Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

Reconceptualizing curiosity as a practice of epistemic connection and the curious subject as essentially embedded in relations prompts a deepening analysis of curiosity not only in philosophy but also in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Within contemporary accounts in both fields, curiosity is typically understood as an organism’s motivation to acquire and accumulate knowledge.

Standing in a swirl of words and things, such an account positions relations at the forefront, whether between (un)knowers, (un)knowledges, or (un)knowns.

The pragmatic knower thus follows a thread from the self to the world, discovers the knits between things in that world, and then knits themselves back into that web, that worlding.

“What remains for us to do after having observed all that surrounds us?” Rousseau concludes, but “to convert to our use all of it that we can appropriate to ourselves, and to make use of our curiosity for the advantage of our own well-being.”26

So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate.”

Foucault is a twentieth-century thinker of power and, specifically, the power to resist established ways of thinking and doing.

Rousseau too insists that curiosity must stem from personal investment for it to be authentic.

Natural to every human heart, curiosity extends to anything and everything that is “connected” to an individual inquirer’s well-being.