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. . . but prevention is better than cure.

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An ouch of prevention is worth the pounding cure!

Elias Baumgarten: "Curiosity as a Moral Virtue"

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)

Enemy of Curiosity?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Two days ago, I looked at Thomas D. Kennedy's views on 'Idle' Curiosity, which seemed to be the only kind of curiosity that he recognized -- curiosity as a sort of inattentive distraction from important things. As such, Kennedy stands squarely within the Augustinian tradition in its rejection of curiosity as a vice.

Ours is not an age to receive such curious criticism equably, so the critique likely touches a sensitive point and at least for that reason merits our attention. Let us therefore consider the words of Bernard of Clairvaux, quoted by Kennedy, criticizing curiosity:

The curious person spends much time pasturing these [sinful, hence 'goatlike', eyes and ears] when he does not care to know in what condition he has left himself within. And truly, O man, if you concentrate hard on the state you are in it will be surprising if you have time for anything else. Hear what Solomon says, curious man. Hear, foolish man, what Wisdom says. "Guard your heart with all your might." (Prov. 4:23), so that all your senses may be alert to protect the source of life. (Thomas D. Kennedy, "Curiosity and the Integrated Self: A Postmodern Vice," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4.4 (2001) page 46, citing Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 123-24.)

Bernard understands curiosity much as Augustine did some 700 years earlier: it means meddlesomeness. A curious person is meddlesome, the sort of nosy individual who's forever looking into other people's business and then gossiping about it in a manner likely to engage the curiosity of others.

Well, nobody truly likes a busybody, so if curiosity means nosiness, then it's certainly a bad thing.

Kennedy therefore counsels us to restrain our curiosity by focusing attentively upon God . . . and, interestingly, upon the world:

To love as God loves, that is the goal of Christians, but so to love requires a self and an attentiveness to God and the world difficult to come by in our noisy times. Curiosity trades upon our delight in the riches of creation and demands that we abandon careful attention to the world present to us for the sake of thrill around the corner. It is a subtle vice, its tentacles hard to notice. If curiosity kills cats, it but wounds us, though wounds us deeply, perhaps imperceptibly. But we can learn to love, can learn to study God and God's creation, can learn attentiveness. To that end, a return to our quiet rooms may be both the beginning and end of wisdom and delight. (Kennedy, page 53)

Note that Kennedy maintains that "[c]uriosity . . . demands that we abandon careful attention to the world" (italics mine). And the Bernard quote cited previously insists that "[t]he curious person . . . does not care to know in what condition he has left himself within" (italics mine). Kennedy, following Bernard and placing himself within the Augustinian tradition, holds that curiosity has no genuine care for the objects of its inattentive gaze.

This is a curious point, as we shall see by looking at a passage from another article on curiosity published at the same time as Kennedy's article, both of them in the autumn of 2001. The following passage comes from Elias Baumgarten:

An important feature of curiosity is its fecundity: it tends to lead to other virtues. The virtue of curiosity does not depend on its leading to other virtues, but its having this instrumental value is morally significant. Curiosity bears a close relationship to, and is often bound up with, care and concern. Curiosity is rooted linguistically in the other-regarding activities of "care" and "cure" (from the Latin cūrāre, to take care of). We use the same term, "indifference" to describe both a lack of interest in other persons or things and a lack of concern about their welfare. For one to overcome indifference and be curious about something does not conceptually imply that one will also care about its welfare, but there is often a close relationship. In this section I will explore the connection between curiosity and care or concern in our relationships both with other people and with the non-human world, and I will also try to distinguish curiosity from several closely related character traits. (Elias Baumgarten, "Curiosity as a Moral Virtue," International Journal of Applied Philosophy, Volume 15, Number 2 (Fall 2001), part 2, paragraph one)

Kennedy and Baumgarten, though at odds over curiosity, perhaps know nothing of one another's work. Nevertheless, what we have here is a failure to communicate, foundered upon radically differing views of what "curiosity" means. Kennedy draws upon a tradition in which "curiosity" had come to imply a superficial concern with inessential matters, a meaning established by the the term's use. Baumgarten draws instead upon the sense of the word "curiosity" established by its Latin origin in cūrāre, "to take care of," a meaning established by the term's etymology.
But who is correct, Kennedy or Baumgarten? In a narrow sense, both are right if one can stipulate what a word means for the purposes of one's argument. In a larger sense, they're both right in that the term "curiosity" has both negative and positive meanings, depending upon the tradition to which one appeals -- a strong Medieval tradition denigrates curiosity, but an equally strong Modern tradition extolls it.

I'm latitudinarian enough to accept both views so long as they're working with different meanings of the same word, insofar as they're not talking about the same thing. As such, we would need merely to add, for example, the qualifier "idle" or "attentive" to the noun "curiosity" to know which view we're talking about.

The issue, however, is not quite that simple, for what if they're actually talking about exactly the same activity but evaluating it differently? Augustine, for instance, confessed that his curiosity misled him into watching a spider capture flies within its web instead of focusing upon the state of his soul on its journey toward God. Yet, precisely that curious attention to the details of this world, and to many things other than God and our souls, results in the fruits of science and technology as well as the knowledge of many other fascinating things.

Personally, I find Baumgarten's article more rich in insights, for it leads to connections that I hadn't previously thought about, so I'd recommend it for those curious about curiosity (though I wouldn't neglect Kennedy either).

I also find curious an incidental, even accidental connection in the timing of the two articles' publication. In a number of blog entries, I have investigated the concept of a voluntarist deity, a radically absolutist God unrestrained by reason or ethics and, arguably, intolerant of our curiosity. Hans Blumenberg argues that precisely this conception of God in one Medieval school of philosophy, i.e., nominalism, caused the Christian synthesis of faith and reason to fracture and that the Modern Age arose from those ruins through an act of human self-assertion legitimating theoretical curiosity and the Modern Age. Blumenberg doesn't make the process sound quite so heroic as that, but I'm summarizing, and moreover, times may now require intellectual heroism.

Kennedy and Baumgarten both published in the fall of 2001, and since that dire autumn, we have come to understand the very physical threat posed by the fiery thought in men's minds of a radically voluntarist deity, which strongly suggests that the debate about curiosity deserves our serious attention.

Blumenberg: Cicero on Curiosity as Distraction

Marcus Tullius Cicero

"...when the burden of care is relaxed"

(Image from Wikipedia)

On the ornate steps leading up to the Medieval Christian understanding of curiosity as a vice stands the figure of Cicero in all his ambivalence.

Why ambivalence? Like Augustine -- as Blumenberg explains -- Cicero feels the tug of curiosity but resists:

The naturalness of the cognitive drive is thus both a justification and a danger....

Cicero portrays the danger threatening the curious man by the Homeric image of Odysseus lured by the Sirens, not only by their song but also by the promise of knowledge of all earthly things . . . . Odysseus's conflict in view of the enticements of the Sirens is not a conflict between the aesthhetic and the ethical in our sense but rather between his theorectical curiosity and his native country. Although Odysseus does not succumb to their enticements, it is suggested by the length of his wanderings alone that knowledge was more important to him than his native country. In this context there emerges, in connection with the term curiosus, the negative characterization of curiosity as the longing to know everything. However, this negativity is seen as quite close to the quality of greatness, since being driven by the perception of sublime objects to desire knowledge is characteristic of important men. (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 281-282)

But as Blumenberg notes, "Cicero himself is marked by the conflict he describes" (Legitimacy, p. 282). For Cicero, curiosity -- albeit a natural drive -- threatens ever to draw him away from his practical duties, so he consoles himself with the promise of an afterlife of study:

Alleviation of doubt about the tasks to which life should be devoted can only come through being convinced of an immortality that promises compensation for everything that curiosity's self-restraint denies itself in view of political duties. Even this Platonizing solution has acquired a different function in Cicero than it could have had in the Greek world. The renunciation of theory seems to be something one can perform without prejudice to one's political and practical capability, so that relegation to the Beyond really can resolve the problematic: ". . . as happens now, when the burden of care is relaxed, we feel the wish for an object of our observation and attention, this will happen much more freely then, and we shall devote our whole being to sudy and examination, because nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see truth; and the more the vision of the borders only of the heavenly country, to which we have come, renders easy the knowledge of heavenly conditions, the more will our longing for knowledge be increased." [cf. "Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes I 44; translation by J. E. King (London and New York: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), pp. 53-54)," Blumenberg, Legitimacy, p. 626, n. 11]

Here the transcendant deferment of the satisfaction of theoretical curiosity, whose pursuit in the circumstances of civic life could only be an exceptional situation like that of Cicero's enforced leisure, does not yet have the Christian visio beatifica's essential differentiation from all earthly access to truth. It is only a matter of degree, a drawing near and improvement of the standpoint of the knower, with, in fact, a clear opposition to the immanence of the Stoa, according to which the human observer was guaranteed the favored standpoint of contemplator caeli [observer of the heavens] by his central position in the universe. At the same time the text makes clear, with the antithesis of care (cura) and contemplation (contemplatio), the basis on which the new formation of curiositas comes about: In illegitimate curiosity the place of the civic/practical concerns and chores is occupied precisely by the theoretical attitude, so that this latter, contrary to its nature, itself becomes a care dominating one's life. (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 282-283)

Blumenberg's basic aim here is to show how curiosity came to be seen as a natural drive that tempts us away from our duty. For Cicero, a natural drive is not inherently bad, but in this life, we have other cares that concern us, duties that we must fulfill. For Augustine, natural drives are inherently suspect due to the fallenness of our human nature, so curiosity as a putative 'natural' drive becomes a sinful distraction from our duty to God and thereby places our soul in mortal danger.

Enough for now. I must turn from this curious distraction and return to my grading...

Aquinas: Careless Curiosity

The Slothful Punished in Hell

(Nicolas le Rouge, Le grant kalendrier des Bergiers, 1496)

In a somewhat obscure passage of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (but is anything not obscure in that tome!), Hans Blumenberg observes -- on Thomas Aquinas discussing sloth (acedia) as a sin and a vice -- that for Aquinas, sloth leads both to indolence and to curiosity:

The acedia [indifference, apathy] that is dealt with here accomodates itself better to the syndrome of the 'postparadisaic' situation. Thomas uses this cardinal vice to epitomize the despondency and indolence of the man who has deviated from his vocation, who conceals from himself in this pure melancholy the seriousness of the cura, actio, and labor [care, action, and labor] that are his task. Acedia is a form of sadness that surrenders itself to its own heaviness and thereby turns away from the goal of its existence, indeed, from all purposeful behavior and 'exertion' whatever (fuga finis [flight from purpose]). Curiositas is only one of the forms that this purposelessness takes. Here lies the connection with its definition as inconsistency, as premature failure with respect to the demands of a reality that no longer holds itself open to man in immediate self-givenness. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy, page 334)

By the "postparadisiac" situation referred to here, Blumenberg means the "fallenness" of the world that renders its no longer teleologically fitted to mankind's senses and reason. Recall that Augustine used this reasoning to cast suspicion upon curiosity for its tendency to focus one's attention upon the misleading things of this world and away from one's soul. Unlike Augustine, however, Aquinas is strongly Aristotelian and therefore more interested in the empirical things of this world. One must still seek God's purposes in this cosmos, of course, but this takes focused, purposeful effort. Lack of effort, or purposelessness, results from sloth and manifests itself in carelessness, inactivity, and inexertion on the one hand and in curiosity on the other.

We may find ourselves surprised to read that the vice of sloth leads to the vice of curiosity, since that seems a kind of activity, but that is what Aquinas says in Summa Theologica II. 2, Question 35, Article 4. In Objection 3, Aquinas notes that:

[Isidore of Seville] states that from sloth seven things arise, viz. "idleness, drowsiness, uneasiness of the mind, restlessness of the body, instability, loquacity, curiosity." (Summa Theologica II. 2, q. 35, a. 4, obj. 3)

In his Reply to Objection 3, Aquinas notes that Pope Gregory I ("the Great") specifies some of the effects of sloth as belonging to the "wandering of the mind after unlawful things," concerning which Aquinas observes:

This tendency to wander, if it reside in the mind itself that is desirous of rushing after various things without rhyme or reason, is called "uneasiness of the mind," but if it pertains to the imaginative power, it is called "curiosity"; if it affect the speech it is called "loquacity"; and in so far as it affects a body that changes place, it is called "restlessness of the body," when, to wit, a man shows the unsteadiness of his mind, by the inordinate movements of members of his body; while if it causes the body to move from one place to another, it is called "instability"; or "instability" may denote changeableness of purpose. (Summa Theologica II. 2, q. 35, a. 4, rep. obj. 3)

Thus does sloth lead to action, but action without purpose, lazy, an idleness in activity, and since "idleness is opposed to carefulness" (Summa Theologica II. 2, q. 35, a. 2, obj. 3), hence to carelessness.

Hence the irony -- given the etymological link between care (cura) and curiosity (from curiosus, meaning "careful") -- of a careless curiosity.

Mere Curiosity

Hans Blumenberg

A Curious Man

(Image from Suhrkamp Insel)

I believe that I mentioned in this blog a couple of weeks ago that Warren T. Reich had asked me to participate in his work on the history of care, focusing upon curiosity in the sense of what Hans Blumenberg called "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity" in his great tome, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.

I agreed to take part in this endeavor and so wrote an email to one of my old Berkeley mentors, John Heilbron, who now lives in a very small British village with only one pub but still manages to produce great works in the history of science:

Greetings from Jeff Hodges. I suppose that you're getting accustomed to my bolts out of the blue.

I hope that you are doing well, and I suppose that you've un-retired two or three times by now, despite your wife's wishes...

Your onetime mentioned desire that I become a scholar (a remark dating back to 1983 or thereabouts) might finally be coming to fruition. I had been asked by a Korean scholar to act as a respondant at an international conference last week, and one of the speakers was Warrren T. Reich, the man who founded the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, and his was one of the papers that I had to respond to.

I suppose that I must have learned some intellectual rigor, academic discipline, and research skills from the history-of-science program, for in Reich's reply to my response, he stated, "Professor Hodges' response to my paper was the finest that I have ever heard at any conference that I've attended." I was astonished, to say the least, for Professor Reich is 75 years old. I guess that I just happened to say the right things.

Anyway, he has asked me to participate in a research project on the history of "care" -- specifically, Care: A History of the Idea and Its Practice. Because I had mentioned the term "curiositas" and its treatment in Hans Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Reich wants me to deal with the theme of curiosity and its relation to the developement of modern science. He also wants me to keep an eye to the project's larger theme, i.e., the history of "care."

I recalled from a seminar (perhaps the one that we held in Bancroft Library, a seminar in which Rebecca referred to Galileo as "dropping his balls"), that you once mentioned that "care" and "curiosity" are etymologically related. I believe that Blumenberg had also noted this in his book, but what I'm 'curious' to know is if you could suggest a bibliography relevant to this topic.

Don't go to any trouble, of course, and my role in this project is just one among 75 researchers, though I'd be a "Senior Research Scholar," which sounds honorable enough. If you're especially interested in knowing about the project, I could forward you the description that was sent to me on "Curiosity, Science, and Modernity."

At any rate, you might be interested in knowing what I'm up to these days.

John must have been out-of-village, for I didn't hear from him for over a week even though he's ordinarily very prompt. Here's his eventual reply:

Many congratulations on your performance as commentator and its results. Too often commentators just want to show off and say nothing useful to the speaker or the audience.

I don't know of a bibliography of care/curiosity. For curiosity/wonder in early modern science there is the not-so-good book by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, which will give you some orientation. I would not be surprised if care/curiosity had an entry somewhere in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Other clues might be found in historical dictionaries like the OED. You might begin by reviewing the meaning of "curiosus" in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary.

Take care.

Well, those are some places to start, and I have John's ironic blessing and will indeed take 'care'. I suppose that the paucity of information is a good sign that much remains to be done. I've already checked Amazon Books for what it has on the book by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, which turns out to be titled Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. I've written a note to myself on this book:

Lorraine Daston is Director of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Katharine Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and Women's Studies at Harvard University, so the authors are reputable scholars.

However, John Heilbron, historian of science and one of my mentors at UC Berkeley, mentioned this book but characterized it as "not-so-good."

I've only seen it at Amazon, where I had access to its table of contents and index:

Table of Contents:

Chapter 3: Wonder Among the Philosophers (page 109):

The Philosophers against Wonder (page 110)
Curiosity and the Preternatural (page 120)

Chapter 8: The Passions of Inquiry (page 303)
Ravening Curiosity (page 305)
Wonder and Curiosity Allied (page 311)

Index (page 502): curiosity:

9-10
definitions of: 397, n. 57; 434, n. 12
Enlightenment rejection of: 303-16; 258-58; 356
and magic: 396, n. 51
medieval attitudes toward: 92; 122-25
seventeenth-century attitudes toward: 218; 273-74
terminology for: 434, n. 7

From what I've seen of the book at Amazon, it would appear to link curiosity to wonder and the older sense of the object of curiosity as something 'odd' -- more an object of wonder as presented in the tradition of "paradoxography" than as a phenomenon to be investigated, a 'curiosity' (though I gather that part of the book is a history of how attitudes toward curiosity changed and became more positive).

Anyway, this is part of my initial foray into the obscure, liminal territory of 'curiosities' -- that rare realm of remarkable wonders that surpass our reason. One question for me is how curiosity changed from a willful distraction from things serious to a serious faculty that we should care about and for.

Curious readers are invited to respond...

Warren T. Reich on the Consolation of Phronesis?

Boethius (480-524/5) Teaching Students Consolation

Folio 4r in 1385 Manuscript of Consolation of Philosophy

MS Hunter 374 (V.1.11), Glasgow University Library

(Image from Wikipedia)

Because I'm even more pressed for time this morning, I'll just paraphrase the summary that I've prepared of Professor Reich's paper, "Consoling the Dying and Those Who Mourn: Reviving an Ancient Tradition," which he presented yesterday and which I'll be commenting upon in a session of the conference today:

Reich informs us that the most fundamental and proper form of care that we can show to those who are dying or mourning is by consoling them, which offers an active, direct, and practical approach to these problems, in contrast to the virtues of empathy and compassion, which are also important but which are not essentially connected to action. Consolation thus fills a need that no other virtue can, and Reich turns to the lengthy, 3000-year-old 'European' tradition of consolation for 'new' sources to draw upon in care for the dying. Among these sources are pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones. Common to all three is an understanding of consolation as aiming at anxious care, which consolation attempts to alleviate. Of particular interest is that Reich extends the consolation to be provided far beyond an art of dying to an art of living, an extension that he also finds in late antiquity and that he suggests may be needed even in our present, anxious times, for the various sorts of anxiety can be depicted as a single, unified object of consolation: anxious worry. Reich notes three approaches within the Christian tradition toward alleviating anxious worry: a belief in security, especially divine security; a willingness to let God be God; and a trust that one can cast one's cares upon God and be cared for in return. Reich calls this third sort a care-care dialectic and treats it as something that human beings can also provide, offering consoling care for the anxious care. In the ancient practice, consolation meant not to share grief but to remove it by appeal to reason and exhortation. This practice entails an art of living well, of knowing the telos of human desire and action, and of seeking happiness. Reich goes on to note the stages that a sufferer undergoes cases of severe health problems and in cases of dying, and he suggests that at a stage where the consoler and the one being consoled are communicating, the consoler should cite and comment upon aphorisms, for these resonate with the larger traditions of practical wisdom (phronesis) from which they stem and have been used in the past to console because they draw upon a broader, richer ground of moral understanding. Reich concludes by calling for a broad-based effort to recover the long tradition of consolation and bring it again into use. In my opinion, he has made a good case for this need, and he has even raised the central question that I would raise, namely, how to develop consolation for a pluralistic society of competing beliefs and values.

That last point is the tough one. In our fragmented, postmodern world of competing values, can a caregiver console the dying if their values are fundamentally different? Some religious traditions are exclusivistic and offer no consolation to those outside. A caregiver belonging to an exclusivistic religion might believe that consolation follows from conversion and that the means toward converting the outsider would first involve raising the outsider's level of anxiety about what to expect after death before extending the only hope of consolation.

That sounds like an issue for discussion at the conference today.