Wonder as an Experience of Beauty

Wonder plays a role in many aspects of our lives—e.g., in appreciating art and nature, religious experiences, and scientific and philosophical inquiry—and there is a wide variety of intuitive cases of the experience. This diversity raises philosophically interesting questions like, What is wonder? In what ways is this experience valuable? Are there objects at which we ought not wonder? Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes note the significance of wonder, yet the topic of wonder remains underexplored in philosophy. There have been few attempts to answer these questions about the nature and value of wonder in a systematic way. My dissertation aims to provide such answers. I show how understanding wonder as a type of experience of beauty—an idea that has not received serious attention—reveals new insights about wonder’s nature and value. After I examine and make necessary modifications to features of wonder that are often cited in the literature, I further develop my picture of wonder and its relation to beauty by drawing on Alexander Nehamas’s account of the latter. On my Nehamasian view, the experience of beauty characteristically involves a pleasure of anticipation and a vague desire to learn more about the object. This prompts an inquiry in which the subject aims to better understand and appreciate what makes the object distinctive and finally valuable. Wonder is an experience of beauty in which the subject also has a sense that the object is extraordinary. My characterization of wonder and the inquiry associated with this experience provides resources for thinking about the normative evaluations that we can make about episodes of wonder. Drawing on these investigations and neo-Aristotelian work on virtue, I develop an account of virtuous wonder (i.e., the disposition to experience wonder in appropriate ways) and argue that this trait is an aesthetic and intellectual virtue. Similarly, I bring together Aristotelian ideas and my previous insights to propose methods for cultivating this character virtue.