Chapter 1 To Wonder ...

 Chapter 1  To wonder …

"The most beautiful experience is the mysterious. He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed."

- Albert Einstein

 "Wonder is the beginning of wisdom."

- Socrates

“For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. They wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters too.”

- Aristotle

"We naturally have greater admiration for tings which are above us than those on the same level or below us. And although the clouds are scarcely higher than the summits of some mountains, nevertheless, because we must turn our eyes toward Heaven to look at them, we imagine them to be so elevated that poets and painters see in them the throne of God"

- Descartes

 “A sense of wonder and awe is neurologically linked to specific brain activity and physiological responses. Experiences of awe involve reduced activation in the default mode network (DMN), an area associated with self-reflection, and increased activity in regions related to emotion processing, reward, and self-representation. These responses are accompanied by physiological changes like vagal nerve activation, reduced sympathetic arousal, and the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin.”  

AI Overview

 

The stars above.

Wonder, immense, familiar but eternal.

Patterns unchanging … rhythms of light and darkness, of warmth and chill.

And we people are attracted to rhythms, and patterns, and order, and predictions. It is genetic, it is inherited, as are the patterns of interpretation and behaviour of every animate species, whether cognisant or not.

As a social species, as a communicating species, we find solace and comfort to have these patterns explained. We find comfort in understanding. We respect, even awe, those who seem to understand the unfathomable.

The clear night sky conducts itself with a majestic regularity.

But down here, things are often messy. 

Storms and falls and diseases and attacks. Wild beasts and poor crops and lost goats. Crazy people of chaotic temperament and trees that crash for no clear reason.

Who can make sense of the mess down here?

The ancients saw, as we see, beauty in order and order in beauty. Hence the word “cosmos” for the universe, originates from the ancient Greek kosmos, meaning good order (and from which we also get the word “cosmetic”).

And among the ancients arose men who seemed able to explain an order to our more terrestrial concerns. Shamans, witch-doctors, soothsayers, yes, but also men more learned in our own sense: men who sought out, and found, order in among the chaos of this earthly life.

Broadly, these men were our early philosophers.

The word “philosophy” today has a rather restricted sense and a relatively bound usage. High school grads can now toddle off to university to study all sorts of courses without needing to enrol in “philosophy” as such. Others think and ponder and speculate without ever imagining themselves dabbling in philosophy. But in past times *there was no* pondering and speculating and study without that pondering occurring under the rubric of philosophy (which, to Thomas of Aquinas, was the handmaiden of theology itself).

Under the rubric of philosophy ancient Greeks studied first the “Trivium” of grammar, logic and rhetoric (trivium = tri (3) + via (ways) ), then the “Quadrivium” of mathematics, geometry, music and astronomy, but to take a place among the leading citizens of the day the ancient Greek had to be familiar, and publicly familiar, with affairs of government, of law, and of gods: which amounted to the gamut of the affairs of humans. 

Being the lover of wisdom, the lover of truth, the philosopher was sought after and held in esteem, often holding positions of authority and responsibility, with all the attendant wealth and status such positions entail.

It must be admitted, embraced, heralded at the very onset: across the millennia and across the planet it has been, historically, the philosopher who has sought the highest in human thought and word, and who has been justly held in the highest regard by the highest of us all.

For humans everywhere have always held in higher regard things unseen and mystical, even spiritual, over things material and mechanical. Anything mechanical can be devised and calculated, ultimately controlled, and one need never revere what one can control. But the unseen and ethereal – one must give the mercurial spirits a wide berth and pacifying homage. Thus, those who were held to have insights into the unseen were also to be flattered and feted.

 And so did the philosophers, and the theologians, command the honour thought owed to them by those less familiar with the spiritual and the unseen, while the tinkerers and metalsmiths and alchemists and apothecaries, artisans all dealing in the mechanical, worked their humble trades.

Indeed, in the classical Greek polis, the citizen of stature was expected to be conversant not just in matters of state and warfare, but also in metaphysical speculation. 

Cicero—no mean thinker himself—asserted that “philosophia est ars vitae” (philosophy is the art of life). 

Socrates, condemned to death ostensibly for corrupting the youth, was in fact a threat to the political order precisely because he placed speculation and questioning above received custom. 

The reverence accorded to those who speculated was not without risk, but neither was it without reward. 

As Plutarch recounted of Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, his wisdom was inseparable from his philosophical bearing. 

To rule well, one had to think deeply. To think deeply, one had to be versed in philosophy.

By contrast, the artisan—the maker, the doer, the technician—though essential, was never elevated. In Plato’s Republic, craftsmen are consigned to the lower tiers of his tripartite society. They possess what Plato terms doxa, opinion, but not epistēmē, true knowledge. Their skills, though valuable, are bounded by utility. Theirs is a knowledge of the how, not of the why. Aristotle was marginally more generous, acknowledging in Metaphysics that practical arts might contain a form of wisdom, but he nonetheless distinguished such arts from the “first philosophy” that dealt with causes and principles.

 This bifurcation between the speculative and the mechanical endured for centuries. 

In medieval Europe, surgeons—though literally life-saving—were referred to as “Mister”, whereas physicians, whose work more often entailed diagnosis and prognosis than hands-on treatment, carried the title “Doctor”. The distinction was more than semantic; it was hierarchical. 

Physicians were learned, usually  trained in Latin and philosophy, and operated within the realm of theory. 

Surgeons, like barbers and butchers, wielded blades and tended wounds. They were functionaries of the body, not interpreters of the soul.

We may trace this prejudice even into recent centuries, when the emergent empirical sciences began to challenge the dominance of speculative metaphysics. Even so, many of the era’s scientific titans were themselves deeply enmeshed in theological or philosophical pursuits. 

Isaac Newton, though lionised today for his Principia Mathematica and his laws of motion, dedicated more of his written output to alchemical experiments and biblical prophecy than to physics. As John Maynard Keynes observed of Newton, “He was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.”

Likewise, Paracelsus, the 16th-century Swiss physician and alchemist, viewed his medical work as merely one application of a broader, unified philosophical system that blended mysticism, astrology, and natural law. 

Vesalius, the founder of modern anatomy, framed his revolutionary dissections not as a rebellion against theology, but as a deeper expression of divine order. In his De humani corporis fabrica, the human body was not merely a machine to be understood, but a vessel of sacred architecture.

Even when mechanical and experimental science began to offer transformative insights into heat, light, magnetism, and steam, these developments were often seen as instrumental rather than exalted. 

James Watt’s steam engine might have powered the factories of England, but it did not explain there energy of life. 

Michael Faraday’s work with electromagnetism changed the world, yet Faraday himself was a devout member of the Sandemanian church and saw no contradiction between scientific discovery and spiritual belief. 

Benjamin Franklin, while famously pragmatic, nonetheless engaged in philosophical dialogues with Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, aspiring always to transcend mere practicality with a broader vision of virtue and civic wisdom.

This long-standing reverence for the abstract and unseen has always shaped the human valuation of knowledge. The material may be impressive; the metaphysical is sublime. 

Mechanical knowledge may be replicated, automated, even outsourced. 

But the knowledge of the divine, the moral, the ontological—these reside, or so it has been thought, in a different realm altogether, and those who dare speak on such matters do so with an aura of priesthood.

It is no accident that the oldest universities of Europe—Bologna, Paris, Oxford—were founded as centres of theological and philosophical learning. Their original faculties were not laboratories, but cloisters. The original degrees were not in engineering, but in the sacred and the speculative. And the prestige of such learning was zealously guarded. For to lose one’s monopoly on wisdom is to risk one’s social position.

Even in modern times, vestiges of this hierarchy persist. Consider the Nobel Prize: the Peace Prize and the Literature Prize, both awards for the human spirit and intellect, attract as much reverence as those given for the physical sciences. Even as the world becomes more technologically dependent, the yearning for transcendent meaning—the kind offered by philosophy, theology, and the speculative mind—has not abated.

In sum, the historical record is unequivocal: humans have always reserved their highest admiration not for those who build, but for those who interpret; not for those who do, but for those who see. The purveyors of wisdom, especially when that wisdom touches on the invisible, the divine, the ultimate—have consistently enjoyed elevated status. 

And once such status is attained, it is not surrendered lightly. 

The guardians of mystery, from the oracles of Delphi to the dons of Oxford, from the shamanic dreamer to the philosophical metaphysician, have all known that the invisible carries not only truth, but power.