Philosophy at a basic level is reflecting on the very fact that
things are. One of the deepest things being lost today is the sense of wonder before the mystery of existence and reality as a whole, writes Philip Gonzales
For both Plato and Aristotle philosophy begins in wonder. But, with Plato, I also think that philosophy should never seek to dispel wonder. Wonder, then, should be the very dwelling place of philosophy, its home and permanent habitat. Wonder must be the beginning and end of philosophy. But what is wonder and what does it have to do with our humanity or with the majority of people who have never studied philosophy? And, further, what does it have to do with our current technologically advanced, disenchanted and secularised world? My answer is that wonder has everything to do with the questions just posed. For the former question, this is the case because to be human is to be a philosophical and wondering animal and to live, ask and confront metaphysical questions. For the latter question, this is the case because it is my belief that one of the deepest things being lost today is the sense of wonder before the mystery of existence and reality as a whole. To lose wonder before the mystery of existence and reality is, in turn, to lose what it means to be human in the first place.
Philosophical questions
Aristotle tells us in his great work the Metaphysics that before philosophical questions can arise certain basic conditions of life must be met. Only then in a society in which leisure is possible can one begin to think about the profound mysteries right before our very eyes. Think, for example, of a nomadic tribe of hunters and gathers that are underthreat every day by death, caught-up in the pressing worries of whether or not they will even find food. Clearly, here any leisure is impossible as is the possibility of thinking about the astonishing fact that things are. However, in ancient Greece such conditions of leisure and security were met and this is one reason why ancient Greece is the birthplace of Western philosophy.
Before what were the pre-Socratics overwhelmed by wonder? Answer: that things are at all, that there is existence”
Philosophy arose, not just with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, but in the Sixth and Fifth Century BC with the pre-Socratic philosophers. I mention the pre-Socratic philosophers because when one reads the fragments that we have from them, and the simplicity in which they wrote, it is easy to see how philosophy began. It is thus the proper way to treat the most basic philosophical experience of wonder. Before what were the pre-Socratics overwhelmed by wonder? Answer: that things are at all, that there is existence. Things are! There is the sun in its unspeakably glorious and life-giving radiance; there is the starry heavens in its shimmering sublimity; there is water in all its life-sustaining forms from the nourishing rain, to the solemn winding of rivers, to the mystic reality of the sea and its ever-mysterious call; there is fire burning upon the hearth with its life-saving heat, the centre of the very life of the family; there is the flowing movement of the air through which we breath thus making our flesh a living flesh; there is the majesty, yet humility, of the earth from which the clay of our flesh sprung and in whose furrowed fertility seeds are planted in the cosmic covenant of planting and harvesting, the ripening of the fruits of the earth and our labour. One could go on and on…These are not just romantic sentiments but the very heart of philosophical wonder from which philosophy springs and is ever-filled. This is the mystery of the extraordinary in the ordinary within the very world in which we dwell. Things are, things exist, and they call to us in the language of their beauty, as St Augustine would say, and it is good to be, to be here. This is the wonder from which philosophy lives, where what is most basic and quotidian becomes a dreamscape or a reverie of the real. Here no fantasy is needed because the real is the fanciful and mysterious as it was for us when we played as children before we became disenchanted with the real.
Mystery
The wonder of philosophy before the mystery of being concerns the most basic experience of what it means to be human and thus to dwell within, and alongside, the four elements of earth, water, air and fire, as the pre-Socratics would say. How much is this fundamental experience being lost today in our world of money, disenchantment and technological mastery of reality is a question for another time. But what needs to be noted is that a life that can no longer be struck by these realities of the mystery of being and existence is a human life that is being dried-up and withering at its very roots. To live in wonder is to live a human life before, and within, the very mysteries in which our dwelling is enveloped, if we would only open again our five senses to the elements of being.
It was no historical accident that Christian thought took this pagan wisdom of wonderment and baptised it. It is an easy jump from the mystery of being, and a dwelling within the four elements, to a Christian sacramental vision of reality. Without the fertile furrows of the ground of philosophical, that is, human wonderment before the mystery of being the sacraments and our Christian faith ring hallow. So I end with the Deer’s Cry or the Lorica of St Patrick, a prayer that lived within a Christian wonder before being’s abiding mystery: I arise today, through
The strength of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The radiance of the moon,
The splendour of fire,
The speed of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of the sea,
The stability of the earth,
The firmness of rock.
Dr Philip John Paul Gonzales is a lecturer in philosophy at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. This article is part of a new regular column where philosophers from Maynooth Drs Gaven Kerr and Philip Gonzales offer accessible introductory thoughts on perennial themes in the history of philosophy and the Catholic tradition.