It is curious that so little has been written about curiosity. Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens with a succinct statement on curiosity – ‘All men by nature desire to know’ – and David Hume ends Book II of A Treatise of Human Nature with a section titled ‘Of Curiosity, Or The Love of Truth’. Saint Augustine, too, dedicates an entire chapter (X-35) of Confessions to ‘temptation’, while the aim of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie is to ‘cover everything related to human curiosity’ (IV: 577-578). It is also true that one of Flaubert’s most dazzling novels is entirely dedicated to portraying the excesses, adventures and outlandish incidents sparked by the curiosity – elevated to a passion – of his delightful characters Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Yet, other than these and a few other notable episodes, and other than the odd, frequently circumstantial, reference in texts by authors ranging from Tertullian to Einstein, Seneca to Montesquieu, and Kepler to Sigmund Freud, texts on curiosity – studies that attempt to address this universal desire to know – are surprisingly few and far between.¹

It is as if there has been insufficient curiosity to carefully and doggedly consider that thirst we call curiosity. Or perhaps it is the case that curiosity belongs to a class of concepts that are too vulgar, trivial, humble, and so elusive and widespread that, for this very reason, they resist – or are even, perhaps, unsuited to – theorisation.

Yet we are all curious without even thinking about it. This is as true of children, whose curiosity is supposedly sparked at school and proverbially repressed at home, as it is of scientists, regarded as those in whom this virtue is heightened, and of men and women of all ages and circumstances who may suddenly be seized by an imprudent desire to get to the heart of facts, events, opinions or theories.

Curiosity can be described in many different ways: as superficial or profound, fragile or vigorous, focused or diffuse, serious or mundane, spasmodic or persistent, whimsical or obstinate, inoffensive, indiscreet, or even awkward. An intense desire to know the unknown, or a frivolous thirst that is satisfied by the easy, or futile. An active and forward-looking receptiveness to the new, or an interest in the rare, the bizarre, the exotic, or the extraordinary. A pure desire to learn or a voracious appetite for novelty, from the palace intrigues of the powerful, to scandals involving public figures, and from motorway accidents to neighbourhood crimes. It is a movement towards the new and the unknown, an openness to surprise, and for surprise to calm the intensity of our questioning.

One thing seems to be common to every kind of curiosity. Attention (or ‘care’, from the Latin etymon cura²) to the singularity of things, and the ability to see what things are not, but could be. Not so much the ability to see, perhaps, as to notice, observe, speculate. Attention that makes it possible to recognise that which is strange, irregular, and falls outside established familiarities. And the desire to see things in a different way, open up discordant realms, and point out diverging paths.

However – and this is Hans Blumenberg’s and Philip Ball’s thesis3 – curiosity has a History. It is coextensive with a specific type of question that can only be considered at a specific moment in history. If Aristotle was able to enshrine curiosity as a cognitive virtue, it was because the Greek city had recently created the possibility of all questions. If, during the long period that followed (from the end of the ancient world to the dawn of modernity), curiosity went from being a virtue to a vice, and then, from a vice to a sin, it is because the pre-eminence of theological order established divinity as the exclusive focus of all attention. Curiosity was thus condemned as an impudence through which men, forgetting their finiteness, sought to violate the distance that separated them from the gods (Epicurus), the intemperance of those who wanted to know more than was their need or duty (Seneca), or the impiety that distracted them from the attention that only the creator merited (Tertullian). Writing at the end of the Roman Empire, Saint Augustine was to be decisive in the condemnation of curiosity. It became a vain appetite, an indolent enchantment with insignificant and contemptible things, a malady that distracted the soul from what should be its overriding interest in God and salvation, and a submission to the world of appearances. As he wrote:

The echo of this condemnation would resound throughout the Middle Ages. Curiosity – an infinite pretension of finite beings – entered the catalogue of vices. It was not until the thirteenth century (with Thomas Aquinas and the return of naturalist Aristotelianism) and, later, with the Renaissance and modernity, that curiosity was reclaimed as a legitimate desire to know something that could, and should, now be known: nature had, in the interim, become an entity worthy of observing, cataloguing and unshrouding from its secrets and folds. It was no longer the creator, but creation that was the focus of all questions.

The first phase was the explosion of a curiosity that was disorderly, diffuse, and incapable of going beyond the mere accumulation of natural and man-made objects that were rare, exotic, prodigious or, in a word, curious. Wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity were an eloquent manifestation of that obsession with the variety of the world’s beings that swept through sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Europe. A plethora of objects accumulated, without order, plan or method, in the houses of noblemen and wealthy merchants, brought together under the banner of a curiosity that had just regained its right to innocence.

The second phase was the founding of modern science. The multiplicity of beings and events in the world, and the apparent arbitrariness of the movements and forces at play within it, were now to be subsumed by the unity and simplicity of laws and theories. In other words, rather than a diligent appreciation of the world’s range of objects and beings (mirabilia), what was now underway was a methodical investigation of nature. The investigator’s task was to pursue vestigia, a gesture of defiance, of aggressive, provocative questioning. It was not enough to look; one had to know how to see, and to question. As Galileo posited, it is not enough to read the great book of the world, one must know the language in which it was written or, as Kant would later state, it is necessary to interrogate nature and compel it to answer the questions put to it by pure reason.

What this means is that, for modern science to be possible, for men to have been able to understand the cause of sunspots, the secret of the forces that uphold the stars and explain why terrestrial bodies fall, curiosity had to be re-evaluated or, rather, rehabilitated as a dynamic force in knowledge of the new. This new type of curiosity, which Blumberg proposes naming ‘theoretical curiosity’, thus acquired the status of a legitimate and vital actor in the investigative process, a determining element of the cognitive force that underlies the production of conjecture and theory.

Galileo’s telescope and Leeuwenhoek’s microscope are objectifications of this industrious compulsion to discover what is not yet known. And Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, Descartes’s Discourse on Method, the radical optimism of Leibniz’s Monadology, and Vesalius’s Humani Corporis Fabrica are strident forms of curiosity in its pure state, written, conscious and considered marks of a particular will to dispel all idola and hasten the advance of the light of reason. They outline the programme of the new natural philosophy, and set out the basis for the Enlightenment.

It is true that Aristotle had already identified and defined this type of curiosity more than 2,000 years earlier in the first stage of Metaphysics. Yet it was not until time had passed, tracing its way slowly through the twists and turns of the history of mind-sets and beliefs and above all, ideas had poured forth as they clashed against one another, that curiosity was once more able to assert its right as the force behind the science to be constructed.

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*Translated by Lucy Phillips