The Theme Of Wonder In Kenneth Gallagher's Philosophizing

Kenneth Gallagher rightly accounts for the cause of man’s philosophizing. Philosophical inquiry cannot advance from the attitude in which everyday thinking operates, but may proceed only from wonder, a kind of self-reflecting receptivity to the mystery of being.1 Wonder is something separate from disinterested curiosity, something apart from bewilderment before the new or very complicated.2 Man wonders at himself and God and time and death and other obvious things. Wonder is that which grips a man stepping backward from, shocking him upon drawing again toward something almost too obvious.3 There and only there, confronted by the formerly unmarvelous, does man marvel, doing so from a position both near and remote, interrogating now with the
Gallagher makes the observation that, rather than “a set of formulated answers,” philosophy or the act of philosophizing is more akin to “entering into a certain kind of question” in that the posture of him who wonders and proceeds to philosophize is that of a man rising enthusiastically from his seat of indifference, fully alert to his own sudden pair of rejections: that is, he necessarily rejects both the comfortable and presumptuous offer to accept “what everyone knows” and the absurd, though deeply tempting, proposition that nothing really can be known.4 Gallagher’s treatment of wonder is commensurate with that of Josef Pieper who, in writing precisely about wonder in his essay The Philosophical Act, makes the observation that wonder bears a similar structure to hope and that philosophizing is preeminently hopeful in its
. . well, the attainment of wealth, power, honor or pleasure; even though each of these classic distractors disappoints man both in and out of their respective and variously combined possessions. Man may also proudly despair—hopelessly—that knowledge, if it can be had at all, can only be of the scientifically verifiable sort, that “truth” is reducible to fact, and Truth-with-a-capital “T” is the stuff of fairytales for children, of dogma for fanatics, of propaganda advanced by bigots; even though each of these judgments is grounded in an appeal to an absolute truth that cannot be scientifically verifiable. The proudest, it hardly needs saying, is this final one, the modern skeptic: he is a rationalist and has seen through it all and won’t be fooled, like everybody else. Yet he is the most fooled and, be assured, in