Topics Philosophy

Question It seems to me that one of the things that philosophy does, at least for me, a beginner, is to expose mysteries where I thought there were none. Do any of you feel the same way, do you like that chill up your spine when you realize what you thought was self-evident might not be? Is the feeling that you have solved the problem more exciting than the feeling of wonder?

Accepted:
October 7, 2005

Comments

You have put it very well: exposing those mysteries is a deep pleasure of philosophy. That is one of the reasons that the great skeptical arguments -- arguments that seem to show that we have no reason to believe anything we have not seen, or anything outside ourselves, or even that our thoughts have any content -- are fascinating. They do cause a chill up the spine. The feeling of having solved the problem (a feeling I rarely have) is difficult to compare with the feeling of wonder at the problem. But if you are by disposition a philosopher you will not be inclined to wallow in the wonder; instead it will drive you to try to solve the problem.

I think this feeling of wonder is common among philosophers. It's one of the things that attracted me to philosophy in the first place. And many philosophers have commented on this phenomenon -- e.g., William James in Some Problems of Philosophy:

Philosophy, beginning in wonder ... is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. Its mind is full of air that plays round every subject. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.... [A person] with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.