curiosity

St. Augustine, a key bishop in Christian doctrine, called curiosity (along with lust and ambition) one of the "great temptations." He once had a friend named Alypius, pious and godfearing. When his friends invited him to the gladiatorial games, he refused because he hated the spectacle of carnage. But his friends eventually forced him to go. For a while, Alypius kept his eyes shut, but a huge roar from the crowd overwhelmed him with curiosity. And as soon as he saw the blood, he lost himself in his own savagery; he "found delight in the murderous contest" and became drunk on "bloodthirsty pleasure." Alypius was no longer the person who entered the stadium, but an anonymous spectator in the crowd.

Roughly 900 years later, Thomas Aquinas categorized the ways curiosity may be corrupted. Though he acknowledged the human desire to know is natural and good, we often seek knowledge for immoral or vain ends. One of Aquinas' corrupted curiosities: knowledge of trivia that distracts from what you ought to pay attention to. As with the gladiatorial games, you must ask yourself:

1) Is this knowledge/spectacle worth knowing about?

2) What are the forces trying to profit off my curiosity and why?

The Roman emperors knew the plebeians would be less inclined to revolt if satiated with bread and circuses.

Curiosity is one of our biggest strengths, pushing us to grow and learn, transforming the Unknown from something to be feared to something to be explored. Yet it can be our greatest weakness, exploited by fascists (flood the zone!) and profiteers. Our curiosity must be ordered and disciplined.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger coined the word Verfallen to describe the habitual patterns we humans (unintentionally) find ourselves in. Translated as "fallenness" or "entanglement," it is a passive and mundane state of being. When we fail to realize our potential, when we are adrift and at the whim of others, we are in Verfallen. The fallenness is threefold: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity.

Idle talk is our engagement in groundless, superficial chatter. Our opinions are socially convenient and not based on critical thinking.

Curiosity, to him, is the childish engine that spurs us to seek spectacle, entertainment, or “the pleasure of the eyes." We pursue knowledge not to understand it but simply because it is new. We hop from novelty to novelty, leveling everything to shallow amusement.

Ambiguity is the pervasive difficulty of sifting truth from garbage. Say a complex issue starts trending on social media. Everyone rushes to talk about the trend, but hardly anyone actually understands it, so buzzwords and headlines dominate the conversation. Because everyone uses the same buzzwords, it seems like we all understand the issue. Yet in reality, almost no one has done the deep work to comprehend it. That is ambiguity. As Oscar Wilde said, 'The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.'"

Thus, curiosity cannot be restless and greedy for the new. It must be intentional and explicit. It must dwell in its findings as a hermit crab does in a beautiful shell.

Curiosity has been on trial since humanity acquired it. It is the quality of Eve and Adam, of Hamlet and Einstein, of Sherlock Holmes and Scheherazade, of Sun Wukong and Sartre, of Cicero and cats and Black Mirror. German philosopher Hans Blumenberg traces the word's long history and its conversion from sin to virtue in "The Trial of Theoretical Curiosity."

The greats of Classical Antiquity acknowledged the importance of knowing (both the world and thyself). But the pursuit of abstract knowledge was savagely attacked. St. Augustine saw curiosity as a vice because it overturns the established order of things. Curiosity, to Augustine, seeks to make God 'useful' for our 'enjoyment.' Instead of focusing on salvation, we waste time engaging with our fallen world. Curiosity, in the medieval realm, was a flaw. Some knowledge is reserved for God (secreta naturae) and that's too bad for you.

Yet scholasticism eventually collapsed. Nominalism, arguing that universal concepts are mere names rather than objective realities, undermined the medieval synthesis of faith and reason. Everything could now be subjective, determined by individual impression or linguistic convention. This gave us humans a license to investigate the world.

Francis Bacon was instrumental in reversing curiosity from a transgression to an obligation. He illustrated it as the restoration of dominion lost at the Fall. This began the SLOW process of untangling guilt from curiosity, turning the urge to uncover secrets into the foundation of modern science. Blumenberg argues that modernity is exactly the self-assertion of curiosity against imposed limits. Yet just as it has been forever, there are forces that want the boundaries narrowed, the thresholds barred.

I will give the final word to Eça de Queiroz:

"Curiosity, an instinct of infinite complexity, may lead one to listen at doors or to discover America – yet both these impulses, so different in terms of dignity and results, spring from an intrinsically precious source, the activity of the mind."

The West has a foundational obsession with punishing women for being curious. The Bible is explicit that Eve, tempted by the serpent, ate first from the Tree of Knowledge. Her curiosity infected Adam. God cast the two out of Eden, dooming their progeny (the entire human race) to a fallen world. Later in the Bible, Lot's wife (who didn't even get a name) looks back over her shoulder to the wicked city of Sodom and turns into a pillar of salt. In the Greco-Roman mythos, there is Pandora and her jar (not a box!!), and Psyche lifting the lamp over Eros. Curiosity kills nothing other than the cat, one of the most feminized animals across cultures.

Associating transgressive curiosity with women triggers a cascade of other characteristics. Irresponsibility, naiveté, seditiousness, disobedience.

A famous French story, reinvented dozens of times, follows Bluebeard, a nobleman whose wives keep disappearing. The seventh wife, locked in his manor while Bluebeard is away, is given a key and allowed to explore any rooms she wishes except for the cellar. Her curiosity becomes too great, and she unlocks the cellar door, only to discover his six dead wives hanging on hooks from the walls. In her shock, she drops the key onto the ground, staining it with blood that cannot be washed off. Bluebeard returns and, just as he is about to murder her, her sister and brothers rescue her and kill Bluebeard. Many interpretations of the story exist, but one thing is clear: her curiosity is vindicated. The prohibitions imposed on her were there to protect the prohibitor. The irremovable blood stains on the key symbolize knowledge that cannot be unlearned.

Fetishism and Curiosity is a 1996 collection of feminist essays by Laura Mulvey that contrasts the two titular traits. Fetishism is a fixation with the visual and superficial, and in fact, it is from Mulvey, in an earlier essay, that we derive the "male gaze" concept. Society is built so that men do the looking and women are looked at. Patriarchal culture masks women with oversexualization, replacing complexity with safe and consumable fantasy. Fetishism disavows or masks deeper anxieties and power imbalances, disabling us from digging deeper.

Curiosity, though, is active and investigative. Mulvey positions curiosity as a feminist tool. It is a desire to uncover and decipher the hidden political and social truths behind popular culture and art. It encourages the viewer to ask why and how, to stop passively consuming and begin deciphering the structures that oppress them. Curiosity, thus, is punished, particularly when it is women doing it. Yet the punished look is almost always the justified look.

In a 1980 interview, "The Masked Philosopher," Michel Foucault dreamt of a "new age of curiosity." He was not simply interested in discovering "what is impossible for us to do or to know." He wanted us to uncover "the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think." Curiosity, in this way, is escape from inertia. Our thoughts, beliefs, habits, and rules were devised by humans, and so they are malleable. He asked us to find what surrounds us "strange and singular," part of a twisting genealogy and not mere backdrop. Curiosity is thus a "lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and essential." Refuse the pre-ranked world!

Foucault said elsewhere that the point of knowledge is for "the knower's straying afield of himself." Curiosity must be in the service of self-transformation.

Detailed above is curiosity's corruption into voyeurism: knowing to see rather than knowing to know. But its more insidious shadow is apathy. Named by monks in late antiquity as the "noon-day demon," Acedia is a feeling of overwhelming existential boredom, emptiness, and disconnection. It is not laziness, but a listless aversion to one's own life and duties. Thomas Aquinas called it tristitia de bono, sorrow to the good, when one is deadened by joyful and exciting things. It is neither painful nor pleasurable, but a purely hollow condition.

It is not the dogma of anti-knowledge, but an unconscious alienation from curiosity. Apathy is deployed as social armor, for being curious can leave you exposed and vulnerable. If you pretend to know or don't care altogether, you never have to ask. The humanist cannot fear the act of caring, for care underpins our accumulation of knowledge, our defense of our own autonomy, our appreciation of taste, and our compassion for fellow humanity.