Is Wonder the Key to Wisdom?

Philosophy didn’t start in a classroom. It started with a gasp.

This episode is about Wonder — that sudden feeling that something familiar isn’t so familiar after all. We’ll talk about how this moment of awe, confusion, or deep curiosity isn’t just the spark of philosophy but the doorway to a more conscious, meaningful life. It’s what wakes us up — if we let it.

We’ll draw on Plato, Buddhist insight, and everyday examples to show how wonder isn’t childish or naïve. It’s the exact opposite: a courageous refusal to take the world for granted. This isn’t about trivia or theory. It’s about waking up to your life.

Transcript

Mike Ramirez has been fixing cars for 25 years. He's the kind of auto mechanic who doesn't need Google. He can hear a misfire. He can sniff out a bad sensor. To him, cars are problems to be solved. Broken pieces with clear functions that just need to be restored in order to work. But one day, the lady in a newer model hybrid rolls into his shop with a strange issue. Her car dies at red lights. not just idelling, completely dead. Then, five minutes later, it starts up like nothing never happened. It doesn't happen at stop signs, she says, just at red lights that take more than a few seconds. She tells Mike that there's no warning light, no error codes. Her battery's been replaced, her alternator's working just fine. Everything's been checked out, at least according to the first two mechanics that she's already taken it to. Mike is intrigued. He tears into the problem, he checks the fuel lines, the throttle body, the relays. There's nothing wrong. Mike knows engines. This isn't how they work. He runs every test in the book, the sensors, the wiring, and still nothing. That night, half asleep while lying in bed, it finally clicks. He's been thinking like a mechanic. But this car isn't just pistons and belts. It's a computer on wheels. The problem isn't something broken that you can hold in your hand. It's a glitch, buried somewhere deep in the car's software. The next morning, he calls the manufacturer, receives a patch, and the problem is solved. Now, nothing had changed about the car except how Mike had seen it. That shift changed everything for Mike. That's "wonder". It's that idea that hits you when you realize you're looking at the same thing and seeing it completely differently now. Wonder is what happens when your worldview cracks just as enough to let in a new sliver of truth. Welcome back to American Socrates. I'm your host, Charles M. Rupert. On today's episode, I thought we would examine this idea of wonder. Plato tells us that all of philosophy starts with the concept of wonder. We have to be curious about ideas, but it's deeper than that. It's not just saying, like, gee, I wonder what this is like. It's really deeply trying to figure out what it is that we are looking at. And if there's any other possible way to see it, maybe we should start with the definition of for wonder. We could define it somewhat pragmatically, I think, that the idea of that moment when you look at something, usually something familiar, and you can't see it the same way anymore. You just look at it. You don't have a way to describe it. You don't have a way to talk about it. It looks different somehow, in a way that makes no sense. There's a quote from a philosopher who said that philosophy makes the stone more stone-like. What he means by that is, yes, we're all familiar with rocks. We've all seen stones, but the concept here is to understand the stone in ways that not everybody does. A geologist will not see the stone the same way as a kid who wants to just skip it across the pond. We're going to look at the rock as deeply as we can. We're going to try to understand it from multiple dimensions. In this way, wonder is not just a matter of being surprised or being curious. It is something that stops us in our tracks. It opens us up to a kind of deep reflection about things and that that experience itself is often transformative. It's not the object that changes, but our way of seeing it. Marcel Prost once said that the point of traveling is not to see different places, but to see the same world with different eyes. And that's what we're getting at here, how looking at things in a a more deep light can change ourselves, that's the sense of wonder. I've included as the image for this episode, a particular picture that I are often use in my classes to invoke a sense of wonder in my students. I would recommend you pause the podcast right now and go look at that for a little while. While you were looking at the image, what do you really see? Can you describe that image in any way? I'll give you a hint if you're still looking at it. It is a photograph of some kind. It depicts something you're familiar with. Some of you may have recognized it right away, but for those of you who didn't, it put you into a state of wonder. When you're in a state of wonder, you literally can't tell what you're looking at. It makes no sense. I mean, you can describe it in certain ways. Yes, it's an image. Maybe, yes, it's a photograph. Yes, maybe it's, you know, know, low contrast or you're reduced to these sort of phenomenological descriptors. You can't conceptualize it because you have no current concept of what it is you're looking at. That's the defining characteristic of wonder. You have stopped being able to look at it through a certain concept, and so you have left what you are experiencing, without a concept. The goal, of course, is to refine the concept so that when you do eventually see what is in the image, you will be able to know it well, fully, more deeply. It's an interesting way to be in the world because what this suggests is that certain people are able to see things that are other people can't. Even though they're right in front of their face, I can see what is in that image. I can see what it is a picture of because I happen to know what it is. That knowledge gives me an advantage over all of the people who look at that image and simply cannot tell me what it is. Their words fail them. Their language has become useless. I know what it is and they don't. I promise I will tell you what is in the image before the end of the episode. But for right now, try to enjoy being in a state of wonder because as an adult, it becomes an incredibly rare phenomenon. We have learned so much, and we have learned so many concepts that we just look around the world and we see things before we even think about it in terms of the concepts we're already familiar with. It's hard for us to look at something without any concept of what it is. If you're able to do that right now with that image, enjoy it. Because once I show you what is in that image, once you actually see it, it will be impossible for you to go back. Your mind will force you to look at it in the way of this concept. And this is this is what we mean when we say people have closed minds. We mean that they see things a certain way. They have come to look at them one way, and it is very difficult for them to unlearn that way of looking at it and look at it from any other point of view. But that action, that sense of wonder, is the root of all philosophy. So let's go back to Plato for a second. Plato said philosophy starts not in boredom or in cleverness, nor even in argument, but in this state of wonder. It's that wide-eyed, gut-deep whoa feeling that hits you when the world cracks open for a second and you realize you've been sleepwalking. You've seen this world a million times, and it never looked this way to you. So wonder isn't about having answers here. It's about realizing that you don't even know what the real question that you're trying to ask is. It's when your assumptions begin to break down, when your beliefs start to falter and you actually can see something different for the first time. And I do mean this literally. You see something that other people can't see. It's something that you couldn't see before, but now you see it differently. Saul on the road to Damascus, said that the scales fell from his eyes. There were no scales on his eyes. What happened was he had a revelation. He began to see things differently. He had heard the teachings of Christ and they meant very little to him, but he thought about it, and he pondered it. And then he started to understand it in a new way. And when he did, it was such a revelatory experience for him that he had to change his own name because he wasn't the same person anymore. He was no longer Saul, he was Paul. So for Plato and many others, this is a sacred moment. It's as close to the divine as you can actually get. Wonder isn't something to get past. It's something to live in, right? We want to try and cultivate a sense of wonder about the world if we're going to try to be a good philosopher. It's a gateway. Wonder makes you humble because you're looking always to be traveling into this new world. It makes you curious. It makes you look for things instead of just reacting to them in their everyday sense. It is, in essence, the opposite of common sense. Common sense is when you think you already know everything. Everybody knows that this is what this is. Anyone who asks anything deeper about it or tries to look at it in a deeper way is being foolish. That's what common sense tells us. This is critical sense, or what we might call good sense. You were wondering about things. You were looking at how you can understand it in a different way. Now, contrast that with what most people think philosophy is today. Ask someone what philosophy is, and they'll probably tell you something like, it's the abstract. It's a bunch of dead guys arguing about stuff that doesn't matter very much. It's, you know, for professors who don't really have a job, you know, who don't need to make money or something like that. The secondborn princelings of somewhere. But if they're just a little bit more generous, you could argue that philosophy is a cool, intellectual exercise, where you are trying to cultivate a sense of understanding that is deeper than common sense. Somewhere along the line, we seem to have lost the fire here, right? If that's what philosophy was to Plato, like, it's certainly not really what it is to most of us today. Modern philosophy can often feel like it lives in our textbooks. or in, you know, footnotes. But as a field, it's something that you study, but not something where you live. And that's a real tragedy, because philosophy. when it is alive doesn't need a classroom. It just needs questions. It needs this sense of wonder, a mind that is awake enough to at least ask those questions. And I don't want to give the impression that this is merely a Greek idea. In something like Zen Buddhism, there's a concept called Shoshin, which is the beginner's mind. It means approaching every situation as if you were seeing it for the first time. There's no assumptions. There's no ego, no, oh, I already know what this is. There's no common sense here. That's not to approach it from a place of ignorance. It's to approach it from a place of openness. Think about how powerful that is as an exercise. What you could approach to your, say, partner or your job or your life, not with the jaded eyes of your experience, but with a new set of eyes, the kind of attention you give it the first time you see something. You know, when we see something we've never seen before, we often have to pause and stare at it, our mouth agape, wondering what it is. And that's what we're talking about here. artificially inducing that moment so that we can try to see things differently or see things deeper. That's where wisdom really comes from. It's not from stacking a bunch of facts, but from paying attention to the minutest details. The Taoist sages say something similar. When they talk about the Tao, which is the way, as something that can't be named or pinned down, but that reveals itself in the smallest and quietest things in the water flowing downhill, a breeze in the grass, in a bowl of rice. To them, wisdom wasn't in mastering abstract truths. It's about aligning yourself with the rhythms of the world by being attentive and still, by getting yourself out of the way of your own understanding. They didn't chase meaning by escaping the world. They found it in the ordinary, by looking, truly looking, at what's already there. So let's return to our image for a second. One of the most amazing things about being in a sense of wonder is when you don't know what's something is, it can be a lot of things. Your imagination really breaks open here and allows you to see things in different ways or experience them in different ways. You know, you can hear a tone that sounds one way when you think about it this way, but sounds different when you think about it in a different way. That is not possible once you have decided what something is. Once you have decided, well, this is the best way to look at this or this is the best way to understand it, your mind literally closes, and you cannot think of it in a new way or you have extreme difficulty of doing that. This idea, then, with this image, students see amazing things in this image before I tell them what it is. One Once I show them what it is, they're amazed that it was right in front of their eyes the entire time, of course, but they lose all of the things that they saw before. I often hear it that it's a, they see a bird. It's an aerial photograph. It is a microscopic photograph. They see all sorts of different things in the image. But once they come to see the reality, it becomes impossible for them to see it any other way. Now, that could be a good thing or a bad thing. If we start to see something as it really is, we do get closer to the truth, and that is excellent. Unfortunately, there are often many pratfalls in the way of this. You start to see something more of the way it really is, but that might still not be the fully incomplete way. Plato talked about us being in a cave and the idea of being that we simply cannot see what the reality outside is from inside the cave. We have to experience it. But there are caves within caves, within caves here, just because you have peeled back one layer of reality and understand something deeper now does not mean that you have completely understood it from all possible levels. And so we need to keep that in mind as well. So you know wonder isn't just a passing feeling. It can be a complete turning point for us. It's a moment of clarity, but only if we pause long enough to sit with it, without reflection, wonders tends to pass us by like scenery outside of a car window as we drive down the highway. But when we stop and look and really look, wonder does crack things open and it shows us the world and ourselves in this new light. Let me give you a few examples of what I mean here. Imagine a janitor going through the motions, mopping the same floor night after night. One evening, maybe he's tired or maybe he's just paying attention in a new way. He notices the pattern the mop makes on the tile. The way the fiers twist and spiral, it's just water and soap, but something about it catches him. He starts playing with the motion, and he sees a rhythm, he sees a beauty that was never there. That moment, that's a moment of wonder, even though it's really simple. It's just something, you know, not life-changing or anything like that. But he finds a certain beauty in mopping the floor that wasn't there for him before. And because he lingers in it and he lets it sink in, he lets it grow, eventually, maybe he starts painting. It pushes him in a new direction. I can see a pattern in this water that wasn't visible to me before, and now I can put that pattern into a painting. And I can make other people see what I was looking at before. Or you could think of a welder every day. He bends steel, he's fusing metal. He's good at it. But one afternoon, the shape of the weld reminds him of a bird and a flight or something like that, pauses, studies it, and the same thing happens, right? Now we have a sculptor. We even see this in science. Wonder shows up in these sorts of flashes. We all know stories like Newton sitting under the apple tree and the apple hitting him on the head or Archimedes stepping into the tub and noticing for the first time that the water rises as he gets into the tub. They weren't trying to have revelations, but what happened was, is something odd or something beautiful happened, they didn't shrug it off. They had been reflecting. They had been thinking about certain problems, and they noticed something that they just hadn't noticed before. They paused. They thought about it. They wonder why it is the way it is. And it's in that pause. That's where the clarity came. That's what turned a falling apple into a theory of gravity. The thing is, we all get moments like these, not always with apples and welding and things like that, but in conversations, in nature, in our work, we just don't always notice them. And if we do, we often move over them way too quickly. So here's the point. Wonder isn't just about awe. It's about paying attention. It's the mind waking up to something that has almost always missed. It's always been there, but they've always missed it. And if we give it time, wonder can open new doors. We still have to choose to walk through those doors, though. But if wonder is so powerful, why do we ultimately come to lose it? Why does it fade as we get older? As kids, you know, everything is new. A thunderstorm feels like magic. A bug under a rock is a world waiting to be discovered. But somewhere along the way, we start saying, yeah, I've seen that before. We trade our curiosity for a feeling of certainty, and we stop looking twice. Part of it is, of course, survival. You know, we've got jobs, we've got bills to pay, we've got deadlines to meet. You can't be pausing in awe every time sunlight hits the countertop just right. But part of it, I think, is a kind of cultural drift. We get taught that being serious means being a little bored, that smart people don't get excited, that if you're impressed, you're probably being naive. But that leads us to something dangerous, a kind of cynicism. Cynicism pretends to be smart, but it's really just lazy despair. It says, you know, nothing really matters, nothing, everything's fake, you know, don't bother me. It shuts the door before the questions are even asked. And once you're in that place, wonder doesn't survive long. It gets smothered under things like sarcasm and eye rolls. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we shouldn't question things. We should, but that's where skepticism comes in. It's very different from a sense of cynicism. Skepticism means not taking things at their face value, you know, our first look at something or in the Latin, the prima facie. Like that idea, our first glance at it, is not what necessarily means it true. Skepticism means asking hard questions, you know, and trying to dig under the surface here, refusing to be fooled by the obvious. It still hopes there is something worth finding. Cynicism, on the other hand, says, actually, everything's empty. There's nothing under the surface. It just is what it appears to be. That's all there is to it. And that's the mindset I want to argue against. I don't want us to be cynics. I want us to be skeptics. There should be a sort of skeptical openness, an ability to question everything. Don't just accept what you're told. You don't accept what you're told from politicians, by teachers, or even yourself. Just because something looks one way to you does not mean that it is in fact that way. It might just be how it appears to you. You want to stay in a state of amazement, in a state of wonder. You want to stay willing to be surprised, to keep your mind open to certain things, certain beauties, certain mysteries. It's something that's more than what is obvious, because that's where wonder lives in the tension between our doubts and our discoveries. So you don't have to pick between being like a hardhearted realist or a starry-eyed dreamer. You can be both. You can say, look, I don''t know, but I'm going to look closer. And that's where wisdom truly begins. So let's go back to our image again. If you've been looking at it long enough by now, maybe you've come to see what it is. If not, I'm going to prime you with what the answer is and see, go back again and see if you can find it now. The image is a picture of a cow. That's all it is. It's a picture of a cow. Once you see the cow, you can't unsee the cow. The point that I like to tell a lot of my students is that there are a great number of cows hiding in the world. And this is really the point of education. You can start to see the cows. You can start to see them through this philosophical inquiry, this journey into wonder by noting that they are out there, that they can be discovered. You know, like, two people can see the same instance and one of them sees that it is racist and the other one, not be able to see that it's racist. And they literally cannot see it in the same way that you couldn't see the cow before, and maybe you've come to see the cow now. In case you're still looking, the cow is really just the head of a cow leaning over a little fence. So once you start to see the fence, the wire fence, you can start to make out the eyes and the ears and the nose. It's really a close-up of the cow's head. So once you see it, once it clicks for you and you realize, my God, I've been looking at this thing for so much time now and I couldn't see it and now I can, that's the experience that we're talking about. You've come to see something in the world that you couldn't see before. In this case, like, like it's physical. It is very real. Your mind could not conceptualize what you were looking at and then it could, and then it could. And so this exists with so many concepts, so many ideas. You look at it a certain way, and you see it in this way that you've never been able to see it as before. You can see yourself being exploited in ways that you weren't. You can see yourself being abused in ways that you didn't understand you were being abused. You can see evil in places where evil didn't seem to exist before. You can see the things that you do in a different light. Maybe you were trying to survive. Maybe you were just desperate for attention in ways that it didn't make sense before. And that's the entire point. That's what philosophy really does. It offers us this sense of understanding and at a deeper level than most of us experience. Most of us are walking around with some kind of understanding of what's going on in our lives, but it's not necessarily the deepest. It is not necessarily the truth in that more complete sense. And so what we can learn from all of this is how to find those kinds of deep truths. And once you get a taste for them, you want to seek them. Like the idea of just letting things go with this simple and weak understanding is just anma. Plato, again, said that once a man has been to the surface, he's not going to go back down to the cave and talk to the people there and really care about the things that they care about. He's beyond all of that now. He has seen a deeper level of truth and the things that they praise themselves for, the rewards they give themselves, just will mean nothing to this guy. And that's that's partially what I'm trying to instill in you, a sense of moving beyond the things that you think are terribly important right now to find other deeper things that are even more important. And again, that's not the end. There are even deeper levels to be explored, but you have to do it. You have to do the work of seeing these things, and wonder will get you motivated to go do that. So as usual, I like to end today's episodes with a sort of call to action, a sort of, you know, something you can go do with it. And this one, I think it's going to be really simple. I think all you need to do is sometime this week, find a person, a tool, a task, that you think you know really well, you think you really understand, and try to look at it again. try to see the hidden cow that's there that you've been missing your whole life. Maybe you'll find it. You'll find that stir of wonder. You'll be able to look at things in a different way than you've ever looked at them before. And it might be trying to teach you something that you never knew. There are a great many cows in this world, and I hope you find them all. Thanks for tuning in to American Socrates. For today's episode of philosophy got you thinking in new ways, make sure to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode. New full episodes drop every Wednesday. If you enjoyed the show, leave a review. It helps others find us, and it means a lot. And if you know someone who could use a little more practical wisdom in their life, share this episode with them. Want more? Visrates.buzsprout.com for show notes, resources, and exclusive content. You can also follow me on Facebook, Blue Sky, or TikTok to keep the conversation going. Until next time, keep questioning everything.