On Irrepressible Curiosity

In Varieties of Religious Experience, just after the passage naming the two forms of judgment I wrote about last week, William James writes a sentence that has returned to my mind over and over since I first read it:

Irrepressible curiosity imperiously leads one on.

This sentence is poetry. The first three words are five syllables each. The first two, "irrepressible" and "curiosity" have identical rhythmic structures: the third syllable is heavily stressed, and the rest unstressed*. "Imperiously," though equal in length, violates this pattern: it is the second syllable stressed, not the third. This effects a turn in the rhythmic pattern of the sentence that concludes with three single-syllable words, each stressed––a percussive triple-beat. There's a musicality to the sentence that makes it memorable and sticky.

And "imperiously" turns more than the form of the language––it violates our expectations. In what other context have you ever seen curiosity described as "imperious"? It's a new formulation. "Irrepressible curiosity" is evocative and strong, but there's nothing novel to thinking about curiosity as an inner force that can't be contained. But to apply to it imperious connotations of dignity, power, expansion––sovereignty, even––that seems new to me.

What's more, "irrepressible curiosity" is purely descriptive––there's no value judgment. This kind of curiosity could equally drive one to break into locked rooms or to dedicate one's life to studying how plants grow. "Imperious" is not only a rhythmic turn, and it's not only a turn against our expectations: it's a normative turn, too. By choosing this word, James endows curiosity with the authority to guide one's path and suggests, however subtly, that our curiosities are the bedrock of our dignity, our power, our expansion––our sovereignty, even.

Contrast the evaluation of curiosity in this sentence with The Impertinent Curious Man, one of the many short stories embedded within the first part of Don Quixote. In this cautionary tale, the Florentine nobleman Anselmo becomes dangerously curious about the limits of his wife's fidelity. He convinces his friend Lothario to try to seduce her, just so that he can find out whether or not she would capitulate. At first, Lothario refuses, but Anselmo insists more and more until Lothario finally gives in to his request. After Anselmo's wife, Camilla, passes the test, he convinces Lothario to try again in different ways. Eventually, Lothario falls genuinely in love with Camilla, and she with him. After Anselmo finally learns of their betrayal, he dies of grief.

Far from imperious, Anselmo's irrepressible curiosity impertinently pulls him down. His curiosity is not the seat of his sovereignty, but the weight that drags him headlong into the abyss. On its own, curiosity is no more than a force of nature inside us. It transcends good and evil. It represents an inner drive for knowledge that has no mind for the consequences of knowing things. Anselmo was too eager to know whether his wife could fall in love with someone else to ever wonder whether he could handle knowing that she could.

So what to make of William James? I turn to his context and to his percussive triple-beat. This poem-of-a-statement is embedded within a preface dedicated to expounding a method for approaching questions about religion. James carefully constructs the path through reasoning and research long before he invites the reader to walk it with him. It is only when he finishes foregrounding his work that he writes to us, "still, you may ask me...why threaten us at all with so much existential study of [religion's] conditions?"

James writes of curiosity in response to a nihilistic question: why threaten us with questions about religious experience? Why should knowledge about these things matter if it threatens our very foundation? Lest we fall prey to the despair of believing that knowledge has no merit whatsoever, James reminds us of our natural urge towards knowing. He names that urge good, but tempers it with methodical considerations, with the patience to gain "acquaintance with the whole range of its variations." Most importantly, he names his chief aim not "the wholesale condemnation" of religious experience, but to "ascertain the more precisely in what its merits concist...[and] at the same time to what particular dangers of corruption it may also be exposed."

James differs from Cervantes' Anselmo in his willingness to consider slowly, thoroughly, deliberately, and maintaining a balanced purpose to name the good along with the bad. As this line of poetry embedded in his prose echoes again and again through my mind, it reminds me of the imperious task of applying method, balance, and rigor to inner forces.

*The "ir" in "irrepressibly" and the "cur" in "curiosity" both strike me as being minorly and contextually stressed, but when I say this sentence aloud to myself, I do not stress them.