Why Cats Should Fear Curiosity

If you’re going to meet your feelings, the best feeling to meet first would be the one that can introduce you to the rest. It’s like when you go to a party. If you want to get to know everyone at the party, you should hang with the social butterfly, perhaps the host, and not the wallflower who was dragged there and spends the whole night checking his phone. At a party of your feelings, the one feeling that will introduce you to everyone is Curiosity.

Centuries ago, Curiosity was a shameful feeling, but now it’s everyone’s best friend. It’s said to be the engine of personal growth. When we’re curious, we seek out new experiences, learn new things, and challenge ourselves; leading to greater creativity, better problem-solving, and a broader perspective on the world. Curiosity keeps us engaged and motivated. When we’re curious about something, we put in the effort, leading to a sense of meaning and fulfillment. Curiosity also improves relationships. When we seek to understand others, we can build stronger connections and have empathy for those around us.

Nonetheless, you can recognize Curiosity by the blood on its hands, for it’s just come from killing the cat. I asked it, what do you have against cats? But Curiosity has no answers, only questions.If I want answers, I must turn to its companion, Knowledge. Curiosity and Knowledge are like a pair of explorers. Curiosity is a scout, always wanting to find out what’s over that next ridge. Knowledge is a mapmaker who follows close behind, trying to make sense of everything Curiosity finds, how one thing is related to everything else. 

I believe this relationship between Curiosity and Knowledge is an answer to Meno’s Paradox. How can you look up the spelling of a word in the dictionary if you don’t know how it’s spelled? Partial Knowledge is how. Curiosity takes it the rest of the way. Curiosity starts with the blank spots on Knowledge’s map, filled with suppositions and hypotheses and fills them in. 

I was struggling to find a way to illustrate this, so I decided to take a break by going on a hike. As I walked through some woods, I saw a clearing up ahead and started to think I might find raspberries there. Curiosity was aroused. The clearing was just beyond the range of my Knowledge, but I did know raspberries grow best where there’s sun, so I would find them in a clearing. Furthermore, they become ripe this time of year and they taste yummy. That was enough. Based on partial Knowledge, Curiosity drove me to test an hypothesis. 

Once I got to the clearing, sure enough, there were ripe raspberries near the trail. Once I ate them, I became curious whether there were more, deeper in the raspberry patch. Partial Knowledge told me when there are berries on the edge, there might be more berries in the middle. Curiosity drove me to venture further in. Knowledge might have spoken up at this point to tell me there would be prickers in the patch, for I already knew that raspberries had thorns. Maybe Knowledge did try to warn me, but Curiosity was so single-mindedly focused on berries that it was unmindful of the dangers. 

I found a handful of berries but got scratched up and tore my clothes in the process. Then I hurt myself some more when I tried to get out of the bramble. For the sake of a few berries, I looked as though I’d been in a knife fight. That’s how cats get killed by Curiosity. It narrows the field of inquiry so it can penetrate the unknown and misses the big picture.

I could have avoided that trouble had I read Thomas Aquinas before taking my hike. He had a dim view of curiosity, or curiositas, as he called it, being a writer of Latin. He thought it would be better to cultivate studiositas, or intellectual rigor, which is what you get when Knowledge, rather than Curiosity, is put in charge of exploring the unknown.

Remember, Knowledge is the mapmaker, while Curiosity is the scout. Exploration should be done at a pace that allows the mapmaker to keep up, for the mapmaker examines all the features of the landscape, not just the ones Curiosity is interested in. The mapmaker lingers to integrate each new discovery into what was known before.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The person who masters a specialty and doesn’t see how it fits in with everything else thinks that he knows more than he does. That’s what many are afraid of with the advent of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Scientists who are so intent on getting answers to their specific questions that they miss the broader implications. That’s what’s behind what I call the geek’s curse. When you acquire so much knowledge in a specialized subject that you become a geek and lose the ability to function with people. Curiosity’s gone wild.

I sometimes see clients who are so interested in exploring the contents of their psyche that they use psychedelics to do so. It’s fine with me if they do, provided they have a safe source and take the time to process their experiences. Psychedelics are agents of Curiosity, they open you up to new vistas you never imagined. Processing afterwards is the mapmaking. Unfortunately, I find the very people who are the most open about using psychedelics are often the most closed about processing their experiences afterwards. They’re afraid making sense out of it all will render their extraordinary experiences ordinary. I try to tell them I don’t intend on taking all the color and life out of their psychedelic experience, I only want to make it useful in their daily life and help them avoid a derangement that occurs when some elements of experience are not integrated with the rest. 

Of course, things don’t always go horribly wrong when Curiosity leads the way. I don’t always bleed when I pick raspberries. Most of the time, Curiosity yelds positive results. Disaster doesn’t happen often, but it’s still a disaster, so you may want to take out some insurance against it. Curiosity should be praised for its openness to new experiences and willingness to experiment, but it also should be restrained. Like a bloodhound when it picks up a scent, intellectual rigor should keep it on a leash. Bloodhounds can still sniff perfectly well when leashed, but the leash allows their handlers to keep up.  

My experience with Curiosity in the raspberry patch taught me something. As I write this field guide to feelings, I should slow down and see how each feeling is related to everything else. When I meet each feeling, I’ll ask the same questions.

1. What are the circumstances that give rise to the feeling?
2. What’s the relationship between the feeling and my physiological state?
3. What’s the relationship between the word used for the feeling and the history of that word?
4. What’s the relationship between the feeling and other feelings?
5. What’s the relationship between the feeling and my values?
6. What’s the relationship between the feeling and other people?

I’ll start by asking these questions about Curiosity, itself. I already completed #1 by telling you the story of the raspberries. Let’s look at the other questions.

What’s the relationship between curiosity and my physiological state?

When I feel curious, I feel it as arousal or attention. I tune my senses towards the object of my curiosity. At times, when my curiosity is strong enough, I pay attention to nothing else. I’m over focused. This might be how the cat gets killed. She’s so intent on finding out one thing, that she misses the dangers around her.

What’s the relationship between the word curiosity and the history of that word?

Curiosity comes from the Latin curiosis, meaning careful, diligent, painstaking, and fussy. It’s related to curio, the word for a priest. Priests are often called upon to be scrupulous about their purity and rites. I can imagine the word curiosity arising from a desire to tie up loose ends and not let any questions go unanswered. 

In later Latin, the word became curiositas and it was thought of as excessive inquisitiveness, arising out of the sins of pride, greed, and gluttony. This is the way Thomas Aquinas used it. Today, curiosity is regarded more favorably. It’s associated with open mindedness and receptivity. Perhaps it was rehabilitated during the Enlightenment, which involved a great advance in knowledge when scientific inquiry began to challenge blind faith. Maybe capitalism has something to do with it. Curiosity in developers results in many new products for capitalists to sell and the curiosity of consumers drives those sales.

What’s the relationship between curiosity and other feelings?

As Thomas Aquinas suggested, I can see how my Curiosity in the raspberry patch came out of the feelings of greed and gluttony. I was eating them, and I wanted more and more. But, when I began to be curious about raspberries, I wasn’t hungry. Sustenance was not what motivated me. Instead, I was driven by a desire for a bit of triumphal pride in finding the berries. It was more like a puzzle I was trying to solve. I wanted my hypothesis to be right.

I tried to locate Curiosity in the model of feelings I developed, based on the instinctual behaviors of fight, flight, freeze, feed, flop, and affiliation. I found it all over the model, depending on what I’m curious about. In the case of the raspberries, it’s derived from instinctual feeding behavior. The feeling is then similar to wonder, interest, noseyness, questioning, scrutinizing, engrossed and enraptured. There are other times when my Curiosity seems similar to desire, lust, passion, infatuation, craving, or obsession. Then it appears to come out of a drive to affiliate, to mate my knowledge with that of others. In other circumstances, curiosity can come out of the startle reflex. Let’s say I heard a loud rustling in the bushes. I might stop, transfixed, and listen closely, curious whether it was a bear. 

In his color wheel of the emotions, Robert Plutchik says Curiosity is a combination of confidence and surprise. I can understand how confidence comes in, but unless I hear a rustling in the bushes, I can’t agree with surprise. Using the Circumplex Model of Affect, which plots feelings in two dimensions, whether we consider it positive or negative valence and whether we’re aroused or put to sleep, I was aroused by the delightful possibility of raspberries. This region is characterized by the feeling of alertness. As I began to find berries, my feeling migrated to the positive valence, and I started to feel happy and excited.

The trouble I’m having in fitting the feeling into the categories we have for feelings just goes to show you how defective our categories can be. Feelings are not entities that can be fixed on a pin, they are living concepts with personal meanings.

What’s the relationship between curiosity and my values?

Curiosity comes from the belief that more is better than less, that complete is better than partial, that the known is better than the unknown, that answers are better than questions, that open is better than closed. By being focused on only one point, it seems to favor reductionism, rather than a holistic approach. Then there’s the value of the answers you seek. Raspberries are good.

What’s the relationship between curiosity and other people?

When I learned how to be a shrink, I was taught to show my curiosity towards clients. They instructed me to face them square on, lean forward with both feet on the floor, have good eye contact, reflect on what they said, and make lots of noises like huh huh and go on. This should tell people that I’m interested in what they say. Almost immediately, I found out that this was terrible advice. It’s far too aggressively intense for most people. It’s better to sit at an angle, cross my legs, and vary my eye contact; but I still make the same noises and reflect on what they say. This seems to communicate that I am curious about them, but I’ll respect boundaries and not dig deeper or faster than they want to go. 

Perhaps, despite the ideological favor we of the modern day have towards curiosity, there’s still a sense of its danger. We should respect the dangers, but not let it keep us from being curious.