Abstract

This paper approaches the experience of wonder phenomenologically. The account is descriptive. I suggest that in addition to the familiar treatments of wonder as constituted through a break with everyday involvement, on the one hand, and an awareness of the sheer fact of existence, on the other, the experience of wonder involves an intensification of the primary contact by which the world is given. That contact is prior to and presupposed by both our involvement with objects as implements of mediation and our relation to others as persons. Because of that, wonder is depersonalizing and neutralizing, and so takes place outside any sense of ethical obligation. In contrast to efforts that aim at linking wonder and the good, I suggest that wonder is more aptly understood as making us deeper without making us better.