DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9205.2012.01474.

x
Philosophical Investigations 36:4 October 2013
ISSN 0190-0536

The Varieties of Wonder phin_1474 340..354

Patrick Sherry, Lancaster University

Abstract
Although wonder is a response to what is extraordinary or regarded as such,
this covers a variety of things. Hence, wonder covers a spectrum from mere
surprise or puzzlement to stronger responses like dread or amazement;
moreover, it is often linked to other powerful responses like fear or admi-
ration, and it can lead people into many pursuits and areas of reflection. I
look at the variety of the objects of wonder, and of the neighbouring
responses and conceptual connections found here, then I discuss the
response of wonder itself, and its causes and effects. Finally, I ask why the
sense of wonder can atrophy, and whether it can be suppressed deliberately.

Both Plato and Aristotle stated that philosophy begins in wonder, and
many later philosophers, e.g. Kant and Wittgenstein, have appealed to its
central role here. Wonder, too, it has been claimed, may be at the origins
of science, art, religion, theology, and many other human pursuits and
fields of study, and it ranges in intensity from mere puzzlement or
curiosity to astonishment and awe. It is surprising that relatively little has
been written about it by philosophers.
In this paper, I shall argue that, in most cases, wonder may be defined,
minimally, as a conscious human response to what is extraordinary or
regarded as such, like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But many
kinds of thing in life are extraordinary, and that is why there is such a
variety of wonder. That is why, too, wonder is often linked closely with
other powerful human responses like admiration, fascination, delight, fear
or horror, gratitude, and worship, so that different conceptual connections
are made in the variety of contexts in which people express their wonder.
I shall go on to explore this variety, and then say something about the
response of wonder.

I. The Varieties of Wonder

In his Theaetetus, Plato depicts Socrates as suggesting various difficulties that

arise if we attempt to define knowledge in terms of perception, and
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Patrick Sherry 341
Theaetetus as responding that he wonders at such things, so that sometimes
his head is dizzy. Socrates replies in turn that this makes him a philosopher,
for wonder [thaumazein] is the origin of philosophy (155cd). A contempo-
rary analytic philosopher might well prefer, given the range of propositions
discussed so far in the dialogue, to speak here of puzzlement, but Plato
would have found this term inadequate. It is too weak a translation of the
Greek term: if we translated the cognate adjective thaumastos as “puzzling,”
this would hardly fit, for instance, Symposium 210e where Plato writes of the
wondrous [thaumastos] vision of beauty bursting upon us at the end of our
mounting the “ladder of beauty.” In any case, Plato had a far wider
conception of the scope of philosophy than most of our contemporaries.
This is true also of Aristotle. At the beginning of his Metaphysics, he says
that the kind of knowledge being investigated, e.g. of final causes, is not
practical but theoretical, for men begin and began to philosophise through
wonder [thaumazein], at first wondering about perplexities to hand, then
progressing to greater questions, e.g. about the sun, moon and stars, and
then about the origin of everything (982b11ff.). Thus, for Aristotle, meta-
physics embraces a lot of what people today label as science, in this case
cosmology. Elsewhere, discussing the beauty of animals’ limbs, he writes of
finding something wonderful in all natural things (De Part.An.645a16ff.).
One could mention many later scientists who have seen wonder as being
at the origin of their vocation. Before pursuing this line of inquiry,
however, let us look at one or two other philosophers who have regarded
philosophy as motivated by something more than curiosity or a fascination
with conceptual puzzles.
Most famously, Kant affirms at the beginning of the “Conclusion” to
his second Critique: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increas-
ing admiration [Bewunderung] and awe [Erfucht], the oftener and more
steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral
law within me.”1 The former, says Kant, begins in the external world of
sense, and the latter in the invisible self; but in both cases, “I see them
before me,” and they are both to be examined by reason according to the
appropriate methods. Not surprisingly, in his writings on aesthetics, Kant
associates wonder especially with the sublime: to be more specific, he says
that the “noble sublime” arouses wonder, the “terrifying sublime” dread or
melancholy, and the “splendid sublime” has a “beauty completely pervad-
ing a sublime plan.”2

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Lewis White Beck, trans. (Indianapolis:
Bobbs Merrill 1956) p. 166.
2. Idem, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, J. T. Goldthwait, trans.
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960) pp. 48–49. See also his
Critique of Judgement, J. C. Meredith, trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press) pp. 124–125.

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342 Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein, like many others, went a step further than just wondering
at the origin of everything, for in his early notebooks, he writes of simply
wondering at the existence of the world: “. . . the wonderful thing is that
the world exists. That there is what there is.”3 Not long afterward,
he writes in his Tractatus of the existence of the world and of feeling
it as a “limited whole” as being “mystical,” without, however mentioning
wonder as such (6.44, 6.45).
In his later work, Wittgenstein prefers to write of wondering at par-
ticular things,4 and he seems to look more to aesthetics than to science
here. In 1930, he writes in a manuscript that “[m]an has to awake to
wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending them
to sleep again.”5 One might ask here how people who have been sent to
sleep in this way look at things. The answer seems to be that they take
things for granted or are bored, and that everything looks familiar to
them. But then what is it to look familiar? Elsewhere, in the Brown Book,
Wittgenstein points to the feeling of relief that we may get when passing
from the unfamiliar to the familiar, contrasting it with the feeling of
surprise.6 He sees art as having a role in awakening wonder; in 1947, he
writes in a manuscript:
One might say: art shows us the miracles [Wunder] of nature. It is based
on the concept of the miracles of nature. (The blossom, just opening out.
What is marvellous about it?) We say: “Just look at it opening out!”7
More commonly, however, Wittgenstein writes of philosophers being
puzzled, especially “by the mystifying use of our language.”8 And such talk
of linguistic and conceptual puzzlement has become commonplace in
British and American philosophy of the last few decades.
A similar situation exists in science: many famous scientists have written
of their sense of wonder, and many educationalists today, regretting that
more young people do not choose to study the sciences at school,
emphasise the need for teachers to arouse a sense of wonder in their
pupils. For the most part, however, science is regarded today as a way of

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von

Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961) p. 86.
4. In his “Lecture on Ethics” of 1929 or 1930, he says that we can only wonder at
something being the case, but not at the existence of the world, although the tendency to
run up, thus, against the boundaries of language is one that he cannot help respecting
deeply. See The Philosophical Review 74 (1965) pp. 3–26 at p. 8 and p. 12.
5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Peter Winch, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
p. 5e. He does, however, write of the mathematician wondering at the miracles of nature
(p. 57e).
6. Idem, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) pp. 129, 127.
7. Idem, Culture and Value, p. 56e.
8. Idem, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 6.

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Patrick Sherry 343
discovering particular aspects of nature, remedying our lack of knowledge
or understanding of them, or of solving practical problems. Of course, one
might use the word “wonder” in such contexts, but this might well be in
a weaker sense of the term, familiar to us in ordinary life when we say
things like “I wonder why he said that?” or “I wonder what she’ll be
wearing tonight?” Here, the weaker usage expresses curiosity, puzzlement
or mild surprise, whereas my interest in this paper is with expressions of
something much stronger, of amazement, awe, admiration and so on. Of
course, on occasion, one may move from a weaker response to a stronger
one: if our initial puzzlement or curiosity has been satisfied, we may still
be stimulated to admiration or amazement. (The adjective “wonderful”
and the adverb “wonderfully” likewise have weaker and stronger senses:
contrast “We had a wonderful holiday” and “I was bowled over when I
first got to know Beethoven’s wonderful late quartets.”)
Despite what Wittgenstein says about science sending us to sleep, we do
find expressions of a strong sense of wonder in the writings of many
scientists. Richard Dawkins, for example, writes of the “feeling of awed
wonder that science can give us,” which is, he says, “a deep aesthetic
passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”9 Such
a sense of wonder can, I think, be evoked by particular aspects of the
world, like the variety and intricacy of natural forms, or by the cosmos as
a whole. The latter sense was often expressed very vividly by Albert
Einstein. In an article, “The World as I See It,” for instance, he writes of
the experience of the mysterious as leading to wonder, which he describes
as “the cradle of true art and true science,” and as engendering religion.10
In another article, “Religion and Science,” he writes of “cosmic religious
feeling” as being the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research,
found in, e.g. Kepler and Newton,11 and elsewhere, of such a feeling
taking the form of a “rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural
law.”12 He uses even stronger language when discussing the Jewish tradi-
tion, especially the Psalms, many of which, he says, express “a sort of
intoxicated joy and amazement at the beauty and grandeur of this
world . . . This joy is the feeling from which true scientific research draws
its spiritual sustenance . . .”13

9. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999) p. xii.
10. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (London: Souvenir Press, 1954) p. 11.
11. ibid., p. 39.
12. ibid., p. 40.
13. ibid., p. 186. Here, Einstein brushes aside the conventional religious significance of such
a feeling, whereas in my preceding citation, he sees the “harmony of natural law” as
revealing a stupendous intelligence.

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344 Philosophical Investigations
Both Dawkins and Einstein may be contrasted with Max Weber, who
thought that the world revealed by science is a “disenchanted” one. In a
famous lecture “Science as a Vocation,” delivered to students in Munich
not long before his death in 1920, Weber says that the rationalisation
brought about through science and technology rules out appeal to “mys-
terious incalculable powers,” for “one could in principle master everything
through calculation. But that means the disenchantment of the world.”14
The German word used here is “Entzauberung,” which means literally
“losing its magic,” and for Weber, this entails the demise of religion and
the relegation of the arts to our private lives.
Weber, seemingly, could allow that science, like philosophy, starts with
wonder, in the sense that it leads people to ask questions. But once the
questions are answered, the world becomes grey and predictable.15 As
Keats exclaims in Lamia, “Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold
philosophy?”; thus, the rainbow, he continues, once it has been explained
by Newton, is just another item in “the dull catalogue of common things.”
Weber’s view of science was questioned at the time, for in 1926,
philosopher Heinrich Rickert, commenting on the lecture, wrote,
But we can say that science does not need to lead to the demystification
of the world, for it is quite capable of making us fully conscious of the
‘magic’ of life, and the clarity it creates can still give happiness and joy
to a theoretically minded person.16
Hence, Dawkins argues that one can know the physical explanation of
the occurrence of rainbows and still wonder at them, and he raps Keats
over the knuckles for thinking otherwise.17 For him, wonder and scientific
understanding are not incompatible, and indeed wonder may be increased
by such understanding. Likewise, although in a very different context,
Kant distinguishes between astonishment, “the affection attending the
representation of novelty exceeding expectation,” and admiration, “which
does not cease when the novelty wears off.”18 For some religious thinkers,
too, wonder at God never ceases, and indeed always increases. St Gregory
of Nyssa, for example, says in one of his Sermons on the Song of Songs,

14. Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, ed. P. Lassman, I. Velody, and P. Martins (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1999) pp. 13–14.
15. Aristotle suggests that, as it progresses, science dissipates the wonder from which it starts
(Met. 983a13–983a20).
16. Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, p. 84. See my “Disenchantment, Re-enchantment, and
Enchantment,” Modern Theology 25 (2009) pp. 369–386 for further discussion, arguing that
Weber lacked a sense of wonder and a real understanding of sacramentality.
17. Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, pp. 39–42. See Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and
the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) pp. 89–90
for a similar point. He, too, makes the phenomenon of the rainbow a central motif of his
study of wonder.
18. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, J. C. Meredith, trans., p. 125.

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Patrick Sherry 345
“It is the same with one who fixes his gaze on the infinite beauty of God.
It is constantly seen as something new and strange in comparison with
what the mind has always understood. And as God continues to reveal
himself, man continues to wonder . . .”19
Of course, as all the world knows, Dawkins would agree with Weber
that the rise of science entails the demise of religion, and he does not
make the kind of connections with it that Einstein does. Rather, Dawkins
obviously wants to link science with aesthetics, and indeed his book,
Unweaving the Rainbow, (the title refers to Keats’s poem) is a polemic
against those who ignore the aesthetic appeal of science.
Dawkins quotes the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar as
speaking in a lecture of “shuddering before the beautiful” (with reference
to mathematics).20 This suggests that we need to go on here by consid-
ering the connections among wonder and beauty, profundity, the sublime
and other such concepts. Even if we confine ourselves to what are
conventionally called “aesthetic” responses and concepts, we will have to
consider the appreciation of natural beauty as well as that of works of art.
In both cases, the response of wonder is frequently accompanied by joy,
delight or admiration. We may be surprised or overwhelmed on occasion,
but often too the responses require some effort on our part: as Philip
Fisher says, “The essence of the aesthetic state of wonder is the play of the
mind over the details of the object itself. Aesthetics is part of the mobility
of attention, interest, and delight.”21 So there may be a “learning how”
here.
As in the case of science, there is often, too, a connection between
aesthetic and religious wonder. Rudolf Otto wrote in The Idea of the Holy
of people’s awe at the mysterium tremendum, the “Wholly Other,” seeing it
not only to be feared and wondered at, but as fascinating and entrancing;
and Einstein’s mention of the Psalms should remind us that many of them
express praise, thanks, joy, delight and worship, along with “awesome
wonder.” This is especially true of what are commonly known as “Cre-
ation Psalms,” e.g. 8, 104 and 148, in which God is envisaged almost as a
cosmic artist, and as deserving the kind of admiration that is given to
artists, as well as praise and reverence. Even when the scientific explanation
of natural phenomena is known, God is regarded, nevertheless, by later
Jewish and Christian tradition as working through “secondary causes,” i.e.
the usual course of events.

19. In Jean Daniélou (ed.), From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical
Writings, H. Musurillo, trans. (Crestwood NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979), p. 246.
20. Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, p. 63.
21. Fisher, Wonder, p. 39. He notes, too, that such attention and exploration are clues to the
link between wonder and science.

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346 Philosophical Investigations
C. S. Lewis sought to make some logical connections here:
Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.”
Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off
and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the
sunbeam to the sun.22

Lewis could have explored more widely here if he had wanted to go

beyond the context of prayer to other aspects of religion, for example
what is commonly known as “extrovertive mysticism,” in which people
have a seeming apprehension of God or of some ultimate reality, not
through an inner experience but through distinctive experiences of the
natural world. People talk here of the world “radiating” or emanating
some divine presence, or of a “wider sacramental sense.” Or Lewis could
have started with particular works of art that seem to evoke something
more than aesthetic wonder. Towards the end of his book, A Secular Age,
Charles Taylor draws attention to:
. . . certain works of art – by Dante, Bach, the makers of Chartres
Cathedral: the list is endless – whose power seems inseparable from their
epiphanic transcendent reference. Here the challenge is to the unbe-
liever, to find a non-theistic register in which to respond to them
without impoverishment.23

It is in such contexts, in the case of works of art of extraordinary quality,

that people talk too of inspiration. Sometimes, there is an appeal here to
the action of God, the Holy Spirit, a power which is in some sense
“outside” of artists and writers, although also regarded as working through
or within them. But sometimes, there is simply the sense that the latter
have surpassed themselves in producing works of outstanding quality, so
that insofar as there is an unknown power, it is merely their subconscious
or the human capacity to do better than intended or expected. Either way,
excellence may arouse our wonder.
Others have found what Taylor calls an “epiphanic, transcendent refer-
ence” in the saints, in the sense that some people seem both to exemplify
humanity as “going beyond itself” morally, and for religious believers, to
radiate a sense of God’s presence. To some, saints may seem “walking
miracles,” not in the sense of being exceptions to, or violations of, laws of
nature (as has been generally assumed miracles must be in recent centu-
ries), but in the original sense of being “signs and wonders” (Acts 2:22).
I shall pass by the wider question of the role of miracles within religions,

22. C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964) p. 118.
23. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) p. 607.

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Patrick Sherry 347
although obviously they are objects of wonder to believers and there is an
etymological connection in many languages.24
Finally, as Hepburn notes, wonder can arise from metaphysical reflec-
tion: Heidegger, among others, wondered that there is something rather
than nothing.25 For many religious people, such wonder may lead to an
acceptance of a doctrine of Creation (as contrasted with, e.g. Bertrand
Russell’s stance, “I should say the universe is just there, and that’s all”26).

II. The Objects of Wonder

In this brief survey, I have touched on a wide variety of types of wonder,

found in different contexts and expressed in different ways. It can be
directed at a variety of things, as we have seen, like the cosmos as a whole
or aspects of it, human skill or ingenuity, beauty in art or nature, virtue or
sanctity, profundity, wisdom and so on. Although the typical expression of
wonder is an exclamation (hence, it is sometimes referred to as “the Wow
factor”), there is a variety of language corresponding to the variety of
contexts: there is the “awesome wonder” of religion, and there are admi-
ration, puzzlement, amazement and delight (not to mention differences
between languages: the French “admiration,” for example, has different con-
notations from the English “admiration”). Common sense might suggest
that wonder can only be directed at what is surprising or extraordinary,
although this might include the monstrous or the fantastic (as in Alice in
Wonderland). Fisher defines it as “a sudden experience of an extraordinary
object that produces delight.”27 Yet other writers exhort us to wonder at
the familiar or ordinary, including our own existence and that of the
cosmos, and thus to transfigure them by making the familiar seem strange,
as if seeing the world again through the eyes of a child. After all, neither
Plato nor Aristotle specifies that we can wonder only at the extraordinary.
Thus, G. K. Chesterton wrote of his time as an art student in London:

24. I notice that some translators of Wittgenstein’s works use “miracle” as a translation of
his “Wunder,” e.g. Peter Winch in Culture and Value, p. 56e, already quoted, rather than
“wonder” or “marvel,” whereas Hume restricts the term to violations of laws of nature
brought about by God or some invisible agent.
25. E.g. in “What is Metaphysics?” and its “Postscript,” in his Pathmarks, William McNeill,
trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) pp. 86–96 and 233–237. See further
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), Ch.1. (The remaining chapters of this book
discuss Levinas, Nancy and Derrida.)
26. In “A Debate on the Existence of God,” in John Hick (ed.), The Existence of God (New
York: Macmillan, 1964) p. 175.
27. Fisher, Wonder, p. 55.

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348 Philosophical Investigations
At the back of our brains, so to speak there was a forgotten blaze or
burst of astonishment at our own existence.The object of the artistic and
spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a
man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually
alive, and be happy.28
I do not think that such an account contradicts the common-sense
assumption that wonder is directed only at the extraordinary, for we are
being encouraged to look at the ordinary with new eyes and so to regard
it as being extraordinary and even as exciting. There is the fascination of
the known as well as of the unknown.
Having said that, however, I have to say that there are some things I
find it hard to wonder at in a strong sense, like William McGonagall’s
poetry, or in general, what seems dreary, mediocre or merely odd. If, to
borrow an example from G. E. M. Anscombe, I cannot understand why
someone might feel a moral obligation to leave a saucer of mud on the
doorstep at noon every day, likewise I cannot wonder or marvel at such
an object. The human and conceptual scaffolding, as it were, seem to be
lacking in such cases.
If wonder presupposes a certain background, we might ask about its
absence. Can dogs wonder? I do not know. Possibly, they can experience
something analogous to it, but I suspect that their lack of conceptual skills
and language rules out anything close to human wonder. Thus, Wittgen-
stein suggests that, although a dog can feel fear, it does not feel remorse
because the latter requires language (Zettel 518–519). Also, as Aristotle
noted right at the beginning of his Metaphysics, human beings naturally
reach out after knowledge (Met. 980a21).
Why then do so many people apparently lack a sense of wonder? What
are the causes and effects of such a lack? Ronald Hepburn suggests that
wonder goes with humility, compassion and gentleness, and contrasts it
with dread or a sardonic attitude.29 It may be, too, that many “natural”
human responses are not universal, or at least that they need education and
cultivation to awaken them: Dr Johnson thought that this is the case with
kindness.30 Fisher thinks, as we have seen, that aesthetic wonder requires

28. G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1937) pp. 94–95.The title
of Michael Mayne’s book, This Sunrise of Wonder: Letters for the Journey (London: Fount,
1995), a study of religious wonder that attempts to encourage a sense of the sacramentality
of the world, is derived from a phrase in the passage quoted.
In a similar spirit, D. Z. Phillips tells us that “Wittgenstein is a philosopher who makes
us see the wonderfulness of the ordinary,” in his Faith after Foundationalism (London:
Routledge, 1988) p. 127.
29. Ronald Hepburn, “Wonder,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary 54 (1980) pp. 1–23, at
14–15. This essay has been reprinted in his Wonder and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1984).
30. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 852.

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Patrick Sherry 349
attention and interest. And we are all familiar with the atrophy of this
faculty (despite what is claimed about its inexhaustibility), perhaps within
ourselves. Max Weber is perhaps a case in point. Wittgenstein pointed to
a similar occurrence in philosophy, when he remarked that some philoso-
phers suffer from what may be called “loss of problems”: for them
everything seems quite simple, and “the world becomes broad and flat and
loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and
trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.” (Zettel 456; this raises the
question of what he would have said about G. E. Moore’s claim that the
main stimulus to philosophise for him was what other philosophers had
said about the world or the sciences, e.g. McTaggart’s view that time is
unreal.31)

III. The Response of Wonder

I think that we need to go on now and to dig a little deeper by exploring

the nature of the human response that is wonder. At the beginning of his
Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that “[t]rue
philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world . . . ,” and that
phenomenology is “as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust,Valery or
Cezanne – by reason of the same kind of attentiveness or wonder . . .”32
But whereas attentiveness requires some effort, wonder, I think, needs
openness rather than effort: we tell children to “Pay attention!,” but it
would seem strange to say “Now wonder!” On the other hand, like
Wittgenstein, we can direct people’s attention to a plant’s blossom and say
“Just look at it opening out!” Here, we hope that the effort of looking
attentively, which is subject to the will, may awaken in them an experi-
ence of wonder.
Is wonder, then, a “mental process”? Well, such a description does not
get us very far, as Wittgenstein points out in the case of “understanding,”
although we do say that the latter is “an activity of mind” (Zettel 446).
Wondering, too, is an activity of mind, but more specifically, John Lyons
classifies it as a “contemplative emotion,” along with awe and surprise.33 It
is a feeling, and one that is intentional, in the sense that it is directed at
something, like fear and other such responses, and it is cognitive in that it
presupposes certain perceptions or beliefs, especially evaluations of what is

31. G. E. Moore, “An Autobiography,” in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G. E. Moore,

3rd edition. (La Salle, IL: Open Court Pr., 1968) pp. 1–14, at p. 14. For that matter, what
would Plato or Aristotle have thought?
32. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith, trans. (London: Rout-
ledge, 1996) pp. xx–xxi.
33. John Lyons, Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 44.

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350 Philosophical Investigations
perceived.34 Thus, not only does the perception of a rainbow arouse my
wonder, but the latter is directed at the rainbow and embodies an implicit
appraisal of it as beautiful or mysterious. Similarly with fear: it is usually
directed at things we believe may harm us (although the pusillanimous
may also direct it at the sudden, unexpected or strange).
Of course, my wondering at the rainbow may draw the response “Well,
what’s so wonderful in that?” Here, my respondent acknowledges that a
perception of the rainbow may have aroused my wonder, but questions
whether the rainbow is worth it. Similarly, although the perception or
anticipation of certain things may cause fear, and fear is directed at them,
outsiders may question whether they merit this response, as when parents
comfort a frightened child during a thunderstorm. In both cases, the
subject’s implicit beliefs or evaluations are questioned by others.
Like fear, wonder is most commonly directed at the extraordinary
(including the ordinary somehow transfigured), and it can come suddenly
and unexpectedly as well as being anticipated. But in the latter case,
wonder, unlike fear, is usually the reward of attention, receptivity and
reflection, and it is regarded as worthy of cultivation. In some ways, a sense
of wonder is like a sense of humour: both of them may seem to be
completely lacking on occasion or to have atrophied (I am not sure what,
if anything, corresponds to “black” humour. Perhaps wondering only at
the monstrous, bizarre or fantastic?). Moreover, in both cases, someone
may argue that the object in question is not really funny or wonderful, so
the responses are inappropriate, as in the example of the rainbow above.
But then, I may try to open my respondent’s eyes by pointing out some
features of the object or situation that seem to have been missed or
ignored. Michael Mayne records that when a woman once said to J. M.W.
Turner “I don’t see clouds and water like that,” the artist replied “Don’t
you wish you could, Madam?”35
Fear leads people to avoid or flee from what is frightening, if they
cannot face it courageously. But as Lyons points out, emotions like wonder
and sorrow rarely issue in actions.36 So what are the effects of wonder?
Immediately, there may be a physical response like the intaking of breath,
as with fear, and since awe has an element of fear in it, “awesome wonder”
in religious contexts may, on occasion, arouse trembling and dread. But
usually, wonder has more positive results, like attraction, delight or a sense
of mystery, and also, as Fisher and Lyons indicate, more long-term ones
that follow on from its contemplative or exploratory nature, some of

34. Hence Hepburn argues that wonder presupposes value, in his “Wonder,” p. 12.
35. Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder, p. 132. He notes that both Turner and
Constable opened our eyes to the beauty of clouds.
36. J. Lyons, Emotion, pp. 51–52.

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Patrick Sherry 351
which I have discussed in the first part of this article, such as motivating
and energising the intellect to acquire knowledge and to pursue an
interest in science or philosophy, or acquiring a taste for exploring aspects
of the world like natural beauty or the arts.
Fisher suggests that wonder is most likely to appear towards the begin-
ning of a discipline like optics or philosophy, or towards the beginning of
an individual’s intellectual life, and it declines with age, or may degenerate
into blind curiosity as well as familiarity.37 He goes on to note that most
great discoveries in mathematics and science are made by young scientists,
and he claims that the “scientific pathos of the liquidation of wonder by
explanation runs like a thread through Descartes’ work.”38 Thus, for the
latter, “[w]onder is the middle condition between an unawakened intellect
and a systematic knowledge so complete that there no longer exists
anything unexpected.”39
I think, however, that Descartes himself suggests in The Passions of the
Soul one remedy for the fragility or transitory nature of wonder when,
having described it as “the first of the passions,” he defines it as “a sudden
surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects
that seem to it unusual and extraordinary,” and one that has knowledge as
its object and so has no effect on the heart or the blood.40 Indeed, he goes
on immediately to say explicitly that the remedy for wondering too
much, e.g. through blind curiosity which seeks out rare things just to
wonder at, is the acquisition of knowledge and understanding (sections 76,
78). Moreover, Fisher himself indicates some remedies when he asks
whether there is ever a final moment of complete explanation, and
suggests too that some features of explanation still preserve wonder.41
Descartes distinguishes wonder not only from blind curiosity but also
from astonishment, which too is an excess of wonder. It prevents us, he
says, from perceiving more than the first impressions, and thus acquiring
more knowledge of things, so it can only be bad (section 73). More
graphically, Kant writes of
[t]he astonishment amounting almost to terror, the awe and thrill of
devout feeling that takes hold of one when gazing upon the prospect of
mountains ascending to heaven, deep ravines and torrents raging there,
deep-shadowed solitudes that invite to brooding melancholy . . .42

37. P. Fisher, Wonder, p. 55.

38. ibid., p. 60.
39. ibid., p. 58.
40. Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” Pt.2, sections 53, 70–71, in The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), J. Cottingham,
R. Stoothof, and D. Murdoch, trans., pp. 350, 353.
41. P. Fisher, Wonder, pp.119–120.
42. Kant, The Critique of Judgement, J. C. Meredith, trans., pp. 120–121; cf. again p. 125 on
the transitoriness of astonishment, contrasted with wonder.

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352 Philosophical Investigations
I have already touched on the atrophy of wonder in old age (although
the latter can also lead to a more contemplative attitude to life, and
thereby arouse wonder), and on the thesis that wonder is not incompatible
with having a scientific explanation of some phenomenon. But a further
question arises of whether one can actually repress wonder, somewhat in
the way that courageous people seek to repress their fears. Well one can,
I suppose, put it on one side, as it were. But is something stronger possible?
I do not know, but the question is suggested to me by John O’Neill’s
assertion that Claude Bernard is revealed as blinding and deafening himself
to the blood and cries of animals, in his Introduction to the Study of
Experimental Medicine.43 Just before making this comment, O’Neill men-
tions also that Marx thought that capitalism dehumanises workers’ per-
ceptions as well as their productive capacities. But the cases are not
parallel, for Bernard was supposedly blinding and deafening himself on
purpose in some way, whereas Marx thought that it was capitalist pro-
duction, not the workers themselves, that dehumanised their perceptions.
So the question remains still of whether I can impoverish my perceptions
deliberately by actively excluding or repressing wonder. I am inclined to
think that one can do so, but only over a long period of time, by lapsing
into certain bad habits, of inattention, lack of openness, concentrating only
on some aspects of things, failing to take account of other aspects and so
on. Perhaps it is just a particular kind of mental laziness!
Some light may be cast on what is at stake here by looking at
Wittgenstein’s concept of “aspect-blindness.” John Churchill brings in this
idea at the end of a substantial discussion of the role of wonder in
Wittgenstein’s work, early and late. Like Dawkins and others, Churchill
maintains that the availability of scientific explanations need not rule out
the possibility of wonder, and he suggests that, in certain cases where
wonder is lacking, there may be a kind of “aspect-blindness” at work.44
Wittgenstein himself applied the idea of such a kind of blindness
especially to examples in aesthetics, and contrasted it with what he called
the “dawning of an aspect.” He introduces the latter idea in his famous
discussion in Philosophical Investigations II.xi of the duck-rabbit, which can
be “seen as” a duck or a rabbit. He goes on to extend it to aesthetics, when
we often say things like “You have to see it like this, this is how it is
meant” (p. 202). Thus, in music, we may say “You have to hear this bar as

43. John O’Neill, “Science, Wonder and the Lust of Eyes,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 10
(1993), pp. 139–146.
44. John Churchill, “Wonder and the End of Explanation: Wittgenstein and Religious
Sensibility,” Philosophical Investigations 17 (1994), pp. 388–416. In general, Churchill thinks
that Wittgenstein moved from wondering at the existence of the world to wondering at
“the intricate attunement of human beings to the world in all its detail and complexity”
(389).

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Patrick Sherry 353
an introduction,” or “You must phrase it like this” (p. 202). When a theme
is played several times, each time in a slower tempo, there is a “dawning
of an aspect” as we hear it as a march or as a dance (p. 206). He coins the
term “aspect-blindness” for people who seem to lack the capacity to see
something as something, e.g. not recognising that the figure of a double
cross contains both a black and a white cross (p. 213). It is akin to the lack
of a musical ear (p. 214). Maybe, Turner was drawing his interlocutor’s
attention to something like aspect-blindness.
Churchill also introduces a line of thought in the later Wittgenstein that
is very different from the one just discussed, but perhaps equally relevant
to our consideration of wonder as a human response. Wittgenstein often
insists that there are some things we simply do, and that insofar as anything
is basic and fundamental in philosophy, it is certain actions, practices and
responses. Hence, it is sometimes silly to ask for reasons or justifications for
things: “Does man think, then, because he has found that thinking pays?
Does he bring up his children because he has found it pays?” (Phil.
Investigations, 467). Sometimes, he thinks, we must just say “Such is human
life.”45 Giving grounds and explanations comes to an end some time, but
“the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of
acting” (On Certainty 110); “This is simply what I do.” (Phil. Investigations
217). He also uses descriptions like “something animal” (On Certainty 359,
of our everyday certainties), “our natural history” (Phil. Investigations 25;
cf. 415) and “the common behaviour of mankind” (ibid., p. 206).
This is an important line of thought, but it needs slight qualification in
the present context because of two considerations that I have mentioned
already: wonder does not seem to be a wholly universal human response,
and it can be misdirected. Thus, although it would be silly to ask whether
wonder is rational or needs justification, we can indeed, as I have sug-
gested, regard some phenomena as unworthy of wonder. Thus, I may
wonder at the ingenuity of an elaborate mechanism, but it would be
strange to wonder at something as simple as a see-saw (Hepburn’s
example) – although I might wonder at the pleasure it gives to children.
This is true of many other things that Wittgenstein labels as “forms of life,”
“the common behaviour of mankind” and so forth: thus, it is simply a fact
of nature that people tell jokes, give or obey orders, make up stories or
report on past events, and it would be silly to ask for a justification of such
practices; nevertheless, individual cases can be appraised in various ways, for
jokes can be funny or crude, orders pointless or immoral, and reports
untrue or graphic. So, again, wonder can seem, I think, to be inappropriate
on occasion.

45. ‘Bemerkungen uber Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” Synthese 17 (1967), p. 236.

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354 Philosophical Investigations
IV. Conclusion

My qualification here might suggest perhaps two further question: does all
philosophy arise from wonder, and maybe one role of philosophy might
be to show up inappropriate wonder? I have just suggested that the latter
might be the case (although the basic consideration here, I think, is that
we simply do not wonder at certain things). As regards my first question,
Hannah Arendt remarked that even Plato and Aristotle did not regard
thaumazein as the preliminary condition of political philosophy.46 This may
well be so, but we might balance this by suggesting another area of
philosophy which we have not discussed so far and which might arouse
wonder, that of philosophy of history. It is one that Arendt herself brings
up when she warns against just seeing history in terms of causes alone and
so merely developing working hypotheses for arranging the material of
the past, as if “something irrevocably new can never happen” or as if there
is no human freedom, and then she insists on the occurrence of “new
beginnings” in history.47 So perhaps this is another possible sphere of
wonder.
Be that as it may, there is no reason to insist that wonder has a role in
all branches of philosophy, equally, or in the same way. In any case, I hope
that this article has shown plenty of examples of other concerns, pursuits
and significant areas of human reflection that arise from wonder, and
thereby brought out its central role in human life.

Department of Philosophy, Politics, and Religion

Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YL
UK
[email protected]

46. Hannah Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,”
in her Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994) pp. 428–447,
at p. 445.
47. Eadem, “Understanding and Politics (the Difficulties of Understanding),” op. cit., pp.
307–327, at p. 320.

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