I’m currently slowly working through Philip Fisher’s The Vehement Passions. Fisher begins by asking if there are any pair of words that seem as natural together as “dispassionate knowledge.” But the passions in at least one instance have always been seen as inextricably connected with the quest for knowledge: the case of wonder. Descartes considered wonder to be an impassioned state that makes learning possible at all. “In wonder we notice the background of a lawful and familiar world something that strikes us by its novelty and by the pleasure that this surprising new fact brings to us.” We all at every stage of life have a “distinct but provisional horizon” that separates the familiar from the unfamiliar and the unknown. Wonder lets us know where this horizon is at any given moment.
If it is only scientific knowledge that we are considering, then anger or grief would seem to “preclude clear thought”, that is “the pursuit of a continuous chain of thought and experiment, and the preservation of the calm atmosphere in which order and rationality make possible long and arduous projects.” But Fisher thinks that “vehement passions” like anger, grief, shame and fear have a significant role to play in the quest for knowledge. Wonder is no mere exception to the rule. The vehement passions design for us “an intelligible world” doing so by means “of a horizon lines that we can come to know only in experiences that begin with impassioned or vehement states within ourselves.” For instance, just as wonder plays an important part in scientific thought, so anger plays a significant role where the discovery and delineating of injustice is concerned. The fact that we are surprised by wonder or anger is a clue that something new really is disclosed in “states of vehemence.”