Curious Minds: The Power of Connection

33 It is only via this growth pattern—of multiplying links, relations, and connections—that newly curious configurations can be conceived, new architectures erected, and new affinities sewn together. Curiosity is a rogue shuttling across networks, a randomized walk, a lunging across lattices that has the capacity to upend it all.

“Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking.”

Determined, she returns to casting her line, over and over again, until the arc of her queries weaves a tapestry: A Room of One’s Own. In this masterful piece, she puts two and two together: thinking requires the freedom to fish, or “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

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

Although inconsistent with the traditional view and its current manifestations, there are undeniably resources, scattered across the history of Western philosophy, for thinking curiosity at the edge, as a practice of connection and a promulgator of relation.

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.

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

Descartes defines curiosity as a “desire to understand.”

In the early 1900s, the strain was so great that educational leader Abraham Flexner founded the Institute for Advanced Study as a place where a scientist could once again think about questions that were simply interesting, irrespective of their utility. In his now-classic essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Flexner suggests that our concep

It cannot be one thing, located in one place, practiced by one person, in the pursuit of one piece of information. But if not one, then what? What would it mean to rethink curiosity from a relational or even a network perspective? To take up the art of forming and fashioning the concept of curiosity anew?