Alex Boisvert retweetledi
I want to quit my job and work on my book, Wonderism, full-time. Below is my application to a popular online grant. If this sounds of value to you, and you have the means to support me, please do reach out. If not, please consider reposting.
Q. What is your story?
I am a writer interested in the connection between reason and aesthetics. I am, in a sense, that combination personified. In school—like so many students in state education—I was faced with the choice between science on the one hand and art on the other. Between logic, laboratories, and stable career prospects; against literature, libraries, and much less of that. They are immiscible fluids, oil and water, we are told, one part passion and the other part rigour, as likely to mingle as diesel in lemonade. But I wanted to do both. I wanted to write about reason and write about it beautifully. This is, I think, far more faithful to the spirit of science than lab coats and calculators; reason as a purely cerebral process is a largely modern misconception. It is intimate, delicate, romantic. How could knowing the world be any different? Karl Popper, the foremost epistemologist of the 20th century, was right when he said that ‘Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.’ This has been, and remains to this day, my guiding inspiration.
After school, I studied geology at University College London. There I read John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World”. A journalist, not a geologist, McPhee wrote personally about a subject that appeared most impersonal. He had wondered, as a child, not merely what brought the placer gold from the Yukon mountains down into the rivers that divided them, but, far more deeply, “what had put the gold in the mountain to begin with?” This was intended both literally (orogenic gold deposition is mostly the result of hydrothermal alteration of the surrounding fabric rock) and metaphorically (how can beauty inspire us to know?) I took both meanings to heart, and after graduating, moved to Australia to work as a mining geologist. This might appear strange for a writer most interested in art. But it is, in truth, a great source of inspiration for an aesthetic theory in constant contact with the physical sciences. Gold, I have learned, borders quartz; and beauty, I am confident, is a concrete part of this world.
Outside of my academic and professional pursuits, I am interested in philosophy, popular science, science fiction, poetry, and writing. I was inspired by the books of David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf and consider myself an optimist in his style: problems are inevitable; they are soluble; people are both fallible and improvable; there is no inherent limit to the amount of progress we can make through conjecture, criticism, reason, and knowledge.
Q. What is your project?
I have suggested that the separations between reason and feeling are manufactured and, inevitably, false. I have also outlined the problem as precisely that clash (or family of clashes): reason/feeling, thought/passion, logic/instinct, sense/sensibility; their various applications: science/art, industry/nature, technology/biology, synthetic/organic; and other related divides: materialism/spiritualism, naturalism/supernaturalism, utility/beauty, function/form… These proposed dichotomies (and others) are a modern deconstruction of an older dispute: between The Enlightenment of the 18th century (representing reason and science); and Romanticism of the 19th century (representing emotion and art). Today, this schism has exceeded conventional wisdom and has been ossified into dogma; it has been codified into equally extensive, exhaustive, and at times exhausting slogans: “head vs heart”, “hot vs cold”, “the rider and the elephant”, “left brain and right brain”, “type 1 and type 2 thinking”. The result is to excise meaning, feeling, inspiration and significance from material, mechanical, technological progress; and to fuse it inseparably to mystical, irrational, primitivist stasis. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. This is the problem I am trying to solve.
My proposed solution is a new philosophy. Wonderism.
There are two meanings to the word wonder: wondering and wonderment. The former is curiosity, imagination, and reasoning in the face of mystery. The latter is astonishment, adoration, and inspiration in the light of discovery. This simple polysemy contains within it every facet of human thought and every feature of the problem described.
I want to write a book. Called Wonderism.
A rough-sketch outline is as follows.
PREFACE (“What put the gold in the mountains?”)
This will be a personal introduction to myself and my relationship to both science and the arts.
INTRODUCTION (“In Wonder It Began”)
This will be an investigation into the history and nature of the concept of wonder. The Greeks called it “Thauma”. Indeed, Plato himself said that all philosophy begins and ends in this unified concept. (Popper would later go on to say: “What matters is neither methods nor techniques—nothing but a sensitiveness to problems, and a consuming passion for them; or as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.) And the philosophical divide between Plato’s spiritualism and Aristotle’s materialism can be viewed as the progenitor of the problem as described.
BOOK 1: An Ode to Inspiration (“Catching Fire”)
This chapter will be a series of short stories exploring the process of inspiration and using the central icons of fire and flight. The first bird, first campfire, first balloon flight, first stone placed at the foot of The Statue of Liberty, first SpaceX rocket catch. All are literal and spiritual applications of “catching fire” to mean both ignition and inspiration. This will be a modern promethean epic told in short form.
BOOK 2: A Comparative History of Enlightenment and Romanticism (“Songs of Lightness and of Love”)
This chapter will be a comparison of The Enlightenment and Romanticism, focusing on their epistemologies, their unification under Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, and its own elevation into Wonderism.
BOOK 3: Terrorism (“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”)
This chapter will explore the erroneous applications of wonder. The opposite of wondering is boredom. And the opposite of wonderment is terror. You can plot this on a "political compass”-style graph to yield four quadrants: Wonderism, Scientism, Terrorism, Mysticism. The title is taken from Goya’s famous inscription and his statement: "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders". It will cover religious irrationality, scientific and other secular authoritarianism, sophistry, slavery, and war.
BOOK 4: Art (“The Language of Wonder”)
This chapter will cover art as the key mode of communicating emotions. It will focus on semiotics, the philosophy of symbols, and art as an alternative to language. It will also explore “the great un-mystery” of art (namely beauty) and aim to debunk various fallacies surrounding it. Finally, it will outline some tenets of a Wonderist style, prose in the immediate, but all forms more generally. As I have explained above, I want to “Wonderise” the mundane through aesthetics. This is one of the core tenets of the work: namely that, in order to communicate well, one must not merely say the thing but sing it also. I intend to do both.
BOOK 5: A Guide to Radical Humanism (“Man the More”)
This chapter takes its title from an inversion of Byron (“I love not man the less, but nature more”). It aims to be an optimistic tour-de-force in the Deutschian tradition: people are universal, the glory of the universe.
The remaining material is undesignated pending structural decisions. It includes an aesthetic and heroic theory of romance (i.e. person to person relationship; love); a list of my picks for the modern wonders of the world; the Wonderist manifesto; and more.
I am currently employed full-time at a salt mine. The work is physically demanding and doesn’t leave much time for research. I would use any support as a means to quit my job and work on the book full-time, systematising my research, developing the philosophy, and accelerating the writing process for a 2026 first-draft. I would hope, with your sponsorship, to make the new year my very own “annus mirabilis”.
A year of wonders.
English
