Ethical Attention, Scientific Explanation: Wonder in the Epistemologies of Descartes and Spinoza

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.