Assignment 1

Albert Knox states that "It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world."
When I first read this statement, i thought it was impossible for anyone to 'lose the ability to wonder about the world'. Wouldn't anyone ever think about their own existence in some point of their lives even as an adult? How can anyone just live life like it is just for the sake of being alive? And then I think again; when was the last time i ever thought about life which doesn't include getting frustrated over homework? This is when i realized that I too, am losing the 'ability to wonder about the world'...

As we cruise through life, we start taking 'the world for granted'. Unlike babies who has the 'faculty of wonder' we go through everyday seeing the same things over and over again and we stop getting curious about anything we have seen before. So what is this due to? The process of getting used to? Education? Busy life? Lack of imagination? Lack of curiosity? Lets say. All of them. As adults, we have seen everything before and have been educated at the age of awareness to see the world as we were taught to see it as. Education has blinded us all to see clouds not as fluffy white cotton candies floating in the sky (as some might have pictured them to be as a child) but just as the condensation of water. This also links with the lack of imagination part of an adult. Although one would have to say that designers have a big imagination but when it comes to the existence of humans and the world, their imagination only lies on creating things that are appealing, convenient and are useful to humans. It is not a surprise that they start losing the 'ability to wonder' with their imagination being preoccupied contributing to their busy lives. I too, am getting way too used to how the world is and with the homework and things outside of school? Wondering about life just doesn't seem so as important.

But sometimes I also think what's the point in wondering now when no one has the question to anything? So what if you have you have the ability to wonder? One day you might start thinking why horses look the same and as Knox has pointed out that they don't. This is either due to 'logic' or 'innate ideas'. Plato has dismissed the idea of 'innate ideas' as their has to be a first 'idea' of anything for it to be real and that is impossible seeing as humans would have to see things first to have the 'idea'. So now we’re left with logic. We see one horse and its printed in our minds and we see how the next horse has the same certain characteristics as the previous one and that is how humans categories things. Now we know all that so what? What's the purpose of going so deep into something that is certainly quite useless? My own naivety has been contradicted by Knox's metaphor of a 'magic trick'.

Everything that was said in the paragraph before is probably what Knox said about people being so caught up with everything and how adults ‘accept the world as a matter of course’. We 'snuggle' deeper down in to the rabbit’s fur and stay there comfortably knowing that at the tip of the rabbits hair is where all our childhood imagination are. While losing all our childhood innocence at the same the deeper we climb.

Albert Knox’s statement is certainly arguable although I would definitely agree with him. It doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not a philosopher would not ‘wonder about the world’ but they certainly wouldn’t go as deep and wonder all the time. Although one would also argue that it is not that we don’t ‘wonder’ but it is only because there is no point in pondering over questions that are never answerable and there is no need for them. I too, am one of the people in the latter where ‘the world itself’ naturally ‘becomes a habit’.