Natural Philosophy and the Lost Sense of Wonder

Listening to “Ancient Greek Philosopher-Scientists” on LibriVox. Most of what we have of these thinkers are disjointed fragments, often not even complete thoughts. It is all too easy to see some of what they say as inchoate, even naïve. After all, they only had the senses to work with to explain the natural world. Yet, at times there is something poetic, perhaps because, like good poetry, these fragments leave space for the listener to play with ideas and visions that aren’t always open in more analytical writing. 

As a listener, I was drawn to these natural philosophers’ speculation about the stars. Curiosity seemed to have pushed them to the inexplicable. And what could be more inexplicable, what could be less understandable by the senses, than the stars? (Aside: did natural philosophy become science when Galileo was handed a telescope and had a device that would augment, and for later generations, substitute for, his senses?)

I wonder if what we have lost that these natural philosophers had, our sense of wonder, of the need to explain the inexplicable? Sure, we have gosh-gee photos of nebulas and super novas. But let’s face it, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it’s not worth one moment looking up at the night sky.

When was the last time you went out and looked up into the night sky? I did on my (5:00 AM) morning run. I could see a sliver moon and one star, probably Saturn or Jupiter. (It’s been a long time since I took Astronomy.) Sure, it was 5:00 AM, and even that early the sun is starting to cause the night sky to fade a little and the less visible stars to wink out. Even at the best of times I can see so few starts that I’m pretty sure I could count them were I a little less lazy. That’s light pollution.

The last time I saw the night sky as I think those ancient natural philosophers did was on a backpacking trip in the Canadian Rockies. Sometime in the night I woke to a flashlight shining in my face through my tent walls. Who in the world? I thought. It should have been what in the world, or what out of this world. I crawled out of my tent to find I was staring at the largest full moon I had ever seen. So bright, that I discovered I could read a book by it. The stars earlier that night had been so thick that the night sky looked grey. I can only describe that sky as a dome. It looked like the stars were all spots of light painted on the same domed surface that I couldn’t shake the impression was just above my head. 

That, I think, is what those natural philosophers saw and somehow had to explain. We like to explain away ideas about the universe that they had as naïve. I think that it may simply be that they were closer to the universe than we are. They felt as though they could reach out and touch it if they just stretched hard enough. That, I’m afraid, is what we’ve lost.