Wondering animals: Reflections on human exceptionality

Both historically and in common human practices, attitudes, and beliefs, a sense of human exceptionality in comparison with other animals undergirds normative anthropocentrism, i.e. prioritization of human interests. The question I wish to address in this article is whether we can use a particular element of the cognitive apparatus or toolkit that supposedly makes us special, namely our s e n s e o f wonde r, to de c e nt e r u s. Several authors have argued that when we view other beings or the natural world with wonder, we are inclined to care for and wish to protect them. But here I am interested in what happens when we turn our sense of wonder onto ou r s e lve s as the peculiar animal, the strange evolutionary experiment that we are. Not, as has historically been done, in an admiring way, but in an evaluatively more neutral way, characterized by puzzlement, an attunement to mystery, and a sense of unlikeliness and contingency. In particular, how might
our thinking about ourselves change when we think from a wonder that revolves around our embodiment, around that which roots us most fi rmly in the world, in “nature,” and reminds us most clearly of our membership of a community of earthly life? Wondering at and about ourselves as an animal species may remind us of our material embeddedness in the world, but what could its e th i c a l imp o r t be? More specifi cally, the paper explores whether there is an escape from the ethical
quandaries of human exceptionality, which relate to the impossibility of doing with or without that exceptionality. I argue that there is not, but that in wonder we can hold together incompatible possibilities.