become impossible only on the basis of an essential transformation of thinking and questioning, and the necessary carrying out of that is now scarcely underway.
Yet our reflection on the necessity and the need of the beginning of Western thinking might prove a little less “fantastic” if we recall that the Greek thinkers themselves say that the origin of philosophy—hence the origin of what they began—is θαυμάζειν, or, as we translate, wonder. μάλα γὰρ φιλοσόφου τοῦτο τὸ πάθος, τὸ θαυμάζειν οὐ γὰρ ἄλλη ἀρχὴ φιλοσοφίας ἢ αὕτη.1 διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν.2 (φιλοσοφία: ἐπιστήμην τῶν πρώτων ἀρχῶν καὶ αἰτιῶν θεωρητική).3 Thus the origin of philosophy is a disposition? But to what extent is wonder what disposes and determines, and consequently the mode of compelling of the need we have spoken of, and therefore the way this need itself exists and incorporates man, in order to transport him, through this incorporation, into a basic disposition, into the not knowing the way out or the way in? (This not knowing became, at the end of the great Greek philosophy, in Aristotle, a component of the process of philosophizing, and today we have made of it an empty formula of pedantry.) If we wish to understand θαυμάζειν as this wonder, then we must in advance maintain strictly that the task is to clarify the basic disposition of the beginning of thinking. Therefore to adhere to the common representation of the meaning of θαυμάζειν cannot suffice; indeed, it will lead us into error.
It has long been known that the Greeks recognized θαυμάζειν as the “beginning” of philosophy. But it is just as certain that we have taken this θαυμάζειν to be obvious and ordinary, something that can be accomplished without difficulty and can even be clarified without further reflection. For the most part, the usual presentations of the origin of philosophy out of θαυμάζειν result in the opinion that philosophy arises from curiosity. This is a weak and pitiful determination of origin, possible only where there
1. Plato, Theatetus. Platonis Opera, ed. J. Burnet, vol. I, Oxford 1900. 155D 2ff. [“This is the great passion of the philosopher: wonder. There is no other beginning of philosophy than this.”—Tr.]
2. Aristotle, Metaphysica, A 2, 982b 11ff. [“For it is precisely through wonder that people today and at the beginning began to philosophize”—Tr. }
3. Cf. ibid., A 2, 982b 8ff. [“Philosophy: theoretical knowledge of the first principles and causes”—Tr.]