Magic and Wonder: A Brief Reflection on “Wonderstruck” by Helen De Cruz

Wonderstruck by Helen De Cruz is a book written in the kind of simple, direct, lucid prose one often despairs of writing oneself. It deals with the topic of wonder. Aristotle, at the very beginning of Western philosophy, told us that all thinking, especially philosophical thinking, begins in wonder; yet, apart from scattered treatments in thinkers like Descartes and Adam Smith, the topic has gotten little treatment since. For a certain kind of philosopher, one focused on conceptual or linguistic puzzle-solving, the question of wonder might well be considered ‘soft.’ Treating it forces us to consider things like religion, aesthetics, magic, and so on, and these are sub rosa topics for the hard-core professional philosopher. Wonder, we see right off the bat, is elusive. It is a mood, and on a certain level, there is no defining a mood. We may indeed consider wonder closely and carefully as a concept, yet, at the end of our consideration, wonder remains wonder: a certain x we feel when faced with situation y. Thus, we face a number of puzzling questions. Is wonder the same thing as awe? What is its relation to what aesthetics has called the sublime? Is wonder curiosity, and if it is not, what is its relation to it? Do we cease to wonder once we have understood what puzzles us, or does the very fact that we can understand the world only cause us to wonder more? Say we answer every single question God puts to Job out of the whirlwind, are we any the wiser for that? If thinking begins in wonder, in the eros of the philosopher for wisdom or the whole, is it dispelled in the result? Does something ever remain as an object for wonder, some givenness outside the scope of any mediation? Phenomenology speaks of the ‘saturated’ nature of phenomena: something is always given in excess of the conceptual or categorical. An alternate view, the Cartesian one, sees wonder as dispelled in understanding: thinking eliminates the original excess, which we then cease to wonder at. It becomes radically our possession.

Out of these opposed possibilities, Dr. De Cruz constructs her own treatment. Her emphasis lies on the virtues of epistemic maladjustment. The function of ritual, science, religion, and magic (all treated here as potential technologies of the self) is to provide the dissonance of surprise, which leads either to new insights or to a new appreciation of the already known (2024; 6). Wonder is here conceived as a product of surprise, the kind of surprise that does two things. Firstly, if we are surprised by the scale, force, or grandeur of something, we have that feeling we call the sublime (2024; 53-54). This induces in us the emotion of awe, which can be taken as distinct from wonder in general. This feeling causes a decentering of the ego and has the potential to make us feel connected to a larger whole (2024; 63-64). Wonder can also come in the form of curiosity. We wonder why something is so and seek for an answer. Thus, we may see something we consider an anomaly and reconsider our assumptions about the world to account for it (2024; 45). Thus, the scope of our perception and knowledge can be productively expanded or purged of unthought prejudice. Here, wonder is a positive emotion that has epistemic utility. Without wonder, our mental lives would be cramped, and we can cultivate wonder as a virtue. Of course, it is not only surprise that makes us wonder. We might be surprised about the regularity of things as well. Why does nature react in such predictable ways? Here, ritual may play a role in bringing our attention to the quotidian, and the wonder embodies not just in sublime things but ordinary ones. De Cruz gives a remarkable example of this from the Jewish tradition, which involves blessings uttered for everyday sights and ordinary events (2024; 112-113).

Still, De Cruz tends to emphasize the extraordinary and the anomalous, in line with the early modern aesthetic we can see embodied in the curiosity cabinet (2024; 126-27). The notion of the ‘monster’ once had this function, though current biology has banished them to the realm of trash TV and tabloids. Here, De Cruz brings in the importance of magic and its wonders to developing our curiosity and expanding our perception. She admits historic magic into this discussion, thanks to the work of Frances Yates (2024; 91-92). She is happy to grant that the magical tradition was important to the development of science (2024; 86-87). However, she seems more interested in magic as spectacle, prestidigitation, and trickery. This is what she terms stage magic (2024; 78-84). We hear only briefly about the magical tradition as embodying a philosophy of nature or a cosmology, though this is what interested people like Bruno or Agrippa far more. The magicians of old were fascinated by the ‘occult’ or hidden linkages and correspondences that bound the cosmos together. Magic was the highest form of religious consciousness because it explicated the divine secrets of the cosmos by articulating the modes in which microcosmic order participated (in the Platonic sense) in macrocosmic reality. It articulated and embodied in theurgical and ritual action the unity of all things. Of course, Agrippa also, with remarkable prescience, describes for us robots, holograms, and satellite communication. Modern techne fulfills a will to power contained in occult tradition, as we can see in the legend of Faust. For this reason, we tend to forget the contemplative side of magic, or, if we do remember it, dismiss it as weak, silly, and of no abiding interest. Magic has fulfilled its purpose in giving us chemistry! Also, in the form of illusions, it causes us to question what is given to our senses (2024; 80-81). Here, I am happy to concede her point: stage magic is important in showing us how biases in perception help construct, and potentially distort, how we see the world. It allows us both the experience of wonder and the opportunity to question and even critique the way sensation presents reality to us.

De Cruz is further concerned to emphasize that we underrate the sciences in terms of their ability to generate wonder, especially in the form of awe. She calls this the ‘scientific sublime’ (2024; 161-162). The scientific sublime can help us in the quest to achieve a more balanced relationship with the earth’s ecology. It can assuage ecological grief and make us more effective stewards of the natural systems that sustain us. This is because it allows us to see the general interconnectedness of things and to reinforce our sense of our own smallness and dependency. Because, it seems, the toxic culture wars that dominate the U.S. cannot be avoided even in a book about wonder, we are assured that exposure to the scientific sublime will cure people of ‘young earth creationism’ and even ‘teleology,’ here understood in the polemical (and I think inaccurate) sense (2024; 147). We are further told that people who are exposed to the sublimity of landscapes and mountains will prefer science museums to art galleries (2024; 147). I am not sure exactly why that is a good thing, and here is where, in an age of underfunding, I would have liked De Cruz to put in a word for the aesthetic sublime. Still, it is hard to argue with the above, though I shall have to note some complications that arise when we assume the modern sciences give us only visions of wonder and not, potentially, darker, disenchanting ones as well.

Here, I must register what is not so much a criticism as a query. If there is anything to question in this excellent book, it is its assumed naturalism. I must delineate carefully how I am using this term. Naturalism might be taken in any number of senses, but it is determined in a very specific way here. Wonder is embedded in nature taken radically. This means it is taken as part of a conceptual cluster that involves several cognate concepts. These concepts may or may not be taken as directly entailed by ‘naturalism’ as a philosophical stance. Whatever one thinks of these questions, they are congruent with such a stance and tend to pre-shape what kind of ‘nature’ we are talking about in either an explicit or, more often, implicit way. The ‘nature’ evoked here is not the nature we encounter, say, in indigenous cultures. It is not nature in the sense of Greek phusis or medieval natura. It is a technological, modern nature, and we see repeated references to wonder and magic, and, indeed, religion and ritual, as ‘technologies of the self.’ This is nature as conceived by the elites of North American technocracy. It is bourgeois nature, and I mean that descriptively and not polemically. By this, I mean it is constructed under the rubric of notions of fitness, adaptation, and efficiency. Nature is a struggle to maximize output in the form of survival and productivity. This metaphysical stance is what is articulated in the modern biological sciences, which then become the framing for our treatment of social, cultural, and spiritual phenomena. It is the framing for our economic lives. Evolutionary biology becomes not just a theory in the life sciences but a comprehensive paradigm. Under the sign of adaptation and growth, we produce the totality of the natural, social, and spiritual realms. We have, as Heidegger saw, a complete enframing, a totalization under modern techne and its logic. This is a totalization under the identity of being with power, will, and work potential. This involves putting all things in play under techne, including ‘human resources,’ to use the current, baleful phrase. Lyotard has warned us of the implications of this as, in his own way, did George Grant in Canada. The former spoke eloquently of the culture of total efficiency (neoliberal, economic, and technical) as the last thing that survives the dissolution of traditional metanarratives. Legitimation in this regime is by performativity or efficiency in extending the operating power of a system (1979; 47-53). This is the culture that is currently destroying the humanities. The latter, in Technology and Empire and other books, has warned us of what is lost in this totalization, including the dignity and, indeed, children and lives of the original peoples of North America.

De Cruz seems much more in the spirit of American pragmatism. Ritual, magic, religion, wonder, and emotion are evolved mechanisms of survival (2024; 50-52). They are tools for doing things. This is the very presupposition of how they came to be, for all that comes to be in modern Western nature comes to be as an adaptive tool in the struggle of life and is justified in what it contributes to the survival and function of organisms. I am not particularly concerned with how plausible or not any particular adaptive story about religious ritual or primitive magic happens to be under this framing. My query concerns the framing itself. Though forced to live under it, my Mi’kmaw neighbors (an indigenous people of Newfoundland and Labrador) do not reflexively share it, and, to be honest, neither do I on a good day. Or, to be more exact, I do not share the conviction that it is necessary, inescapable, and the embodiment of universal rational necessity. There may, and I think there are, places to stand outside it. One of these places, indeed, is the tradition of Renaissance magic, could we recuperate what was beautiful and true in it (not an easy task!). Of course, we are then faced with the following dilemma: the magical tradition is Janus-faced and includes, within its beautiful tradition of cosmic contemplation, those very technical dreams whose fulfillment has subverted it and reduced it to a running joke and permanent symbol of stupidity and superstition. I suspect that a more just, more ecologically sound social order founded on reciprocity and stewardship might radically alter how we see biological phenomena like evolution, though this is for working biologists to decide.

I might sum up the broader problem this way. If we are to identify what it is that opposes wonder, we might label it ‘disenchantment.’ Disenchantment is a product not of science directly but of something cognate with it. It can be characterized as the universal instrumentalization and, following Marx, commodification of all things. All things ‘really are,’ when examined in the light of ‘reason and science,’ tools for realizing instrumental ends or productive value (as defined by return for shareholders). Genes are simply instrumental to making more genes, as money is a tool for making more money. In Dawkins’ concept of the selfish gene, we see, for instance, the comprehensive instrumentalization of all living things. Animals are machines for the mindless replication of the gene, as culture is the means for the mindless replication of the meme. De Cruz, of course, wants very much to make a place for inherent, non-instrumental values, and for this, she must be commended. The question, though, is whether such pious wishes can be maintained in the face of an ontology that has, in itself, no room for them. What is an inherent good in a mechanical universe in which teleology is such a dirty word that wonder is supposed to cure us of it? Where does the good reside in a world without purposes or ends? We might flip the equation, and, instead of trying to justify the good as adaptive and conducive to survival, wonder if the good is not, as Plato held, what is actually (in the radical sense) prior. The good may be something irreducibly given and may designate that which is exactly not subject to manipulation, control, and something not alienable in relation to some cash value or reducible to a ‘technology of the self’ that contributes to differential fitness. This would relate to another value we might associate with wonder, which is reverence for the holy or the radically given. What we may wonder at, then, is not so much surprise at this or that, but surprise that beauty, goodness, and intelligibility should be woven into the fabric of things: that values should not just be values in a private, subjective sense, but also the very sinews of the real.