Critical Writing

Must-read writing by Sarah Lawrence College alumnae/i, faculty, and students. For this issue: philosophy faculty member Michael Davis considers the role of wonder in education_and in the funny pages—in an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education.

I must admit to a certain thrill when the paper girl comes in the evening with the Westchester Journal News. We get it, of course, because it is very important to stay abreast of local issues. Well, actually, the first thing any of us do is turn to the comics. I will never forget the look of bewilderment on my daughter's face-she was about four-when she asked for the comics in the morning, and I told her that the Times had none. I must admit, too, that I am one of those people who first flips through the pages of the New Yorker for the cartoons and never returns for anything else. So, I start with a puzzle: why do these things have such power over a person otherwise obviously quite serious? I want to try to understand the curious power of the funnies with the help-this is not a joke-of Aristotle. Now, this will involve doing what one is never supposed to do-explaining jokes. So forgive me in advance.

Let's look first at an example from Gary Larson's The Far Side. Two policemen stand next to a tree in the middle of a forest. One holds a pillow in one hand and a bloodhound on a leash in the other. Leaning against a tree is a very tired looking goose plucked of all but a few feathers. The first policeman says to the dog, "You idiot! We want the scent on the pillow! On the pillow!" What is the joke here? The police are presumably looking for a criminal. They have a pillow with his scent on it and want to use a bloodhound to follow the scent. But, instead, the dog follows the scent of the goose whose feathers were plucked to form the pillow. Why is this funny? Well, for one thing, it catches you having the same expectations as the policemen. And it shows you how silly you are to take those presuppositions for granted. In fact, the bloodhound is not so dumb. What the relevant scent is depends altogether on your interpretation of the prior situation.

The particulars here are instructive. What is at stake is the status of the pillow. From the point of view of the policemen, the pillow is the thing and the feathers are just the matter that makes up the thing. For the dog, however, the feathers are the thing. The police and the dog thus give two discrepant answers to the question, What is this thing before me? The difference turns on what Aristotle would have called the material cause of the object. In the first book of his Metaphysics and the second book of his Physics, Aristotle spells out four possible answers to the question, What is x? One can answer by identifying the matter or underlying stuff (hupokeimenon) from which something is made. The statue is bronze, the pillow is feathers. One can say the statue is a horse and thereby identify its being with its form or looks (eidos). One can identify the statue with the immediate cause of its coming to be formed or shaped as it is, for example, pouring the bronze of the statue into a mold. This is the efficient cause or cause of motion. Finally, one can answer the question, What is it? with the end or purpose for the sake of which the being came to be-what Aristotle calls the final cause. The statue could be a monument to a famous horse. What Larson's cartoon calls attention to is that answers to these questions are not simply separable from one another. What something is made of is not so obvious as it seems. True, the pillow is made of feathers and the statue of bronze, but as soon as you turn your "what is" question on the underlying stuff your answer will give it a form and, therefore, necessarily assume some formed stuff underlying it. Bronze is a form or kind of metal, and feathers are a kind of animal tissue. The dog appears to be at a deeper level of inquiry than the police.

Let us turn briefly to another example by Stan Hunt and from the New Yorker. The joke here is that judgment is the sort of thing one can have only by exercising it. Once again, there is a parallel in Aristotle. In the first and then again in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points to how difficult it is to define virtue. It cannot simply be a potentiality, for there has to be something actual or real about it. On one level, just by being alive we are potentially courageous or wise. And even if we have a propensity toward courageous acts or wise thoughts, we are not virtuous if we never exercise that propensity. We do not call babies virtuous, nor would we say that someone who slept his whole life was virtuous. Yet virtue is not simply the same as the virtuous action. We all know that it is possible to do good things without being good. In fact, this is how we teach children to be virtuous. If it is anything, then, virtue must somehow be a cross between pure potentiality-i.e., possibility-and actuality. Aristotle calls this mixture a hexis, a disposition or, literally, a having (the verb, echô, from which hexis derives means either "to have" or "to be able"). What we call character is clearly something of this sort-an actualized potentiality. This cartoon points to this strange character of virtue by pointing to half of the problem-i.e., unexercised good judgment is ridiculous.

So why do the comics seem particularly fertile places for philosophical questioning? For Aristotle the origin of philosophy is wonder. That philosophy always begins in wonder means that it is not progressive; it does not allow for building on the work of previous generations. Rather, if its beginning remains the same, its initial perplexities are always with us. Now, Aristotle does not simply mean that "all men by nature desire to know" so that when you do not know what someone has been doing since graduation, you write, or telephone, or go to a reunion. Ordinarily a desire to know is simply the attempt to transform something opaque into something plain. But wonder involves the recognition that one does not know the cause of the ordinary and everyday-that the unhidden is really hidden. And the cause of the unusual, when properly understood, is the same as the cause of the ordinary; the everyday path of the sun is the cause of its occasional eclipse. This sort of radical change of perspective is not easy. Oedipus' strangeness-he kills his father and marries his mother-is meant to provide the impetus to wonder about what is most ordinary and likely to be taken for granted, mothers and fathers. Now, this is something like what the funnies do. In making us laugh, cartoons and comics bring us to awareness of what was hitherto hidden in the obvious. They help us to wonder and so to be philosophic.

Michael Davis has taught philosophy at Sarah Lawrence since 1977, with seminars on political philosophy, moral philosophy, and thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. He has published several books, including Ancient Tragedy and the Origins of Modern Science, The Poetry of Philosophy, and a translation of Aristotle's On Poetics (with Seth Benardete).

From Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education. Copyright 2006 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Augustine's Press.