Wonderstruck
How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Descripció de l’editorial
A philosopher explores the transformative role of wonder and awe in an uncertain world
Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life’s most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.
Drawing on the latest psychological insights on emotions, Helen De Cruz argues that wonder and awe are emotional drives that motivate us to inquire and discover new things, and that humanity has deliberately nurtured these emotions in cultural domains such as religion, science, and magic. Tracing how wonder and awe unify philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences, De Cruz provides new perspectives on figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, William James, Rachel Carson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Abraham Heschel. Along the way, she explains how these singular emotions empower us to be open-minded, to experience joy and hope, and to be resilient in the face of personal troubles and global challenges.
Taking inspiration from Descartes’s portrayal of wonder as “that sudden surprise of the soul,” this illuminating book reveals how wonder and awe are catalysts that can help us reclaim what makes life worth living and preserve the things we find wonderful and valuable in our lives.
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Awe and wonder drive "our pursuit of knowledge" by defamiliarizing the known and pushing the mind beyond "existing schemes and heuristics," according to this erudite study from De Cruz (Religious Disagreement), a professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University. Allowing one to "see something for the first time, or to see something as if for the first time" and "accept the immensity and wondrousness of it," awe and wonder are at work in magic tricks that "make spectators experience something they deem impossible." They're also intrinsic, De Cruz writes, in religious rituals that "train our minds and bodies" to attune to and appreciate complex emotional states and fleeting details, and even in scientific theories and research: "No scientific (or other) beliefs" are "definite... we will always need wonder to challenge" existing hypotheses to make way for new ones. Broadening the study to examine awe in more surprising areas, including feminism and environmentalism (wonder helps to reframe nature as "valuable in itself" rather than a resource to exploit, for example), De Cruz constructs a persuasive and nuanced case for looking through the "everydayness" of the world to see the "strange and paradoxical" lurking in plain sight. It's an expertly fashioned analysis of what it means to perceive the world anew.
