Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe

 
 

Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Columbia University Press

2009

 

Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy’s ambivalent relationship to the Platonic “wonder” that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder’s indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility.