The Vehement Passions

Introduction
Could any pair of words seem as natural together as the words "dispassionate knowledge"? Yet in at least one case the passions were always understood to be essential to the search for knowledge. Descartes, in naming wonder the first of the passions, described wonder as an impassioned state that makes learning possible. In wonder we notice against the background of a lawful and familiar world something that strikes us by its novelty and by the pleasure that this surprising new fact brings to us. Each of us has at every stage of our lives a distinct but provisional horizon separating the familiar from the unknown and the unknowable. Any one experience of wonder informs us about the momentary location of this horizon line. The horizon line a red balloon reveals as it rises in the air before the eyes of a small child marks a different line from the one revealed when, as an adult astronomer, she sees for the first time in human history a pattern in the distribution of galaxies.
The passion of wonder has always been described by scientists and mathematicians as the heart of the experience of the search for new knowledge. At the same time, the very details of wonder might seem to rule out even more strongly any similar claim for anger, fear, grief, shame, and the other vehement passions. If it is only scientific knowledge that we are concerned with, then anger or mourning would seem to preclude clear thought, the pursuit of a continuous chain of thought and experiment, and the preservation of the calm atmosphere in which order and rationality make possible long and arduous projects.
As I hope to show in this book, wonder is not an exception. Each of the strong emotions or passions designs for us an intelligible world and does so by means of horizon lines that we can come to know only in experiences that begin with impassioned or vehement states within ourselves. The part played by wonder in scientific thought, both in the moment of attention that leads to a first discovery and in the final ordered knowledge that we call science, is played by anger in discovering or marking out for us unmistakably the contours of injustice and of unjust acts in certain moments of time. In this case as well, the concrete and ordered form that those local discoveries sponsored by anger lead to in the end is the nuanced legal system that is both codified and altered over time by newly discovered paths of anger and outrage, sometimes at individual acts that in their aftermath lead to new or stronger laws; at other times the outcome is the retraction of laws that in their workings lead to cases that arouse angry demands for redress.
That we are often surprised by wonder or surprised by anger is one clue to the fact that something new is disclosed to us in states of vehemence. The object's demand for attention that makes up one detail of wonder lets us see that we do not choose the objects we end up thinking about. Something, as we put it, catches our attention. Descartes describes how we find ourselves delighted, puzzled, and then drawn to pause and to think about what is new and strange to us.1
Wonder is located at that promising line between what we already know--our familiar world--and all that it would be pointless to think about because we personally lack, or our historical moment as a whole lacks, the skills and framework of knowledge that would let us profitably spend time thinking here and now at this location. Wonder occurs at the horizon line of what is potentially knowable, but not yet known. We learn about this horizon line when we find ourselves in a state of wonder. Surprise has guided us to something where we can invest energy and time in a profitable way. The same is true for anger, although it will take many chapters of this book to make plausible this claim about anger.
Scientific discovery and the demand for justice might seem, even if shown to be grounded in wonder and anger, to have saved these two vehement states at the expense of many others: distress (the Stoic's encompassing term that includes grief and mourning), shame, and, above all, fear. But in at least the case of fear, the deep and intrinsic connections between fear and aesthetic experience have been known in a restricted way since Aristotle's work on tragedy, where pity, fear, surprise, recognition, and suffering, along with a certain shudder of terror, were for the first time systematically described as states of pleasure. It is by means of the relations between fear and pity that a civic component enters into the highly self-centered and self-defining vehement states, and does so most clearly in the aesthetic experience of a spectator at a play or film, or the reader of a novel. An important parallel experience occurs in law courts where, as jurors, we are placed as observers and judges of opposed stories told by the prosecution and the defense about a set of events.