The Intellect as a Door to Wonder (Part 1)

How modern, science-based conceptions of reason often stifle wonder

Plato tells us that “philosophy begins in wonder.” It is not easy to put our familiar assumptions aside and rest indefinitely in liminality concerning the deepest existential and metaphysical questions. I think Plato rightly points out that this suspension of the familiar, which philosophy requires, must go hand in hand with a sense of wonder. Wonder allows us to perceive the unknown dimensions of life that often produce feelings of suspension, confusion, and fear as gateways into a boundless mystery that arouses a deep sense of awe and respect. This very much resonates with the experience I had when I first took philosophy as an elective in high school. As each class challenged and often uprooted assumptions I had held for my entire life, my familiar reference points began to fall away. This process gradually allowed me to see that reality was a much vaster, more mysterious, and more dynamic phenomenon than I had been taught to think throughout my education. Although this was very much a deconstructive process, it did not produce fear or despair of any kind. On the contrary, I felt precisely the kind of wonder that Plato describes—the sense that reality was not something already “figured out” that I could be taught about in school, but a living mystery in which I could directly participate by making use of my rational faculties.

Looking back, I now see that my own experience with philosophy mirrors the way the philosophical process is understood in Ancient Greek thought, which is often regarded as the origin of the entire Western philosophical tradition. For Plato, the ultimate source of all reality—the Form of the Good—is not an independent object that we can learn about from someone else, but something dwelling in the deepest recess of our being. The philosopher can discover, synchronize with, and live from it by refining and employing their rational faculties. However, we want to be careful here. Plato’s conception of reason is very different from the reason of modern science and modern philosophy.

Let me explain this difference by continuing my personal anecdote. Although my philosophical journey was sparked by this Platonic feeling of wonder, within a few years I found that the journey had taken me 180 degrees and deposited me in an almost opposite place. I had been committed to following reason no matter where it led, as I wanted the truth regardless of whether that truth was positive or negative. At the time, it seemed to me that such an objective rational analysis necessarily led to the conclusion that reality is a cold, lifeless place made up of mechanical interaction between physical atoms, and that everything that matters to us as human beings can ultimately be reduced to these mechanistic interactions between dead pieces of matter. My sense of awe and wonder was gone, replaced with despair over the lifeless and meaningless wasteland I thought reality to be.

Why had a project that had initially begun with a sense of deep wonder and awe led me toward a conception of the world that was final, closed, meaningless, and lifeless? I now see that the turning point in my philosophical journey hinges upon the understanding of reason I was working with. While I had initially treated reason as a tool by which I could directly access and participate in the fundamental truths of life, at some point along the way I had adopted the assumption that the proper role of rational analysis was simply to comment on observations made about the outside physical world. I had unknowingly taken on the conception of reason proposed by a group of philosophers in Britain in the early 20th century known as the logical positivists.

The logical positivists thought we needed to have reason withdraw from its more speculative pursuits and, except in the realms of linguistics and mathematics, tether it only to the observation of empirical reality. Bertrand Russell, a proponent of this way of thinking, writes, “Questions of fact cannot be decided without appeal to observation.” When it comes to metaphysical truth, these thinkers believed reason’s only role was to analyze the observations we made through our senses. They were concerned that when we do not bind reason to empirical, scientific observation, it becomes lost in wild, confused speculation. Although most people have never heard of logical positivism, outside of the realm of religion, this seems to be the most widespread conception of reason in our culture. (Further, when I mention religion, it is only the theological grounding of religions that makes use of more nuanced conceptions of reason. Many religious practitioners think of the objects of their faith, such as heaven, hell, God, or Nirvana, as something very akin to sense objects or experiences they have not yet perceived.)

The famous physicist Stephen Hawking’s statement that we don’t need philosophy anymore because physics can reveal all of reality to us, or the unstated assumption in most education systems that the natural sciences are most important because they teach us how “reality” works, are both based on logical positivist conceptions of reason. Any suggestion that humanity’s most “objective” and “unbiased” access to truth consists in observing the behavior of outside objects is rooted in logical positivist assumptions about the nature of reason.

I now see that my unconscious adoption of this conception of reason led to a stifling of Platonic wonder. By claiming that the source of truth is in the outside world and that our rational faculties can, at best, comment on the truths we observe outside ourselves, truth and reality are placed outside of our own being. For the logical positivists, we will always be barred from any kind of direct communion with reality, as reality is, by definition, an external phenomenon that exists within the sense objects that our mind perceives as outside itself. Of course, if we want to be good philosophers, the fact that such a theory leads to this unfortunate place of despair and alienation does not itself act as evidence that the theory is false. For this, we would need an independent articulation of why this conception of reason is impoverished or misleading.

If we look at conceptions of reason in pre-modern Western philosophical traditions, such as the Platonic, Neo-Platonic, and Christian traditions, as well as the Islamic tradition we find such a suggestion. We find an allegorical articulation of what I see as a common thread in all these traditions in Plato’s story of the cave. At first glance, logical positivism may seem to embody a “common sense” view of reality: that the objects we perceive through our senses are the fundamental “stuff” of the world, and thus tethering our rational analysis to the behavior of these phenomena makes sense. Plato’s allegory of the cave turns this assumption on its head. Plato suggests that those who take the perception of their senses at face value are like prisoners chained in a cave who have their eyes fixed on the shadows dancing on the cave wall. These prisoners have not so much as turned their heads to see the fire behind them that is casting these shadows, let alone walked outside the cave to perceive the outside world or the Sun, the source of all light itself.

For Plato, committing ourselves to the logical positivist and scientistic conception of reason is to commit ourselves to keep our eyes forever fixed on the shadows on the wall, refusing to look at the vast expanse of reality that we discover as we turn our eyes towards the source of these shadows. For Plato, when we properly employ reason, we find that there are deeper levels of reality on which these objects of our senses depend. Further, unlike the objects we perceive through our senses, these more fundamental layers are not outside of our own being but can be directly accessed, experienced, and lived from by making use of our inner rational faculties. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this intuition was active when I first began learning philosophy: the idea that I could use my inner faculties not only to discover truth but to develop an immediate intimacy with this truth as an active, living force of ethical guidance and ontological illumination.

For now, I will leave this as a suggestion: What if the physical realm of sense objects that natural science so rigorously explains were just shadows on the cave wall? What if we had other faculties within us that could access deeper layers of reality, which make the perception of these shadows possible in the first place? In the following post, I will delve into Greek, Islamic, and modern conceptions of reason that offer such a perspective.

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