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Language is a most wonderful thing, and when mixed with philosophy an even more wonderful thing.

Many people will recognize the experience of being struck by wonder at the world and one’s existence in it. Sometimes the experience stems from, or is accompanied by, a shift in perspective: perhaps, all of a sudden, you look upon yourself, as it were, from a remote corner of the universe. It is wondrous, bordering on absurdity, to imagine that, from a standpoint countless light years away, one may still know this earth to exist and you on it. The wonder attaches to the naked facts of there being a world and you being there to witness and contemplate it and ponder its meaning. Though the element of a ‘cosmic flight’ is a recurring motif in expressions and descriptions of wonder from Plato and the Stoics to the present day (Vasalou Citation2015: 156–159), anything can, in principle, engender such an experience. Most commonly cited as evoking wonder are the starry heavens, rainbows, and other natural spectacles and events, such as ‘the miracle of birth’. Wonder is often said to be the inspiration for and the beginning of philosophy, art, and science. The experience of wonder is complex, comprising (usually) some mixture of surprise, bafflement (a felt inability to understand whatever gave rise to one’s wonder), a sense of the importance of what one is contemplating, and a desire or felt need to dwell on the object of wonder, to stay with it, keep attending to it. It easily develops into admiration, awe, or reverence––though it can also give rise to less ‘positive’ feelings. I say ‘wonder is’, and ‘it can’; we must be careful, however, as Hepburn (Citation1980) and Vasalou (Citation2015) rightly point out, to speak of wonder or ‘the’ sense of wonder in the singular. The family of experiences––or types of experience––that comes under the heading of wonder has many members. Historically, wonder has been closely associated with fear, and this is readily understandable given wonder’s unsettling nature and its proximity to awe––why would a confrontation with something both immensely greater than us and beyond our comprehension necessarily be pleasant? A common distinction in the literature is that between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ wonder or ‘wonder(ing) about/how/why’ and ‘wonder at’ (Parsons, Citation1969: 88; Hadzigeorgiou, Citation2014: 45; Goodwin, Citation2001; Sinclair and Watson, Citation2001); elsewhere I speak of ‘deep’ or ‘contemplative’ wonder rather than ‘passive’ wonder (Schinkel, Citation2017), and Hepburn’s ‘existential wonder’ expresses the same type of experience. I have most recently used the terms ‘inquisitive’ and ‘contemplative’ wonder (Schinkel, Citation2018). It is the latter type of wonder that I will be concerned with in this paper, not inquisitive wonder, the kind of wonder that (to put it somewhat roughly, though not, I think, incorrectly) is more akin to curiosity. Inquisitive wonder is aimed at––in principle––answerable questions or puzzles which it motivates us to investigate. It is thus a more active, searching attitude, a wondering about something that is resolved when the answer to one’s question is found. Deep, contemplative, or existential wonder is not merely passive, however; but though it may also inspire a search for explanations and understanding, it cannot be resolved by any answer we may find. It is not, as Hepburn (Citation1980: 9, 10) calls it, ‘displaceable’, its object is ‘secure’: The finally secure object of wonder is the totality of laws and entities, the world as a whole. Explanation runs towards the totality, but there absolutely ends. Wonder is generated from this sense of absolute contingency; its object is the sheer existence of a world. I shall call it ‘existential wonder’([…] If the world’s existence is the basic wonder-generating fact, there is no good reason after all why that existential wonder should seem threatened by the network of causal relationships among the world’s constituents. Moreover, the totality is itself ungraspable in experience […] existential wonder is secure, whether directed at the thought of the whole or at the particular seen as representing the whole. To clarify this last point: existential or deep wonder is aimed at the whole or at the particular in the aspect of its ‘that-ness’, the bare fact of its existence. Thus, deep wonder can give rise to questions that sound exactly like those of the ‘active wonderer’, questions like: ‘how is it possible that … ?’, ‘how can there be such a thing as … ?’ But they are aimed, ultimately, at the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, at the sheer fact of existence, whether in general or in the form of the existence of a particular entity (the earth, a harebell, a bus stop). And for that reason they are in fact very different questions, and the wonder that inspires them cannot be resolved by explanations or answers of any kind. If (some part of) a scientist’s wonder remains after she has found the answer to a question she put to herself, this is likely to be more like contemplative wonder.Footnote2 Such wonder is perhaps best described as a mode of consciousness in which we experience that which we perceive or are contemplating as strange, deeply other or mysterious, fundamentally beyond the limits of our understanding, yet worthy of attention for its own sake. The experience is suffused with a vague but strong sense of importance and (often, though not always) meaning; it engages us fully, and touches us at an existential level. Like active wonder, deep wonder can be––but need not be––dispositional, even to the point where it becomes a constant element of one’s awareness or, in the most extreme case, a mode of consciousness one ‘inhabits’. Now, given the above description of contemplative wonder, it will not come as a surprise that many authors have suggested that there is a connection between wonder of this kind and ‘our’ (human beings’) search for meaning, for what is traditionally called ‘the meaning of life’. In Plato’s Theaetetus, the young man whose name the dialogue bears, having been presented with a number of perplexing philosophical problems, says: ‘By all the Gods, Socrates, I really cannot stop marvelling at the significance of these things, and at moments I grow positively giddy when I look at them.’ And Socrates replies: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder).Footnote3 Pieper (Citation1963: 103) emphasizes the essential nature of the connection between philosophy and wonder: Wonder is not just the starting point of philosophy in the sense of initium, of a prelude or preface. Wonder is the principium, the lasting source, the fons et origo, the immanent origin of philosophy. The philosopher does not cease ‘wondering’ at a certain point in his philosophizing––he does not cease to wonder unless, of course he ceases to philosophize in the true sense of the word.Footnote4 And philosophy, of course, is (or was, originally) that discipline, that ‘love’, that is not satisfied with the everyday meaning of things but seeks a deeper, even ultimate meaning. For Wittgenstein, too, to give a more recent example, wonder was intimately connected with meaning. In his ‘A lecture on ethics’ he remarks that ‘[e]thics […] springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life’ (Wittgenstein, Citation1965: 12) and says that the best way to describe the experience that comes to his mind in connection with the idea of absolute or ethical value is ‘to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world’ (1965: 8).Footnote5 My purpose in this paper is to explore this connection between wonder and meaning, in particular ‘the meaning of life’: does wonder ‘merely’ inspire our search for meaning, or does it also point the way towards meaning? Neither the philosophical literature on wonder nor that on meaning in life (or the meaning of life) addresses this issue in any systematic way.Footnote6 In light of the intrinsic connections between wonder, philosophy, and the search for meaning this can be seen as an omission. Naturally, this article cannot fill this gap alone, but it makes a start. It is not my purpose to engage with particular conceptions of life’s meaning developed in the literature. My aim is the more modest one of showing that ‘wonder’ (in particular contemplative wonder) is an interesting point of departure for reflection on life’s meaning, both because it is so strongly suggestive of (the possibility) of meaning and because at the same time it seems to foreclose the possibility of unshakable meaning or a definite view about life’s meaning. Furthermore, contemplative wonder points to the existential importance of the of late relatively neglected ‘big’ question of ‘the meaning of life’, rather than ‘meaning in life’, the things that make our lives more meaningful on a day-to-day basis. (I explain the distinction further in Section 5.) I begin to explore the abovementioned question about the connection between wonder and meaning in Section 2, and I pursue it further in Section 3, where I examine the suggestion that the meaning wonder points us to lies in connecting us with or sensitizing us to the mystery of existence. Can there be meaning in mystery, or is wonder––characterized as it is by puzzlement, a state of being lost for words in the face of mystery––rather antithetical to meaning? This discussion leads to the idea, explored further in Section 4, that wonder (also) depends on the meaning we ascribe to and find in things. In the concluding section I first ask whether wonder can still be a source of meaning in life, regardless of its relation to ‘the meaning of life’, and then return to the second half of my initial question: can wonder point the way towards meaning, even a ‘deeper’ meaning of life?

THE WRITE STUFF Václav HavelPowerofthePowerles Wittgenstein Short History Jane_Eyre1to3 zarathustra.html Books_Films1 Lancashire Recollections Language is a most wonderful thing, and when mixed with philosophy an even more wonderful thing. Many people will recognize the experience of being struck by wonder at the world and one’s existence in it. Sometimes the experience stems from, or is accompanied by, a shift in perspective: perhaps, all of a sudden, you look upon yourself, as it were, from a remote corner of the universe. It is wondrous, bordering on absurdity, to imagine that, from a standpoint countless light years away, one may still know this earth to exist and you on it. The wonder attaches to the naked facts of there being a world and you being there to witness and contemplate it and ponder its meaning. Though the element of a ‘cosmic flight’ is a recurring motif in expressions and descriptions of wonder from Plato and the Stoics to the present day (Vasalou Citation2015: 156–159), anything can, in principle, engender such an experience. Most commonly cited as evoking wonder are the starry heavens, rainbows, and other natural spectacles and events, such as ‘the miracle of birth’. Wonder is often said to be the inspiration for and the beginning of philosophy, art, and science. The experience of wonder is complex, comprising (usually) some mixture of surprise, bafflement (a felt inability to understand whatever gave rise to one’s wonder), a sense of the importance of what one is contemplating, and a desire or felt need to dwell on the object of wonder, to stay with it, keep attending to it. It easily develops into admiration, awe, or reverence––though it can also give rise to less ‘positive’ feelings. I say ‘wonder is’, and ‘it can’; we must be careful, however, as Hepburn (Citation1980) and Vasalou (Citation2015) rightly point out, to speak of wonder or ‘the’ sense of wonder in the singular. The family of experiences––or types of experience––that comes under the heading of wonder has many members. Historically, wonder has been closely associated with fear, and this is readily understandable given wonder’s unsettling nature and its proximity to awe––why would a confrontation with something both immensely greater than us and beyond our comprehension necessarily be pleasant? A common distinction in the literature is that between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ wonder or ‘wonder(ing) about/how/why’ and ‘wonder at’ (Parsons, Citation1969: 88; Hadzigeorgiou, Citation2014: 45; Goodwin, Citation2001; Sinclair and Watson, Citation2001); elsewhere I speak of ‘deep’ or ‘contemplative’ wonder rather than ‘passive’ wonder (Schinkel, Citation2017), and Hepburn’s ‘existential wonder’ expresses the same type of experience. I have most recently used the terms ‘inquisitive’ and ‘contemplative’ wonder (Schinkel, Citation2018). It is the latter type of wonder that I will be concerned with in this paper, not inquisitive wonder, the kind of wonder that (to put it somewhat roughly, though not, I think, incorrectly) is more akin to curiosity. Inquisitive wonder is aimed at––in principle––answerable questions or puzzles which it motivates us to investigate. It is thus a more active, searching attitude, a wondering about something that is resolved when the answer to one’s question is found. Deep, contemplative, or existential wonder is not merely passive, however; but though it may also inspire a search for explanations and understanding, it cannot be resolved by any answer we may find. It is not, as Hepburn (Citation1980: 9, 10) calls it, ‘displaceable’, its object is ‘secure’: The finally secure object of wonder is the totality of laws and entities, the world as a whole. Explanation runs towards the totality, but there absolutely ends. Wonder is generated from this sense of absolute contingency; its object is the sheer existence of a world. I shall call it ‘existential wonder’([…] If the world’s existence is the basic wonder-generating fact, there is no good reason after all why that existential wonder should seem threatened by the network of causal relationships among the world’s constituents. Moreover, the totality is itself ungraspable in experience […] existential wonder is secure, whether directed at the thought of the whole or at the particular seen as representing the whole. To clarify this last point: existential or deep wonder is aimed at the whole or at the particular in the aspect of its ‘that-ness’, the bare fact of its existence. Thus, deep wonder can give rise to questions that sound exactly like those of the ‘active wonderer’, questions like: ‘how is it possible that … ?’, ‘how can there be such a thing as … ?’ But they are aimed, ultimately, at the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, at the sheer fact of existence, whether in general or in the form of the existence of a particular entity (the earth, a harebell, a bus stop). And for that reason they are in fact very different questions, and the wonder that inspires them cannot be resolved by explanations or answers of any kind. If (some part of) a scientist’s wonder remains after she has found the answer to a question she put to herself, this is likely to be more like contemplative wonder.Footnote2 Such wonder is perhaps best described as a mode of consciousness in which we experience that which we perceive or are contemplating as strange, deeply other or mysterious, fundamentally beyond the limits of our understanding, yet worthy of attention for its own sake. The experience is suffused with a vague but strong sense of importance and (often, though not always) meaning; it engages us fully, and touches us at an existential level. Like active wonder, deep wonder can be––but need not be––dispositional, even to the point where it becomes a constant element of one’s awareness or, in the most extreme case, a mode of consciousness one ‘inhabits’. Now, given the above description of contemplative wonder, it will not come as a surprise that many authors have suggested that there is a connection between wonder of this kind and ‘our’ (human beings’) search for meaning, for what is traditionally called ‘the meaning of life’. In Plato’s Theaetetus, the young man whose name the dialogue bears, having been presented with a number of perplexing philosophical problems, says: ‘By all the Gods, Socrates, I really cannot stop marvelling at the significance of these things, and at moments I grow positively giddy when I look at them.’ And Socrates replies: I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder).Footnote3 Pieper (Citation1963: 103) emphasizes the essential nature of the connection between philosophy and wonder: Wonder is not just the starting point of philosophy in the sense of initium, of a prelude or preface. Wonder is the principium, the lasting source, the fons et origo, the immanent origin of philosophy. The philosopher does not cease ‘wondering’ at a certain point in his philosophizing––he does not cease to wonder unless, of course he ceases to philosophize in the true sense of the word.Footnote4 And philosophy, of course, is (or was, originally) that discipline, that ‘love’, that is not satisfied with the everyday meaning of things but seeks a deeper, even ultimate meaning. For Wittgenstein, too, to give a more recent example, wonder was intimately connected with meaning. In his ‘A lecture on ethics’ he remarks that ‘[e]thics […] springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life’ (Wittgenstein, Citation1965: 12) and says that the best way to describe the experience that comes to his mind in connection with the idea of absolute or ethical value is ‘to say that when I have it I wonder at the existence of the world’ (1965: 8).Footnote5 My purpose in this paper is to explore this connection between wonder and meaning, in particular ‘the meaning of life’: does wonder ‘merely’ inspire our search for meaning, or does it also point the way towards meaning? Neither the philosophical literature on wonder nor that on meaning in life (or the meaning of life) addresses this issue in any systematic way.Footnote6 In light of the intrinsic connections between wonder, philosophy, and the search for meaning this can be seen as an omission. Naturally, this article cannot fill this gap alone, but it makes a start. It is not my purpose to engage with particular conceptions of life’s meaning developed in the literature. My aim is the more modest one of showing that ‘wonder’ (in particular contemplative wonder) is an interesting point of departure for reflection on life’s meaning, both because it is so strongly suggestive of (the possibility) of meaning and because at the same time it seems to foreclose the possibility of unshakable meaning or a definite view about life’s meaning. Furthermore, contemplative wonder points to the existential importance of the of late relatively neglected ‘big’ question of ‘the meaning of life’, rather than ‘meaning in life’, the things that make our lives more meaningful on a day-to-day basis. (I explain the distinction further in Section 5.) I begin to explore the abovementioned question about the connection between wonder and meaning in Section 2, and I pursue it further in Section 3, where I examine the suggestion that the meaning wonder points us to lies in connecting us with or sensitizing us to the mystery of existence. Can there be meaning in mystery, or is wonder––characterized as it is by puzzlement, a state of being lost for words in the face of mystery––rather antithetical to meaning? This discussion leads to the idea, explored further in Section 4, that wonder (also) depends on the meaning we ascribe to and find in things. In the concluding section I first ask whether wonder can still be a source of meaning in life, regardless of its relation to ‘the meaning of life’, and then return to the second half of my initial question: can wonder point the way towards meaning, even a ‘deeper’ meaning of life?
The philosophy of literature The philosophy of literature addresses the most fundamental questions about the nature of literature as an art. Some of these questions address the metaphysics and ontology of literary works: What, if anything, essentially distinguishes literary works of art (such as epics, novels, drama, and poetry) from other kinds of writings, such as scientific reports, historical treatises, religious texts, guides, and manuals, which may happen to be written in a literary manner? Also, what kinds of things are literary works of art that seem to exist over time in some way independently of any of their particular printed editions? Other questions address our ways of engaging with literature, such as: What norms govern our interpretation and understanding of such works? Is the meaning of a work fixed, or does it change with the changes in the contexts in which it is read? Can we have a genuine emotional response to the characters, events, and states of affairs represented in such works even when we believe that they are not real? Finally, some questions address the value of works of literature: Do they offer any distinctive form of knowledge or insight? Can their cognitive and moral merits and defects count as artistic merits and defects? Philosophy of literature is not alone in pursuing these questions, for literary history, criticism, and other modes of scholarship address these concerns, as do readers when they reflect on their own and others’ practices of attending to works of art. However, the philosophical approach to literature, while often productively drawing on the empirical study and first-order analysis of literary works, tends to adopt a more systematic, theoretical, ahistorical, and foundational approach than commonly found in other fields. Also, while the philosophy of literature tends to address the nature of literature as an art, it has been profoundly shaped by work in other areas of philosophy far from aesthetics such as analytic metaphysics and philosophy of language, which since their inception have addressed such topics as the metaphysics of fictional characters. More recently, there has been an exciting cross-fertilization between philosophical approaches to literature and developments in cognitive science, particularly in areas devoted to the study of emotions and imagination.

Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, value, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions. Historically, many of the individual sciences, such as physics and psychology, formed part of philosophy. However, they are considered separate academic disciplines in the modern sense of the term. Influential traditions in the history of philosophy include Western, Arabic–Persian, Indian, and Chinese philosophy. Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece and covers a wide area of philosophical subfields. A central topic in Arabic–Persian philosophy is the relation between reason and revelation. Indian philosophy combines the spiritual problem of how to reach enlightenment with the exploration of the nature of reality and the ways of arriving at knowledge. Chinese philosophy focuses principally on practical issues about right social conduct, government, and self-cultivation. Major branches of philosophy are epistemology, ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemology studies what knowledge is and how to acquire it. Ethics investigates moral principles and what constitutes right conduct. Logic is the study of correct reasoning and explores how good arguments can be distinguished from bad ones. Metaphysics examines the most general features of reality, existence, objects, and properties. Other subfields are aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of history, and political philosophy. Within each branch, there are competing schools of philosophy that promote different principles, theories, or methods. Philosophers use a great variety of methods to arrive at philosophical knowledge. They include conceptual analysis, reliance on common sense and intuitions, use of thought experiments, analysis of ordinary language, description of experience, and critical questioning. Philosophy is related to many other fields, including the sciences, mathematics, business, law, and journalism. It provides an interdisciplinary perspective and studies the scope and fundamental concepts of these fields. It also investigates their methods and ethical implications.