Nov 3, 2019 08:49 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/history-and-philo...nd-strange
EXCERPT: . . . Philosophy, Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, begins with wonder. History does too. It starts with obvious perplexities but also with our realisation of the strangeness of the everyday, making our head swim like Plato’s Theaetetus. History works to make sense of things via our crossings from the present to the past, and from the physical world to the spiritual world. It takes us from the specific to the universal and vice versa; from the habitual to the new; from understanding things to understanding ourselves; from one discipline to another; from exclusion to inclusion and thereby the unethical to the ethical. If you want to know where the cross-beams and limits of history’s blueprint are, look at wonder.
Yet wonder is sadly absent from much of our discussions on history and philosophy today. We use the word in conversations all the time but, somehow, the idea that we might feel like Theaetetus at times doesn’t seem very explicable or, worse, grown-up. History and philosophy don’t do wonder: that is for rockstar boy-scientists, children and sideshow alleys. In thinking these ways, I think we have lost something immeasurably more powerful than the racks of books that I still grieve.
In a way, I think we want wonder lost because it is discomforting. It gets under your skin, mocking your efforts at sense-making. When we look at the way that people have thought about wonder through time, our tidy, rational disciplinary histories unravel. New voices emerge, and we aren’t sure what to do with them. We also come face-to-face with those who appropriate the ‘look’ of history and philosophy to challenge and confuse us about what is certain and what is good, right and fair. They do so for good and for ill. And we face the dark thought that our efforts at ordering both knowledge and the world can prevent us from facing our most troubling ethical problems.
Acknowledging wonder is fraught with difficulties and can leave you riddled with doubt. Even the earliest historians and philosophers knew that. The Hellenistic historian Polybius thought he had it all sorted out when he argued that historians should make sense of things through seeing and the other senses, and that they should do so in as straight a manner as possible. No drama, no elaborations, no making things up. Wonder, he instructed, should be used by the historian to talk only about things that even the gods could not understand. He kept his wondering to natural catastrophes and – like Herodotus and Thucydides – used phrases such as ‘others say’ to describe claims to wonder that he wasn’t at all sure about. It didn’t work... (MORE - details)
EXCERPT: . . . Philosophy, Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, begins with wonder. History does too. It starts with obvious perplexities but also with our realisation of the strangeness of the everyday, making our head swim like Plato’s Theaetetus. History works to make sense of things via our crossings from the present to the past, and from the physical world to the spiritual world. It takes us from the specific to the universal and vice versa; from the habitual to the new; from understanding things to understanding ourselves; from one discipline to another; from exclusion to inclusion and thereby the unethical to the ethical. If you want to know where the cross-beams and limits of history’s blueprint are, look at wonder.
Yet wonder is sadly absent from much of our discussions on history and philosophy today. We use the word in conversations all the time but, somehow, the idea that we might feel like Theaetetus at times doesn’t seem very explicable or, worse, grown-up. History and philosophy don’t do wonder: that is for rockstar boy-scientists, children and sideshow alleys. In thinking these ways, I think we have lost something immeasurably more powerful than the racks of books that I still grieve.
In a way, I think we want wonder lost because it is discomforting. It gets under your skin, mocking your efforts at sense-making. When we look at the way that people have thought about wonder through time, our tidy, rational disciplinary histories unravel. New voices emerge, and we aren’t sure what to do with them. We also come face-to-face with those who appropriate the ‘look’ of history and philosophy to challenge and confuse us about what is certain and what is good, right and fair. They do so for good and for ill. And we face the dark thought that our efforts at ordering both knowledge and the world can prevent us from facing our most troubling ethical problems.
Acknowledging wonder is fraught with difficulties and can leave you riddled with doubt. Even the earliest historians and philosophers knew that. The Hellenistic historian Polybius thought he had it all sorted out when he argued that historians should make sense of things through seeing and the other senses, and that they should do so in as straight a manner as possible. No drama, no elaborations, no making things up. Wonder, he instructed, should be used by the historian to talk only about things that even the gods could not understand. He kept his wondering to natural catastrophes and – like Herodotus and Thucydides – used phrases such as ‘others say’ to describe claims to wonder that he wasn’t at all sure about. It didn’t work... (MORE - details)