If one took a famous figure of the Enlightenment, Descartes, for instance, the natural inclination would be to assume that he fits perfectly within the self-assured version, and that wonder would be hard to find in the pages of his books, so closely aligned is he with the search for absolute and certain foundations of truth. In fact, it’s impossible to deny that Descartes is anxious in his search for certainty, and that he puts a sacred trust in the power of reason to achieve this. And yet . . . Descartes is never as self-assured as many caricatures might suggest. Indeed, when Descartes takes up the question of wonder, for instance, he speaks with a different tone and suddenly sounds more modest and reserved about the powers of the human mind.
In Descartes, wonder is described as a “sudden surprise of the soul” in the face of something new, unusual, or strange.3 As Stephen Greenblatt explains regarding Descartes, this sudden surprise in the experience of wonder is the quintessential response to a “first encounter”: “Wonder—thrilling, potentially dangerous, momentary immobilizing, charged at once with desire, ignorance, and fear—is the quintessential human response to what Descartes calls a ‘first encounter.’”4 As a first encounter, wonder has so much force that it causes a momentary paralysis of the intellectual faculties (and, thus, for Descartes, occurs strictly in the brain). At best, the mind will grasp one side of the object of wonder, it will get only a glimpse. “One can perceive of the object,” he explains, “only the first side that has presented itself, and consequently one cannot acquire a more particular knowledge of it.”5 One might say that the mind reaches an impasse in wonder because passage to the other side is blocked. Because of this limitation in wonder—an experience of ignorance—there is something unsettling about wonder for Descartes, as if it introduces doubt and equivocation into his most cherished convictions.
No wonder, then, that Descartes is ambiguous about wonder, expressing both fear and delight about it: fear, because it is loaded with ignorance and this philosopher wants to pass through wonder to reach the other side, the Promised Land of certainty; delight, because it provides us with the opportunity to learn about something “of which we were previously ignorant.”6 In the former instance, Descartes warns of the potential perversion of reason in the free play of wonder, especially when it turns extravagant and excessive. In excess, he writes, wonder “prevents or perverts the use of reason” and thwarts the acquisition of knowledge.7 For this philosopher, wonder has to be a momentary paralysis of the mind, as thrilling as it is, because he is after a solution to the puzzle of human understanding. He wants to pluck the heart out of the mystery of wonder in order to advance scientific knowledge.
As Jean-Luc Marion argues, however, there are numerous moments in Descartes when this project is significantly interrupted by phenomena outside the control of the human mind. When Descartes stops to consider the thought of infinity, for instance, the surprise and thrill of wonder suddenly returns to suggest something enriching. When discussing infinity, his language suddenly sounds a lot like the apophatic language of the mystical traditions. It is this opening in Descartes that gives us his more passionate and soulful side—and his capacity for wonder. Since infinity is strictly incomprehensible for Descartes, human thought can only “touch it,” not comprehend it.8 In the face of infinity, even Descartes’s beloved and proud “cogito” appears rather impotent. The gaze of the cogito cannot “take hold of it as much as surrender to it,” an experience that is closer to dispossession than possession.9 And most significant for our purposes, when Descartes describes the human gaze looking toward God, he speaks of the failure of comprehension as an experience of wonder. The gaze is stunned by the appearance of wonder: “I should like to pause here and spend some time in the contemplation of God, to reflect on his attributes, and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the eye of my darkened intellect can bear it.”10
These instances when Descartes concedes the weakness and submissiveness of the cogito, when he describes the intellect as darkened and blinded by “this immense light,” are the precious cracks in Cartesian philosophy that Jean-Luc Marion wants to expand and deepen. Marion deepens these cracks so that they become gaping chasms, and wonder has a part to play in all of this. Indeed, Marion considers amazement a paradigmatic case of the mind’s response to a “saturated phenomenon”—that is, something inescapably inaccessible and incomprehensible, something that forever remains in the dark no matter how much brilliance is brought to the matter. When confronted by an amazing phenomenon, the soul is bedazzled by a phenomenon so saturated with novelty, splendor, and otherness that it is unbearable and overwhelming to the human gaze.11 The mind is flooded by a tidal wave of meaning, leaving the subject flabbergasted and unsure. The object of wonder is stranger than anything that can be imagined or foreseen and, thus, impossible to possess, like trying to palm the wind or touch the sky. The object of wonder, in this sense, is an impenetrable mystery: it comes in an enigmatic guise, unrecognizable, incommensurable, and unfathomable to all categories of knowledge.12 Baffled by so much surplus, the mind finds it futile to control and assign it a determinate meaning. The mind is ravished, awed, stupefied, undone.
Because wonder comprises these features—uncertainty, obscurity, inscrutability, alterity—there is something in wonder fundamentally at odds with “Enlightenment” models of knowledge, if only because it dwells in shadowy and foggy conditions instead of the light of the sun. “The eye apperceives,” Marion writes, “not so much the appearance of the saturated phenomenon as the blur, the fog, and the overexposure that this phenomenon imposes on its normal conditions of experience.”13 As a saturated phenomenon, wonder steals up in the fog or cloud of unknowing.
In this case, the alliance between wonder and darkness is expressed nicely in the Spanish verb asombrar, to wonder, carrying within it the word for shade or shadow, sombra. Something wondrous can be seen only through the haze of shadows, as a blur, like the fleeting and vanishing passing of the Lord God before Moses (he is permitted only a glimpse of God’s back, not the face as he desired; see Exodus 33:23). Wonder is this partial glimpse, never the fullness of God’s face, never the fullness of knowledge. Even as an object of wonder appears and reveals itself, thus it shrouds itself in darkness (obscuridad) to remain obscure and hidden, concealed in its beauty, a black beauty of sorts. The truths that hold us spellbound are, in this sense, wondrous because of their lack of transparency and intelligibility. They are shadowy epiphanies.
To be lost in wonder, consequently, would describe the moment when the mind is suddenly lost and confused, when the racing mind is stilled and paralyzed, when something so different and fascinating appears to startle us enough that our habitual and predictable patterns of thought and action are disrupted. The mind is then driven beyond itself into a condition of ecstasy where shadows and their uncertain ghosts dwell in lieu of clear and evident truths.
Many of the classic Jewish and Christian mystics knew these ecstasies of wonder. Their encounters with otherness always carried them outside themselves and beyond—beyond the ordinary, beyond reason, beyond being, beyond God. For them, wonder was a bridge to transcendence, to a larger domain outside the fixed truths and confining borders of reality. It was a bridge across the river, through the fields, and into the vast and infinite ocean. Because it would carry them to the infinite depths of the ocean, mystics were always deep sea divers, exploring the mysteries of life and God in all their most peculiar, odd, and startling manifestations. Though wonder is surely not the sole property of mystics, it is, nevertheless, a particularly intense and concentrated case of it.
Though this elusive term, “mysticism,” has been subject to a wide variety of nonsensical and inane interpretations—fueled by the “New Age” movement—it is clear that the early Jewish and Christian sense of this term is synonymous with a strategy of apophasis. In contrast to kataphasis, or positive