Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life’s most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.
Drawing on the latest psychological insights on emotions, Helen De Cruz argues that wonder and awe are emotional drives that motivate us to inquire and discover new things, and that humanity has deliberately nurtured these emotions in cultural domains such as religion, science, and magic. Tracing how wonder and awe unify philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences, De Cruz provides new perspectives on figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, William James, Rachel Carson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Abraham Heschel. Along the way, she explains how these singular emotions empower us to be open-minded, to experience joy and hope, and to be resilient in the face of personal troubles and global challenges.
Taking inspiration from Descartes’s portrayal of wonder as “that sudden surprise of the soul,” this illuminating book reveals how wonder and awe are catalysts that can help us reclaim what makes life worth living and preserve the things we find wonderful and valuable in our lives.
Helen De Cruz is the Danforth Chair in the Humanities and professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Religious Disagreement and (with Johan De Smedt) A Natural History of Natural Theology and the editor and illustrator of Philosophy Illustrated.
“In Helen De Cruz’s extraordinarily rich and deep dive into awe and wonder, you will learn of their philosophical treatments, their role in magic and religion, their place in evolution, and how we can reclaim these two states so vital to our imagination and adaptation in the twenty-first century. This elegant book is filled with wonder-inspiring insights, awe-filled observations and cultural histories, and beauty. Read this book and you will look at the world around you with more wonder and awe.”—Dacher Keltner, author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
“This smart and highly readable book blends insights from philosophy and psychology with religion, science, and beyond, offering the reader their own sense of wonder at the scope and power of this broad-ranging emotion.”—Tania Lombrozo, Princeton University
“De Cruz synthesizes a remarkably wide range of topics with enthusiasm and philosophical rigor, producing a novel perspective on wonder that is both intellectually stimulating and applicable in everyday life.”—Alan Levinovitz, author of Natural: How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science
“In this book, Helen De Cruz is a gentle, erudite, and wise instructor in the science and philosophy of wonder and awe and the cognitive technologies that they help shape (and are shaped by). All readers’ love of wisdom will be reshaped as De Cruz invites us to experience our world’s strangeness, not from a sense of alienation but from a humane sense of the potential for mutual cooperation. It’s a rare gem of a book that treats the humanities and sciences as equal partners in our collective destiny.”—Eric Schliesser, University of Amsterdam
