About Curiosity

Curiosity As Sin
by Stanley Fish


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Sunday, September 20, 2009

September 14, 2009, 9:30 pm — Updated: 8:24 am -->
Does Curiosity Kill More Than the Cat?

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson’s “trinity of inalienable rights: ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, “a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality.” He was, after all, the “living embodiment of an inquisitive mind” and was reputed to have known “all the science that was known at the time.” Surely he would have prized curiosity, especially since it is the quality “oppressive states fear.” Given that “the cornerstone of democracy is access to knowledge,” it is not too much to say, Leach concluded, that “the curious pursuing their curiosity may be mankind’s greatest if not only hope.”

This sounds right, even patriotic, but there is another tradition in which, far from being the guarantor of a better future, curiosity is a vice and even a sin. Indeed, it has often been considered the original sin.

When God told Adam he could eat of all the fruits of the Garden of Eden, but not of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, he placed what has been called a “provoking object” in Adam’s eyes. The provocation was to go beyond the boundaries God had established and thereby set himself up a rival deity, a being with no limits on what he can conceive, a being whose intellect could, in time, comprehend anything and everything. Such a being would imagine himself, God-like, standing to the side of the universe and, armed only with the power of his mind, mastering its intricacies. Those who engage in this fantasy, says Thomas Aquinas, think “they are doing something great, if with surpassing curiosity and keenness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world; so great a pride is thus begotten, that one would think they dwelt in the very heavens about which they argue.”

Another churchman, Lorenzo Scupoli, put it this way in 1589: “They make an idol of their own understanding” (“Knowledge puffeth up,” I Corinthians 8:1). Pascal said it succinctly: “Curiosity is only vanity.” Jonathan Robinson, writing in this century, makes the same point: “What we are talking about is the desire to satisfy our curiosity on any and every conceivable subject that takes our fancy” (“Spiritual Combat Revisited”).

Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge’s boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H. to digitalize just about everything. “The computer revolution,” he announces, “holds out the prospect that the digital library could be become an international citadel for the pursuit of curiosity.”

That’s exactly what Paul Griffiths, professor of divinity at Duke University, is afraid of. Where Leach welcomes the enlargement of curiosity’s empire, Griffiths, who is writing a book on the vice of curiosity, sees it as a sign of moral and spiritual danger: “Late modern societies that are fundamentally shaped by the overwhelming presence of electronic media and the obscene inundation of every aspect of human life by pictures and sounds have turned the vice of curiosity into a prescribed way of life” (“Reason and the Reasons of Faith”). The prescriptions come in the form of familiar injunctions: follow the inquiry as far as it goes, leave no stone unturned, there is always more to know, the more information the better. “In a world where curiosity rules,” Griffiths declares, “unmasking curiosity as a destructive and offensive device . . . amounts to nothing less than a . . . radical critique of superficiality and constant distraction.”

Griffiths builds on the religious tradition in which curiosity is condemned because it distracts men from the study and worship of God, shackling them, says Augustine, “to an inferior love.”

But curiosity can also distract men from secular obligations by so occupying their minds that there is no room left for other considerations. These men (and women) fail to register the pain of animals subjected to experiments in the name of knowledge, pay no heed to the social consequences of their investigations, and take no heed of the warnings issued in Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus,” Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (not to mention the myth of Pandora and the Incredible Hulk).

They are obsessive and obsessed and exhibit, says John Henry Newman, something akin to a mental disorder. “In such persons reason acts almost as feebly and as impotently as in the madman: once fairly started on a subject, they have no power of self-control” (“The Idea of a University”). They have no power of self-control because they have no allegiance — to a deity, to human flourishing, to community — that might serve as a check on their insatiable curiosity. (Curiosity is inherently insatiable; its satisfactions are only momentary; there is always another horizon.)

In short, curiosity — sometimes called research, sometimes called unfettered inquiry, sometimes called progress, sometimes called academic freedom — is their God. The question, posed by thinkers from Aquinas to Augustine to Newman to Griffiths, is whether this is the God — the God, ultimately, of self — we want to worship. Given the evidence, including Chairman Leach’s address, the answer would seem to be yes.

COMMENTS

And it’s certainly news too me that too many people are curious and curiouser. Quite the opposite, I’d guess.— Edward G. Nilges


Curious article.
Odd to hear that curiosity “distracts” one from worshiping. It’s actually a pretty frightening argument — justification for punishing people because they aren’t satisfied with a dogma. It turns the whole argument about curiosity on its head, and shows just how prideful and arrogant a person can be in their “humble ignorance.” Like — there’s really nothing more to know?
I don’t know. The portrayal of curiosity as some sort of stepping-stone to pride and arrogance is certainly not true. Knowledge (starting with Socrates’s famous statement about it, that we “know nothing”) often breeds humility. Nor do I think it accurate to describe curiosity as “insatiable.” Curiosity can certainly be muted, a person not really minding that his curiosity is never satisfied. Pride and insatiability do not go hand-in-hand with curiosity. Lots of curious people are neither, and lots of non-curious people are both.
I find the arguments presented kind of repulsive, but thank for the article. I didn’t know this strain of thought had existed.— Pear

Object to the premise: Far from “killing” cats, curiosity instructs them. As a life-long cat caretaker, I have gobs of experience demonstrating just that.— Daphne Chyprious

What an odd article to print - that being curious is sinful - at a time when Americans really need to be more curious about what their government really is doing. Is this meant to quell questions about what is going on politically?— Kurt


While Mr. Fish presents some cogent arguments about why being in a state of constant curiosity would be personally unsatisfying, he does not explain how curiosity hurts society. Nor does he offer an alternative state in which a person should be. Should people just ignore their natural urge to discover and instead read things that have already been written? The implications of this column are deeply disturbing and slightly patronizing.Mr. Fish’s column implies one of two things. First, that all the things we need to know have been discovered, therefore more curiosity would be extravagance. Or, that only certain men (Mr. Fish being among them?) are capable of riding that crazy monster known as Curiosity.Mr. Fish is known to be a scholar. At some point, he was a mere mortal, a mere undergraduate. I wonder what his twenty-year-old self would have thought after reading this column. Would the young Fish gone on to become a foremost expert of Milton? Or would he have duly suppressed his curiosity about a long-dead English poet and gone on to mechanics, a wood cutting or some other, more tangibly useful field?— Katy


Can I asume that your last paragraph does not indicate that you worship at the altar of the God of unfetted cuiosity(to the detrment of all else)? This would seem then to be in contrast to the defence of the religious God in previous articles. THat is not to say that I(or you) would wish to sacrifice curiosity and inquiry to worship a religious deity. As a theology student I know they must go hand in hand.— zac

Another way to ask this question, perhaps more productively, is to consider the role of values or morality in determining the direction and nature of intellectual inquiry.
The problem is not curiosity itself, but whether curious energy is directed into narrow channels whose shape is determined by ideological or political forces (e.g. devising more complex financial securities products), or whether it is directed at knowledge that relates to or advances scientific knowledge, creative thought, and human welfare.
The freedom to question our own questioning - that is a curiosity worth supporting.— Kevin

Prof. Fish, I did like it better when you were trying to create a pedagogy for college writing on the basis of speculation, conviction, and anecdotal evidence. This is so serious. Also, so limited, at least given the example of the interwebs.
The internet, to quote my girlfriend’s able work, is rhizomatic, collective, myriad, connected, a series of infinite systems that are at once small and large. They isolate and distract, replace other forms of contact; they enhance and enable, making contact possible. They are the pharmakon: hey will heal us or poison us, depending on whether we are inside or out. The essential element is orientation: how will we consider the phenomenon of ‘modernity’, and what will we make of it? Curiousity is necessity, and the sort of shiftless drive for the next extreme, or the desire to replace God, is something else entirely. Surely you know that, when you’re not making an abstract argument abstractly?— MC

My wife, who is a cancer researcher, had a very hard time learning to do dissections. Watching family members die of cancer was much harder.
The reason we do science is because we have a very firm belief in human society, kindness and life.
Humanists may imagine scientists are self-worshiping and fame seeking. This caricature does not fit the horde of (mostly immigrant) hard working, anonymous scientists toiling in the basements beneath your offices.
If humanists would like to be relevant again, they should perhaps pick something to rally around other than antiquarian complaints about civilization.— Brett

The reasoning “against” curiosity assumes (a) a “god” and (b) a transcendent god who want us to remember we that we are “inferior.”I wonder (a form of curiosity) why we have to make these assumptions. They certainly reinforce a particular hierarchical/political attitude.I agree that there are issues related to technology, internet, etc. I suppose Galileo faced similar “technology” issues regarding his curiosity.On a personal level, it is my own curiosity that keeps me alive. It is one of my most valued traits. Without it I would feel like a robot.— DM
And thankfully so.
Those who wish it otherwise would do well to start by producing a god which can cure tuberculosis and then moving on to something more challenging.— ctm

My curiosity overcomes me. Why should Mr. Fish want to write such a piece?— Rachlel

Of course religious, especially Catholic, thinkers would condemn curiosity; anyone curious enough to look behind their curtain would find a faulty system, one based on received knowledge long discredited by (here it comes) science. Such inquiries are a shell game with no actual basis and no actual use, save to aid in the repression of human knowledge. The final arbiter is not a demonstrable, indisputable fact, but rather a totally irrational faith, which, if followed, leads to a dark corner. If I must have a religious basis to my epistemology, I prefer the one which values the inquiry “why ruin a perfectly good question with an answer?”— mburgh


It was not curiosity that killed the cat.
It was carelessness.— John C


Prof. Fish, I did like it better when you were trying to create a pedagogy for college writing on the basis of speculation, conviction, and anecdotal evidence. This is so serious. Also, so limited, at least given the example of the interwebs.
The internet, to quote my girlfriend’s able work, is rhizomatic, collective, myriad, connected, a series of infinite systems that are at once small and large. They isolate and distract, replace other forms of contact; they enhance and enable, making contact possible. They are the pharmakon: hey will heal us or poison us, depending on whether we are inside or out. The essential element is orientation: how will we consider the phenomenon of ‘modernity’, and what will we make of it? Curiousity is necessity, and the sort of shiftless drive for the next extreme, or the desire to replace God, is something else entirely. Surely you know that, when you’re not making an abstract argument abstractly?— MC

On a personal level, it is my own curiosity that keeps me alive. It is one of my most valued traits. Without it I would feel like a robot.