Thursday, May 7, 2009

Final chapter

The very end of the last chapter made me think about our discussion that we had in class the other day about fostering curiosity and wonder in students and in people.  The authors write that "One may enter a scientific career through wonder, but one cannot persist in wonder, at least not in public before one's peers." (367)  I question whether or not we realize that we express our wonder in public.  I'll use the example of a grocery store checkout line.  They mention tabloids in this chapter and I can't count how many times I have said something or heard someone else comment on the outrageous headlines in non-celebrity tabloids.  "Three headed baby survives..." or some other catchy headline will always grab my attention (although I don't necessarily believe it is true).  I am more in awe of the fact that these tabloids sell.  People display wonder all the time in public and although that might not mean that they want to pursue or inquire further on the subject, they still identify and comment on these wonders.  Is it that socially unacceptable to have an interest in wonders?  Or is it so common that we only notice it as unusual when someone points it out to us?

Chapters 8 and 9

One of the things that really got me thinking when I read Chapter 8 was the role of wonder and curiousity in today's world and the stature that intellectuals have in our society. While Daston's Chapter 8 was more specific to natural philosophy, I'm speaking more generally in terms of wonder/study/knowledge. Do the curious continue to be looked down upon? While education is highly prized, is there still a sense in which the curious are rejected by certain members of society?

I find it interesting that something so simple, curiousity, could take on so many faces and be viewed in so many different ways throughout history.

On a final note, I'm not sure if we were supposed to read the Epilogue or not, but I enjoyed (and agree with) the following passage. I remember when I first started reading the book I was struck by how little has changed with regard to our attitudes toward wonder:

"There are striking continuities between earlier and contemporary responses to wonders. The tabloids sold in grocery stores, like sections of the Guinness Book of Records, contain many of the wonders in early modern broadsides. Indeed, some of the wonders so closely duplicate seventeenth century oddities - a stockroom clerk who changes sex, a baby who sprouts gold teeth - that one suspects their authors are pillaging the Philosophical Transactions and Journal des Scavans" (365).

Indeed.

chapters 8 and 9

I very much liked the discussion at the end of the Daston book, it's a sort of expected ending like a "what killed the dinosaurs?" that comes at the end of each dinosaur book. But there's a few things that I seem to see as coming back around in regard to order and wonders that seem to make the idea of wonder a bit more cyclical to me. We've already discussed a little bit about the snobbery and the disgust that was looked at onto the people who did have a sense of wonder. But one thing that's continually being destroyed in nature, for example, is order. Once we found the rotation of the planets didn't follow a perfectly circular orbit, and indeed followed lop-sided loops, people were outraged that anyone would say that there wasn't perfection in the heavens. Indeed, there wasn't even close to that. New descoveries of quantum physics showed that at a micro level, the universe is completely random, and only things at a macro level can be even close to predictable. People lose half of their brain, and somehow relearn how to walk, talk eat and participate in society like nothing has changed.
If it felt at the end of this book that the wonders of life were killed and sacrificed on the alter of science, I think it's science that can help bring it back. I guess the question that arises out of these chapters now is that one glaring one: How do we tie this discussion about wonders of the world to truth, understanding and who we are as human beings? How does our own psyche and mind play into this discussion?

passions of inquiry

I think it is really interesting that this chapter opens with a discussion of wonder as "musing admiration" in the sense that wonder is passive and rather uninquisitory whereas curiosity is much more active and full of intent to discover the meaning behind this wonder. This ties is really well with what we were discussing at the end of class on Tuesday (props to McCrickerd) because I once believed that people today are much more curious and less relient on pure wonder, but after reading this Newton example, I feel like that thought has changed. We seem to be generally apathetic towards wonder today, in a sense that we rely heavily on science to tell us what is wonderful, but with that we have also lost a lot of what makes us curious individuals.

"The senses were first snared and lulled by delightful novelties; understanding snapped to attention as novelty deepened to philosophical anomaly; and body and mind nobilized to probe the hidden cause of apparent marvel (304)"

I think that people today are less likely to "delight in novelties" and we tend to reject that which is different or wonderful in hopes that science will tell us what to do/think about the natural order of the world. Maybe this is characteristic of human imagination in our time, whereas in Newtons time, that which was new and wonderful caused excitement and hightened curiosity, instead of confusion and repulse.

These novelties were was served as catalyst to scientific inquiry in the 17th century and out of this, dramatically new ideas came forward. For example, Newtons theories on light and colours came out of his wonder at the intensly coloful result of light passing through a prism. I can't really think of any examples in todays scientific world that began with pure wonderment? Can anyone else? I think it is interesting that something so sensible and direct as scientific inquiry could come out of pure wonderment, imagination, admiration, and curiosity. These words, to me, seem completely contradictory to sensibility or fact.

We talked in class also about a role of emotion in inquiry. This chapter addresses how emotion and sensibility fade in and out throughout a history of human imagination. Additionally morals, passions, and virtues begin to play a role in determining what is worthy of inquiry, making pure wonder a tool of the past, and turning more towards stable emotions as a way of building curiosity. This is seem much more today then a method of pure wonder and admiration.

I also like how chapter 8 points out that passion and inquiry are not just scholarly attributes, but rather important for general curiosity and discovery. Learning is built apon a base of curiosity and emotional attachement towards subject matter.

Wonder is often seen as a vulgar, or infantile way of viewing the world. It was not always seem as a scholarly attribute but rather as a recreation or hobby. I like how this book views wonder as a very signifigant way of discovering the natural world.

more to come later on ch9

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

playfulness and wonder

What really caught my eye in these chapters is this notion of playfulness. Wonder in this playful sense becomes a bit of a game between humans and nature where the two play off of each other. The wonder seems to come from the appearence of a game where humans are trying to one up nature by producing an imitation of what nature has despite the fact that it seems rather useless while nature seems to trying to one up humans by imitating the productions of humans. So you have humans who engineer an imitation of a duck and score the point and nature responds to the playful competition by producing an imitation of a painting of a cat or landscape. Back and forth both groups go showing off their skills of imitating the other and surprising each other with what the other is capable of doing. Humans walk away from this with wonder of how playful nature can be with them to produce imitations of the productions of humans that seem to have no function in nature nor an explanation for the reason of production. The wonder continues with the playful call to respond and one up nature through it's own show of imitation.

Monday, May 4, 2009

6&7

I found parts of chapter 6 to be kind of perplexing. I liked the idea that more people were not able to be considered academics, but that seem contradictory to notion of the need of credibility offered on page 219. Though I also thought the entire idea of credibility was almost contradictory to the concept of marvels and wonders. Perhaps this was due to the advances in technology of the time. The authors mentioned new forms of technology, including the printing press, and it seems these have impacted the society, which of course, is true, and this may be one of the first instances in this book where we see advances such as these playing a part in historical changes, which brings me to think abotu current society/technology and the impact that advances have on our ideas of credibility and "marvels." Technology and other advances have led us to become a society more focused on credibility than marvels - let's discuss that.

"It was the mutual imitation of art and nature that was wondrous, not th eobjects in themselves" (287).
This idea continues throughout the paragraph on pg 287, and I think this section captures much of chapter 7. The idea that taking nature and making it "more interesting" was quite a topic for this time, was it messing with something that shouldn't be played with? Or was it an amazing way to channel creativity? Personally I think it's fun and agree with the sense of imitation/mutation being captivating, and seems "wonderful" versus mundane being exciting, though I woudln't discount somethign natual as not being art. I'm pretty sure there's room for "normal" or natural and strange/unnatural.

Nature and Art

The relationship between art and nature came under scrutiny in chapter seven. The authors discussed the relationship prior to the seventeenth century as completely different than that during the seventeenth century. Art came to mimic nature, as evident in the most intricate of displays, such as the cabinet discussed in the first part of the chapter. However, nature could not be found in art. This was a great departure from earlier thought, as both were found to be completely separate and inimitable entities. One of the most interesting sections was then the close of the chapter, in which the authors suggest that later naturalists thought that simple works of nature could never be considered art. Nature was created by God, and could never be considered art in its own right.

Paradox of Categorization

I think the most interesting part of this chapter was the juxtaposition of apparently antithetical categories. The blending of nature and art and of natural opponents (the example of the cat-bird) creates a startling yet stimulating opposition that defies conventional categories. This is precisely what drew me into Buddhism; the utter disregard for convention and logical unfolding of logic itself opens one's eyes to many things not previous seen in our mental and social construction of reality.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Wunderkammer

In Ch.7, Daston & Park emphasize a particular era of art in relation to wonder which they call Wunderkammer. In this historical era the relationship of nature and art is portrayed either mimetically or synthetically. Some artists sought to evoke wonder via artistic mimesis of nature by in some cases painting objects like grapes so realistically that birds tried to eat them. To mimic nature produced wonder because it was fascinating to see which was the Real. Another mode of evoking wonder was to synthesize art with nature. Artists would take natural artifacts and synthesize them into downright bizarre creations, evoking curiosity and wonder. The authors discussed how wonder came about in this synthesis by alluding to some of the philosophical mindsets prevalent at the time. Or, to say it differently, people were astonished by the art of Wunderkammer because it blurred the lines between art and reality, and at times, perhaps as a result of this, it would cause further wonder about the nature of reality itself. Questions like, "could this artifact indeed exist in nature?" could be posed when seeing a collage of marine and land artifacts synthesized into a greater composite. Wood with antlers, shells and leaves...astonishing synthetic creations.

What I find compelling about what is going on in this book, by my read, is the dialectic that exists between the prevailing way of thinking of an age, and the art that co-temporally existed. By seeing these wonder-evoking syntheses of art and nature, one could further synthesize natural and artificial modes of thought. Maybe since these different mediums can fit together to produce a beautiful whole, there are more possibilities of existence than previously thought! And at the same time, perhaps the thought of the times influenced the creation of the new ways of art.

strange facts

The authors begin the chapter by addressing the new wave of people that are getting involved with wonderous things.  At this point in time there are more people that are able to advance their knowledge through learning about curious things.  On page 218 the authors write: "Title pages of works in natural history and natural philosophy began to address themselves to 'the curious' or 'the ingenious' of Europe."  They go to explain that this group of people "constituted themselves as self-declared, cosmopolitan elite, one which spanned national and confessional boundaries, and which was the immediate ancestor of the Republic of Letters of the Enlightenment."  Today, who would the curious be?  Is it a particular group of people with specific characteristics (such as intellectuals) or is everyone considered to be curious?  And is there a specific subject matter (such as natural philosophy or science) that the curious are interested in?  Or have we, in modern days, expanded the subject matter to include any and or everything?