Stanley Fish assesses the contending conceptions of curiosity in Christian and Enlightenment thought:
Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, “Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”
Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson’s “trinity of inalienable rights: ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’” Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, “a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality.” He was, after all, the “living embodiment of an inquisitive mind” and was reputed to have known “all the science that was known at the time.” Surely he would have prized curiosity, especially since it is the quality “oppressive states fear.” Given that “the cornerstone of democracy is access to knowledge,” it is not too much to say, Leach concluded, that “the curious pursuing their curiosity may be mankind’s greatest if not only hope.”
This sounds right, even patriotic, but there is another tradition in which, far from being the guarantor of a better future, curiosity is a vice and even a sin. Indeed, it has often been considered the original sin.
Continue reading “Does Curiosity Kill More Than the Cat?” here.
Essential reading on these themes must now include chapter 2 (on “Curiositas”) of Paul J. Griffiths’ new book, Intellectual Appetites: A Theological Grammar (Catholic University of America Press, 2009).