determinate, individual, and unusual, set off against what is determinate and usual. To be amazed is to be carried away by something particular and unusual and hence is an abandonment of what in its own sphere is particular and usual.
b) Admiration.
Admiration is different from amazement and marvelling. The admired is indeed also something unusual, and again is something individual set off against the usual. Yet it is no longer merely that which captures curiosity and surprise, or which enthralls and amazes. The unusual that provokes admiration, the admired, becomes objective explicitly as the unusual. The production of what is admired, the achievement by which it comes to be in the way it comes to be, is explicitly acknowledged and appreciated.
No matter how wholly and genuinely admiration may be carried away by what fulfills it, yet it always involves a certain freedom over and against what is admired. This occurs to such a degree that all admiration, despite its retreating in face of the admired, its self-deprecating recognition of the admired, also embodies a kind of self-affirmation. Admiration claims the right and the capacity to perform the evaluation which resides in the admiration and to bestow it on the admired person. The admirer knows himself—perhaps not in the ability to accomplish things, though indeed in the power to judge them—equal to the one admired, if not even superior. Therefore, conversely, everyone who allows himself to be admired, and precisely if the admiration is justified, is of a lower rank. For he subordinates himself to the viewpoint and to the norms of his admirer. To the truly noble person, on the contrary, every admiration is an offense. This is not meant to discredit admiration itself. Within its proper limits, it is necessary. Without admiration, what would become of a ski jumper or a race driver, a boxer or an actor?
What is admired is—just like the curious—in each case something unusual juxtaposed to the usual, i.e., near it and over it, such that there can be exchange, to and fro, from one to the other, because, in this juxtaposition, each needs the other.