Nurturing the wonder: why questions matter more than answers

Written by Matteo Celli Photography by Noemi Duroux

The fact that our planet is suitable for living beings depends on a number of physical constants and values, and if at least one of them was out of place, life as we know it would not be possible. Philosophers and scientists describe this arguably miraculous alignment of circumstances by saying that the universe is ‘fine-tuned’ for life, and argue whether such a striking concomitance of factors stands in need of explanation. Imagine a monkey hammering on a computer keyboard: both “ljhsvcòv jh ljhasvf p97BDBPO” and “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”, given the vast amount of possible combination of streaks of letters, are each comparably unlikely. However, the fact that the latter is the incipit of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway strikes us as odd, and maybe even miraculous. Is it just a random event, rationally equivalent to the monkey writing “ljhsvcòv jh ljhasvf p97BDBPO” or “aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”, or is there a reason behind it which is worth our enquiry?

Either way, there is a strange fact that carries along something marvellous, and the wonder that we feel makes us formulate and compare questions. In this regard, Plato wrote that “wonder is the only beginning of philosophy”. The person that uses this idea in the most interesting way, however, is the American philosopher Robert Nozick (1938 - 2002): not so much because of any philosophical theory per se but mainly because of how it relates to the development of his intellectual life. “Philosophy begins in wonder” is the first sentence of his book Invariance; its last concludes that “It never ends.”

Taking such a refrain merely as a literary device would mean wasting a valuable intellectual opportunity. To see why this is the case, we need to have a look at the preface of his masterpiece, Anarchy, State and Utopiaarguably the most sophisticated libertarian manifesto of contemporary political philosophy. After an outline of the core ideas of the book, Nozick dedicates some paragraphs to witty criticism of any attempt to formulate ultimate, leak-proof philosophical theories. He compares any such attempt with “pushing and shoving things’’ into a fixed perimeter that cannot contain them all, so that as we press the content on one side it bulges on the other, until we find a perspective from which we cannot see any protuberance, and we quickly take a snapshot from a distance. He shows how hard it is to admit the limits of your lines of thought, and explicitly states that he is not going to provide any sort of answer to the questions he raises but merely ideas and contributions to the development of the debate. Nozick changed between various philosophical interests and positions throughout his life, and always strived to push the boundaries of the subject and constantly evolve.

Put in this context, “Philosophy begins in wonder. It never ends” can be seen as the mantra of an ever-curious, never-settling, and vibrant mind. Hence, philosophical wonder is at the same time the most childish and the most mature of mindsets. On one hand, there is abandonment to awe and curiosity for its own sake, while on the other there is the awareness that no answer is set in stone, and what really matters is the activity of questioning itself. Philosophical wonder goes beyond the specific subject of philosophy, or in other terms, we do not need to be trained philosophers to do philosophy, nor do we need to define the boundaries of the subject. Its core underlying theme is in fact an endless pursuit of wonder that does not necessarily need to be useful, nor to provide any ultimate solutions to our questions.

Inquiry in its most general conception, be it through the arts or the sciences, is thus a process of nurture of our philosophical wonder, which in plain English means developing a love for questions. Like children, who innocently ask “why?” when they get puzzled by some new discovery, but also like grown-ups of the wise kind, who do not presume to acquire eternal truths. Nurturing philosophical wonder also means educating our minds to understand and appreciate other people’s opinions without necessarily endorsing them, as we acknowledge that everything is part of a process that grows more and more complex from an elementary state of curiosity.

What matters the most is enjoying inquiry as a game that ends in itself, rather than a race. This kind of intellectual playfulness has also an important political spillover; the first being its natural tendency towards tolerance, but the signature quote of German economist Albert

Hirschman can give us a cue for a deeper dive into a more subtle implication. Hirschman is in fact famous for his idea of “happiness of pursuit” - as opposed to the more famous “pursuit of happiness”. While the phrase is a clear indicator of Hirschman’s liveliness as a thinker, it might be surprising at a first glance to see it used in an economics essay about organisational behaviour. But, in the context of Hirschman’s economic and political writing, it expresses “the felicity of taking part in collective action”.

The “happiness of pursuit” can be seen as the practical equivalent of the nurture of philosophical wonder: while on one hand there is enjoyment in engaging with collective inquiry and research, on the other we have appreciation of political participation. Caring more about questions than about answers is not simply an antidote against populist oversimplifications. Nurturing the wonder, through the political happiness of pursuit, can translate into nurturing the democratic process and enjoying it in itself, rather than because of its success.