Curiosity and Democracy: A Neglected Connection

Abstract

Curiosity’s connection with democracy remains neglected and unexplored. Various disciplines have mostly treated curiosity as an epistemic trait of the individual. Beyond epistemology, curiosity is studied as a moral virtue or vice of the self. Beyond epistemic and moral frameworks, curiosity is examined politically and decolonially. However, all frameworks remain focused on the individual and rarely imply a relevance of curiosity to democracy. The present article departs from such explorative frameworks philosophically to expand the research scope on curiosity in the direction of democratic theory. It highlights the complex politics of curiosity as a collective, rather than merely individual, desire for knowledge. I argue that curiosity should become a key analytical category for studying democracy as a political attitude and as a way of life. Investigations of the multifaceted curiosity of the demos may enhance the visibility of ethico-political issues that often escape the curious eye of citizens and researchers.

1. Introduction

Democracy operates as a normative concept. It represents, for most people, a good and worthwhile form of government and way of life. The study of democracy is complex and multidisciplinary. The related scholarship contains efforts to explore multiple connections of democracy and other valued concepts, such as empowerment, reciprocity, inclusion, participation, deliberation and equality. Given the extent of the engagement with democracy and its rich connections, there are hardly any concepts whose significance for democracy may have been under-studied or perhaps not studied at all. Yet there is at least one such concept: curiosity. Curiosity as a complex and ambiguous key analytical category is missing in studies of democracy and of what may advance or harm democracy. Even approaches such as Perry Zurn’s [1], which focus on the political importance of curiosity, narrow their scope down to collective curiosity’s role in resistance politics. They have not connected curiosity more broadly with democratic theory. Nor have they distinguished collective curiosity from group-differentiated curiosity, as I will do in the relevant section. Likewise, Jef Huysmans’s [2] discussion of democratic curiosity is limited to connections with surveillance challenges and does not engage with the broader meta-theoretical issues and intricacies of curiosity’s role in democratic theory and practice. Instead, I argue that the neglected connection of curiosity and democracy ought to be clearly spelled out and that some curiosity, along with some epistemic restraint, is of paramount importance for democratic theory and practice. Therefore, this article aims to initiate a dialogue on why democracy needs curiosity and vice versa, that is, why curiosity needs democracy.

The aforementioned claims may also be made about epistemic restraint, namely, the virtue in not seeking knowledge, in not trying to find out [3] (p. 240). The respectful treatment of otherness within a democracy compels such a restraint and avoidance of the gaze that objectifies or taxonomizes diverse people and groups. Likewise, epistemic restraint is important for democratically respecting freedom in private life and space and for democratically letting others be. Epistemic restraint from some kinds of knowledge may make room for a more reflective and critical distance from what currently counts as valued knowledge and thus help people avoid the time-honored enemy of democracy: demagogy and conventional wisdom. Another example of the value of epistemic restraint in a democratic culture concerns cases where it is more ethical and politically sensitive to avoid the morbid desire for knowledge beneath “thanatoptic” and “thanatourist” experiences that advance the lifestyle of the consumer rather than of the citizen and turn monuments of pain and collective memories of sorrow into global curiosities [4]. However, in this article, attention will be given to curiosity, and not to epistemic restraint, which will be mentioned only sporadically. Restraint will not be fully explored concerning when it is conducive or harmful to democracy. This is due to reasons of focus and does not reflect any compelling priority of emphasizing curiosity over restraint. Likewise, my focus on collective and group-differentiated curiosity is only due to length considerations and does not downplay individual curiosity. Another important caveat is that the connection of curiosity and democracy will be tackled philosophically rather than empirically. Though some of my claims will be illustrated with examples of social realities, the article’s framework is philosophical and its focus is on democratic theory, not on actual democracies. Philosophically, democracy is a possibility rather than an actuality: an ideal situation not fully attained and ever to be pursued [5].

The first section roughly outlines how curiosity has typically been tackled in modern and postmodern discourses and thus prepares the ground for exploring curiosity’s role in democratic theory and politics. Such a section is necessary because it reconstructs the backdrop against which the claim in favor of a head-on discussion of curiosity and democracy can be canvassed as both innovative and sound. The next section discusses the even more neglected concept of collective curiosity and introduces yet another distinction, that of group-differentiated curiosity (to be explained in the relevant section). Even after some (post)modern politicizations of curiosity, most philosophers (examples of exceptions: Refs. [1,6]) have not used adjectives such as “collective” or “social” as premodifiers of curiosity, let alone in democratic theory. Studies on curiosity have used other premodifiers in order to specify curiosity, namely, attach it to specific domains (philosophical curiosity, religious curiosity, scientific curiosity, etc.), or qualify curiosity, namely, distinguish which curiosity is good (e.g., resistant curiosity) and which is problematic or even undesirable and should be kept in check (e.g., idle, sovereign, objectifying, morbid, intrusive, colonial, etc.). Yet, premodifiers that predicate a less individualized or privatized curiosity have escaped the curious eye of related scholarship. Why democracy needs the public thematization and the scholarly study of collective and group-differentiated curiosity (along with the appropriate epistemic restraint) of the demos will preoccupy the final section.

2. Curiosity Epistemic and Political

Continental and Anglo-American philosophical investigations of deliberative democracy and its reliance on procedural or substantive principles abound (see, e.g., [7]). However, none of these considers principles concerning curiosity. Neither discussions of liberal democracy in 21st-century capitalist countries nor critical theories of egalitarian democratic politics and subjectivity engage head-on with curiosity. If Jacques Rancière [8] (p. 13) is right that democratic thought should turn to distributions of the sensible and what they render inaudible or invisible, the lack of interest in curiosity (that is, in a disposition to see and hark in order to know the so far unknown) is all the more curious.

The connection of curiosity and democracy is overlooked not only by democratic theorists but also by modern researchers on curiosity. These have not treated curiosity in a way that would make its connection with democracy more visible. At the conceptual–descriptive level, curiosity is placed within the cognitive realm. At the critical–evaluative level, many researchers treat curiosity as a good thing for science but as irrelevant to politics. When curiosity is politicized, it is typically considered a scopic power mechanism of bad politics that decolonized societies should at least hold in check. Feminist thought has especially contributed valuable insights on this issue [9]. However, even when the ambiguities of curiosity’s politics are acknowledged their deep implications for democratic theory and society are not explored.

Most sciences have typically viewed curiosity as a merely epistemic trait of the individual. Disciplines that research curiosity as a motor of learning consider it a positive mental state that motivates people to ask pertinent questions about truth and obtain knowledge [3]. To keep away the ambiguities of the everyday or cultural use of curiosity and to sanitize the notion, many researchers distinguish the valued epistemic curiosity from the so-called “idle” curiosity of unscientific mentalities, gossip and other inappropriate cares. For instance, a modern precursor, David Hume, valorized the scientific curiosity of the noble knowledge-hunter and disparaged the “trembling” curiosity of superstitious low classes and “barbarous” nations [9]. Heirs of Hume’s legacy now populate, mutatis mutandis, many modern communities of experts. These praise the curiosity of social groups in tune with official narratives and moralistically chastise the curiosity of those susceptible to truth eroders and “alternative” facts.1 The scientific curiosity that such scientists valorize is presented as beyond politics. It remains thus unacknowledged that this policing of curiosity, this very act of differentiating curiosity on grounds of group and identity, which ensures that the “good” curiosity is that of scientists or high classes, is evidently political. Certainly, many official narratives and widely trusted sources indeed have a higher epistemic warrant than many unauthorized ones that disseminate simplistic, unsubstantiated and even preposterous claims. However, truth eroders may occasionally be the least suspected sources; their seeming trustworthiness makes their questioning even more difficult and thus consolidates their hegemonic political effects [10].

At any rate, if Aristotle got it right that the human is a political being, then curiosity, the human desire for knowing and connecting things, is political even at its most epistemic moments. Curiosity is political not only in its being a trait of the always socially situated individual but also in its collective modality, namely, in its being the desire for meaning-making that may characterize a whole polis, society, country or group of people. However, most approaches that engage with curiosity as the lifeblood of science overlook the politics of curiosity. They focus only on curiosity’s epistemic benefits.2 Within the Western Enlightenment tradition, curiosity has been “linked to scientific entitlement”; the dominant belief is that “the researcher’s right to investigate in order to bring about a betterment of humankind” [11] (p. 57) sanctifies scientific curiosity. Political side-effects of this entitlement, such as “the colonialist subjugation and disenfranchisement of many peoples and cultures world-wide” [11] (p. 57) or the destruction of the environment, have conveniently been cast aside.

Many modern scientific discourses have not just overlooked the political character and operations of their valued epistemic curiosity. They have even actively sought to deny this character by presenting scientific curiosity as “disinterested”. From early modernity onwards, curiosity’s status evolved from the vice that medieval times condemned to the virtue that, so long as it remained only a scientific drive, would ensure ever new progress and development [12]. Many theorizations of curiosity have used premodifiers, such as “disinterested”, “scientific”, etc., to rescue curiosity’s normative character, namely, to maintain its status as a good thing, which is threatened when curiosity is directed at epistemically “unworthy” objects (gossip, sensational or fake news, etc.), usually by “unworthy” “others” (such as women, minorities, uneducated or regressive ideological groups, etc.), or when curiosity is assumed to serve “partisan” (that is, “committed”) reason. The seemingly exclusively epistemic character of curiosity soon proved to require moral qualifications in order to maintain its social value. Important ground has been covered in that respect too by works within virtue ethics and virtue epistemology (e.g., [3]) but not on the issue of curiosity’s politics. Having discussed this elsewhere,3 I continue with an account of some philosophical developments that led to acknowledging epistemic curiosity’s political operations in (post)modernity and some examples of such operations.

Epistemic approaches to curiosity have not only reflected political entanglements of the world and the human but have also operated politically. They have, for instance, turned curiosity into a power differential and a qualifier of who should have the right to define worthy knowledge and to determine what merits the status of a “healthy” and beneficial desire for knowledge. Curiosity thus becomes a moralist matter of individual psychology, and its colonial, able-ist and disciplinarian operations are glossed over. The tendency to use a medicalized pattern for tackling an issue [13] is also identifiable in the (post)modern scientific tackling of curiosity. Research such as Zurn’s [1] confirms that a medicalizing logic has indeed been at play concerning curiosity too. On this logic, “curiosity is not merely located in able-bodyminds”; it is “itself defined by able-bodymindedness” and is presented as rational, healthy, self-composed, individual and independent [1] (p. 160). Expressions of curiosity that do not conform to or do not advance the scientific model “are dismissed as ‘distracted’, ‘idle’, or ‘self-interested’ or delegitimized as ‘crazy’ or ‘weird’” [1] (p. 160). They “are presumed to be ‘unhealthy’” and are disparaged or “sometimes punished” (p. 160). The dominant tendency has been to purify curiosity “from all taint of disease and deformity” [1] (p. 153). I would add as a most recent example the so far totally neglected issue of how curiosity has been group-differentiated and treated regarding the pandemic, depending on who the curious are vis-à-vis the social categories “COVID-19 vaccinated/unvaccinated and pro-vaxxers/anti-vaxxers”. Certainly, there has been much idle, scopic and populist curiosity on the part of many unvaccinated and anti-vaxxers. The curiosities of the vaccinated and those of the unvaccinated have come to police one another. But the “medicalizing” reaction of many experts, politicians and vaccinated/pro-vaxxers to the curiosity of the unvaccinated/anti-vaxxers and of whoever may divert from hegemonic views on the pandemic is even more striking and alarming. Any searching question that does not comply with hegemonic concordance, even the most well-meant query that is totally unrelated to anti-science or far-right ideology, becomes delegitimized and tarnished as politically unhealthy. In its hegemonization, this elitist and medicalizing reaction to what it sweepingly treats as “populist” ironically turns itself into a new populism, a globally dispersed new conformism. Apart from harming the very spirit of democratic deliberation and expression, this policing of the public opinion’s curiosity and this sanctification of current official narratives may prove in the future to have been unscientific, regressive and in need of decolonizing treatment.4 In any case, the point that this example helps me make is that even the curiosity that seems at first sight to be about a scientific issue evidently has political functions and receives political “treatment” (e.g., classifications into “populist” and “pseudo-scientific” or “justified”, “legitimate” and “properly scientific” curiosity).

To return to the historical legacies, most modern scientific discourses maintained a positive outlook on the curiosity that they considered disinterested and conducive to the scientific aspirations of the inquisitive modern individual; incriminated the curiosity of lay social groups when it diverted from the scientific mindset; ignored the political operations of their purportedly “disinterested” curiosity; and thus blocked the possibility of politicizing curiosity as a collective matter of relevance to a democratic public sphere. On their part, modern human sciences largely displayed a similar lack of interest in the colonial and patriarchal political operations of the curiosity that they affirmed. They rarely engaged with curiosity head-on but directly or indirectly advanced the “scientific”, scopic outlook on curiosity along with the rendering of some others as “curiosities”. As Jacques Derrida reminds us, in English and in French, the word “curiosity” can designate the subject and the object. “One speaks of someone’s curiosity, but also of something or someone who becomes a curiosity, a curious thing for the spectator or the enthusiast” [14] (p. 297). The other as curiosity on display or the other’s cultural artefacts in curiosity cabinets nourished the taxonomical fantasies of the modern colonizer as a curious subject eager to explore and utilize the new and the unknown [12] and laugh at the ridiculously or monstrously curious.

Postmodern human sciences are now taking great pains to decolonize themselves from such legacies of imperial curiosity. They admit that the colonial project “strives towards the taxonomical standardization of humans based on race, sex, and gender” in ways that are not just uncosmopolitan but also “intrinsically flawed” in obscuring that “what is human is always already a heterogeneous construct based on interspecies dependencies” [15] (p. 7). The contribution of some modern philosophy, and, later, of postmodern (mainly French continental) philosophy, to the demystification of colonial curiosity is complex. This complexity is missed when some commentators endorse Michel Foucault’s complaint that philosophy incriminated curiosity. Foucault famously condensed philosophy’s position on curiosity: “curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science” [16] (p. 325). I have argued elsewhere [17] why this is a half-truth and an oversimplified narrative of curiosity’s philosophical record. Thus, what I would highlight here is that, with the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche (e.g., [18]), Sigmund Freud (in his more philosophical essays, e.g., [19] (pp. 27–30)) and Martin Heidegger [20] (pp. 215–217), most modern thought depoliticized and approved rather than stigmatized curiosity, especially when it naturalized it as a psychological motivation toward knowledge and capacity conducive to learning. Contra Foucault’s assertion [16], although most modern philosophy bypassed curiosity, the modern philosophy that discussed curiosity considered it a virtue [17]. “Where it has garnered philosophical interest, curiosity has most often been understood as a question of ethics or epistemology” [1] (p. 2). It was granted epistemic value and was hardly associated with politics. In fact, the modern normative treatment of curiosity is full of intricacies, ambiguities and negative or positive references to curiosity [17]. Moreover, the philosophical outlook on curiosity was also complex before Christianity, and, sadly, is still neglected. Ancient philosophy generally praised curiosity qua desire for knowledge and qua wonder (which, later, in Medieval times, became the dialectical “other” of curiosity).5 However, some ancient philosophers and poets condemned the curiosity that was termed polypragmosyne, namely, the colonial collective curiosity that propelled one state’s expansionist meddling into the affairs of another [9,17]. Some ancient sources criticized polypragmosyne and contrasted to it apragmosyne, a well-meant withdrawal from such interest in others. They regarded apragmosyne as polypragmosyne’s dialectical “other” [9]. Apragmosyne denoted the politically appropriate and desirable epistemic restraint that propelled justice and a positive quietude (hesychazein). Despite its fascination with antiquity, Western philosophy totally, and probably conveniently, overlooked ancient Greek political–philosophical condemnations of polypragmosyne and the anti-colonial tone of apragmosyne.

A caveat here: I have not claimed that the ancient tackling of curiosity that I have retrieved, in previous work, proves curiosity to be inherently or inescapably complicit in patriarchy and imperialism. Nor have I assumed that endorsing some epistemic restraint relieves us from grappling with politics. I have only illustrated that a helpful critical awareness of curiosity’s colonial politics antedates current theoretical mainstream positions and restraint occasionally has better politics than curiosity and could operate correctively in a complex interplay with curiosity for avoiding bad politics. I have unveiled the ignored story of polypragmosyne/apragmosyne and complicated the one-sided narratives that depoliticize and normativize curiosity in unqualified ways. Curiosity qua polypragmosyne represents a collective curiosity of bad politics that gives us reasons not to idealize curiosity in an unqualified and uncritical manner. In pointing this out, I am not incriminating curiosity wholesale. I only emphasize the ethico-political ambiguities of epistemic notions. That I problematize the unqualified and uncritical welcome of curiosity reveals that I consider a qualified and critical account of these notions possible and important for contemporary democratic politics.

In Roman times, philosophy bypassed ancient Greek politicizations of curiosity and restraint. In the passage from medieval to modern times, most philosophers elevated epistemic curiosity to a virtue of the person. This philosophical epistemicization, individualization and depoliticization of curiosity made common cause with modern scientific discourses. Philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Hume and Thomas Hobbes praised epistemic curiosity and condemned the curiosity that did not suit their ideals or political purposes [9,12]. As mentioned above, a major exception to such philosophizing about curiosity was Nietzsche’s agonistic inquiry into curiosity. Nietzsche considered curiosity a socio-political rather than merely epistemic or moral notion. He associated it with “a struggle between formations of power and investments of value” [1] (p. 52) and between life-affirming and life-negating forces [1] (p. 17).6 Another modern source that associated curiosity with power beyond mere knowledge acquisition was Freud’s psychoanalysis [19,21]. Freud rejected the modern assumption that curiosity is natural and disinterested yet maintained the modern assumption that there exists a drive/instinct to look and to know (Schau- und Wisstrieb) [21]. He valorized epistemic curiosity as sublimation rather than a natural desire for knowledge, a sublimation motivated by practical (not intellectual) concerns: for instance, a child becomes curious about a new-born sibling because of the new power relations within the family that come along and affect the child’s own familial position [21]. Unlike Freud, who politicized curiosity without emphasizing undesirable operations, Martin Heidegger expressed strong suspicion of curiosity’s complicities. Heidegger saw in curiosity “an inauthentic form of Dasein’s relation to knowledge” [14] (p. 297). Especially within the Heideggerian philosophical lineage, the dangerous common cause of curiosity, technology and science was disclosed but primarily from an ontological rather than directly political perspective. Thus, very briefly and indicatively, we see that some modern thought had opened paths for other human sciences to interrogate accounts of scientific curiosity, acknowledge curiosity’s political character and scrutinize its political operations.

The drift of philosophy’s outlook on curiosity into Nietzsche’s, Freud’s and Heidegger’s orbit marked the postmodern discussion of the notion. Like Nietzsche, Foucault conceived of two opposing political forces of curiosity: curiosity may be institutionalized in established power relations or mobilized through resistance [1] (p. 17). Foucault did not analyze curiosity head-on but critiqued the institutionally sanctioned will to knowledge while occasionally praising the resistant will to truth [17]. Nevertheless, he greatly contributed to postmodern explorations of curiosity’s politics. He indicated how curiosity has “been institutionalized in specific architectures, geographies and temporal junctions and how has resistance developed in response”, through specific practices and social formations [1] (p. 75). Concerning Freud’s legacy, post-Freudian psychoanalysis did not pursue a further, head-on elaboration on the notion of curiosity and its politics: “curiosity has been the subject of limited scrutiny in psychoanalysis” [22] (p. 868). Indirectly, however, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, e.g., Jacques Lacan’s, radicalized Freud’s account of curiosity qua sublimation by discussing less favorably the operations of the scopic drive. Both infantile and scientific curiosity may be exposed as scopophilic and voyeuristic. Postmodern psychoanalysis, especially the feminist post-Lacanian strand, gives a negative political spin to the pleasures of looking at, knowing and objectifying the world. Moreover, psychoanalysis increasingly becomes a “powerful theory for scrutinizing colonial discourses” and for revealing “the unconscious mechanisms of the settler’s demands, describing how institutions preserve and conceal violences of settling and obstruct decolonial efforts” [23] (p. 31). Thus, potentially, psychoanalysis constitutes fertile ground for head-on engagements with curiosity’s doubly political character, namely, the role that it plays in social structures and distributions of power and curiosity’s regulation by political outlooks on the world and the human. Lastly, Heidegger’s critique of curiosity and psychoanalytic critiques of the scopic drive underpinned much of Derrida’s [14] own deconstruction of autopsic and therapeutic modes of curiosity. Derrida’s critique of the curiosity that serves the aim of mastery implicitly assumes the possibility of a deconstructive curiosity, thus strengthening the view that curiosity is ambiguous and complex. A deconstructive curiosity resists the autopsic mode “by not allowing a clean dissection of terms” and challenges “the therapeutic by compromising the clean confinements of terms” [1] (p. 101).

However, none of these thinkers or their postmodern followers unpacked the implications of curiosity’s ambiguities for a philosophy of democracy and for the practice of democratic politics. Even the acknowledged ambiguities strike me as somewhat Manichean reflections of dichotomous reasoning: here is an institutionalized, hardened and reified curiosity and there is a resistant and transformative one. On the one side, a sovereign curiosity; on the other side, a deconstructive and “transgressive curiosity”. The good curiosity is demanding and dangerous: it is collective rather than individual, “it asks forbidden, uncomfortable questions” [1] (p. 61) and “sets us free” (p. 64). Such neat classifications worry me. Though I agree that curiosity has the doubleness of acting either as “a technique of resistance” or “as a tool of institutionalized power” [1] (p. 74), embedding in it a possibly creative tension, I doubt that resistant curiosity is just collective (it can equally be individual); collective resistant curiosity should be normativized without one’s being first curious about what it is thus resisted and asking forbidden, uncomfortable questions is per se a sign of good curiosity, regardless of the content of the questions asked, who or what forbids them, how and for what reasons. Nor are the distinctions of good and bad curiosity as neat and clear as they are made to appear when the curiosity of Foucauldians and Derrideans is praised as per se redemptive because of its rupture with any fixity of meaning, regardless of what it is resistant to. Finally, what is still decisively operative and causes me concern is the postmodern valorization of the premodifiers “resistant” and “transformative”; it worries me that it reproduces the practice of using normativized premodifiers for singling out the “properly” or “desirably” curious self. It does so in a way that foregrounds and forecloses the privileged or disparaged discourse prior to any deliberation on the content of what passes, and why, for resistant, desirable or transformative.

To sum up, postmodern philosophy and human sciences created a more propitious climate for politicizing curiosity, for also theorizing it as collective and for connecting it with democratic political theory. However, the latter steps have not yet been taken. When politicized, curiosity remains confined to decolonial, deconstructive projects, to the neglect of more reconstructive agendas of what epistemic “affects”7 and what kinds of averted gaze might be more relevant to the complexities and challenges of democracy. With the aforementioned as a backdrop, I argue next that the scholarly scope on curiosity (and epistemic restraint) should be enlarged to also cover collective and group-differentiated rather than just individual curiosity.

3. Collective and Group-Differentiated Curiosity

Some modern and many postmodern philosophies have re-politicized the discourse on (un)desired knowledge. However, contemporary sources (with exceptions such as Zurn’s8 [1] and Phillips’ [6] path-breaking works) still explore curiosity as a matter of the individual. By contrast, as explained in the previous section, some ancient Greek philosophy critiqued collective curiosity’s politics. It condemned the polypragmosyne that propelled the city-state to meddle into the affairs of other cities, pursue faddish innovation (neoterizein) regardless of the value of the new and seek profitable conquest. Polypragmosyne could be individual (characterizing the “[hu]man of action”), but it could also be collective, characterizing even expansionist city-states.9 Unlike other philosophies (e.g., medieval and modern), ancient Greek philosophy challenged colonial curiosity and regarded individual or collective apragmosyne (anti-colonial epistemic restraint), and not wonder, as a preferable alternative. Ancient engagements with the politics of curiosity and restraint subsided from Roman times onwards, giving way to individualizing, moralistic and, later, in modernity, to scientistic treatments of curiosity and restraint.

Concerning politicizations that overlook collective curiosity, Zurn argues that Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida implicitly privilege “the solitary figure as bearer of resistant curiosity”. Despite their socio-political standpoint, “their characterizations of resistant curiosity in particular are implicitly individualistic” [1] (p. 147). It is most revealing to consider who incarnates the commendably curious in these philosophies. The figures of resistant curiosity are for Nietzsche, himself, his ideal reader and the free spirit of the future; for Foucault, himself, the parrhesiastes and the intellectual; and for Derrida, himself, his cat and some emblematic literary characters. In all cases, collective curiosity is missing [1] (pp. 131–132). Against this exclusive attention to individual and solitary curiosity that these philosophers have paid, Zurn fleshes out the collective curiosity of political resistance movements to “illuminate the under-theorized sociality of curiosity”, the collective and communal curiosity that is not “the isolated characteristic of a genius or a rebel” [1] (p. 145). Likewise, Phillips [6] theorizes the sociable curiosity that prompts either knowing about others (empathetic curiosity) or knowing with others (relational curiosity) or both.

However, I see a yet unnoticed risk for democratic politics in the aforementioned canonical philosophies (Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida). The risk is of being master discourses that not just emphasize individual curiosity but implicitly elevate the master to an avatar of good (resistant, transformative) curiosity and his disciples to paradigmatic curious learners while limiting their curiosity to what the master is curious about. Arguably, it often feels as if all it takes for becoming a good curious social agent is to be versed in Foucauldian or Derridean parlance. A group-differentiated, rather than generally collective,10 curiosity may thus emerge, though one which is channeled into the themes that the master narratives prioritize. This implicit, possible account of the “good” curiosity of one group of people is accompanied with the possibility of stigmatizing collective curiosities (of other groups) about questions that master discourses or official narratives have not authorized as pertinent. Ironically, a taxonomic curiosity is thus reaffirmed. The related taxonomy rigidly segregates those groups whose curiosity is resistant or transformative and therefore “healthy” and the “others”, whose curiosity is regressive, “anti-” (anti-West, anti-science, anti-climate, anti-state, anti-vax, etc.) and leads them to inappropriate cares and questions.

Another caveat here: the previous critical point is no relativist defense of just any collective/group-differentiated curiosity. Nor does it tolerate or condone populist hate speech and criminal acts. Some populist curiosity certainly expresses the concerns of anti-democratic forces that claim and appropriate democratic values only when their own communicative power is at stake or when their curiosity is policed. However, neat distinctions of “goodies” and “baddies” produce ossified categories of progressively and regressively (in)curious groups. Any question may then be disparaged just because it was voiced by a member of a “regressive”, “anti-something” group. Against this I argue that, admittedly, as part of the explorative process concerning a case’s facts, it may occasionally be enlightening to consider who says something and with what intentions; but this should not have the final word in the democratic deliberative process. More decisive should be the validity of the argument (or the plausibility of the question), not who makes the argument (or who poses the question). Such a principle helps us avoid rigid demarcations of legitimate curiosity that operate on grounds of group-differentiation and concomitant exclusions. Practically, it helps avoid the following tendency that Christophe Guilluy [25] chastises: the progressive, anti-populist, anti-nationalist and anti-fascist rhetoric that dominant élites employ sometimes tarnishes as reactionary even the rational, just and democratic worries of citizens, especially of the lower classes. To push this further, the “othered” collective/group-specific curiosity of such “others” becomes wholesale incriminated. These “others” then become themselves “curiosities” in the eyes of the “progressive”; they become the “monstrous” of our times, the glaring “pathologies” that are feared and demonized. Their questions are conceded to them as their “turf” and are excluded from “our” scope and the caliber of “our” curiosity.11 We then feel legitimized to exert epistemic restraint (the politics of which we simultaneously amplify and miss) on such questions. Instead of evoking a resistant epistemic restraint, this lack of curiosity becomes an institutionalized and regressive force that deters people from asking certain questions only because such questions preoccupy certain “others”. This harms the public sphere and solidifies democratic deficits. There will be more on it in the next section.

Apart from the risk of taxonomizing curiosity’s “goodies” and “baddies”, there is also the risk of dichotomizing individual and collective curiosity. Both may operate in synergy and productive tension. For example, sometimes, one person’s imagination12 may lead to asking new questions, making new connections and becoming more inquisitive, with the consequence of redirecting the curiosity of the person’s peers, field, community, etc., to yet unexplored issues. Or, the varying cultivation of imagination by a collectivity may shape the inquisitiveness of the individual members. Evidently, the relationship of curiosity with other epistemic notions, such as imagination, intellectual courage, etc., is affected by collective or individual modalities of all these epistemic notions in ways that need to be further researched away from dichotomies in the future. Collective curiosity has been philosophically neglected, and this should be changed, yet not through an “individual versus collective” binary opposition. Though Zurn does not spell out this concern, much of his material helps us complicate this opposition. For instance, “many of the architectures of individual curiosity are traceable on the collective scale—e.g., collecting information, problematizing,” etc. [1] (p. 147). Intricacies of individual and collective curiosity should be further explored by related humanities research. “In one sense, collective curiosity is simply an expansion and intensification of individual curiosity on a mass social scale. In another sense, collective curiosity is not only quantitatively but qualitatively different from individual curiosity” [1] (p. 147). Thus, like Zurn, I emphasize the complexities of the relationship between the solitary and the communal. However, I add that, to prepare the categories of individual and collective curiosity for better use in democratic theory and practice, we should mediate them with the category of group-differentiated curiosity. I agree that collective curiosity “highlights the impossibility of disambiguating what is me from what is before me, after me, through me”, etc. These already constrain, disrupt and entangle “‘my curiosity.’ Individual curiosity is always already multiple—such that ‘my curiosity’ is never fully or finally ‘mine’” [1] (p. 148). To press Zurn’s claim further, I suggest, therefore, that curiosity is multiple precisely because the “I” consists of multiple identities that are group-differentiated. Their degree of collectiveness goes up to ever further remote circles of belonging.13 Questions such as the following I consider important for philosophical investigations of collective curiosity: “how might collective curiosities differ from each other, between social centers and social margins” or “between resistant and institutionalized contexts” [1] (p. 147)? Curiosity is not just simply collective; it is also group-differentiated.14 It can be of the whole society (even of the whole world) but also of society’s particular collectivities. In fact, curiosity may even be modulated by field [24]. Allegiance to a specific group affects the range of excited curiosity15 and so does the global interconnectivity that also demarcates what passes for appropriate inquisitiveness, regulates the filter of transparency and adjusts the lens of visibility accordingly.

Hence, hereafter I use “collective” as a shortcut that also covers the “group-differentiated” without obscuring that the group-differentiated is not reducible to the “social” or “global” collective. What kind of collective curiosity is dominant in one’s society and what this curiosity has already made visible is crucially important for individual and group-differentiated curiosity. It frames and affects them deeply. However, as Kalli Drousioti [27] pertinently argues, particularist identities are not homogeneous; e.g., a scientific identity does not compel that all scientists or scientifically minded people will have the same stance toward, say, COVID-19 vaccination. Collective curiosity becomes shaped and “managed” when state mechanisms, social norms, media (social or other) and public opinion predetermine subjects, objects and proper sources of learning. Nevertheless, the directionality of curiosity is affected by many factors. Thus, any curiosity is dynamic and mobile: “trajectories of individual curiosity can certainly be changed by collective curiosity and vice versa” [1] (p. 148).

I agree with Zurn that “if political theory is to adequately engage with resistance movements, it is critical that collective curiosity be theorized philosophically” [1] (p. 146). However, against standard theoretical accounts of political curiosity, and departing somewhat from Zurn’s emphases, I have already implied that curiosity is collective not only in the affirmative sense that it acquires when associated with resistance movements. Colonial curiosity (e.g., ancient polypragmosyne and modern imperial curiosity) has also been collective. Thus, I suggest that not just resistant curiosity but also any collective curiosity/restraint and related, complex and ambiguous politics should be studied. Another neglected terrain in connection to which collective curiosity/restraint could be investigated is that of democratic “ideal theory” and normativity. That is, curiosity/restraint could be examined in descriptive–empirical studies of how the lifeworld, its demos, relates to knowledge as well as in critical–normative studies of democratic vision. The next section deals with the democratic “why” of such investigations.

4. Why Democracy Needs Curiosity and Vice Versa

Explorations of curiosity are important for a democracy that avoids sliding into undesirable alternatives (and their practices); honors its deliberative normativity; encourages the political engagement of all demos; and makes room for searching questions about truth and justice. The following paragraphs aim to support this claim.

Derrida [5] (p. 130) emphasized the “always indisputable lack of adequation between the ‘idea of democracy’ and what occurs in reality under that name”. Despite democracy’s perennial ambiguity and the gap between ideality and reality that Derrida considers irreducible, he clings “to this old noun democracy”. For him, the idea of democracy, the “democracy-to-come”, “governs the most concrete urgency, here and now”. He considers it “the only word for a political regime that, because it carries conceptually the dimension of inadequation and the to-come, declares both its historicity and its perfectibility”. Democracy authorizes us publicly to invoke historicity and perfectibility “in order to criticize the current state of any so-called democracy” [5] (p. 130). In my opinion, crucial for our willingness and readiness to criticize the current state of so-called democracies is what we are (in)curious to know and what is silenced or overlooked. To criticize their lifeworld, citizens need inter alia the curiosity that mobilizes them to collect “information about unjust conditions”; problematize “an oppressive institution”; and imagine “a future of greater justice and peace” [1] (p. 128). Some curiosity uncovers stories that official narratives and privileged media suppress [1] (p. 133). I add that citizens also need the passion for justice that mobilizes such a curiosity. It is precisely these operations of curiosity that democracy’s opposite, the totalitarian state, obstructs. Totalitarian societies suppress the curiosity that does not suit their purposes.

Totalitarianism severely limits “publicly expressed perspectives” and destroys the deliberative character of public space [28] (p. 43). In totalitarian states, people are like “marbles on a table”, similar “and yet unconnected”; “the slightest tilt of the table” suffices to move them “in the same direction”. People become “unconnected or isolated individuals” who should not share “the content of their freedom, but rather be restricted to receiving this from the state” [28] (p. 43).16 The ideal of totalitarianism “is a populous that thinks, acts and, hence, discloses its world according to a limited number of state-approved projects”, while assuming that the “world cannot offer any evidence countering the claims of the state”. In totalitarianism, freedom “operates within a limited set of options, each of which, when enacted, confirms the others in disclosing a single reality, one with no evident alternatives” [28] (p. 43).

“Inconvenient” sources, information and opinions are downplayed or even removed from public view, and the curiosity that would have driven global publics to such sources is incriminated and suppressed. A collective epistemic restraint is cultivated, one that serves covering up, instead of discovering and uncovering uncomfortable possibilities or knowledge. In its Greek, non-religious etymology, the apocalyptic means “uncovering” and could be made to conceptualize people’s desire for the revelatory and its importance for the democratic function of society. Even distortions of the apocalyptic are revelatory of possible democratic deficits; even conspiracy theories, if seen beyond a moralist prism, reflect a struggle for visibility, of raising the obscure to plain light. Thus, even the curiosity that is regressive may indirectly be revealing of our “democratic” societies’ failures to inspire trust in their transparency. Even this curiosity may be a key analytical category of democratic social theory. If, as earlier established, curiosity, either politically positive or negative, is also collective and group-differentiated, then it should have space in actual debates, in real life and in theories exploring polities and bodies-politic.

However, gaslighting is no exclusive practice of the glaringly pathological -isms that are typically singled out in current discourses on what menaces democracy. Using invented or alternative facts to persuade people that what they see and hear is not real, is, unfortunately, not the exclusive province of populism and nationalism; it can be of subtler –isms that, because they enjoy social currency, their bad politics and injustices remain invisible. Truth-eroders may even operate in discourses that pass for democratic and progressive.17 This is most alarming in a democracy. Unlike the totalitarian society, which flourishes through inter alia a mixture of policed curiosity and dictated epistemic restraint, a democracy needs an open, critical and self-reflective dialogue on how it handles public curiosity and restraint and scholarly research on the intricacies of curiosity and restraint. Democracies should avoid what encourages epistemic forms of oppression. In such democracies, public debates would include, instead of silencing, the “idiosyncratically” curious view. And they should include it at its best, not in argumentatively weak, unreasonable or caricatured versions that make things easy for the dominant view to prevail while simply reproducing democratic deficits and exclusions.

Democratic deliberative processes should involve mutual reason-giving, which implies that each participant in dialogue “take seriously new evidence and arguments, new interpretations of old evidence and arguments” and even the reason-giving of opponents or reasons that may have been rejected in the past [7] (p. 165). In interpreting the demand to “take seriously”, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson emphasize inter alia the cultivation of “personal dispositions (such as open-mindedness and mutual respect)” [7] (p. 165); however, they say nothing about (in)curiosity. In my view, what Gutmann and Thompson bypass is that being curious about the possible evidence of the other’s claim is a paramount sign of taking the other seriously and of being truly open-minded. Still, I would not advance an oversimplified curiosity. The curiosity that I recommend as a key analytical concept should be viewed in its complexities and ambiguities. For instance, occasionally, curiosity and open-mindedness may reflect gullibility, especially when an issue is beyond evidence or evidence is not immediately available. Unqualified open-mindedness and curiosity may lead to controversializing principles that should remain uncontroversial and non-negotiable.18 Since not all paradigmatic certainties can be problematized and discussed at once, sometimes epistemic restraint may have better political operations. Yet, this cannot be set in advance and itself requires democratic public debate, scholarly research and phronetic judgment.

As “a dynamic conception of political justification, in which provisionality—openness to change over time—is an essential feature of any justifiable principles” [7] (p. 165), democratic deliberation needs, I claim, the ethic of perseverance (Alain Badiou’s well-known notion) that is presupposed, in my view, for sustaining an unrelenting curiosity where others see a “case closed”. Provisionality means that “citizens and their accountable representatives should continue to test their own political views, seeking forums in which their views can be challenged, and keeping open the possibility of their revision or even rejection” [7] (p. 165). However, I fear that, if interlocutors lack curiosity, provisionality may simply postpone the problem of justification to an uncertain future of recurrent and unvaried deliberative processes. Hence my claim that curiosity is strikingly missing from theories of deliberative democracy (e.g., such as Gutmann’s and Thompson’s). A qualified curiosity enhances (though in no way ensures) the possibilities of a less sterile (already predetermined, repetitive) dialogue. Moreover, if a complex interplay of collective curiosity, restraint and justice is missing, the citizens will continue to test their views in self-assertive ways, seeking the “easy”, caricatured opponents and rendering the possibility of change a vague prospect that merely reflects well on the citizens’ self-image as open-minded and progressive “democrats”.

If “curiosity can fetishize and objectify disempowered people” as well as “awaken and mobilize” [1] (p. 2), then it is crucial that its operations be studied concerning how they affect democracy. The scene of curiosity is a stage of struggle “between warring forces that practice curiosity by different means and toward different ends” [1] (p. 148). To my knowledge, theories of democratic agonistics that follow Laclau and Mouffe [29] have so far overlooked the curiosity arena. Within democracies, I argue, there are under-studied struggles concerning what curiosity passes for legitimate and who is legitimized as a commendably curious subject. Discursively, such legitimizations are carried out inter alia through premodifiers (e.g., “regressive”, “idle”, “transformative”, etc.) of curiosity. A challenge of pluralism and openness for a truly democratic society is a critical reflection on what curiosity our theoretical premodifiers allocate and concede to what people. Curiosity “plays a distinctive role in the ways social structures are built and understood, rebuilt and resignified” [1] (p. 148). True, but, along with epistemic restraint, curiosity is political in a double sense: in its role in social structures and distributions of power but also in its being a product of political outlooks on the world and the human. Curiosity is not just a passion, a primary affect that motivates towards knowledge. It is itself excited by passion (pathos) invested in issues that we consider important and worthy of investing energies in, often to the point of cathected desire. Curiosity is mobilized by things that have moved us. Beneath curiosity there lie the pathos and apathy that constitute one of democracy’s major challenges.19 A lack of pathos keeps curiosity dormant. Impassioned identifications, ideologies, polemics and single-focused perspectives drive curiosity and regulate the dose of pathos and apathy that motivates people to be curious about one thing and incurious about another.

(In)curiosity is affected by a complex interplay of pathos, apathy and their politics. Thus, (in)curiosity about public life may be amongst the things that differentiate the denizen from the citizen. Denizens’ incuriosity indicates an absence of involvement and an apathy that should not be treated lightly or pathologized as faulty individual psychology. It comes from complex socio-political and existential factors of one’s positioning. Concerning pathos, democratic theory, critical theory and the humanities generally could utilize works such as Zurn’s on the collective curiosity of resistance movements as well as Huysmans’s [2] critique of contemporary theory’s exaggerated reliance on the category of resistance. But, I add, theorists, citizens and researchers should also become curious about questions of apathy: what might explain “the gross underrepresentation of the working classes in social movements today” [25] (p. 46)? How does the political disengagement of people relate to their having, for many years, felt that they are no longer “represented by their elected officials, by unions, or by the media”? Why are these same people disappearing from the major global cities (p. 46), retreating to affordable margins and peripheries of the world that ensure for the “cosmopolitan” élites the growing invisibility of these very same people? The distinction between institutional and resistant curiosity is too rigid to allow for the visibility of these people and to explain these people’s literal (physical) and figurative (epistemic) retreat, namely, their epistemico-political restraint. At least in some European countries, “the failure to enlist the support of the most vulnerable members of society (the poor and chronically unemployed, undocumented immigrants, and so on)” and “the co-optation of popular demonstrations by the most secure members of society” show that “social protest movements no longer address the concerns of a majority” of the population [25] (p. 47). Democracy-to-come needs our curiosity concerning such issues too. “It is important to ask if there is more to democracy than the institutional eyes see” [2] (p. 75) and, I add, than what the eyes focused on institutions may see. Curiosity about what lies beyond clearly defined institutional mechanisms and their “hierarchical organization of visibility” (p. 76) heightens one’s consciousness of democratic challenges.

An expanded scope on curiosity/restraint should also cover, I argue, issues that are currently too controversial or too risky for one’s academic reputation20 and not only issues that ensure for the researcher academic distinction and for the activist positive visibility. There are taboo topics conveniently attributed to regressive social forces (e.g., far-right, conspiracists, Trumpism, postapocalyptic loonies, etc.). The lack of related curiosity ensured that even undemocratic measures such as forced vaccinations (or felt as forced because low classes or immigrants could not exert free choice about them without major personal cost) attracted no scholarly discontent and contestation.21 Another example of what remains beyond the scope of elitist curiosity and about what questions the desire for knowledge gets restrained may be drawn from Christophe Guilluy: “today’s bourgeoisie is no less disingenuous “than yesterday’s. It insists on the need to emancipate the poor and help immigrants, but its own lifestyle and standard of living are closely tied to keeping these same people in their place” [25] (p. 45). This is “conveniently obscured by substituting a sanctimonious appeal to cultural differences for the unpleasant reality of class antagonism. The delicate question of who benefits from immigration is very seldom raised, the taboo subject of social and cultural domination never” [25] (p. 45). Noticing more “material” and more demanding ethical obligations would not diminish the importance of combating verbal violence, xenophobia and all the other pathologies that, being glaring, are easily detected and chastised (especially when voiced by “backward” “anti-” groups of all kinds). On the contrary, it would add to this task another epistemic and political responsibility: to remember that, unlike other regimes, as Derrida most interestingly asserts, democracy’s historicity and perfectibility is “essentially aporetic” [5] (p. 139). I interpret this as a dependence of democracy’s qualities on the question mark and on how certain questions, such as Guilluy’s, for instance, are handled within it.

For the sake of democracy-to-come, democratic vision (doubly meant as an aspiration/dream and eye-sight) must be enlarged [31]. Furthermore, to have political effects, curiosity requires protest, since protest brings to the fore neglected issues and excites the curiosity of the uninvolved. Protest becomes “a tool to grip public attention, throw the status quo into attention” [1] (p. 133). However, we may learn not only from the curiosity of resistant and welcomed movements but also, and this may seem a scandalous claim (then again, one of the unparalleled merits of democracy is its being deep-down scandalous), from movements that infuriate us, and, as critical theorists, we should study them not moralistically but socio-politically. Finally, I see the prospect of challenging “the colonial discourse of human exceptionalism by extending the democratization of people to include environmental bodies within their global context, replacing hierarchies with collectivities to reveal humanism’s underrepresented others” [15] (p. 1), as one also depending on appropriate political curiosity/restraint. Different historicizations and politicizations of the curious Eye/I and the curiosity about the world must be examined. A critical–democratic/transformative vision requires different foci of curiosity in synergy and tension.

In a democracy, even a most scandalously self-reflective question is permitted: should we not be curious about whether democracy as such is a surpassed ideal thematized in Greek antiquity that may not be suitable to contemporary societies? But what already gives an answer favorable to democracy is that, unlike other regimes, it is democracy and its settings that permit one to raise this very question. In other words, what makes the asking of this question possible, in the first place, is the freedom of critical thought and curiosity that democracy makes possible. It is evident, then, that curiosity needs democracy, just as democracy needs curiosity. Democracy is non-circumventible (to adapt Karl-Otto Apel [32]) when it comes to accommodating normative presuppositions (equality, freedom, co-responsibility, justice) of asking questions, being curious and applying restraint. Therefore, democracy is a condition of curiosity, as much as curiosity is also a condition of a democracy worthy of the name.

5. Conclusions

I have argued that, as a theory and as a way of life, democracy needs curiosity and vice versa. Within deliberative democratic paradigms, democratic deliberation and legitimation depend on the inclusion of the people’s views, or of their representatives, in the decision-making processes. If views are shaped by what passes for truth and knowledge then many democratic deficits and crises may relate to the degree to and manner in which curiosity and restraint operate in shaping political views. The so under-studied relationship of collective and group-differentiated curiosity and democracy may have great ethico-political significance for a world of unchallenged official narratives, post-truth, half-truths, fake news and “alternative facts” phenomena. Critical theory and democratic philosophical theories that study the body-politic in its qualities, prospects, complicities and deficits may be enriched through attention to curiosity. Simultaneously, discourses on curiosity may be invigorated by the attention to the politics of curiosity and epistemic restraint while the curiosity of global publics may get more fruitfully excited within a context of democracy that may approximate the ideal of a democracy-to-come.