Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle held that philosophy - the love and practice of wisdom - begins in wonder. But whence wonder?
At the beginning of his Metaphysics (982b12 ff.), Aristotle observes that in the lead-up to philosophy people wondered first about "the strange things near at hand" and then about celestial phenomena like the moon, the stars, and the origin of the universe. What were these "strange things" that people found so fascinating and astonishing?
One prominent example might have been the ambiguous, confusing nature of human beings. Consider the wonder or amazement (θαύμα) with which we can be struck speechless or reduced to babbling (ψελλίζω) when we weigh (ὑπολαμβάνω) the overlapping nature (ἐπάλλαξις) of human beings, wavering or teetering (ἐπαμφοτερίζω) as we do between independent and herdlike, competitive and cooperative, deceptive and truthful, ignorant and insightful, cunning and just, foolish and wise, beastly and godlike.
There's a cluster of concepts here that might not be immediately obvious. To unravel things we can start by pulling on any one of the threads, so let's look at ἐπάλλαξις, which is a certain overlapping or intermixture of characteristics. If we think of Aristotle as a strict taxonomist like Linnaeus, we'd be wrong. In his biological works, Aristotle identified numerous animals that have overlapping characteristics and thus "waver" or "teeter" or "dualize" (ἐπαμφοτερίζω) between natural kinds: seals dualize between water animals and land animals, hermit crabs between crustaceans and testaceans, sea anemones between plants and animals, apes and monkeys and baboons between humans and quadrupeds, etc. Similarly, although Aristotle famously said that human beings are political animals, we are also "social solitaries" who tend toward both ends of the continuum from independent to herdlike (Historia Animalium, 487b33 ff).
Ambiguities like these can reduce one to babbling (ψελλίζω): if someone asks you whether seal are land animals or water animals - or whether humans are, say, competitive or cooperative - you might not be able to say. Moreover, in his Magna Moralia (1197a31), Aristotle says that ὑπόληψις (the noun derived from ὑπολαμβάνω, in the sense of taking something up for consideration, entertaining a notion, or weighing alternative accounts) is that whereby we "waver" or "teeter" (ἐπαμφοτερίζω) between thinking that something is one way or another.
Yet Aristotle was anything but an epistemological defeatist: "the strange things near at hand" inspire us to wonder and then to inquiry, thought, and dialogue. Indeed, the longer I live and the more deeply I reflect, the more I wonder about the sorts of overlapping, dualizing phenomena that seem to be characteristic not only of human affairs but also of physics (light is both a particle and a wave), biology (are viruses alive or not?), history (in which there's never just one cause), and so on. There are endless sources of wonder in life, if only we can attune ourselves to them!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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