Thaumazein
“Through wonder men began to philosophize, both now and in the beginning.”
Aristotle, Metaphysics 982b
On the Saying that Philosophy Begins in Thaumazein
by John Llewelyn
Part I
'Wonder is the only beginning of philosophy', Plato has Socrates say at 155d of the Theaetetus. And at 982b of the Metaphysics Aristotle says, 'it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophise'.
'Wonder', thaumazein, is one of those wonderful words that face in opposite directions at one and the same time, like Janus and the androgynous creature of whom Aristophanes tells in the Symposium. It seems possible to use it in opposite senses at once; thaumazein both opens our eyes wide and plunges us into the dark. It is both startled start and flinching in bewilderment. Reflection on it might well have made Theaetetus's head swim as much as do the aporias Socrates leads him into in the pages culminating at 155 in Theaetetus's exclamation: 'By the gods, Socrates, I am lost in wonder (thaumazô) when I think of all these things. It sometimes makes me quite dizzy'. His condition would be well described by analogy with the stunning effect of the sting-ray to which Meno likens the effect Socrates has on those he approaches. Theaetetus and Meno - and, according to the response he makes to Meno's comparison, Socrates himself - are perplexed by aporias. Theaetetus, for example, is puzzled at the suggestion that six dice can be both fewer than twelve and more than four. And Meno is paralysed by the less readily solved problem of how to define virtue. Despite the greater depth of Meno's problem, he too suspects Socrates of performing conjuring tricks, thaumato-poios being puppetry, juggling and suchlike acts of prestidigitation that dumbfound. As at the beginning of the Meditations Descartes is so stupefied at not being able to identify any sure mark by which to distinguish waking from dreaming that he can almost persuade himself that he may be then and there asleep. 'Obstupescam', he says. His Latin also speaks of stupor, for which the French gives étonnement, astonishment.
Thaumazein, astonishment, Aristotle says, is provoked by aporias. According to him the difficulties that arose for the early philosophers were first to do with matters close at hand but later concerned remoter questions, questions about the solstices, for example, and the genesis of the universe, peri tês tou pantos gene-seôs (982b 17). As with Plato, the aporias often have the form of apparent contradictions, such as the prospect of dolls at a puppet show behaving as though they were alive, and the idea that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with the side. When the cause of the puppet's movements has been revealed and when we have learned a little geometry our astonishment disappears. What would astonish us then is the suggestion that what we now believe to be possible is not. These are two cases that Aristotle regards as ones that might give rise to astonishment with anyone at some stage. He mentions them immediately after stating that 'all men begin, as we said, by wondering that all things are as they are', archontai men gar, hôsper eipomen, apo tou thaumazein pantes ei autôs echei (983a 12). The 'as we said' refers back to a passage that attributes wonder to any beginning philosopher. It appears to follow that any puzzled person is a philosopher provided he seeks to remove that puzzlement and that his desire to achieve the knowledge that will remove it is a desire for knowledge for its own sake, not just for the sake of removing the puzzlement and not as a means to some further end. As support for his analysis Aristotle appeals to what he sees as the historical fact that it is only when man's economic needs are secured that he begins to seek knowledge for its own sake.
Given the triviality of some of the aporias Aristotle has in mind, it might seem that a further condition would be required to distinguish knowledge from the specific kind of knowledge called sophia for which philosophy is the philia. Such a further condition is stipulated. It is that the knowledge sought should be of the universal, knowledge ultimately of the first cause. This condition is compatible with philosophy's beginning with perplexity over 'obvious difficulties', that is to say, over aporias which can be explained away by the discovery of causes that are not far to seek. For these difficulties and their removal may be on the way to knowledge of first causes, divine science, the science of being. So we have the picture of a teleological progress of inquiry from proximal causes to the ultimate cause, a cause being for Aristotle one of the four kinds distinguished in the Physics. This suggests an Aristotelian parallel to Heidegger's assertion that existing as Dasein is to be already concerned with being. If there is a parallel here it implies that already in our concern with the problem of earning our daily bread we are taking our first steps in philosophy. This would be an awkward implication for Aristotle at least, because it would endanger his thesis that philosophy is not concerned with production, that it is ou poiêtikê. How could this danger be met?
It could be said that in his absorption in solving the problem of his biological survival man is only potentially a philosopher. However, this still clashes with Aristotle's thesis if the potentiality just mentioned means that man has already begun to philosophise, though only in an undeveloped way. On the other hand, if the potentiality is no more than a possibility, all we shall be saying is that concern with the immediate problems of survival and comfort-able living is consistent with going on to become concerned with seeking wisdom for its own sake. Heidegger is not himself faced with the particular difficulty that confronts Aristotle, because he says that Dasein's world is everyday only zumeist, that is, not always, but only as a rule (SZ 370). 1Although Heidegger is not himself giving a genetic account, what he says leaves room for anyone wishing to give one to say that there is philosophy as soon as there is Dasein. It is not only because his account is not historical (historisch) that Heidegger would refrain from saying that where there is Dasein there is philosophy. If philosophy is an articulated theory of being, an ontology, Dasein's pre-theoretical concern with being does not make him a philosopher (SZ 12). Of course there is an Aristotelian parallel to this distinction, and it is this that provides him with the best defence against the above-mentioned danger.
We shall come back to the German Greeks and to what they say about the saying that philosophy begins in wonder. Meanwhile, what else can we learn from what the Greek Greeks say relative to this, for instance on the idea that philosophy seeks knowledge for its own sake?
This idea sets philosophy apart from sophistry. But does it not let into philosophy the solving of crossword puzzles, provided the solutions are not sought for the prize or for the self-conceit that may follow? Not if solving crossword puzzles and suchlike activities are indulged in to pass the time or to relax so that, as Aquinas puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, 'we may afterwards become more fit for studious occupations' (III, XXVI).
As for the collection of facts, even facts about natural causes, just for the sake of having them in one's collection, we shall postpone mention of one of the reasons why this is not philosophy. A reason that may be mentioned forthwith is that in so far as philosophy is what Aristotle means by metaphysics it comes after physics conceptually, whether or not it is called metaphysics on that account or on grounds of bibliographical history. Philosophy is not only a search after epistêmê and, where possible, nous concerning causes, but also that pursuit given direction by the hope of wisdom, sophia, knowledge of the most honourable kind. This ultimate aim is what impresses the stamp of philosophy on the humbler questions with which it begins. It is important that this be remembered as we pursue the question what Aristotle means when he says that philosophy begins in thaumazein. Does it go without saying that a hierarchical structure analogous to this must be kept in mind when we ask what Plato means when he says this?
On Aristotle's conception of philosophy, but not on Plato's, philosophy keeps its roots in 'the things we see'. But is it true to say that the thaumazein from which philosophy springs according to the Theaetetus has, at the beginning, its roots in the Forms? The following passage of the Parmenides could be taken to suggest that the answers to both of these questions must be 'No':
if anyone sets out to show about things of this kind - sticks and stones, and
so on - that the same thing is many and one, we shall say that what he is
proving is that something is many and one, not that Unity is many or that
Plurality is one; he is not telling us anything wonderful, but only what we
should all admit. But, as I said just now, if he begins by distinguishing the
Forms apart by themselves - Likeness, for instance, and Unlike-ness, Plurality
and Unity, Rest and Motion, and all the rest - and then shows that these Forms
among themselves can be combined with, or separated from, one another,
then, Zeno, I should be filled with wonder. I am sure you have dealt with
this subject very forcefully; but, as I say, my astonishment would be much
greater if anyone could show that these same perplexities are everywhere
involved in the Forms themselves - among the objects we apprehend in
reflection, just as you and Parmenides have shown them to be involved in
the things we see. (129c-e)
From this it would appear, perhaps to our astonishment, that Platonic thaumazein is of less noble birth than the Aristotelian kind. The down-to-earth Artistotle would seem to allow for thaumazein over the ultimate causes of things, whereas the other-worldly Plato would seem to limit to our questioning about 'the things we see'. Is Plato not saying through Socrates that we can be astonished at the idea that a stone can be both many and one, but not astonished at the idea that Unity is many? On closer inspection we find that this is not what Plato is saying. Since he goes on to tell Zeno that he would be astonished if it could be shown that the Form Unity taken separately from the counted things was also many, he cannot be contending that the Forms are not appropriate objects of wonder. Someone who had not made the distinction he has just made between the Forms considered in themselves and the particular things in which they are unsubstantiated might well be astonished at the propositions Zeno advances. What Plato is denying is that such propositions about the Forms considered in themselves can be proper objects for aporetic wonder when we understand their logical and ontological status. Aporetic wonder about such propositions would suffice to show that we had not understood this status.
Once we do understand the status of the Forms and the ultimate causes, is wonder at an end? Is thaumazein only the beginning of philosophy? Is its telos its own end, the end of philosophy? All we have shown so far is that neither Aristotle nor Plato denies that there may be a place for thaumazein thaumazein is superseded. But do they argue positively that a kind of thaumazein may persist? Or do they show any signs of recognizing that aporetic thaumazein has a positive side that may be capable of surviving the solution of a problem, surviving into sophia? Interpretable as such a sign perhaps is the suspicion Aristotle evinces that it may be blasphemous to entertain the thought that one might attain sophia, or at least that others might think so, this 'might' becoming articulated a few sentences later into the disjunction that only god can possess sophia or, at any rate, god will possess it in a degree above others. Knowledge of the highest kind of the final cause may be beyond human capacity. This is something Aristotle admits, speaking for himself. But it is only speaking as a mouthpiece for the poets that he brings in the idea that divine wrath might descend on him who supposed sophia to be within his reach. And there is no explicit statement by Aristotle that the separate and permanent objects of the divine science, if not of mathematics and physics, may be objects of such Bewunderung as Kant confesses to experiencing when he contemplates the starry sky above. Plato too avoids the word 'thaumazein' when he speaks of the separate and unchanging Forms. Also when he refers to the gods, as at Republic 379, though there, as in Aristotle, the language of the traditional myths is used self-consciously. Perhaps this is a clue. The myths have lost their hold. Invocation of a god has become a mere stylistic device, and the god a deus ex machina before which the only sort of wonder possible is of the lowly sort caused by the puppeteer. That this is so for Aristotle is borne out by his remark that 'even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders'. Here still the wonder is provoked by something one cannot explain, an aporia before which one has the feeling of being trapped, of there being no way out, no way out of the flybottle.
when aporetic, interrogative,
Interrogative or aporetic wonderment is based then on a sense of one's ignorance, where the ignorance is not any absence of knowledge, but an ignorance that challenges us to dispel it because it is presented dramatically in the form of an apparent contradiction or dilemma and is therefore difficult to live with. The object of the wonder is incredible. The stupidity we feel before it is not the stupor of dull indifference that Hegel speaks of when in connection with Aristotle's dictum that philosophy begins in thaumazein - for which Hegel's word here is 'Verwunderung' - he writes in the Philosophy of History: 'the Greek spirit was excited to wonder at the natural in nature. It does not maintain the position of stupid (stumpf) indifference to it as something existing (als zu einem Gegebenen)' (PH 234). This Stumpfheit is not that of being stumped for an answer. It is not just failure to hear an answer. It is failure to hear a question. Ignorance of ignorance, alogicality, it is below the threshold of mental laziness, since laziness does rise to the level of perceiving that there is something that calls to be done, for instance a question that demands to be answered. But the stupidity of Stumpfheit is unquestioning. However, it is neither of this, the blank look, nor of the stupidity of interrogative thaumazein, the puzzled look, that Aquinas can be speaking when in his comments on Aristotle's dictum he writes in the Summa Theologiae:
What laziness is to outward behaviour, amazement and stupor are to mental
effort. One who is amazed refrains for the moment to pass judgement on the
object of his amazement, fearing failure. But he does look towards the
future. When stupor envelops a man he is afraid either to form a judgement
here and now or to look towards the future. Hence amazement is a source of
philosophising, whereas stupor is an obstacle to philosophical thinking.
(la2ae, 41, 4)
The stupor of which Aquinas speaks here is not the stupor of dull unquestioning indifference. The latter is consciousness of a state of affairs, and it has an intentional object, therefore it is not so thick a stupidity regarding something that nothing regarding that thing enters our ken. The thing is not something of which we are unconscious. But our consciousness of it does not include consciousness of any question it poses. The stupor of which Aquinas speaks has an intentional object, but the person's attitude to it is not one of indifference. He sees that a question is raised, but he is afraid to even seek an answer. He buries his head in the sand. He wants nothing to do with the question, hoping that if he diverts his eyes from it, the question will go away. Aquinas therefore rightly distinguishes this stupor from what he calls 'admiratio', concluding that wonder or amazement motivates philosophy whereas stupidity is an impediment to it. It will be recalled that our proposal in the present essay is that there is a kind of stupor that is intrinsic to thaumazein. We are pursuing the idea that 'wonder' is a wonderful word in something like the sense of the 'speculative' word 'Aufhebung' that delights Hegel because it incorporates opposite meanings, and like the sense of the antithetical words Karl Abel claims he comes upon in Ancient Egyptian, words that he finds as astonishing ('erstaunlich', he says) as one would find it if 'in Berlin the word "light" was used to mean both light and darkness'. 2
We are wondering whether this may be how it is with at least one of the varieties of thaumazein. So far we have been addressing ourselves mainly to its dark side. Now we must turn towards the light, return to the question whether astonishment can be sustained in wisdom.
Part II
Can astonishment be sustained when we issue from the cave into the light? As we emerge the light blinds us. This confusion by bedazzlement of which Plato speaks at Republic 515f is the counterpart of the confusion by dizziness that comes over us as we make the passage from seeming understanding (Schein) into the darkness of aporetic wonder. As we move into the light of real understanding the object of our vision is, in the words of the hymn, hidden by the splendour of light. Our eyes cannot accommodate themselves to its brilliance any more than our darkness can comprehend aporia. Aporetic astonishment persists as long as there is aporia, lack of passage, as long as the puppeteer or geometer has not administered the aperient. Paradoxically the laxative that is a pharmakon - remedy is at the same time a pharmakon - poison in so far as aporetic astonishment is a healthy state compared with blank indifference. 3 It is the very source from which philosophical inquiry springs, the springboard of its Satz vom Grund, the point from which its spirit spurts. Astonishment is the pathos of philosophy, as Plato says; as Heidegger says, its Stimmung (WP 79), the very timbre of philosophy's voice.
This being so, how can we contemplate with equanimity the prospect that contemplative wisdom promises or threatens? How can we face its apparent lack of dis-ease? We shall perhaps be happy with the satisfaction of sophia if we ever reach it. Who knows? One thing we do know here and now is that we do not value highly the satisfaction of pre-aporetic indifference. How then can we with consistency value highly here and now post-aporetic bliss conceived as satisfaction of all our needs, including the need for philosophy? Can Paradise be paradise unless it continues to have something like the shortcomings of existence in Purgatory? It is not simply that heaven threatens or promises to be uneventful and ennuyeux. Presumably the gods are not bored up there on Olympus. Nor are we bored at the peaks of, say, aesthetic ecstasy. But would we not here and now prize their and our experience less if it lacked a sense of wonder? Theologians at least since Heraclitus have recognized this. It is recognized in what one reads about the experience of mystical union being at the same time an experience of feeling apart: feeling oneself apart and feeling oneself a part. It is manifest in the apartness that is a part of love, in what is wanting in love, as this is recognized by Levinas when he writes:
Intersubjectivity is not simply the application of the category of multiplicity
to the domain of the mind. It is brought about by Eros, where in the proximity
of the other the distance is wholly maintained, a distance whose pathos is made
up of this proximity and this duality of beings. What is presented as the
failure of communication in love in fact constitutes the positive character
of the relationship; this absence of the other is precisely his presence
qua other. The other is the neighbour - but proximity is not a degradation
of, or a stage on the way to, fusion. (EE 95 [163])
As well as this Judaic tradition there is a fusionist tradition. To this latter Hegel belongs. This is the tradition of belonging and of longing that ends in belonging, the tradition announced in Hegel's remarks on the way wonder is the origin of philosophy among the Greeks. The Greeks, as Hegel reads them, are a home-loving lot. Home-builders and cultivators of Heimatlichkeit, their gods are really all gods of the hearth.
It is this veritable homeliness, or, more accurately, in the spirit of homeli-ness, in this spirit of ideally being-at-home-with-themselves in their physical, corporate, legal, moral and political existence; it is in the beauty and the freedom of their character in history, making what they are to be also a sort of Mnemosyne with them, that the kernel of thinking liberty rests; and hence it was requisite that philosophy should arise among them. Philosophy is being at home with self, just like the homeliness of the Greek; it is man's being at home in his mind, at home with himself. If we are at home with the Greeks, we must be at home more particularly in their philosophy. (LHP 151-52)
And in a passage of the Philosophy of History from which we have already had occasion to cite, Hegel says:
According to Aristotle's dictum, that philosophy proceeds from wonder, the
Greek view of nature also proceeds from wonder of this kind. Not that in their
experience spirit meets something extraordinary which it compares with
the common order of things; for the intelligent view of a regular course of
nature, and the references of phenomena to that standard, do not yet present
themselves; but the Greek spirit was excited to wonder at the natural in
nature. It does not maintain the position of stupid indifference to it as
something existing (als zu einem Gegebenen), but regards it as something
in the first instance foreign, in which, however, it has a presentiment of
confidence, and the belief that it bears something within it which is friendly
to the human spirit, and to which it may be permitted to sustain a positive
relation. This wonder and this presentiment are here the fundamental
categories. (PH 234)
Here we are at the beginning of a history in which the foreign gradually becomes the friend, the fremd, the Freund, to the point that in the end the distance between philosophy and the sophia it loves vanishes away completely in an infinite consciousness of its loved self, Hegel's version of Aristotle's noêseôs noêsis.
Philosophy proper commences in the West. It is in the West that this freedom
of self-consciousness first comes forth; the natural consciousness, and
likewise mind disappear into themselves. In the brightness of the East the
individual disappears; the light first becomes in the West the flash of
thought which strikes within itself, and from thence creates its world out of
itself. The blessedness of the West is thus so determined that in it the
subject as such endures and continues in the substantial; the individual mind
grasps its being as universal, but universality is just this relation
to itself. This being at home with self... (LHP 99)
Compare this view of the history of philosophy with the history as Heidegger sees it issuing from the same source, the thaumazein experienced by Heraclitus and Parmenides. We quoted earlier Aristotle's statement that 'all men begin by wondering that things are as they are'. That is also how Hegel sees the beginning. He sees both the end and the beginning in an Aristotelian light. And that, in Heidegger's view, is how philosophy tends to see itself. But this is only one aspect of philosophy as Heidegger describes it in his lecture 'What is Philosophy?'. To bring to thought philosophy's hidden side, wonder that things are as they are must be supplemented by wonder that things are. That is what astonished Heraclitus and Parmenides in their astonishment that things are as they are. The seven or seven million wonders of the world of which the poets sing are set within the context of the wonder of all wonders, das Wunder aller Wunder, that which is (EB 386 [W 307]). What Heidegger might at one time have called fundamental ontological wonder, the thaumazein of the thinking of being, prepares the way for another beginning in which man is not only the preserver of the unconcealment of beings but also the guardian of the openness of being (GP 190). No attempt will be made in the confines of this essay to interpret what Heidegger says at different stages of his work on the question how the tasks of the Wahrer, Wächter and Wegbereiter are related to those of the scientist and the poet understood in the wider and the narrower senses of Dichter, 4 to ask how far one is helpmeet of the other and how the wonder of the thinker bears upon ontic wonder, whether that of the Dichter who names the holy or that of the scientist whose wonder, although it is the wonder of the se demander, the demand for an explanation, may coexist with a wonder of a different kind: the wonder expressed by the zoologist who named the sabella magnifica, the aranea mirabilis and (with less Greek) the thaumetopoea processionea. 5 This last-named is the caterpillar to be seen trailing across the Mediterranean countryside head-to-tail in processions up to eight metres long. The accounts that Fabre and more recent naturalists have given of the behaviour of these creatures are studded with words like 'remarkable', 'singular', 'puzzling', 'extraordinary'. However, in the final section of these reflections it will be relevant to remember that it is not only the puzzling and extraordinary that the natural scientist explains.
Part III
In this final section we apply to questions raised in the first and second some of the distinctions Heidegger makes in the Grundfragen der Philosophie, his most detailed treatment yet published of the saying that philosophy begins in thaumazein. So far we have rung the changes on the various ways this Greek word may be translated into Latin, German, French and English. Within limits that I shall not attempt to make precise the terms are often interchangeable. There is therefore some arbitrariness in the choice of terms Heidegger uses to indicate the outlines of a thaumatology, and this Spielraum is allowed for in translating those terms into English.
Heidegger distinguishes Verwunderung, Bewunderung, Bestaunen and Er-staunen with a hyphen, the unhyphenated Erstaunen being employed usually to range over all four of the notions he distinguishes. The first three he regards as the ordinary terms for the unordinary. He examines what they mean with a view to eliciting clues to the meaning of Er-staunen, ontological thaumazein.
Verwunderung (and sich wundern) is marvel at what one finds surprising, remarkable, what one cannot explain and does not want to have explained. It is a manifestation of a craving for novelty, a cult of the unusual and unique that turns its back on the ordinary.
Bewunderung is admiration. What is admired, like the object of marvel, is the singular as contrasted with the ordinary, but, in contrast to the marvellous, what is admired is recognized as unusual. Instead of being swept off his feet by it, the admirer stands back and appraises it. To the extent that he gives it marks he achieves a kind of mastery, however lacking he may be in the competence being judged.
Bestaunen, amazement, like marvelling, recoils before its object. But it does not evaluate or patronise. Admiration, however wanting in the skill or talent it assesses, assumes it has critical gifts of its own that confer authority to evaluate. Amazement does not grade. Furthermore, what amazes me does not stand out only as unordinary. By comparison with the ordinary it is extraordinary, so surpassingly extraordinary that the very idea of putting a value upon it would never enter my head.
In all three cases so far considered there is some particular thing that causes surprise. And all three involve comparison of the ordinary with what is out of the ordinary to a lesser or greater degree. Er-staunen, ontological astonishment or wonder, on the other hand, is wonder at the most ordinary itself. The utterly ordinary in everything strikes us as utterly unordinary. The most commonplace overwhelms us. Like the commonplace where and of which, in the anecdote told by Aristotle and more than once retold by Heidegger, Heraclitus says to his slightly disappointed visitors 'The gods are also even here (kai entautha)', here being the humble kitchen where the daily bread is baked. The gods are everywhere. There is no place that they do not haunt. As Aristotle in his way puts it, as he is about to tell this story in De Partibus Animalium, en pasi gar tois phusikois enesti ti thaumaston, 'every realm of nature is wonderful' (645a 17). As Heidegger in his way puts it, wonder knows no way out from the unordinariness of the most ordinary. There is no escaping it, because the attempt to escape by explaining the unfamiliar presents us with something familiar in its stead which however is again utterly strange. Nor does ontological wonder know any way in. Whichever way it turns, it is always already faced by the superlative unordinariness of the ordinary. There is no transition to or from wisdom here, since the wisdom of ontological wonder is an ontological between, a Zwischen. It is a passage, and it is only in this moment of passage, poros, from the most ordinary to the most unordinary that ordinariness and unordinariness as such are highlighted. In that moment dawns the wonder that and what the totality of being is, the wonder of what elsewhere Heidegger calls the ontological difference and here the Spielraum of the between of the being of beings. Here too in the Grundfragen der Philosophie we come upon the stunning statement that our wonder before the totality of what is is wonder 'dass es ist und das ist, was es ist': that it is, and that is to say, what it is (GP 174). This points up strikingly the betweenness of the ontological difference and the near-farness of the Denker and the Dichter who, in one of the images Heidegger borrows from Hölderlin, 'dwell near to one another on mountains farthest apart' (EB 392 [W 312]). There is a complicity between them, but also an abyss. How that can be is the mystery of this 'und das ist'.
Returning to the Greeks, Heidegger quotes from the first chorus of Sophocles' Antigone:
There is much that is strange, but nothing
that surpasses man in strangeness.
He sets sail on the frothing waters
amid the south winds of winter
tacking through the mountains
and furious chasms of the waves.
'Here', Heidegger says, '"sea" is said as though for the first time' (IM 129 [EM 117]). The dialogue between thinking and poetry is the dialogue of the between. The between 'is' man's transitivity before the totality of what is, his displacement, depaysement, before the question of the ground, the wonder at there not being nothing. Hegel too speaks of the totality:
The position of hearkening surmise, of attentive eagerness to catch the meaning
of nature, is indicated to us in the comprehensive idea of Pan. To the Greeks
Pan did not represent the objective Whole, but the indefinite that is at the
same time connected with the moment of subjectivity; he is the inexplicable
frisson (der allgemeine Schauer) that comes over us in the silence of the
forests; he was, therefore, especially worshipped in sylvan Arcadia (a 'panic
terror' is the common expression for a groundless terror). (PH 23S)
It would be precipitate to identify this grundlose Schreck with the objectless 'Angst in the sense of terror', Angst im Sinne des Schreckens, of the Postscript to 'What is Metaphysics?' (EB 392 [W 312]), notwithstanding that Heidegger there and Hegel here are describing a stance with regard to totality. For the meaning of nature of which the Greeks have a presentiment will turn out to be the overcoming of terror and outlandishness when the Greek spirit finally comes home. When at last it is fully bei sich in its Wohnung everything about it is gewöhnlich. The ordinary has no trace of the extraordinary.
Heidegger's Heimatlichkeit is otherwise, as is his reading of the Greeks. Provoked by his reading of Antigone, a work that gropes in vain for a way out from the tragic aporia of the between of the heimlich and unheimlich, he writes, referring to the violence (deinon, Gewalt) with which man is enabled to break open new paths, as when the Dichter for the first time discloses the sea as sea, the earth as earth, the animal as animal (IM 132 [EM 120]):
Immediately and irremediably, all violence comes to nothing in the face of one
thing alone (Nur an einem scheitert alle Gewalt-tätigkeit unmit-telbar). That
is death. It is a term beyond all termination, a limit beyond all limits. Here
there is no breaking out or breaking up, no capture or subjugation. But this
strange thing (Un-heimliche) that banishes us once and for all from everything
in which we are at home is no particular event that must be named among others
because it too ultimately happens. It is not only when he comes to die, but
always and essentially that man is without exit in the face of death. In
so far as man is, he stands in the exitlessness of death. Thus being-there
(Da-sein) is the very happening of strangeness. (IM 133 [EM 121])
Strangeness, das Unheimliche, on Hegel's interpretation, is alien to man's final home. On Heidegger's interpretation it is the very finality of man's being at home. No wonder that Freud, in his paper 'Das Unheimliche', like Karl Abel before him, exclaims that '"heimlich" is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich'. 6 And no wonder, therefore, that we should find that 'wonder' is a word that points in opposite directions. Ontological wonder is wonder over the between of the heimlich-unheimlich, over the entrée of the exit, death's entrance.
Ontological wonder is a Grundbestimmung. There are at least two ways in which we can get wrong what Heidegger means by this. In Vom Wesen des Grundes he warns that Begründung, founding, 'should be understood, not in the narrow and derivative sense of proving ontical or theoretical propositions, but in a basically primordial sense. Founding is that which makes the question "Why?" possible in the first place' (ER 113 [W 168]). The Bestimmung is a ground base attunement of temper and disposition that is a dis-position in that it is a displacement of man from the condition in which he sees things in an everyday light to the condition in which he sees this seeing as blindness, now that it is disclosed to his astonishment that everything as thing is phusis, and that phusis is a-lêtheia, unconcealment, as Heraclitus saw at the very same time that he saw that phusis loves to conceal itself, at the first beginning of philosophy and when history first began. The first beginning of philosophy and history (Geschichte) is the happening (Geschehen) of word, work and deed. It is incalculably rare, das Seltenste (GP 170). Geschichte ist selten (EHD 76). The astonishing passage between the ordinariness of beings and the unordinariness of the being of beings is utterly and unutterably unordinary. It is therefore inexplicable, whether in terms of the causality of beings outside man or of the agency of man himself. The Grundbestimmung is not a psychological Erlebnis, a passion undergone, nor is it an act of will. It is a way in which one deports oneself. It is an Erfahrung, a displacement. Not a mental state in which Dasein luxuriates, but a luxation beset with risks: a gefährliche Erfahrung.
In posing the Grundfrage der Philosophie, 'Why are there beings, not rather nothing?' (GP 2; EB 380 [W 122]) man finds himself disposed toward another beginning of philosophy. This disposition is a being possessed by a question-savoir 7 which recognizes that first philosophy is more and more fundamental than it is conceived to be by Plato and Aristotle, who begin to bring the first beginning to its end when the latter conceives philosophy as the quest for the most universal causes underlying the secondary causes of physical phenomena, and the former, through his doctrine of ideas, prepares the way for a conception of truth as adequacy and correctness and conceives logos as assertion that can be repeated and passed on, no longer as gathering, legein, sammeln.
Before Plato and Aristotle, Parmenides, with whom, as Hegel says, philosophy proper begins (LHP 254), is wonder-struck at the belonging together of gathering thinking with being that at once makes possible inquiries that demand answers and runs the risk of being forgotten on account of such inquiries. Following Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias speaks more truly than he knows when, in his commentary on Aristotle's dictum that philosophy begins in thaumazein, he says that wonder precedes inquiry. 8But meanwhile technê, which at the first beginning is neither passive suffering nor active exercise of will, but receptivity toward phusis, a disposition of disponibility, Bereitschaft philia is represented as the Symposium represents erotic desire, then the attainment of sophia will be the attainment of a petite mort, the substitution of indifference for wonder.
(GP 170), is on the way to becoming technical control, and the 'for its own sake' which Aristotle identifies as a mark of philosophy comes to be interpreted as theory opposed to practice, instead of what that distinction presupposes. Paradoxically, the conception of philosophy as quest for wisdom understood as knowledge of the first cause or Ideas imposes upon philosophy the means-end structure of praxis, so that Plato sometimes gets perilously close to regarding philosophy as a machine for producing statesmen. Paradoxically too, this peril is what keeps open the possibility of philosophy. If philosophy is the desire for the possession of knowledge, if its
If, however, philia is not a variety of epithumia, if it is being possessed by love that does not seek to possess, but to let being be, wonder will belong to sophia as to the beginning of philosophy. The archê of philosophy which is thaumazein is not just a beginning that is left behind. It remains its ground and guide. Das Erstaunen trägt und durchherrscht die Philosophie (WP 80), the lecture in which Heidegger says this was delivered in 1955. In it, as in the lectures entitled Grundfragen der Philosophie given in 1937-38, the word 'philosophy' covers metaphysics and what will be called essential thinking in the 'Letter on "Humanism"' of 1946 and 'The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking', a lecture given in 1964. However, what he earlier calls the coming philosophy, die künftige Philosophie (GP 2), and what he later calls the thinking of another beginning is a thinking of and a thinking on the first beginning, a remembrance of it:
The preparatory thinking in question does not wish and is not able to predict
the future. It only attempts to say something to the present which was already
said a long time ago precisely at the beginning of philosophy and for that
beginning, but has not been explicitly thought. (BW 379 [SD 67])
What was said at the first beginning but not explicitly thought (nicht eigens gedacht) is what Parmenides and Heraclitus named alêtheia, unconcealment. They also experienced lêthê, oblivion, as a dispensation of concealment (EGT 108 [VA 264]). But they did not think this explicitly as such, and so did not think explicitly what Heidegger calls Lichtung, opening or clearing, as of a forest: the complicity of concealing and unconcealing, which makes possible the opposition and play of darkness and light in which things appear and disappear; which makes possible the language of Platonic and indeed all metaphysics (BW 386 [SD 74]). To stress the irresolubility of this complicity, Heidegger says, not without poignancy, that self-concealing belongs to light. It is not a simple supplement, not eine blosse Zugabe (BW 390 [SD 78]). It is because concealment, lêthê, is a syncope at the very heart of unconcealing, a-lêtheia, that Heidegger says that philosophy understood as love toward wisdom cannot be superseded by sophia understood as absolute knowing (BW 242 [W 3364]). If indeed there is necessary concealment, then philosophy, zukünftige philosophy and essential thinking will never cease being underway. This means that in principle wonder will never cease, even though its aspect as awe before the stupendous may from time to time give way to its aspect as stupor so dark that it forgets its own oblivion. The very interplay of concealment and unconcealment will be 'what is ever and again worthy of wonder and is preserved in its worth by wonder' (EGT 121 [VA 279-280]).
But if what this denkende Er-staunen wonders at is the ground of the distinction between darkness and light, must not our own characterisation of wonder be itself replaced by one that is no longer framed in the language of chiaroscuro, the language of Platonism, the language of metaphysics? Can this be done? Can Heidegger himself describe the Zwischen of concealing and unconcealing except by the light and the shadow cast by the idea of the interplay of darkness and light? That we do not yet see how this can be done is perhaps what Heidegger is wishing to bring out by employing the ambiguous word 'Lichtung'. But whether or not thinking at the beginning of another beginning can accomplish the task of thinking beyond the language of the end of the first beginning, it will be, as we have seen, a thinking on that first beginning. It will therefore inherit the thaumazein which is the only beginning of philosophy - but which is not only the beginning of philosophy or only the beginning of only philosophy.
This essay, 'On the saying that philosophy begins in thaumazein'. by John Llewelyn was first printed in Post-Structuralist Classics (pp.173-91), edited by Andrew Benjamin and published by Routledge, 1988.
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”