Freddie is three years old, his back is arched, and his hands are filthy. And he is watching almost so closely as to be touching the prodigious and impossible strength of an ant carrying a leaf. It gets cold, and it gets dark, and Freddie's dad calls him in, but he doesn't care because the outside world is forgotten. All that matters is the ant and its leaf.
For Aristotle, Freddie and children like him embody the first philosophers of the world because they embody something called 'thauma.' Thauma is a deep and immersive curiosity that just needs to know. The budding botanist who marvels at a tree's root network. The young chemist who marvels at a fireworks display. A physicist whose neck aches from looking at the stars for too long. They are all united in the thauma.
Thauma is a deep pull from inside that needs to know. It's that insistent and compulsive voice that looks through the keyhole and spends hours on Google until the early hours, and it sits on the mossy rock looking at an ant.
Thauma is what motivates a person. It's what drives the scientist, the philosopher, the academic to find out. It keeps them up at night, and it gets them up in the morning. It's that voice that says, 'I have to know more about this wonderful thing.'
In many ways, thauma is a gift. Because while many people won't 'get' philosophy, everybody has a thauma. Everybody has something they need to know more about. So what is yours?