And so an age-old word was bestowed upon a modern device constructed by our curiosity that left Earth to satisfy the curious human desire for knowledge of the unknown and to answer questions – both fascinating and disturbing – about the universe and its many worlds, crossing the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that terrified Pascal.

Giving this name to a rover that sent selfies back to Earth was an addition and tribute to the long life of curiosity (of the word itself and of what it has been and meant), updating and universalising a history that is far less simple and far less stable than first appearances might suggest. And it is in the contradictory complexity of this unstable and fluctuating history that we find its most potent and profound meaning. It is these variations and changes over the ages that provide us with the basis for attempting to understand something so crucial to our time.

Curiosity is an immensely powerful motive in mythology, literature, science, philosophy, politics, and in the lives of men and women. It triggers research, investigation, discovery, knowledge, imagination, creation, snooping, transgression, sin, risk, action and progress.

From occult knowledge to the geography of travel (‘This is tiresome, but curiosity triumphs over all: it is perhaps the chief requisite in a traveller…’, Marquis de Custine); from sexual voyeurism (‘Philosophy in the Bedroom seeks the admiration of the curious….’, Marquis de Sade, and Casanova’s The Story of My Life – a tale of curiosity and a telling of curiosities) to scientific investigation; from the bag of winds that Aeolus gave to Ulysses to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and from Archimedes’ ‘Eureka!’ to Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’.

From the questions of children to philosophical inquiry; from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, which tempted Adam and Eve, to Flaubert (‘Love, after all, is only a superior kind of curiosity, an appetite for the unknown that makes you bare your breast and plunge headlong into the storm’); from the Faust of Goethe to the Faust of Fernando Pessoa; from Lewis Carroll to Oscar Wilde (‘The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing’).

From anthropological surveys to historical heuristics; from Pandora’s box to D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopaedia; from the inscription ‘Know Thyself’ at the temple at Delphi, which Socrates made his own, to Montaigne’s ‘What do I know?’; from Thales of Miletus to Nietzsche (curiosity and courage); from Kafka (‘he was interested in everything new, up-to-date, technological, in the beginnings of cinema, […] he followed modern developments with a tireless curiosity’, Max Brod) to Proust (‘Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places, perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable’).

From Icarus and his fatal flight, to Terence (‘I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me’); from Plutarch to Seneca and to Spinoza and his expulsion; from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas (the opposition between studiositas and curiositas); from Hobbes (‘Desire, to know why, and how, curiosity’) to Heidegger; from Aristotle to Jules Verne; from Pascal (‘Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk’) to Sartre.

From David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (‘I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious’); from cabinets of curiosity to André Breton and Marcel Duchamp; from Cicero (‘Without doubt, the indiscriminate desire to know everything is the mark of curiosity’) to Anatole France (‘Curiosity arouses desire even more than the memory of pleasure’); from King Shahryar of The Arabian Nights to the Letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha (News of the Discovery).

From all this to all that and as far as one can imagine, it is curiosity that transports us and drives us.

Words speak for themselves and words speak of themselves. The word curiosity, in its etymological origin (from the Latin curiositas), is linked to curios and curia and carries within it the idea of caring and curing. Yet, over time, this initial positive idea of active philanthropy becomes a negative one of adverse misanthropy.

Throughout Classical Antiquity, curiosity was savagely attacked by many writers and defended by few. Curious people became seen as snoopers intent on discovering secrets in order to do harm, demean, or spread (mis)information. They were even mistaken for spies. Curiosity’s unfortunate reputation has been passed down to us. There is a French adage that says that curiosity is an ugly defect. And there is an English proverb that reminds us that ‘curiosity killed the cat’. To this day, we speak of good and bad curiosity.

Curiosity does indeed consist of many curiosities. It is beginning, middle and end: impulse of the subject, movement towards the object and satisfaction with itself. There is curiosity that is intellectual and physical, about ideas and about perceptions, mental and sensory (each sense has its curiosity and there is one that syncretises them), voluntary and involuntary, about contemplation and about action, about feelings and about imagination. There is curiosity about the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious, good and bad, life and death, individual and collective, profound and superficial, interior and exterior, discreet and indiscreet, laborious and idle. There is curiosity that is Apollonian and Dionysian, mythical and mystical, nomadic and sedentary, theoretical and practical, microscopic and macroscopic, temporal and spatial, about near and far, the past and the future, agitated and serene, systematic and wild, focussed and aimless.

In his very personal history of Curiosity, in which he uses Dante as a guide, just as Dante used Virgil as a guide in his Divine Comedy, Alberto Manguel gives all 17 chapters a question as a title (‘What Is Curiosity?’ ‘What Do We Want to Know?’; What Is Language?’, etc). Manguel reminds us:

And Eça de Queiroz, applying that playful and astute irony that renders the serious more serious still, states:

To sum up and refine this wealth of examples, what curiosity means is: love of truth (Hume), desire for knowledge (Spinoza), drive to know (Feuerbach), drive to investigate (Freud), holy curiosity (Einstein), and relationship with the Other (Sartre).

In his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Hans Blumenberg – a knower of many things in many fields – considers the origins of Modernity, investigating the conditions that shaped the scientific rationality at its heart and addressing its distinctive theoretical impulse (João Constâncio also discusses this in the ‘Passages’ section of this edition).

Combining erudite complexity with interpretative subtlety, Blumenberg likens the long legacy of the past to a trunk full of treasures taken on a journey of quest and discovery.

In this work, which has become a staple of philosophical debate, Part III tells an original history of curiosity (Professor Neil Kenny, of the University of Oxford, takes a critical look at this in the ‘Subject’ section of this edition) about the secrets of nature, showing how a vice that was stigmatised and condemned by theologians and moralists to the point of being classed as heresy, became a modern virtue and even an attribute of human dignity.

In successive chapters, dedicated to ‘The “Trial” of theoretical curiosity’, Blumenberg discusses the turning from pre-Socratic philosophy (knowledge of nature and the universe) to the philosophy of Socrates and Plato (humankind’s knowledge of itself) and the retraction of this; Epicurus and the indifference of the gods; curiosity in the three Hellenic systems (the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics); trust in the cosmos; Neo-Platonism; the Augustine conception of curiosity and its trial by Christianity; heresies; knowledge in the scholastic system; Leonardo, Copernicus and Galileo; the justification of curiosity as preparation for the Enlightenment; the claim to happiness and its relationship with curiosity of Voltaire and Kant; and its integration into anthropology with Feuerbach and Freud.

In this history, a great change takes place when the medieval sin becomes a modern virtue. For theologians, from the Patristic era to Saint Thomas, who never forgot the first curiosity about the fruit of the tree of knowledge (or life) that provoked original sin and expulsion from Paradise, the only curiosity of value and worth was that which led to knowledge of God or to knowledge that led to God. All other knowledge and the curiosity it generated were sins and the work of the Devil. Saint Jerome speaks of curiositate non licita and Tertullian declares: ‘We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.’

When curiosity about the world and nature became a virtue and a condition of knowledge and science, the episteme shifted and we call this the modern age. To contemplate this moment – and what came before and after it – is to better understand what we have been and what we are.

The dedication of this edition’s ‘Subject’ to curiosity is another step along the path that Electra has made its own – that of giving names to the name our age gives itself. This dossier is a participation between writers, creating a polygon with varying points of view as its vertices. And so we look at curiosity as one of the foundations of a modernity that extends and is projected into our own time.

Michel Foucault spoke of curiosity in an interview towards the end of his brief life (‘Le philosophe masqué’, Le Monde, 6 April 1980):

And in the second volume of The History of Sexuality, he reveals what this new curiosity might look like:

Not only differently, but in many different ways and in very different ways, thought Fernando Pessoa. In his work, curiosity is curiosity about everything and curiosity about the nothing that is the basis for everything. In Pessoa, there is always the ontological miracle of the dual potency of being what one is not and of not being what one is.

Thus, curiosity becomes, for him, a counter-curiosity – and it is there that curiosity is realised, as in the psychoanalytical Freudian slip. In Pessoa, curiosity is curiosity about itself and it is a river that runs from mouth to source, from nothing to what prepares it, leads to it or is born in it.

Thus, in the Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares says:

And, in Faust, Pessoa says:

It is Fernando Pessoa and his work, suspended above the abyss, soaring clear- ‑sighted over the terrain of mystery seeking a place to land, that has become the focus of Richard Zenith’s studious and immensely prolific life. He has, indeed, become a charmer of the writings – those shadowy serpents – of this inspired inventor of heteronyms.

After many years of multiple and multiplied studies, from deciphering manuscripts to preserving, organising, editing and interpreting them, there is apparently little Zenith does not know about Pessoa and his vast body of work.

For the last few years, he has immersed himself in this knowledge, writing a monumental biography of Fernando Pessoa. Due to be published in English this summer, and in Portuguese in the autumn, it is a work that is eagerly anticipated by those are familiar – or as yet unfamiliar, but curious – with Pessoa’s writing, wherever they may be in the world.

Thanks to the author’s generosity, Electra is able to pre-publish a chapter from this biography, a foretaste of what will certainly become a key work for students and readers of Pessoa.

As well as thanking Richard Zenith for this privilege, we would also like to congratulate him. We hope his biography will achieve the widespread recognition it deserves, and this fascinating chapter in Electra 12 will certainly spark great curiosity to read the rest of the work. A holy curiosity, in the words of Einstein, whom the ever curious Pessoa read and cited in his work.

António Guerreiro’s interview with Pedro Costa in this edition talks about and of cinema with a lightness and depth of insight that is rare. It is stamped with the same originality of thought that this great filmmaker brings to his now internationally acclaimed work. To cite Gilles Deleuze: ‘What I call Ideas are images that make one think.’

Cinema is also the focus of the ‘Figure’ section. Tracing the ever-changing face of Joaquim Pinto, it discusses someone who has drawn a truth from cinema that speaks of both the truth and cruelty of life. Through all that it offers the reader, this edition of our magazine brings with it an invitation to the greatest of all curiosities: a curiosity that leads us to look at everything, but to know how to choose, from all that we see, the things that are worth more than the vain images and empty voices that surround us, hounding, occupying and diminishing our days.

It was this curiosity that took us to Mars.

*Translated by Lucy Phillips