Notice the power Peirce describes, the way in which this inquiry takes the learner on a wild ride to find a way to resolve the disharmony! Peirce describes this inquiry, this learning process, like an adventure that one almost hopes won’t end for the joy of the journey. Yet it is a journey we desperately want to complete because of the drive for understanding within us. It is this kind of learning that seems to take us beyond the bounds of time so we aren’t looking for ways to distract ourselves until the sermon is over. It is this kind of internally motivated learning we long to see when we stand to preach!

Starting with a puzzle

 

So where does this curiosity, this wonder, come from? What awakens this desire for learning? Peirce described it as “the observation of some surprising phenomenon, some experience which either disappoints an expectation, or breaks in upon some habit of expectation.” That is, there is a puzzle we can’t yet see through. As Peirce said, the push to learn is “the starting of a question, no matter how small or great … causing an irritation which needs to be appeased” (in How to Make Our Ideas Clear).

Recently I was camping with my family in the Adirondack Mountains. We were walking down a trail in the woods and came upon a leaf that was floating in the middle of the trail about three feet off the ground! We couldn’t see anything supporting it, and nothing was making it move.

Neither my wife nor I had to prompt our kids to stop and look. We all just naturally stopped to look – to try to find what could explain this thing that broke in on our normal expectations. Then we explored various possibilities until we discovered an explanation. As Peirce described it, this surprise stimulated us to an inquiry until we could find something that destroyed the doubt or surprise. For us, we searched until we could locate the invisible threads from a spider that had suspended the leaf. The surprise we felt at seeing a levitating leaf took us on a brief and exciting journey until we found an answer.

Doubts, surprises, and puzzles naturally engage us in a search for a solution. When I was in college, I experienced friction climbing which can be a very unnerving experience. It involves walking on steep rocks that offer no handholds or footholds, and you climb without ropes or anything else to hold you up. Rather, you depend upon friction to keep you from slipping down the rock.

You must put all of your weight on your feet in order to have enough friction to keep from slipping. The problem is you want to lean on your hands because you fear that your feet will slip! When I was in that situation, I desperately wanted something to hold on to, like a tree or even a clump of grass, anything that offered some sense of stability. Once I got to a place in the rock that had the tiniest of ridges in it, I was finally able to rest because I had escaped the slippery areas.