“I regard wonder as the first of all the passions,” writes René Descartes in 1649, “for, if the object before us has no characteristics that surprise us, we are not moved by it at all” (Descartes 2006). This paper examines the status of wonder (admiratio) as a primary affect in the psychological writings of René Descartes and Benedictus de Spinoza. Wonder was an affective state that could be newly explained in seventeenth-century Europe by a scientific psychology on the model of medicine and physics, but it could also function as a first principle for epistemology itself, explaining how it is that our attention focuses on this rather than that in the flow of sensory experience. This paper considers how wonder constituted for both thinkers a form of correct attention in a scientific register and an ethico-religious one. I argue that certain ethical implications of the meaning of wonder, and the theological arguments on causation that underpinned such definitions, were foundational to early modern epistemology even in what appeared to be a naïve act and a presuppositionless first principle of scientific procedure: the act of fixing one’s attention.
A curious feature of their affect theories, when taken together, is that Descartes names wonder as the first of all passions while Spinoza declines to count it as an affect at all, not even as the last. Wonder is the effect of surprise at an object, as we learn from Descartes in The Passions of the Soul (1649). He views wonder as the condition of being moved by what we encounter in the world, whether we esteem or dismiss the object of our attention, venerate or scorn it; the verb he uses is the French émouvoir, from the Latin emovere, and this indicates being moved out of place, stirred or dislodged. The result is passion or emotion, to use a familiar derivative of emovere. In Descartes’ science of the passions, there is no being moved without wonder, without the surprise of the new or different.
Spinoza offers the following definition in his Ethics (1677): “Wonder is an imagination of a thing in which the Mind remains fixed because this singular imagination has no connection with the others” (Spinoza 1985). When we perceive an object that has “no connection” with other thoughts in our mind, this means it is a new thought, one that surprises and captures our attention. It can be joined to other thoughts in principle as long as there is a cause for that connection, something that links the present image to an earlier one that resides in memory. It is precisely because this does not happen in the case of wonder that Spinoza declines to consider wonder an affect. Unlike Descartes, who views dislocation as the defining feature of wonder, Spinoza defines wonder in terms of fixation. Wonder is not the first instance of being moved but rather the fact of being unmoved, stalled in the absence of external cause.
This paper reads the difference between Descartes and Spinoza on wonder as evidence of their differing views on causal explanation and their respective departures from scholastic epistemology. Descartes retains the fundamental Aristotelian thesis, inherited through the scholastics, that valid knowledge is knowledge of causes. He rejects other aspects of scholastic explanation, however, such as the explanatory use of substantial forms and real qualities, in favor of mechanical description of matter in motion. For example, we supply no meaningful explanation as to why wood burns, he writes, by stating that fire (a substantial form) is actualized within it or that it gains heat (a real quality); instead, we must explain how small parts of matter in the wood are separated, their physical relation changed (Clarke 2003). Wonder is integral to the observation of such change and in fact causes a change in the mind of the observer.
Spinoza likewise develops an alternative model of explanation based on causal change. The science of psychology allows him to emphasize the change that occurs in us—the more we understand the causes that led to the affect we are experiencing (love, hate, etc.), the more adequate our explanation of that affect, the more such adequacy may be attributed to our own intellectual activity, and the more joy we may feel through right understanding, no matter how painful the emotion. This paper will interpret the meaning of adequate cause (causam adaequatam) in this context and show how it forms the backbone of Spinoza’s program for ethical self-development. Psychology was an emergent natural science that promised not only to classify the forms of human emotion but to explain why they arise and how to control them toward avoidance of evil and promotion of the good. This was true for Descartes, who advocated a disciplined training of the will, and for Spinoza, whose accounts of causality undid traditional notions of will in a manner both revered and condemned in philosophy to follow.
To demonstrate in more depth how causal explanation and ethical instruction were interrelated forms of exposition for Spinoza, I will discuss his argument against miracles (miracula) in connection to his definition of wonder (admiratio)—two words sharing a Latin root, each signaling a problem of correct attention, and each premised on certain accounts of divine and human causality. In this effort, I hope to advance interpretations of Cartesian and Spinozan wonder while making them accessible to a broad audience, building on recent commentary from scholars such as Chantal Jaquet and Catherine Malabou. I also hope to illustrate one way in which theological and ethical arguments on causation, will, and self-development were involved in early modern attempts to ground natural science.
Bibliography
Clarke, Desmond M. 2003. Descartes’s Theory of Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Descartes, René. 2006. “The Passions of the Soul.” in The Philosophical Writings: Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1985. “Ethics.” in The Collected Works of Spinoza. Vol. 1, edited by E. Curley. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
This paper examines the status of wonder (admiratio) in the seventeenth-century psychological writings of René Descartes and Benedictus de Spinoza. Wonder was an affective state that could be newly explained by a scientific psychology on the model of medicine and physics, but it also had an epistemological function, explaining how it is that our attention focuses on this rather than that, and an ethical function, guiding a person to right attention. Descartes treats wonder as the first of all passions, a precondition for all other feeling, but Spinoza declines to count it as an affect at all, not even as the last. This paper reads their divergence on wonder as evidence of their differing views on causal explanation and respective departures from scholastic epistemology. It illustrates one way in which theological and ethical arguments on causation, will, and self-development were involved in early modern attempts to ground natural science.