2. Descartes and Wonder

Although many consider it desirable to evoke wonder in museum visitors, it is difficult to find anyone defending the concept in the museum literature.Footnote ⁶ The most prominent call for a return to wonder in the museum comes from Stephen Greenblatt in his article ‘Resonance and Wonder’. He defines these terms as follows:

Writing in 1989, Greenblatt regrets that the ‘temples of wonder’ have been turned into ‘temples of resonance’ that are concerned with giving objects historical context and cultural meaning. His remark that this change is ‘recent’ seems misplaced, since the turn away from wonder had already happened in the nineteenth century when museums displays began to reflect and communicate forms of scientific categorization.Footnote ⁸ What Greenblatt appears to regret is the replacement of the Enlightenment display, ostensibly showing only the objects themselves and their aesthetic qualities, by nineteenth- (and twentieth-) century museum exhibits focused on context, connections, and interpretation.Footnote ⁹ In any case, Greenblatt's call for a return to wonder seems to have been heeded, and museums are becoming temples of wonder once again.

In recent writing, wonder is portrayed as a quasi- (but crucially non-) religious state of meditative contemplation, or as a childlike openness to the world that propels us towards inquiry. Wonder is said to put us in a state of thoughtful attentiveness while prompting us to go beyond mere looking to developing understanding and knowledge. Wonder also overcomes disciplinary distinctions – another supposed product of the nineteenth century – and enables us to think in a more open way. Thus Jesse Prinz suggests that wonder is the most fundamental of human emotions:

One of Prinz's aims in this piece, written for a popular online magazine, is to suggest that religion, art, and science have a unified origin, and this origin is a feeling and not a fact. Prinz refers to the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, and the early museums of marvels. He adds how much he enjoys museums, noting that ‘Nowadays, we don't think of museums as houses of curiosity, but they remain places of wonder.’Footnote ¹¹ Museums, like scientific, artistic, and spiritual experimentation, deal in feelings before they get to facts, theories, and disciplinary classifications. The feeling of wonder is original to human experience. In this respect and in virtually every other, Prinz's definition of wonder echoes that of Descartes: wonder is a response to something rare that we cannot relate to past experience. It freezes the body and directs all its attention to the eyes. It occupies the senses, elicits curiosity, and instils reverence. It unifies sensing, thinking and feeling – all of the human affective capacities.

Historically wonder has not always been so straightforwardly celebrated.Footnote ¹² Aristotle and Francis Bacon, followed by Descartes, Spinoza, and Adam Smith, stressed that wonder interrupts knowledge as much as it ignites it, and that wonder can be foolish. Wonder is, for Descartes, the first of the passions of the soul: it is original but also basic. In The Passions of the Soul of 1649 he deals with the troublesome connection between the soul and the body.Footnote ¹³ The passions are brought about by the movement of the animal spirits of one's own body in response to external stimuli, and in this respect the soul is passive to them. Yet the passions are located in and referred to the soul, resembling the soul's active and spontaneous volitions. The passions are involuntary thinking the spontaneous mind receives from the body. So the passions of the soul, or feelings, are a kind of bodily thinking, both passively and actively responding to the world. They are thus manifested as embodied mentality, or expressions.Footnote ¹⁴ In a famous passage, Descartes states that wonder is the first of these passive-active modes of bodily thinking:

Wonder is described in terms of its bodily origins and effects. An impression in the brain represents the object as rare, causing the animal spirits to converge upon the impression and keep it there, and to freeze the sense organs in place. The brain and the senses are prevented from moving on to another impression or object. These forceful arrests in the body are the cause of ‘the sudden surprise of the soul’ that is the feeling of wonder.

Descartes is at pains, however, to emphasize the connection of wonder to knowledge, and to downplay its bodily aspects. He stresses that wonder is caused by a change in the brain, and not by changes in the heart or blood, as other passions are. Changes in the brain relate to knowledge of the object, whereas changes in the heart and blood relate to the goodness or badness of the object for the body.Footnote ¹⁶ In addition, wonder is more cognitive than other emotions in that it does not involve evaluation of an object's utility. Relatedly, the motion of the spirits is not agitated and changeable, as it is with the other passions. With wonder, the animal spirits move in order to keep the impression present and stable and to discourage the sense organs from changing position. This too contributes to contemplation rather than evaluation or action. As Susan James remarks, ‘wonder is in the head. It is untainted by the bodily motions that trouble and distract us'.Footnote ¹⁷ For Descartes, as wonder focuses the brain and senses on the object, and not on its utility, it is useful for learning and remembering things that differ from our usual experience:

Wonder makes us attend to and learn from unfamiliar things rather than, say, fearing and fleeing them. It thus disposes us to the acquisition of knowledge. But it is nevertheless a passion that is subject to excess, which we should try to overcome through the purely ‘mental’ thinking of reasoning. Wonder can be harmful if one wonders too much, and if one is astonished by things that are not worth dwelling on, because this obstructs reasoning. If the surprise is especially strong it can be counterproductive for knowledge, driving the animal spirits away from the brain to converge on the body part where the impression entered, typically the eyes. The spirits are then so occupied in preserving the impression there that they do not pass into the muscles, and the whole body is made ‘immobile like a statue’. Descartes calls this astonishment, and describes it as an excess of wonder ‘which can never be anything but bad’.Footnote ¹⁹ His diagrams of the facial expressions of wonder and astonishment show different degrees of affect: with wonder, the animal spirits are focused in the brain, and the eyes and mouth are only minimally affected; with astonishment, the animal spirits are focused in the body, and the eyes and mouth are almost comically widened.

Descartes approves of wonder that prompts intellectual understanding, partly because it leads to its own dissolution. As we understand more and more (and think more ‘mentally’), we wonder less and less, and our bodily thinking diminishes. He does not approve of the habit of wondering at objects of nature and art when the drive to understand them intellectually is absent. If we wonder too much at such things, we become preoccupied by their sensible properties, and distracted from understanding their true nature. In this case, wonder will never cease. The body is frozen like a statue as it fixes on sensible properties, and the mind is never rationally engaged in truly understanding the things concerned. Descartes writes:

Given that wonder is felt only about unfamiliar objects, prior to any evaluation of their utility, it is not clear how we determine whether a thing is worth wondering at or not. If we know that a thing is worth wondering at, then we are already beyond the stage where wonder would be appropriate. An evaluation of the suitability of wonder, it seems, can only be made by someone who does not feel it. This implies a distinction between the scientist who has overcome wonder and the dilettante who ‘investigates rarities’ in order to wonder at them: wonder is for him an end in itself, rather than a means to rational understanding.

Wunderkammern were designed to elicit wonder, raising the question of whether, and how, feeling led to knowing. Descartes was almost certainly familiar with cabinets of curiosities and their wealthy owners:Footnote ²¹ while some were motivated by scholarship, many collected precisely in order to engage in bodily thinking about objects through feelings of wonder, pride, pleasure, and even disgust. If the purpose of the cabinet is to instil and prolong wonder and other feelings, then it is anti-rational on Descartes' view. Wonder in the cabinet of curiosities is not likely to lead to knowledge. If we are to learn from objects in collections, we must look at them dispassionately, thinking through reasoning and not through feeling. He comments that people who are inclined to wonder are neither the most stupid nor the most intelligent, but those who ‘have a good deal of common sense, [but] do not have a high opinion of their competence’.Footnote ²² As opposed to the scientist, the mere collector thinks through the body – using the ‘common sense’ of empirical thought but also of the masses – and thereby gains some knowledge accidentally. But he lacks the clarity and distinctness of rational thinking, which entails certainty about one's knowledge and one's ‘competence’ to attain it.

Nicolas Malebranche, in his Search after Truth of 1675, specifically ridiculed rich men who assembled cabinets of curiosities only to wonder at their contents. He refers to the ‘stupid curiosity’ mixed with veneration that leads people to look at old medals and the worm-eaten slippers of the ancients.Footnote ²³ Their interest in the grandeur of sensible properties, and their reverence for rare objects of distant times and places, are substitutes for true knowledge of purely intelligible reality. A similar ambivalence about wonder can be found in the critiques of Renaissance cabinets by Enlightenment natural philosophers of the early eighteenth century. Whereas Descartes takes wonder to be a significant, if risky, route to knowledge, it became degraded into a low form of pleasure, a mere gawking at novelty. According to Daston and Park's history of wonder in the early modern period, ‘Wonder migrated from the pole of awed reverence to that of dull stupor, becoming the ruling passion of the vulgar mob rather than that of the philosophical elite’.Footnote ²⁴ Wonder was a passive state of inattentiveness, whereas curiosity was elevated into a noble pursuit that required hard work and sustained attention.

Daston and Park argue that wonder was degraded, first, due to the new distrust in and distaste for any talk of miracles among natural philosophers. Second, it was necessary to distinguish the kind of looking and attentiveness appropriate to scientific study from that appropriate to popular entertainment.Footnote ²⁵ The Renaissance cabinet of curiosities was a place of wonders, aligned with both the miraculous world of revealed religion and the fantastic world of theatre.Footnote ²⁶ By contrast, the Enlightenment museum was to serve science, and could not be construed as theatre or show. Instead of focusing on the visual pleasures of transfixed looking at sensory properties, the museum was henceforth to focus on cognitive understanding of a natural order that could not be seen or sensed.Footnote ²⁷

Wonder is Descartes' first passion because it constitutes the border between bodily thinking and mental thinking; put otherwise, between feeling and knowing. The Wunderkammer is appropriately called a cabinet of wonder, because it straddles this border and encourages its users to do the same. Our response to wonder – using it as a self-destructing tool to reach better ends, or tarrying with it as an end in itself – determines on which side of that border we fall. Wonder can lead us to reasoning, and if it does, then we leave it behind; it is both the first passion to be felt, and the first to be overcome. If we wonder for the sake of wondering, our thinking remains bodily, empirical, and passionate, and the other passions gain a stronger pull on us. The right use of wonder, for Descartes, is to initiate a process that ends in its own dissolution. It is possible that an individual strongly motivated by reason will accomplish this in the proto-museum of the cabinet of curiosities. Yet it is a space designed for tarrying with wonder: a space, therefore, that is fraught with the risk that its users will never move on from feeling to knowing.

3. Spinoza on Wonder

This anxiety is more forceful in Spinoza, whose disdain for wonder and the cabinet of curiosities is stronger than that of Descartes. It is not for him an emotion, but an inferior way of knowing. Part III of Spinoza's Ethics, ‘The Origin and Nature of the Affects’, responds to Descartes’ Passions of the Soul.Footnote ²⁸ Affects are feelings, specifically defined as changes of the body by which the body's power of acting is increased or diminished, and at the same time, the ideas of these changes. Affects include both passions, passive feelings caused in us by other things, and actions, feelings brought about with our own power to act. Feelings are both bodily and mental, as they are for Descartes. However, Spinoza is a parallelist rather than a dualist about mind and body. His doctrine is that mind and body are one thing, expressed in two ways. This means there is no causation between mind and body: what goes on in the body and what goes on in the mind are a single process pertaining to one individual. What differentiates them is that mind and body are expressions of that individual in two attributes: thought and extension. Since causality operates only within attributes and not between them, and since events and the ideas of those events unfold in parallel, Spinoza is able to hold that the ‘order and connection of ideas’ in the mind is the same as the ‘order and connection of things’ in the body.Footnote ²⁹ Affects are the changes that our bodies and minds jointly undergo as we interact with other things.

In contrast to Descartes, Spinoza is not concerned about whether passions are more bodily or more mental, because that distinction is for him incoherent. For Spinoza, the key concern is whether an affect increases or diminishes our power of acting. While the link between passion and action is present in Descartes, it is more prominent in Spinoza. For him, the power of acting is the conatus, or striving, of each individual to persevere in its being, and indeed to perfect its being. So when the body and mind change in a way that maintains and enhances our being and thinking, our power increases, whereas bodily and mental changes that diminish or damage our being and thinking decrease our power.Footnote ³⁰ Enhancing changes are actions when we are the complete, or ‘adequate’, cause of those changes; all other changes are partially caused by other things, and are passions.

Spinoza's three primary affects are desire, that is, the feeling of one's own conatus or striving to persevere; joy, the enhancement of one's power (‘a man's passage from a lesser to a greater perfection’), and sadness, the diminishment of one's power (‘a man's passage from a greater to a lesser perfection’).Footnote ³² All other affects are based on these three.

Wonder had been the first of Descartes' six primary passions. By contrast, Spinoza does not define wonder until late in Part III of the Ethics. Like Descartes, he notes that wonder is a response to the rarity of an object that freezes the body (and mind) in place. For Spinoza, rarity does not bring on a feeling of surprise or veneration; it simply brings the body and mind to a halt. The body and mind are caused to consider the rare object at greater length because the object presents no associative connections that would cause us to look at and think of something else. Affects are changes of the body and mind, whereas wonder is the suspension of such changes:

Spinoza's epistemology divides thinking into imagining, reasoning, and intuiting. Imagining is what we do when we experience, remember, anticipate, dream, or otherwise think based on the organization of sense-data and representations, which Spinoza calls images. Feeling always involves imagining, since passions are caused in us by the things we experience and our way of experiencing them. Spinoza has an associative model of imagination: when we imagine an object, we immediately imagine other objects we have experienced it with, and other objects with which it has features in common. If we have previously seen an object together with others, or if we imagine that an object shares a lot of properties with other objects with which we are familiar, our mind will naturally be led along a chain of associated images, and it will not dwell on any of them for very long.Footnote ³⁴ But if we see a rare and unusual object or property, something that we have never experienced before, there is no chain of associated images. There is nothing in the object that determines the mind to move on to imagine other things. So the mind will dwell on the object or its property: it is determined to consider only that thing. This imagination of a singular thing, insofar as it is alone in the mind, is wonder.

Wonder is not described as a feeling because, as we have seen, it does not constitute a change in power. When it is combined with other affects, such as fear or love, it generates feelings of consternation, devotion, veneration, and the like. But wonder of itself is a cessation of imagination that neither enhances nor diminishes our power. In his enumeration of the affects, Spinoza explicitly denies that wonder is an affect:

A ‘distraction of the mind’ is a more extreme version of Descartes’ ‘sudden surprise of the soul’. There is no positive cause of the mind's arrest here, but rather an absence of anything to move the mind along. Wonder occurs when the image of a thing has no connection with any other images; this not only stalls the process of imagining, but obstructs the mind's progress to rational knowledge.

This is due to the fact that wonder prevents us from drawing together commonalities that are the building blocks of reasoning. For Spinoza, knowledge starts with imagination, but imaginative (empirical) knowledge is always partial and confused, or ‘inadequate’.Footnote ³⁶ Through our experiences, however, we discover that things have properties in common with us, and our contact with those things strengthens our understanding of those ‘common notions’. Gradually we gain true, clear and distinct, or ‘adequate’ understanding of those ideas:

The next proposition states that from adequate ideas, adequate ideas follow. Common notions are thus ‘the foundations of our reasoning’.Footnote ³⁸ Commonalities between our bodies and others are the beginning of knowing rationally, which involves adequate understanding of a thing and its causes.Footnote ³⁹ Through commonalities we move from imaginative feeling to rational knowing.

Just as for Descartes, wonder renders problematic the transition from feeling to knowing, for these all-important commonalities are precisely what are lacking here. Wonder is, by Spinoza's definition, our stalled imagining of something singular that has nothing in common with our own body or with anything in our past experience. Strictly speaking, for Spinoza, there are no perceptible objects in nature that have nothing in common with us, for all bodies are extended, and all are defined by some ratio of motion and rest; Spinoza is clear that such properties are ‘common to all’ and ‘can only be conceived adequately’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The point about the singularity of the object of wonder is that if I encounter some unfamiliar object – a bioluminescent fish from the depths of the ocean, for instance – my wonder does not take in its extendedness or motive capacity. I wonder at its alien properties, namely its ability spontaneously to generate light. Its commonality with my body involves only those properties that are common to all things; since such universal properties do not constitute the essence of any singular thing, they do not distinguish that thing from anything else.Footnote ⁴¹ The universal commonalities the fish shares with my body, while adequately understood by me, are indistinct to me insofar as I perceive the fish, and do not suffice to move my imagination along an associative path. The fish's lack of any distinguishing commonalities means I cannot do anything with the image my brain forms of it; it doesn't connect with anything else and cannot lead to any further understanding.Footnote ⁴² Here we see just how important the movement of imagination is for building our knowledge. Wonder at singularities leads us to imagine in a way that is unproductive for knowledge. Perhaps wonder is productive for other things: fixedly imagining the singular without understanding it might be useful for non-cognitive activities such as aesthetic judgments of taste (as it is for Kant), for example. But there is no evidence that Spinoza values or even recognizes these kinds of judgments. He values aesthetic experiences to the extent that they engage imaginative connections and positive feelings, rather than freezing them in place. (I will return to this point shortly.)

Spinoza's critique of miracles contributes to his disdain for wonder and things perceived to be singular. Here the problem is that neither imagination nor reason can supply us with the wondrous object's causal story. When a person experiences something unique that she cannot connect with anything she has experienced in the past, she tends to speculate about supernatural causes. People who are most likely to believe in miracles are the ‘common people’ who are least rational. So those who are most prone to wonder will include those who, through ignorance, are unable to find connections between things or understand their true causes. Faced with something unfamiliar they take it to be singular, requiring a singular explanation through God's will alone, and meriting long consideration and veneration.

Spinoza's philosophy posits that God is nature, or infinite being.Footnote ⁴⁴ We understand God when we understand the regularities of nature, and we do that by apprehending common notions in things and building rational knowledge of their causal connections. Marvelling at nature's singularities is a way of misunderstanding God, for it presupposes that singular things are caused by God immediately. And while God is indeed the efficient cause of every thing, this causality is immanent: the existence and essence of each thing follow from God as from the whole of nature.Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus Spinoza can argue the following: ‘every singular thing […] which is finite and has a determinate existence can neither exist nor be determined to produce an effect unless it is determined to exist and produce an effect by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence’.Footnote ⁴⁶ True understanding of any singular thing involves the knowledge that it follows from God as the whole of nature, by way of understanding how it follows immediately from the causal nexus of finite beings that surround it. The imaginative apprehension of distinguishing commonalities is a crucial first step.

Might wonder legitimately be used precisely in understanding that an infinite universe follows from God and constitutes one causally-connected and wholly determined nature? Wonder at the totality of existence might appear to be an appropriate response to the monistic idea of the universe Spinoza presents, and might even be thought to be related to the ‘third kind of knowledge’ through which – if we get there – we intuitively understand how all things follow from God.Footnote ⁴⁷ R. W. Hepburn notes that where wonder at the singular is denigrated, wonder at ‘the totality of laws and entities [of] the world as a whole’ may be appropriate. Here, we are struck by the very existence of the world, from a ‘sense of [the world's] absolute contingency’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This too Spinoza would deem an inadequate response. To understand the nature of the universe truly is to understand that it absolutely excludes contingency: the world follows from God's necessary existence and the necessity of God's nature. If we truly understand this, we cannot wonder at existence, nor at the particular configurations existence takes on. To wonder at the nature of things leads too easily to teleological speculation.Footnote ⁴⁹

If wonder cuts us off from adequate understanding of God or nature, the Wunderkammer is surely suspect. Spinoza does not discuss it: even if he was aware of this cultural phenomenon, he was not part of an aristocratic circle that would have given him access to a cabinet of curiosities. I imagine his attitude would have been more critical still than Descartes' and Malebranche's. If we view curiosities of nature just to wonder at them as singularities, then we do not apprehend the common notions of properties they share with our own bodies; if we moreover arrange them to be so wondered at, we cut ourselves off from improving our reason and increasing our stock of adequate ideas. We fail to understand things as part of an interconnected nature, and we treat objects as miraculous singularities without causal links to others. The collector who tarries with wonder is epistemically inferior not only to the rational philosopher or scientist, but even to the highly imaginative artist or poet, for the latter's imagination moves along associative chains of images in a way that is productive for reasoning even if it results in no adequate knowledge. For Descartes, the cabinet of curiosities posed the risk that the collector would be interested in his collections only through the senses. For Spinoza, the problem lies with amassing a collection of singular objects which lack distinguishing commonalities, and the risk is that we misunderstand nature and God – potentially obstructing our attainment of blessedness forever.

4. Joyful Encounters

Both wonder and the museum sit on the border between feeling and knowing. The museum presents objects to evoke feeling and encourage knowledge, and wonder is the feeling (or non-feeling) that may (or may not) lead to knowledge. Neither seventeenth-century philosophers nor present-day museum curators deem feeling to be a sufficiently intellectual way to relate to objects; only if wonder does lead to learning has it served its purpose. But Descartes is circumspect about the potential of wonder to open the door to knowledge among non-scientists, and Spinoza believes that wonder is anti-intellectual. Museums that seek to revive an early modern concept of wonder as a way of leading visitors from felt responses to objects to thoughtful ones need to be careful that their efforts do not merely glorify personal sensory encounters with the singular. Such encounters are unlikely to cause visitors to think, to make connections between objects, or to understand their own commonalities with those objects. In short, the strategy of museum wonder may be self-defeating: in reorienting displays away from heavily interpretative and contextual approaches and towards wonder, museums do not necessarily encourage visitors to construct meaning from objects, and they risk obstructing meaning-making entirely.

It might seem that Spinoza's philosophy points us back to an older model of didactic museum display, wherein the commonalities of nature are revealed through numerous examples of very similar (yet in some key respect different) specimens crowded into closely packed glass cases. Perhaps it does, but I think Spinoza would approve of this mode of exhibition only to the extent that it promotes joyful affects in visitors. Consider the following passage:

Aesthetic and leisure pursuits are good for us because they make us feel joy: the transition to greater power which enhances our capability, virtue, and wellbeing. Joy is linked to the increase of reasoning (the power of the mind), and thus leads to knowledge in a way that neither wonder nor the ‘sad passions’ do. Both Descartes and Spinoza argue that the joy we feel in the rational operation of the mind is not the passive joy that we get from sensory pleasures, but an active joy that reflects the mind's activity. As James explains, ‘it is the activity of reasoning, as much as the resulting knowledge, that moves us’, and our feeling of enjoyment makes us want to continue reasoning and to expand our knowledge.Footnote ⁵¹ Descartes speaks of ‘inner excitations’ that the soul causes in itself by itself, which do not depend on the motions of animal spirits in the body.Footnote ⁵² For Spinoza, ‘apart from the joy and desire which are passions, there are other affects of joy and desire which are related to us insofar as we act’.Footnote ⁵³ These are feelings which are not passions, and which are therefore free of the passions' troubling connotations of passivity to and determination by external causes. These feelings are not changes caused in us, but the changes we bring about in ourselves when our minds (and, for Spinoza, bodies) have the power to do so.

I want to finish by suggesting that Spinoza's account of active joy can help us to see how natural history museums might overcome didacticism while inculcating in visitors feelings that are reliably linked to learning. For Spinoza, active joy is caused in oneself by oneself insofar as one thinks and acts ‘adequately’ (that is, one deduces one's own ideas and is the complete cause of one's actions). We increasingly achieve this as we think more rationally. Common notions, based on the commonalities our minds and bodies have with the things we encounter, are crucial to rational thinking, as we have seen; they are also crucial to our feeling active joy. For as we encounter common properties through experience, we recover true understanding of those properties of our own bodies and minds.Footnote ⁵⁴ ‘From this it follows that the mind is the more capable of perceiving many things adequately as its body has many things in common with other bodies’; and the mind ‘rejoices insofar as it conceives adequate ideas’.Footnote ⁵⁵

We increase our chances of thinking adequately by increasing our exposure to those things that have most in common with us: other human beings. Accordingly, community organization is very important, not only for forming good political systems but also for our epistemological and ethical wellbeing. Nevertheless, other kinds of things have much in common with us too: the mammals that are closest to us in bodily and mental organization, and the animals with which humans develop commonalities through frequently acting together (think of a rider and her horse, or a shepherd and his dog). While Spinoza stresses that animals are no substitute for humans when it comes to socio-political or epistemic utility, he is also clear that things are ‘more useful, or better’ for us the more they agree with our nature.Footnote ⁵⁶ This suggests that animals and other natural objects are useful for our attaining common notions on a scale that ranges from those that are most similar to us, down to those with which we have only the most basic natural properties in common.

This raises the prospect of an ‘order of nature’ that arranges things into concentric circles of similarity to human being. Spinoza's philosophy suggests this is the best principle for displaying natural objects in the museum: best because most likely to build common notions, reason, and active joy. To organize nature in such a pre-Linnaean, anthropocentric, non-historic and non-scientific way appears retrograde and misleading in light of our post-nineteenth century views about how museums should educate. It revives what Foucault identifies as the Renaissance episteme, for which the order of things is based on similitude rather than taxonomy or development.Footnote ⁵⁷ In this mode we might present nature to human beings by starting with what is most like us (other humans, primates, pets, farm animals), and building out towards what is strangest to us (recall the bioluminescent fish). Spinoza denies that the universe is organized for human benefit, but points out that humans – indeed all beings – naturally start from the perspective of imagining themselves at the centre of the universe.Footnote ⁵⁸ Beginning with that most ‘natural’ perspective may be the most effective way of getting people to understand that nature is not anthropocentric, by showing us our own place within nature and our complex commonalities with other beings. That might be an effective way of engaging visitors with environmental issues: far more effective than the ‘sad passions’ of guilt and remorse inculcated in us by moralizing ‘conservation’ exhibits in museums and wildlife visitor centres.

Imagine, then, a natural history museum that starts by placing visitors among fellow human beings, asking us to reflect on what it means to be part of nature. Visitors might then consider what they have in common with primates, dogs, and horses, perhaps learning about the different social organizations and communication methods of the animals that share aspects of our bodily forms, living spaces, and working activities. Moving on to other kinds of animals – with which we have progressively less in common – visitors might learn about different body shapes, evolutionary adaptations to different environments, and the genetic causes of differences in phenotype. In this way, visitors might be encouraged to learn by showing us how scientific explanations are connected to us and our own perspective as human beings in nature. If Spinoza is right, such understanding would be accompanied by the active joy of gaining adequate knowledge about ourselves, and the active desire to understand more.

5. Concluding Remarks

Spinoza remains in some respects a Renaissance thinker, but the Renaissance concept he leaves to museum studies is joy through similitude, not wonder. On a Spinozistic reading, museums can best promote knowledge and wellbeing neither by presenting nature as a scientific or moral learning object, nor by encouraging wonder at the unfamiliar. Instead, museums should give us opportunities to feel active joy through our connections and commonalities with plants and animals. This replaces wonder at the contingent complexity of the world with an understanding of some of the world's necessary interconnections – an understanding that is both rationally known and joyfully felt. Feeling, then, has an important place in the natural history museum: I suspect many visitors, especially children, visit natural history museums, zoos, botanical gardens and aquariums not primarily to learn about science, but to rejoice in feeling connected with the rest of the natural world. What starts as a passive joy in sensory qualities becomes an active joy, and feeling meets up with thinking, when we start from these connections. Our greatest joy, for Spinoza, is in knowledge of God – that is, true understanding of the commonality of the whole of nature.Footnote ⁵⁹ Spinoza shows us that joy does the work that wonder cannot: it carries us from an imaginative and felt engagement with the world to a rational and thoughtful one, and from the passive joy of sensory pleasure and novelty to the active joy of true understanding.