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‘A Sudden Surprise of the Soul’: Wonder in Museums and Early Modern Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Beth Lord
Beth Lord*
Affiliation:
University of Aberdeen
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Recent museum practice has seen a return to ‘wonder’ as a governing principle for display and visitor engagement. Wonder has long been a contentious topic in aesthetics, literary studies, and philosophy of religion, but its adoption in the museum world has been predominantly uncritical. Here I will suggest that museums draw on a concept of wonder that is largely unchanged from seventeenth-century philosophy, yet without taking account of early modern doubts about wonder's efficacy for knowledge. In this paper I look at Descartes' and Spinoza's views about wonder and the uses and disadvantages of wonder as a learning tool. This examination is extended to consider Descartes' and Spinoza's likely views about ‘museums’, in the sense of spaces that link objects both to feeling and to knowing. Finally, I suggest that there are resources in Spinoza's philosophy for bringing knowledge-enhancing feelings into the museum without resorting to the problematic concept of wonder.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 95 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 R. W. Hepburn makes the similar point that natural beauty has been forgotten in twentieth-century aesthetics, and art has become the aesthetic object par excellence: see his ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 9–35 Google ScholarPubMed. There are, however, some notable museum exceptions. The Grande Galerie de l'Evolution at the Paris Muséum national d'histoire naturelle is driven by beauty and visual effect. Aesthetic contemplation is a similarly important element of the exhibits at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. But the pleasure of looking at and being in nature is absent from most natural history museums and related spaces. Visitor centres at wildlife conservation centres, for instance, typically overwhelm the visitor with educational and moralizing information and cause a range of negative emotions including sadness and guilt at the loss of wildlife habitats.

2 Understood in this way, a cognitive theory of emotion might capture wonder better than an affective account. As I focus on the feeling-centred early modern conception of the emotions, however, I will continue to refer to wonder as a feeling rather than as a cognitive emotion. For more on this distinction, see Deigh, John, ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics 104/4 (1994), 824–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 This is more commonly done with cultural artefacts than with natural ones. For example, prior to a major redevelopment about ten years ago, Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum favoured highly contextual displays of objects in culturally specific ‘stage settings’. The new displays arrange the same objects in open glass cases, with no context and minimal information. Every object is treated as a work of art, an aesthetic object that apparently stands in need of no interpretation beyond its own presence and the meaning the visitor generates from it.

4 Wonder had, of course, been defined and discussed in ancient and medieval philosophy. Descartes, however, formulated its modern definition, and despite developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, our definition of it has not changed significantly since then.

5 For a summary of this debate see Yanni, Carla, Nature's Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 19–20 Google Scholar.

6 Wonder has, of course, been more widely discussed in philosophy of religion, literary studies, and aesthetics, but my focus here is on its use in the museum world.

7 Greenblatt, Stephen, ‘Resonance and Wonder’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43/4 (1990), 19–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 32.

8 Bennett, Tony, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar.

9 Yanni dates this shift to the 1890s, but much depends on the point at which ‘order’ starts to be represented. See Yanni, Nature's Museums, op. cit., 148. For an argument that the Enlightenment museum was already focused on order and interpretation, see Lord, Beth, ‘Representing Enlightenment Space’, in MacLeod, Suzanne (ed), Reshaping Museum Space (London: Routledge, 2005), 146–57Google Scholar. For the view that the 19th century museum was strongly concerned with visual qualities, see Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, op. cit.

10 Jesse Prinz, ‘How wonder works’, Aeon (21 June 2013). http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/why-wonder-is-the-most-human-of-all-emotions/. A similarly Cartesian definition of wonder is the basis of Fisher, Philip, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

11 Prinz, ‘How wonder works’, op. cit.

12 See Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001)Google Scholar, chapter 3. Hepburn also stresses this ambivalence in ‘Wonder’, his essay on wonder as an aesthetic concept, in ‘Wonder’ and Other Essays, op. cit., 131–54.

13 Descartes, René, The Passions of the Soul, translated by Voss, Stephen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989)Google Scholar. References are to Part (Roman) and Article (Arabic) numbers.

14 See James, Susan, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, chapter 5.

15 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, op. cit., II.53, II.70.

16 Ibid., II.71.

17 James, Passion and Action, op. cit., 188.

18 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, op. cit., II.75.

19 Ibid., II.73.

20 Ibid., II.78.

21 Queen Christina of Sweden, at whose court Descartes lived (and died), had a cabinet of curiosities that had been given to her father, according to Granlund, Lis, ‘Queen Hedwig Eleonora of Sweden: Dowager, Builder, and Collector’, in Orr, Clarissa Campbell (ed), Queenship in Europe 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 71 Google Scholar. Indeed, there is some suggestion that Christina regarded Descartes and other thinkers as themselves rare objects to be collected.

22 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, op. cit., II.71.

23 Malebranche, Nicolas, The Search after Truth, translated by Lennon, Thomas M. and Olscamp, Paul J. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 138–9Google Scholar and 382–3.

24 K. Daston and L. Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750, op. cit., 305.

25 Ibid., chapter 8.

26 See Findlen, Paula, ‘The Museum: its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy’, Journal of the History of Collections 1/1 (1989), 59–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory, op. cit., chapter 7.

28 de Spinoza, Benedictus, Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: the Ethics and Other Works, translated and edited by Curley, Edwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. References to Spinoza's Ethics follow Curley's system of abbreviation: part number in roman numerals, followed by proposition (P), corollary (C), scholium (S), definition (D), or lemma (L) number, or other section as noted.

29 Ibid., II P7 and III P2. For a concise summary of the metaphysics that founds these conclusions, see James, Passion and Action, op. cit., 136–41.

30 Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., III P6 and P11.

31 Ibid., III D3.

32 Ibid., III, ‘Definitions of the Affects’, i–iii.

33 Ibid., III P52 and P52S.

34 Ibid., II P16–P18.

35 Ibid., III, ‘Definitions of the Affects’, iv.

36 Ibid., II P24–P31.

37 Ibid., II P39 and P39S.

38 Ibid., II P40 and P40S1.

39 Ibid., II P40S2.

40 Ibid., II P38 and P38S; see also II P13L2.

41 Ibid., II P37.

42 Similarly, its ‘uncommon’ properties can be neither good nor evil for us, can ‘neither aid nor restrain our power of acting’, and therefore cause neither joy nor sadness. Ibid., IV P29.

43 de Spinoza, Benedict, Theological-Political Treatise, translated by Silverthorne, Michael and Israel, Jonathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 81–2Google Scholar.

44 See Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., I P1–P16.

45 See ibid., I P16, P18, P25.

46 Ibid., I P28.

47 Ibid., II P40S2.

48 Hepburn, ‘Wonder’, op. cit., 140.

49 Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., I Appendix.

50 Ibid., IV P45S.

51 James, Passion and Action, op. cit., 196.

52 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, op. cit., II.147.

53 Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., III P58.

54 Ibid., II P39.

55 Ibid., II P39C and III P58.

56 Ibid., IV P31.

57 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2001)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

58 See Spinoza, Ethics, op. cit., I Appendix.

59 Ibid., IV P28.