A sense of wonder was identified by Aristotle as the experience with which the impulse to philosophize originates, whether in the history of mankind or in the development of the individual. It may be that he was also consciously echoing Socrates who had already been quoted by Plato to have said: 'This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin'.
Arthur Schopenhauer, the subject of this piece, believed passionately that wonder, felt to the point of bafflement, was what motivated philosophy. 'The philosopher always becomes such as the result of a perplexity from which he is trying to disengage himself from...what distinguishes the genuine philosophers from the ungenuine is that the former get their perplexity from looking at life, whereas the latter get their sense of perplexity merely from reading books.' That is why academic philosophers have never said anything original. Most, if not all, the great ideas of philosophy originated, not in the hallowed and dusty corridors of universities, but from the minds of those who were insatiably curious and felt, or had a sense, that the world had much explaining to do. In short, they were perpetually baffled by life, and kept on asking 'why?'. Schopenhauer believed that most human beings experience this sense of wonder very dimly or fleetingly, if at all - a fact which he felt lay at the heart of his feeling of isolation from men. For Schopenhauer was incorrigibly misanthropic and also insatiably curious. He once said: 'The lower a man is in intellectual respect, the less puzzling and mysterious existence itself is to him; in fact everything to him will appear as a matter of course'.
But the attribute at the heart of this is not intellect. There are plenty of intelligent people who lack this sense of wonder - many men of affairs, for instance - merchants, doctors, lawyers, politicians and the rest. To such as these, the world is like a perfectly fitting garment: although it touches them on their skin they are not conscious of it, nor self-conscious in it. Such people are incapable of apprehending the world as strange, let alone mysterious, except perhaps on rare moments, like on Sundays.
The true wonder is that anything exists at all! Why is there something rather than nothing? That there should be anything is not what one would have expected. Nothing is what one would have expected. In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings; this is empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinks, it is a most precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres floating freely in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither, and to be one of innumerable similar beings that throng, press, push, shove, and toil, restlessly and rapidly arising and then dying in beginningless and endless time.
To see this whole, this mystery, this thing! as a riddle pressing on the human mind for a solution is something that happens occasionally, in glimpses, to most people, I suppose. But a few are bewitched and engrossed by it. Among these are some of the great artists, great philosophers, great religious thinkers - and these comprise, in Schopenhauer's assessment, 'the noblest portion of mankind in every age and country'.
What am I looking for? Answer: Insight. I am the fly seeking the insight to lead me out of the flybottle.
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