You were curious when your hand reached out to pick up this book. What is that curiosity? Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Is it ethereal or tangible? Like a loris, can it be categorized and classified, or like love, is it difficult to define? It feels impossible to choose precise words to answer these questions. And yet curiosity seems as if it should be definable because . . . well, because . . . because it is so simple. And perhaps it seems so simple because it is so common.
Obviously, it was curiosity that led me to reading Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, but for the life of me, I can’t now recall what I hoped to get out of this. I know I thought this would be a more accessible/general interest treatment of the phenomenon of “curiosity” (and was excited to learn that this is a book written by twin professors who approached the subject from their complementary backgrounds in Philosophy and Neuroscience), but honestly, as well conceived and crafted and presented as this material is, much of it was beyond my ken. I don’t regret challenging myself with this book, but sadly, there were few nodes, edges, cracks, or boundaries that held my slippery grip. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final form.)
Curiosity is one word, one string of letters, one concept in the mind, but curiosity also has multiple manifestations, a plethora of practices, and kindred kinds in many bodies. Like a genus spanning species or our mother embracing her eleven children, curiosity is both one and many. The one and many nature of curiosity is an opportunity for the attainment of epistemic freedoms: we are permitted to be curious! But it is also a liability for the perpetration of epistemic injustices: we are permitted to be curious in less than many ways.
From the beginning, I was fascinated by the authors’ background (and being particularly curious about people, I do wish they had written about themselves more): Perry Zurn and Dani S Bassett were homeschooled by a mother who allowed them (and their nine siblings) to self-direct their education and follow their own interests. Yet, this was also a home that enforced strict traditional gender roles, so the twins eventually broke away, “Buoyed by the kindness of unlooked-for allies along the way, we broke down walls, crossed boundaries, and scaled heights to become the interdisciplinary scholars that we are today — scholars who are committed to recognizing and resisting the epistemic inequities that surround and suffuse us. We are definitively not what we were meant to be, but we are following the ever-becoming trajectory of the curiosity instilled in us: one that spans, one that connects, one that embraces, and one that builds; one that appreciates the crosscurrents and coalitions within and through which we come to know.” That brief introduction is all we get to the authors’ backgrounds, but Google tells me that today, Perry Zurn is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at American University, and Dani Smith Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. All that to note: Zurn and Bassett bring an incredible amount of experience and expertise to the table, and as academics who “are committed to recognizing and resisting epistemic inequities”, Curious Minds has a particular focus on nontraditional (read: non-Western, non-patriarchal) definitions of curiosity and knowledge-acquisition. Chapters alternate in voice and focus as each of the authors write from their own discipline, and throughout, much is quoted from thinkers (academic and literary) throughout the ages. But I don’t know if I ever really understood what curiosity is or how it works (and can acknowledge that the failing is my own.)
The busybody, the hunter, and the dancer each highlight a unique praxis of curiosity. Whether it involves collecting new bits of information, tracking down specific answers, or experimenting with breaks in tradition, each model illuminates a different modal dimension. They are not static representations of curiosity as such but rather dynamic depictions of how curiosity works, how it behaves, and what it does. They portray how curiosity moves. Throughout philosophical history, busybodying, hunting, and dancing capture specific kinesthetic signatures that map out different styles of knowledge network building in conceptual and social space.
I did find it useful when Zurn and Bassett explored these three models of curiosity, and for the most part (although they stress the types are not mutually exclusive), my own magpie mind seems to be a “busybody” (gadflying about, collecting tidbits, “attuned to the wide wildness of the world”), while the authors are more likely “dancers” (leaping, uprooting, exploring “with serendipitous inklings and exuberant hopes the limits of the seeable and the sayable”.) So while I nose about in the mud, the authors are spinning through the clouds, and that might just explain why I had trouble connecting with them.
Near the end, Curious Minds has a section on the future of education — and while I had hoped that I would find this practical bit more engaging (hoping, actually, that they would return to their own upbringing and explore how early academic freedom led to their ultimate academic success), it was still a bit murky for me. The writing throughout is highly crafted — and this does not read like a textbook — but while the authors were obviously delighting in wordcraft and wordplay, it felt like wordwork to me. Consider the following:
Cracks conduct movement and advance entropy. The crack of curiosity allows the hidden to fly with hatchling wings, the unthought to effuse in a lavalike flow, and the buried to root through nutrient-rich soil. A rooting radicle. A radical conception. A thought uprooted, rerooted, changed from the root as radicalized. A riddled similarity, the curious mind and the first fruition of the seedling are notably alike. As naturalist Charles Darwin penned in his The Power of Movement in Plants, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed . . . acts like the brain . . . ; the brain being situated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements.” Tucking their head down in the safe darkness and anonymity deep beneath the turf, the radicle riotously flings their white sinewy arms into the superficial dirt and spreads their green leafy legs into the air. And then they walk. Walk the air. Walk the sky. Walk over the face of the sun. They walk a circumnutating trail and think — think about how the world looks from this angle, from that distance, from above, beneath, and aside. Their imbibition is a conduit for imbrication; the crack in the soaked seed coat from which the radicle first peers is the prerequisite for the curious walk by which edges of distinction overlap, layers of perception form, and networks of realization grow. When next it rains, we must pause beneath the sky to soak our woolen coats. Then we will stand on our heads and step our legs across the clouds.
Perhaps more aimed at a niche audience (of which I am not ultimately a member), I certainly admired this book, without completely connecting with its content.
