to all theories and all-encompassing systems and presentations of a futural philosophy, the task is simply to become prepared for the necessity of that question. Therefore we have to attempt to clarify the primordial basic disposition, the disposing need, even at the risk of having everything taken as a psychological explanation. For, indeed, let us not deceive ourselves: nothing is gained by making a principle out of the proposition, “The disposition has us, we do not have it.” Whether or not something has been understood here will be manifest only in man’s action, creation, and Being, and not in the mere pretension to be the champion of a new opinion about the essence of disposition.
The Greeks name the origin of philosophy θαυμάζειν, which we translate as “wonder.” This characterization of the origin of philosophy out of marvelling—as it is also called—is often quoted and readily cited in order to account for the origin of philosophy psychologically and in that way to deprive philosophy precisely of the wondrous. All psychology intrudes in this way to disenchant and dispossess. But what is at issue here is only to raise philosophy—or any other essentially creative power—up into its inexplicability and to preserve it there, and only there, as a possible acquisition against all trivialization. To say philosophy originates in wonder means philosophy is wondrous in its essence and becomes more wondrous the more it becomes what it really is.
In order now to capture θαυμάζειν as the basic disposition of the beginning of Western philosophy, we are deliberately starting with the ordinary experiences and interpretations of what is called wonder or marvelling, so that we may expressly dispel what is ordinary from our reflection on θαυμάζειν.
The wondrous is first of all what is striking, remarkable, an exception to the habitual. We call it the curious or the amazing. To be amazed is to find oneself in face of the inexplicable, and indeed in such a way that in this disposition the inexplicability is sustained. Where amazement disposes man, he is transfixed by the curious and pursues its perpetuation, i.e., pursues its continued change, alternation, and exaggeration. For that is what distinguishes something curious: as a determinate, individual “this,” it falls outside of every determinate, individual sphere of the familiar and known. By the same token, the amazing is something