The Recovery of Wonder in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

“Imagination should be the center of your life.” — Ray Bradbury

Is philosophy a special privilege for a scholarly few—too complicated, jargon-laden, and impractical for an amateur to appreciate? If we follow Aristotle’s advice in his Metaphysics, we will answer firmly in the negative. Echoing Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus, who says that “wondering…is where philosophy begins and nowhere else,” Aristotle tells us, “It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g., about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.”

For Socrates and Aristotle, being a philosopher does not mean reading philosophy books or pursuing a career as a professional philosopher. Rather, a philosopher is someone who wonders and pursues truth “in order to know, and not for a utilitarian end.” On this view, schools should aim to produce philosophers. For example, John Senior, the renowned educator, cultivated in his students the idea that being culminated in wonder. His entire educational philosophy can be understood in terms of wonder. The motto of his self-designed Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the 1970s speaks to this proposition: Nascantur in admiratione – “Let them be born in wonder.” Senior wanted his students to renew their gaze upon an enchanted reality and delight with young-eyed zeal in its mystery and intelligibility. For Senior, wonder is natural to everyone and calls us to pursue truth and wisdom. As we know, the word philosophy means “love of wisdom.”

Wisdom and knowledge are mutually supportive. If wisdom is the means by which we discern and acquire our highest good, knowledge of the true and the good in turn frees us to live well and lead a happy life. How, then, do we obtain knowledge that frees us? The answer is a liberal education. The liberal arts free us from thinking about knowledge in terms of mere utility or practice. In this way, they are superior. The humanities include the highest disciplines—philosophy, theology, history, literature, music, and art—because they are subordinated to nothing outside of themselves. They are endowed with intrinsic value and exist for their own sake. They are to be differentiated from the servile arts, which exist for the sake of something else, namely, to produce practical things.

We are now in a position to appreciate why Ray Bradbury advocates for liberal education in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451. Beatty, the anti-intellectual captain of the Firemen, explains to Montag, a ten-year veteran on the force, that the government seeks to cancel philosophy by withholding the schooling that would develop free minds. The government fears philosophers because they will not blindly follow the status quo. Beatty’s values are clear: “With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.” He goes on to tell Montag that the government has developed a formula to all but eliminate the “queer ones” whose philosophical inquiries and imagination open them up to the world. A case in point is Montag’s 17-year-old friend Clarisse. She is a philosopher who slipped through the cracks – which, as Beatty makes a point to say, “doesn’t happen very often.” Her sudden disappearance reveals a stark point: when a totalitarian regime discovers a philosopher prowling about corrupting society through Socratic questioning, it doesn’t just “cancel” you, it kills you. 

To eradicate potential philosophers, students are forced into superficial schooling, which allows the government “to nip most of [the philosophers] in the bud, early.” If schools simply cram their charges “full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information,” then “they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.” Since learning is thinking, there is no real learning in this model of education. The standardized classroom abolishes thinking by curtailing a student’s sense of wonder and subsequent desire for truth and wisdom at a young age. According to Beatty, the worst thing for schools to do would be to give students “slippery stuff like philosophy” and other disciplines that encourage wonder. The government does not want its citizens trying “to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe.” Whereas a mind oriented toward wonder wants to be freed through the liberal arts that explore life’s big questions, the government wants to develop closed minds enslaved to servile arts that promote production.

In Bradbury’s dystopia, the government desires to produce citizens who can take a “TV wall apart and put it back together again.” Practical work is the only useful and acceptable work in this society. Even so, the powerful know that their educational system will not be able to cancel the entire race of philosophers. They admit that a remnant will exist, but the “few crackpots with verses in their heads” must survive in exile, outside the city walls. If most people do not “wander about quoting the Magna Carta and the Constitution, it’s all right.” To ensure that the philosophers cannot access truth and spread it to the ends of the earth like apostles for true education, the government reduces the Great Books of Western civilization to “one-page digest[s],” or replaces them altogether with useless facts and information.

In thematic opposition to Beatty, Granger is a former political philosophy professor and leader of the Book Lovers, a group of outcast philosophers (the “Outcasts”) who live in exile in the wilderness. He explains the Outcasts’ mission to Montag: it is to preserve the Western tradition by passing it “on to our children, by word of mouth” and then letting “our children wait, in turn” before passing it onto “other people.” In other words, Granger wants to expose people to the great cultural conversation and to awaken their sense of wonder and desire for truth and wisdom.

Granger informs Montag that there are “thousands” of Book Lovers scattered across the country who are “bums on the outside, libraries inside.” He continues by emphasizing how the preservation process grew out of a desire to learn and teach others: “It wasn’t planned, at first. Each man had a book he wanted to remember, and did.” Granger, who is “Plato’s Republic,” says that to truly be a Book Lover you must “pound into [yourself]…that [you are] not important.” In other words, you must resist the tendency to engage in pedantry or thinking yourself superior to the authors of these great texts. Only by submitting your ego to the author in a sacrificial act of “becoming” a book can a true teacher be formed. A teacher, at heart, is nothing more than a “dust-jacket for books” who hopes to “help someone.” Teachers who have become humble are most engaging to students because they possess interdisciplinary knowledge of the humanities. Teaching, in this sense, is the art of facilitating knowledge and understanding of realities that students would not be able to discover or would have great difficulty discovering on their own. The teacher is an aid, uplifting students and initiating them into worlds that require a guide already familiar with the landscape.

Montag is the prime example of what a reawakening can look like for students under the tutelage of exceptional teachers. We can deduce that Montag’s younger self recognized his innate desire for truth and wisdom, and as a result, exhibited a philosophical disposition as a child until the school system frustrated his desire. However, when Clarisse started prodding the 30-year-old Montag, she inspired his first painful steps toward becoming the person he was created to be. But just as Theaetetus complains to Socrates that wondering makes him “quite dizzy,” Montag realizes that wondering often plunges the seeker into the darkness of doubt and confusion. After his initial attempt to comprehend books is compared to the frustration of “trying to fill a sieve with sand,” Montag decides to seek a teacher who has mastered the art of reading and thinking. He identifies Professor Faber, another Outcast who is mostly a free agent, as his first teacher, because only a teacher can fortify Montag’s mind to hold true knowledge.

During his lecture to Montag on education, Faber (whose name means “craftsman” or “builder”) focuses on three rules, which Montag adopts as guiding principles. First, he connects with the possibility of discovering truth and wisdom through the exploration of the world of nature and the world of books. Second, he sets aside time for leisure every day to contemplate those two worlds and receive truth and wisdom into his mind and soul. Third, he acts on the truth and wisdom gained from those two worlds. Faber’s pathway to knowledge works in this way: Montag must first sense his innate desire for truth and wisdom to discover them, and then he must do everything in his power to receive them into his being and act on them. His passage from disorientation to reorientation will bring him out of the darkness and into the light. For this very reason, Montag’s conversion story should give the Outcasts hope in their mission to turn imprisoned souls from the shadows of opinions and half-truths to the full light of the sun, as Plato depicts in his famous Allegory of the Cave. A transformation can only happen, though, if students accept what Bradbury’s contemporary, Mortimer Adler, called an “invitation to the pain of learning,” which leads to learning for its own sake, as opposed to the educational “nursery” of entertainment and comfort.

Our major takeaway from Montag’s narrative is that his learning process results from the goodness of liberal education, at the hands of teachers who stir wonder in students by inviting them to engage in well-modeled inquiry. Such teachers guide their students through what Adler describes as “learning by discovery” and “learning by instruction.” Put simply, a student can learn by modelling the teacher’s process of discovery or by actively participating in the teacher’s instruction. In both pedagogies, the essence of teaching is to instigate the activity of learning in the student, and the essence of learning is the innate desire for knowledge on the student’s part. Through his depiction of Montag’s educational journey, Bradbury asks educators to recognize in their students a natural desire for the true and the good, and, in turn, to deploy Adler’s classical model of instruction to fulfill the student’s desire for knowledge. Montag’s emblematic mind must be born in wonder if it is to be brought to knowledge.

Print