Curiositas Revisited
[Trivia: between 2000 and the present, what 6 films were nominated for Best Picture and also Best International Film? Hint: all 6 represented different countries/languages—and one of them actually won Best Picture.]
A while ago I wrote about Curiositas, the vice understood in the Medieval age to be a disordered desire for knowledge—the sort of thing where you wind up following one Wikipedia link after another and the next thing you know it’s 2 in the morning, and you’ve been reading about a whole rabbit trail of topics that you can’t even really recall.
But on the whole I didn’t really delineate where good curiosity verges into the territory of the vice. At the end of it I quoted First Things and continued,
“The virtue Aquinas opposes to curiositas is not humility, but studiousness, that is, knowledge pursued well.” For this writer, “studiousness requires the self-discipline to exclude frivolous pursuits (including the pursuit of frivolous knowledge); that the pursuit of knowledge is at its best when motivated by a genuine desire for the truth, not self-aggrandizement.” There’s also the component of having an end goal in mind. That’s not to say that knowing things for fun isn’t fine, in the same way that dessert is a totally acceptable part of life. Even being curious in learning something specific just to know still feels more like the way a healthy, well-adjusted person acts rather than something tinged with vice.
I’ve kicked around in my mind ever since then where a bright line could be.
And I don’t know.
But I was thinking about watching Pixar’s 2020 Soul, an abstract film about being alive, and I think the most intriguing insight of that film is the way that (1) people’s activity is motivated by a spark of passion, an activity in which they lose themself in a kind of rapture, and (2) too much of this exact thing coincides with people’s soul kind of disappearing—actually losing themself, letting one thing swallow up everything else about them. In that way, it has echoes of CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, but with more of an exploration of the good that dovetails into that, and less attention to the infinite and loving God on the other side of everything. For that matter, I’m realizing that the book Prisoner of Trebekistan (written by stand-up comic and Jeopardy! champ Bob Harris) essentially addressed that same idea on the subject of curiositas—only I don’t have a copy handy to quote from.
The way the movie presents this ecstatic but perilous state is visually striking, and I can’t really do it justice in words. But it’s given me the best analog yet for thinking about curiositas.
Wanting to explore and know something—even with zero regard for practicality, or for building into a schema of knowledge (e.g. when learning a language)—is a really awesome feeling.
And delineating exactly where that exact thing becomes harmful, where you lose yourself to the world (even for just a period of time), is . . . real hard. But I theorized last time that “the component of having an end goal in mind” might be a part of it, and now maybe I think I was barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the way to discern whether inquisitiveness is curiosity or curiositas is to zoom out and consider your position in the context of everything else in your life right then—are dishes accruing grime in the sink, have you not texted your brother in too long, is there sleep that needs being caught up on, etc. etc. Is any recreational and leisurely exploration getting in the way of weightier priorities that touch on your responsibilities to redeem the time, take care of the temple that is your body, or fulfill whatever roles you’ve been given in life?
Or is it fitting very neatly into the necessary category of recreation—a word that is, after all, dripping with etymological significance?
~
Answer: China’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), France’s Amour (2012), Mexico’s Roma (2018), Korea’s Parasite (2019—BP winner), Japan’s Drive My Car (2021), and Germany’s All Quiet on the Western Front (2022).