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[...]nature of knowledge
how people grasp the consciousness of others while living within their own streams of consciousness

attention frigatebird media sea anthropology information [source: wikimedia, photograph by Mario Müller] absent friends:
his brother whom he has described to me
the professor whose books i have read
the postal clerk
the Canadian Parliament
abstract entities like Canada herself
the rules of English grammar
the basic principles of jurisprudence

--Schutz--> more one goes into the contemporary world, the more anonymous the contemporary inhabitants become

...................................

wonder
and its marvels

(Paris wall slogan from the student rebellion of 1968 -->) “every view of things that is not strange (bizarre, foreign) is false” --Bynum--> to jolt her listeners nad readers into encounter with a past that is unexpected and strange

past --> answer questions we haven't asked

-could “wonder” be the special characteristic of the historian?

wonder & marvels --> a medievalist's topic

Bynum represent a rearguard action to claim back from early modernists the irrational and grotesque and to “re-enchant” (if not the world, at least) the historical professional

1180-1320
a great increase in stories of marvels, monsters, miracles, ghosts
medieval europe awash in wonders


*the circumstances under which medieval men and women felt wonder*
wonder-talk
wonder-behavior [==>? empowering them]
the *web of actual horror & delight* we can decipher in medieval texts (and on instagram, telegram, whatsapp) (=/= the idea of “knowing = appropriating” ==> knowing is impossible)

medieval theorist [& my bestiary research] --Bynum--> wonder: (admiratio) cognitive, nonappropriative, perspectival, particular, (not merely a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered

‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder

telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)


scholarship on (early modern age of) wonder
1- enthusiasm for wonders = *expropriative & appropriative* (ضبط و سلب) --> *orientalism: projection of self or construction of “other” as self --> the rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect & explore*:
collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering & missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings & taxation*
Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics:wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descarteswonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar

jinn bath human architecture demon hygiene wonder book [source: Kitab al-bulhan or }=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response

middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writing, collection of odd stories called by one author
admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)


12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival & psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) in their ontological status*
Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)


[1]
early middle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ontological==> flatten the impulse to wonder:
1- (tends to) separate out (with hair-splitting distinction) a small number of phenomena as objectively wonder-inducing (*whereas all others no matter how odd are wonderful only to the ignorant*)
2- (suggests that) most events have natural causes: *if philosophers are diligent enough ==> wonder will cease* [= Sherlock Holmes]
(1235) William of Augergne --> people do not know how to go about investigating the cause [--> detective]
(1325) Oresme --> *vigorous imagining of a retained species + small external appearance + imbalance of some internal disposition ==> marvelous appearance* [----> himself was fascinated and enchanted by the “marvelous properties” of animals and the *diversitas of human experience* especially of tastes in *food and in sexual positions and partners*]
a 13th century treatise “on the marvels of the world” (Qazwini?) --> a great part of philosophers and physicians believe that: natural things ==> marvellousness of experiences and marvels
Roger Bacon --> naturalistic explanation of saints who lived without eating... charms and amulets... *waxed lyrical over the infinite complexity of the common fly* (<-- is this what i did in telegram bestiary?)
Albert the Great --> physical manifestations of admiratio = "constriction and suspension of the heart” confronted with something “great and unusual”
Aquinas --> connect wonder with pleasure = a desire that culminates not so much in knowledge as in encounter with majesty, *wonder: the best way to grab the attention of the soul

}--Bynum--> distinguishing ‘miracle =/= marvel’ ontologically =/= psychologically, perspectivally (or attributing marvels to natural causes) ----> eclipse of wonder

wonder as a response was not devalued or dismissed (even in a philosophical and theological tradition that de-wondered anomalies by insisting on an increasingly ordered world, whose laws were decipherable by the wise)



[2]
in the discourse of the homiletic موعظه and hagiographical تاريخ انبياء (tazkirat) --> wonder =/= imitable قابل تقلید (----> the known, the knowable, the usual)
“non imitandum sed admirandum” (not to be immitated but to be [...]