Curiosity Is No Solo Act

For millennia, curiosity has been characterized predominantly as an individual drive to acquire information. Whether it is Saint Augustine’s “lust to experience,” John Locke’s “appetite after knowledge,” Sigmund Freud’s “scopophilic drive,” or Hans-Georg Voss’s “motivation to explore,” philosophers and psychologists of the Western intellectual tradition have largely understood curiosity at the level of the individual organism, its forces, and its feelings.

But in the ancient and medieval periods, such expressions of individuality were also deeply suspect. Curiosity was seen as a largely vacuous interest in novel or forbidden information. The curious person was thought to reach for what was hidden and secret, beyond their proper purview, and thereby isolate themselves from spiritual and social community.

The accounts of Plutarch, a Roman essayist, and Augustine, a Christian bishop, are representative in this respect. For Plutarch, the curious person — or in his nomenclature, the busybody — was an oddball, a singular fellow, and a bit of an earwig. The busybody’s curiosity manifests as “a desire to learn” and “a passion to find out” what is truly new and novel. They push into the bazaars, marketplaces, and harbors asking, “Is there any news?” The busybody’s quest for maggoty mysteries is pursued without concern for themself or others. Abandoning their own interests and leaving their own soul in seedy squalor, the busybody jeopardizes their friendships and destroys social ties.

As an antidote to this “disease” of curiosity, then, Plutarch recommends a suite of ascetic practices, including not opening a letter upon its receipt, not consummating a marriage, and, upon hearing a theatrical performance in the distance, walking in the other direction. The message is simple: Abandon the singular secret, the devil in the details.

In the Bible, the curious person is in many ways similarly positioned as a sinner. Genesis begins, of course, with a story of creation and curiosity. The first woman, Eve, wants to partake of the one tree forbidden to her, representing the knowledge from which she and Adam are prohibited. Curious to know good and evil, she eats — that is, she reaches for, grasps, tugs, acquires, ingests, and consumes — a single piece of fruit from the forbidden tree, and her eyes are opened. Through her, all of humanity is condemned, metaphorically, to creep on its belly like a serpent, eating things worldly rather than spiritual.

While the hyperindividualized nature of curiosity and its interest in orphaned details is of the utmost concern in the ancient and medieval periods, these same characteristics are curiosity’s strongest commendations in the early modern period, in which scientific and philosophical inquiry set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.

René Descartes defined curiosity as a “desire to understand.” John Locke saw it as “an appetite after knowledge.” David Hume positioned curiosity as “the love of truth.” In the spirit of Francis Bacon, then, modern curiosity, performed by independent knowers, courted surprising information for its own sake, a process that itself ultimately served the cause of social utility. In other words, singularly curious objects inspired the individual practitioner of curiosity to gain knowledge that would be of eventual use to society.

The conceptualization of curiosity as an individual drive to discover something for society’s benefit persists today. But imagine a curiosity that is more social and praxiological than it is individual, intellectual, and acquisitional. Imagine a curiosity that aims less to know and more to make connections, build constellations, find links, and follow threads, functioning within a webbed network of relations between knowers, methods of knowing, and knowledges.

It is an intriguing suggestion at the very least, but is there historical precedent for such a concept? In short, yes.

Michael Foucault is a 20th-century thinker of power, specifically the power to resist established ways of thinking and doing. In a late interview, Foucault discusses this resistance as it relates to the queer community, which inherits a set of practices from the cisheteronormative world that includes settled ways of speaking, thinking, feeling, and relating both sexually and romantically. That is, there are well-worn pathways that typically define the romantic sagas of men and women.

In the face of those established networks, the task of queer people, Foucault suggests, is to “escape . . . [these] readymade formulas” and “invent” something still “improbable” — “way[s] of life” that traverse inherited formulas and institutionalized patterns. That is to say that queer life requires reconfiguring networks, revamping the ways a graph is walked.

To do so, queer people have to think and move in a “slantwise” direction, constantly creating “diagonal lines” in the social network. They must generate fresh forms of signification and sources of significance; they have to tell new stories. Ultimately, given that “what exists is far from filling all possible spaces,” the generation of more channels of information creates more chances for resistance and reconfiguration. With more fabric, there can be more fabrication.

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

It’s helpful, to this end, to consider the contributions of one of the lesser-known figures of early modern history: Olaus Wormius. A 17th-century Danish physician, explorer, and natural historian, Wormius traipsed around the globe and collected — indeed acquired — untold troves of artifacts. A tortoise shell here, an armadillo and elk horn there, shawls from one village and armor from another. From coins and fossils to original artwork and Indigenous artifacts, he brought everything back to Copenhagen. There, he shared his insights widely by establishing his famous Museum Wormianum, a cabinet of curiosities hardly rivaled in the 17th century.

It is easy to think of “Ole Worm” as a solitary curiosus and his collection as a stockpile of curios. But each of these objects was extracted from a network of relations, social systems, and ecologies in which they played a material as much as a symbolic role. Not only were these curios deeply edged, but Ole Worm’s own curiosity was also a cog in the colonial machinery, his interests like so many arms and legs of an imperial natural history. Curiosity and curios are never in fact solitary. Ole Worm himself was no recluse. Often accompanied by his wife, Dorothy (who invented the term tangent) and his pet auk (a penguin look-alike), he was the sort of person who remained in Copenhagen during a plague outbreak in 1654–1657 to care for the sick — even at the cost of his own life.

It is a long-standing hunch in English literature, from children’s tales to adult science fiction, that in fact all the world is threaded together. If only we could see it! We might, as Irene does in “The Princess and the Goblin,” position a thread between our finger and thumb, and journey out into the world, following it wherever it may lead, and ultimately find the cipher of being, truth, and belonging. Or like Mark in “The Changeling,” we might pull on the threads of varying lengths and colors that hang about our world and, from them, gain different kinds of power, as if the way in which things belong together were a source point for cosmic energy and insight. Writer Henry James, in “The Art of Fiction,” memorably observes, “Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the thinnest silken threads.”

Like curiosity, the work of fiction — or of crafting sense through experience — is a work of threading. How does one follow the threads? And by what force does one weave them in and out so as to craft the fabric of a curious life? Edgework invites us to ask these questions in a way that individual knowledge acquisition never could.

Perry Zurn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at American University. Dani S. Bassett is the outgoing J. Peter Skirkanich Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and incoming Wu Tsai Professor at Yale University. Together, they coauthored the book “Curious Minds,” from which this article is adapted.