Our Most Effective Weapon Is Imagination

In his Theaetetus, Plato remarks to Socrates: “This pathos is proper to the philosopher: It is the thaumazein. And philosophy has no other point of departure than this.” The word, which contains the root thauma, the same that appears in thaumaturgy, has often been translated as “wonder.” Philosophy is born out of amazement mixed with the curiosity that arises from facing something inexplicable that fascinates and transcends us. Aristotle writes explicitly that, beginning by asking the simplest questions, humanity has come to wonder about ever more complex things, ending up by investigating the moon, the sun and the stars, and by asking how the very universe itself came into being.

The sense of wonder we get when looking at a star-studded sky is a powerful one, even today an intense and even emotional experience, connecting us perhaps with an echo of that ancient amazement shared by thousands of generations before us. But perhaps too this feeling is not enough to understand the origin of this deep-seated, urgent, primordial, almost innate need to seek an answer to the big questions.

The theme was reprised by Emanuele Severino, a contemporary philosopher, who insisted emphatically on translating thauma as “wonder mixed with anguish.” In this way we recover the original significance of the word, and the knowledge would act as “an antidote to the terror provoked by the annihilating event that comes out of nowhere.”