I dream of a new age of curiosity

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “Care”; it evokes the Care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of Curiosity.

Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980.

https://mappingthemarvellous.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/i-dream-of-a-new-age-of-curiosity/