giorgio Houdini named himself after the sky. And he was kind of a pioneer in creating the stage magic we see today where it isn’t people pretending to commune with the spirits. But it’s, you know, regular evening where nothing up my sleeve. And we’re just as you’re saying, Helen, it’s all about an illusion that is presented as an illusion. And it seems like that’s a really interesting move forward, where we have this kind of wonder that, as a colleague of mine says, delights but does not deceive, right, a very modern way of getting wander back into the world in a in a totally secular way. That doesn’t depend on belief in spirits and ghosts and goblins.

Helen De Cruz
Yeah, I love that. I like the idea that wonder does not depend on gullibility. So if you are somebody who wanders a lot, you’re not particularly a gullible person, or something like you could be as healthy skeptic and yet, make room for wandering your life. And one of the things that I have found in my research on stage magic is there’s many different ways in which you can engage with it. Some people are just happy to see the trick. Other people keep on thinking, Okay, how is this done? And they will not rest they will go to home to YouTube to try to find out how is district done. Other people just love the sort of the aesthetic parts of the performance. So there’s so many different ways. There’s not just one right way to wonder there’s many different ways in which you can do it.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about wonder with Helen De Cruz, author of “Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.”

Ray Briggs
Do you want to cultivate more wonder in your life? Or do you think it’s a big waste of time? Would the world be a better place if we all took time to smell the roses?

Josh Landy
The strange, the striking, and the spectacular—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Moby
No one can stop us now ’cause we ae all madeof stars.

Josh Landy
We really are made of star stuff—doesn’t that fill you with a sense of wonder? I’m Josh Landy. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, our guest is Helen de Cruz from St. Louis University, and we’re thinking about wonder.

Josh Landy
So Helen, do you think there’s a way we can harness our sense of wonder to bring about a better world?

Helen De Cruz
I think we should do it. So Rachel Carson, she was a big advocate for that she was, of course, an amazing advocate for conservation. She was arguing against the use of pesticides or the overuse of pesticides. And she thought, like, there is this tendency to look away, like you see all sorts of horrors, I think it’s so actual, like, you see a lot of horrors in the world, and you look away. And so you get blunted, like you’re already blunted by just like, the every day world where you have to, like, you know, work and put food on the table and things like that. But if you can make a space, you have to make some space in your life, some emptiness in your life, then you can look again at things and and it’s important precondition, in order to change the world, like you can’t despair when you despair, then there’s just not even the possibility of making changes that that could individually or collectively help.

Ray Briggs
So when I think about the environment and wonder, this kind of brings me back to one of the questions that Josh asked about wonder being kind of terrifying and depressing. So a lot of the things in the environment that provoke wonder, are beautiful animals or beautiful ecosystems, that climate change is going to destroy. If we don’t do something. Is it possible to decouple the wonder from the despair?

Helen De Cruz
Ah, that’s difficult, I think, in a sense, not, because when you become acutely aware of how marvelous and how beautiful it is, your immediate thoughts about this is in danger becomes more salient. I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, this is for work in progress with natural scientists. So I did a lot of interviews with them an outreach, and I interviewed about 30. And there were a lot of climate scientists. And they, they clearly had a sense, like they, they are not, okay, these people right now. So they do have a lot of sense of wonder at the beauty of nature, and many of them are super into outdoorsy as well, like they hike and they climb mountains. But they also like this sense of like, we should spread the wonder like lots of people really need this in their lives. And it will help us to, you know, to restore the world around us and to to be more wholesome within that world.

Ray Briggs
I like this way that you just put it a spreading the Wonder. And maybe part of the problem with the climate scientists is that they feel wonder at the natural environment, but it’s not being reflected by the people around them enough and not motivating the people around them enough. So do you have advice for how to spread and share wonder with the people around you?

Helen De Cruz
I think just like local small initiatives, like for example, in Forest Park in St. Louis, where I live, there’s like an owl walk regularly, where you could go and look at owls. And that’s just so amazing. Like, there’s so many owls, so many different ones. So it doesn’t have to be like big and world change. It is good luck, small initiatives, like just walking around in nature, because so many of us are alienated from nature, and thinking about how we can bring that to people, like who normally don’t get that opportunity. So people who live in very urban and deprived environments, could could get a sense of wonder, as well. So trying to democratize it, like wander is not just something for wealthy people with a lot of time on their hands. It’s for everyone, and try to help people to you know, to find it in in their everyday life.

Josh Landy
That’s a beautiful point, because you could just be walking down the street and suddenly a butterfly lands on a flower growing out of the crack in the sidewalk. And that’s available to everybody. But it’s only really available if somehow there’s a space in our mental life for it. Right. Which brings me to a related question, which is, I think you’ve answered beautifully. How do we make wonder available to others? What about making it available to ourselves, right? We we do get trapped into habits and routines and and it’s hard for us, you know to stop and smell the roses. What advice do you have for someone who wants to have more wander in their life?

Helen De Cruz
The paradoxical thing that I’m going to say now is that you should not do it in order to become more productive or anything like I really, really dislike those articles in BBC and New York Times about make some all walks and work against work burnout at work, I’d say, No, this is a problem, right? We have too much work pressure, like, the environment is degrading, you know, people, like there’s all these problems that, you know, prices are rising, you know, those are external problems that need to be fixed. And wonder is not the fix for them. wonder is there for you. And but it shouldn’t be sort of used for you to achieve some and like being productive, it should just be there for you. And for nothing else, or for you and the people you love, and you want to share with now the traditional way in which that has been done, and that Abraham Joshua Heschel talks about is religion. So religion is one way in which people can, you know, make wonder in their lives, but you don’t have to be religious, I think it’s important to just like, use a mindfulness or any sort of technique that works for you to like, take a bit of space in your life that doesn’t have to be productive. Like, if you have a lot of work, if you work, like two jobs or something, it could be really short. But it’s still important to make the space and you know, 10 minutes can be found. So you could start small with things like that.

Ray Briggs
So actually, the religion point raises more questions for me too, because on the one hand, religion can do many valuable things, it can bring people together, on the other hand, religion has not been totally non destructive. So I wonder if there are religious misuses of wonder and how to prevent oneself from doing that, and maybe encourage others not to do that either.

Helen De Cruz
I’m now going with Merleau-Ponty’s sort of concept of wonder. So Merleau Ponty was very critical of religion, particularly of Catholicism, which was the religion would which he grew up with. But at the same time, he recognized that religions like Catholicism really helped people to to have this sense of wonder. So in this case, like he was a Frenchman, you had like these huge masses with like, beautiful music coming out of big organs, and like, all sorts of beautiful clothes, and you know, smells. So the thing is that, I think there is a worry that religion might monopolize the sorts of feelings that really matter to us. And the worry then is if religion does that, if it monopolizes the things that really matter to us and say, like, this is the way and no other way, then they can use that for all sorts of answers, like very spooky political ends as well, and become really disruptive. So I think it’s very important. Like, even if you are religious, I would resist religion monopolizing your wonder, like, you can find it in many different ways. And it’s important to be aware of many different sources of Wonder don’t like take it just from one source.

Josh Landy
Right, including, I would say something dear to my heart and to yours, Helen, the realm of art. I, you know, it’s there are some famous theorists who claim that that’s one of the main roles of artists to de familiarize the world for us to to make the everyday seem strange. Let me give you one example that I like, for the world of science fiction, the movie 12 monkeys, 12 monkeys, sketches out a sort of post nuclear world, but yet, you can’t go on the surface. And thanks to time travel, the main character goes back in time. And there’s a great scene where he’s, he’s just driving around to the passenger seat and hanging his head out of the window, like a dog. Just because breathing air is so amazing. And that’s, I think, a fantastic way that you know, one is one example of many, how art can reinvent the world for us. Art can deliver back to us our world, but with a sense of how extraordinary it is we get to breathe air. What do you think about art as a resource for for Wonder.

Helen De Cruz
So like you I really, really love science fiction and fantasy. I love it because it makes the familiar look utterly strange. And it gives you an appreciation for that. But I agree like any kind of artists capable of doing that, like what artists basically do is help us to see things in a new way. Like, you know, this is like what Oscar Wilde said about, you know, mists and vapors. He said like, it’s not that that actually we only began to see them when the Impressionists started painting them. Even though there were missing vapors before like you had trains. You had steamboats. But then you had Impressionists and people just before like Turner, painting them, then people became aware that they are interesting and beautiful and special. And artists like that, like that’s, that’s why it’s good to go to museums sometimes and lots of them are free, and to just enjoy the way that other people look at things and bring out strangers and it can help you to find the wondrous nests as well.

Josh Landy
Helen, this conversation has been both wonderful and marvelous. I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Helen De Cruz
Thank you so much.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Helen de Cruz professor of philosophy at St. Louis University and author of the forthcoming book, “Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking I’ve been working too hard and I’d like to spend an evening at the Exploratorium.

Josh Landy
What a great idea. We’re gonna put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and listen in wonder, we hope, to our nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog

Josh Landy
Now, so fast he’s the eighth wonder of the world—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The word “wonder” is often used by preachers to get us to stop thinking about how horrible things are and ponder instead the wonders of childbirth, breakfast, and things that do not involve voting.  We can wonder about things, like bacteria and gravity, and wonder AT things, like the Alps.  Wondrous concepts are the beating heart of religion, love, stadium events, 3-D Sensurround viewing experiences, and tourism, but they are thin on the ground these days.  Authors of children’s books are often called wonderful, if they do their own illustrations.  Dr. Seuss is wonderful. Not as much as he used to be, when he was more about the oobleck than Cat in the Hat.  To Think That I saw It on Mulberry street is gone from the shelves, though nobody’s actually read it since 1962.  Things we once saw on Mulberry Street are now problematic.  And once problematic enters in, wonderful goes out the window, unless you’re a fascist.  Which we all are really, when it comes to spectacle anyway.  Who doesn’t love a parade?  There used to be Seven Wonders of the World, which seems kind of skimpy now. I only know about them from newsreels we used to watch in the furnace room at Lewis and Clark Grade School, a low slung building, without one tinge of wonder to it.  Experience of wonder is evidence of something beyond our ken.  It’s become diluted over the years, because we experience more things than we used to, through books, movies, television, records, microscopes, telescopes, and inside those  experiences, manipulating the wonderful through slow motion, extreme closeups, sound effects, bombastic symphony or heavy metal music to make the wonderfulness that much more awesome, until it is all eclipsed by repetition, until the Easter Island heads and Tiki heads and the Rushmore heads merge into one big cartoon, which oddly enough does not effect the experience of seeing Mount Rushmore in real life.  Just like the Colossus of Rhodes, a former wonder of the world, long gone, existing as a movie starring Rory Calhoun, the first movie directed by Sergio Leone, 1961, would not effect our viewing of the real Colossus should Elon Musk decide to build one.  And Leone went on to make some wonderful westerns, making Clint Eastwood a star, even a monument.  See how it all ties in?   If I’d seen the bare rockface of Rushmore before sculpting began, I might have been struck with wonder just by that, nature being what it is and all.  But not the same wonder as now, tempered as it was by IMMEDIATELY wondering why Teddy Roosevelt is included up there, nothing against the guy.  All presidents are problematic now, it’s a fact.  But you know in America, it’s restful now to believe the worst about authority figures.  And oddly it doesn’t take the edge off wonder if you remember that Rushmore is not that far, really, from where Custer met his end.  Which reminds me, when I was a kid in a small town a bit north of Rushmore, some local cubscouts were part of a special event using the high school auditorium, which is also where Nixon spoke when he came there.  The kids reenacted Custer’s Last Stand, right there on the basketball court, with two thirds of the scouts playing Indians, swapping out their scout attire for various manifestations of what ten year old white boys imagined Indians might wear – Apaches, Arapaho, whatever, feathers and tomahawks bows and arrows and whooping.   The other boys were the doomed Cavalry, with the blondest kid as Custer, cap guns popping like firecrackers.  They didn’t even have to swap out their blue cub scout uniforms, just fall in their traces with blood curdling cries, merit badges showing where blood might have been, had they been shot.  It was wonderful!  And cost effective!   My Mother thought it was a bit bloodthirsty for these modern times.  But then mothers have a hard time finding the wonder in westerns, especially if they grew up in the west on a farm that went bust.   I learned later my father had been a scout leader, then discovered his troop was a shoplifting ring.  Nowadays we’d regard that as valuable training for resistance to Antifa incursions, or we’d just blame Biden and walk away. Though there’s a Crazy Horse monument in the works, bound to be unveiled any century now, Rushmore I’d say is immune from cancel culture.  Unless you have a truck full of nitroclycerine, which would make an awesome explosion, but not so wonderful really.  Still you could build a monument to Ozymandias where it once stood, or a stately pleasure dome.  Have Trump decree it.  Or keep it as it is, and put Trump’s head in there.  Maybe replace Teddy Roosevelt, who always looked like he was photobombing the monument anyway.  Build it with lasers to save time.  I have a feeling Trump would enjoy something like that, and frankly, despite his ambitions, it doesn’t seem like Trump gets much pleasure out of life.  It’s all such a complicated wonder, really, isn’t it?  Life I mean.  Many wonders are.  Seldom today is one truly agog.  I gotta go.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website,philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Chariots of Fire
Don’t compromise—compromise is the language of the devil. Run in God’s name and let the world stand back in wonder.