Last week a student told me his dyslexia both made him unusually creative and gave him a special sense of wonder. From what I knew of him, the claim made intuitive sense to me. He is the kind of wildly clever student who sees and connects dots others never even see. I had Eoin in mind as I read Helen de Cruz’s 2024 Wonder Struck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.
The book is a careful, historical explication of the philosophy and psychology behind the twin concepts of wonder and awe. The argument’s point of departure is, in some ways, Descartes’s foundational depiction of wonder as a “sudden surprise of the soul.” De Cruz frames wonder and awe as powerful emotions. More specifically, wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that push us to explore and seek understanding. They are also self-transcendent and direct us away from a narrow self-referential focus. Together wonder and awe are critical to the pursuit of knowledge.
It is an example-filled, breezy read despite the extensive research that frames it. There is an eclectic set of literary references and exquisite illustrations done by De Cruz herself. Together, they give the book a lush thoughtfulness. What I appreciated most were the many instances of where and how wonder and awe shaped progress, advances in our understanding of our social world. De Cruz also does a wonderful job making clear how important wonder and awe are to our well-being —how by enabling joy and hope and facilitating resilience—they are essential to a life well lived. Importantly, as De Cruz notes early on, “To understand awe and wonder is to appreciate an important and enduring aspect of being human.”
Central to De Cruz’s analysis is her concept of cognitive technologies. For De Cruz, wonder and awe are universal human experiences/emotions that need to be cultivated/exercised to flourish. Cognitive technologies (listening to music, putting yourself in slightly uncomfortable situations) create the conditions for wonder and awe.
I confess until the last two chapters there was something nagging at me throughout the read. While I can understand that wonder and awe might be definable emotions, the mere notion that we could parse and define them so meticulously made them somehow less wonder-ful phenomena. De Cruz would likely think me rather Kantian in this view (p. 144). If they are emotions, the inarticulable dizzying impact Kant describes as precisely why they are so important seems a bit lost by De Cruz. Does this analysis undermine that impact? For me, I think so. In the same way that Eoin’s diagnosis of his wonder made it somehow just a bit less charming.
That said, and in contrast to the chapters on magic, religion and science in particular, I think Chapter 7: Transforming the World Through Wonder and Awe and the Epilogue: Reclaiming a Sense of Wonder and Awe returned a bit of that mystical quality I longed for in earlier chapters. In Chapter 7, De Cruz builds on the work of Rachel Carson’s assertion that wonder is a virtue and a path to environmental awareness. She also illustrates both the individual and collective impact of natural wonder, emphasizing how an appreciation of nature is an end unto itself. As such nature’s wonder—a sunset, first snow, etc—offers us important moments of communion.
The epilogue takes a more personal tone and is a lovely reflection on the role of wonder and awe during the pandemic. Here De Cruz reminds us that,
“Wonder involves looking at the world with a sense of firstness…it incites us to learn by challenging our ways of thinking and how we believe the world to be…Awe and wonder can then become catalysts that help us reclaim what makes life worth living, or, as Williams James put it, to make the notion of mere existence tolerable.”
My sense of wonder about wonder and awe is restored.