c) Astonishment and awe.
Admiration must be distinguished from astonishment and awe. Indeed, we find here, as in the case of admiration, a characteristic retreating in face of the awesome, up to what is called dumfoundedness. But in astonishment this retreating in face of the extraordinary no longer postures as that fundamentally arrogant and self-referential evaluation and patronization found well- or ill-concealed in all admiration. In admiration there always resides an attitude that knows itself as applying to oneself as much as to the admired. Astonishment includes a decisive suspension of position-taking. The unusual is now no longer merely what is other, the exciting opposite of the usual, and it is also not merely what is acknowledged as extraordinary and made equal in rank to the admirer. Astonishment rather allows the unusual to grow, precisely as what is extraordinary, into what overgrows all usual powers and bears in itself a claim to a rank all its own. Astonishment is imbued with the awareness of being excluded from what exists in the awesome. Yet even here the astonishment is still in every case an encounter with and a being struck by a determinate individual object of awe. Hence even astonishment does not fulfill what we intend with the word wonder and what we are trying to understand as the basic disposition, the one that transports us into the beginning of genuine thinking.
§38. The essence of wonder as the basic disposition compelling us into the necessity of primordial thinking.
What we call, in an emphatic sense, wonder, and claim to be the essence of θαυμάζειν, is different, essentially different, from all types and levels of amazement, admiration, and astonishment. We will attempt to clarify in thirteen points the essence of wonder, i.e., the basic disposition compelling us into the necessity of primordial questioning. All the previously mentioned modes of marvelling—if we may collect them under this title—have one thing in common throughout all their differentiations, namely