Thaumàzein | Rivista di Filosofia

It is famously Plato who, in the Theaetetus, points to the pathos of wonder as the first principle, the arche of philosophy: “For it is typical of a philosopher to experience this pathos, this wondering. Indeed, there is no other principle [arche] of philosophy than this. And the man [i.e., Hesiod] who made Iris the child of Thaumas [the god of wonder] was perhaps no bad genealogist” (Tht. 155d). Iris is the rainbow that, for Plato, erotically brings earth and heaven into contact and represents the atopic situation of human beings. Iris thus embodies philosophy. By taking up the genealogy according to which Iris descends from Thaumantus, Plato wants to emphasize that there is no father (principle) other than wonder (Thaumantus) who can generate philosophy. But what wonder is this?
First of all, it is a wonder that causes dizziness. This is what Theaetetus himself notices: “Oh yes, indeed, Socrates, I am lost in wonder [thaumazo] what these things can mean; sometimes, to tell the truth, when I’m looking at them I suffer from vertigo [skotodinio]” (Tht. 155c). Those who experience wonder live in an intermediate reality between the topos of environmental closure, where the animal remains dizzy, and the topos of Olympus, where the gods endowed with perfection and sophia live. By contrast, the atopic being feels dizzy because it is an unstable being that has no ground beneath its feet: in fact, it is not rooted in the soil like other earthly plants, but hangs in the air by its hair.
Secondly, the wonder that destabilizes and causes dizziness is not the arche of enchantment, nor even the bite of a narcotic poison. Rather, it is the pathos of someone who suddenly reawakens from an infatuation and grasps what surrounds her from a different perspective, and therefore with surprise. Wonder becomes narcotic only when it becomes astonishment at the miracle that pretends to transgress the laws of physics or to escape into an otherworldly afterlife or an acritical submission to a noetos kosmos, not when it cracks the obviousness of the apparatuses of common sense in which we live, immersed from birth. In such a reawakening, one would look at the same things as before, but with a fresh eye, and succeed in experiencing a feeling of surprise even at that which had previously seemed obvious. Indeed, in some cases, one would be able to experience wonder even at that which previously appeared maximally evident and banal: one’s own existence. Perhaps it is in this sense that wonder can become the generative experience of a philosophy understood as an exercise of transformation: to wonder at one’s own existence is to take the first step to learning to live, that is, to learning to experience oneself not as something obvious and banal, but as a surprise.
Therefore, wonder is not a purely intellectual experience. It seems trivial to say, but understanding something and experiencing something are two profoundly different things. And yet, those who do philosophy often think that an erudite understanding of this passage from the Theaetetus is sufficient. Perhaps, on the contrary, there is a much more challenging and concrete request hidden in its lines. It is to “experience” a specific kind of pathos in the first person, to be filled with a wonder that is not stupefying and self-satisfied, but with the wonder that makes Theaetetus dizzy and that, by destabilizing him atopically, becomes maieutically generative, that is, the arche of philosophy. Thus, it is not just a matter of understanding of the meaning of this passage, but of directly “experiencing” that particular pathos described in it. In this case, the passage would become an annunciation, that is, a communication that destabilizes and transforms.
The intention that animates the cultural project that gave birth to the journal and its series of books is, first and foremost, to promote a non-reductionist reflection on the human condition by providing a free space for critical discussion on the themes of a philosophy experienced as an exercise of reawakening and transformation. This includes the ability to turn one’s gaze to the periphery, that is, to topics and authors that in recent decades have remained on the margins of philosophical debate or have been viewed with suspicion. To this end, the most fruitful solution is to characterize the journal also through a dialogue between experts in ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy.

Guido Cusinato

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