Spinoza’s Concept of ‘Wonder’ as Aesthetic Interruption

Abstract

This article is an attempt to connect Spinoza’s concept of ‘wonder’ (admiratio) to ‘aesthetic interruption’—the response of being ‘frozen’ by a performative event. According to Spinoza we experience wonder when we perceive an object we have never perceived before, and being unable to relate the object to anything else, our mind pauses on it as an unfamiliar singular image. And because for Spinoza body and mind are parallel and equal forms of each of us, our body too ceases its ongoing movement. This wonder, moreover, as Christopher Davidson (2019) notes in his interpretation of Spinoza’s ‘wonder’, may intensify the affects induced in us by external bodies and arouse powerful emotions in the perceiver, as, for example, in ecstatic events such as festivals. However, the aspect of ‘wonder’ Davidson does not touch upon is the question of aesthetic interruption. Since Spinoza does not elaborate on ‘wonder’ in relation to the theatre or the arts in general, I draw an analogy between his concept of wonder and Benjamin’s concept of ‘interruption’ (Unterbrechung) in Brecht’s epic theatre. For much like Spinoza’s description, Benjamin describes ‘interruption’ as a break in an ongoing situation that we see as an unfamiliar standing image that induces our ‘astonishment’ (Staunen). In both cases the wonder or astonishment arises from the element of ‘pause’—an image that interrupts the movement of our body and mind. I conclude my brief exploration of Spinoza’s concept of wonder as aesthetic interruption by applying it to two concrete responses to a performative event: Normand Berlin’s response to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and my own response to Thom Luz’s When I Die.

Notes

1 The concept of ‘wonder’ goes back to the beginning of Western philosophy: Plato described it as a puzzled gaze at reality that ignites philosophical thinking, claiming that ‘philosophy starts nowhere else but with wondering’ (Theaetetus 155d4). Aristotle, too, asserted that ‘it is owing to their wonder’ that human beings ‘both now begin and at first began to philosophize’ (Metaphysics 982b12). Descartes considered it as one of the six primitive passions, defining it as the response to an object we perceive as surprising, novel or unique (The Passions of the Soul §53). Spinoza has, in this context, an interesting and quite different understanding of ‘wonder’.

2 My references to the Ethics are as follows: 1d4 refers to definition 4 in part 1; 3p52s refers to the scholium of proposition 52 in part 3; 3DA4e refers to the explanation of the fourth definition of the affects in part 3; and so forth. The Theological-Political Treatise is cited as follows: TTP 7.25 refers to chapter 7, section 25.

3 In Spinoza’s terms, these perspectives are called the ‘attributes’ of the one and only ‘substance’, which is God itself, while the particular expressions of God are called ‘modes’ (1d3–5).