Aristotle’s Wonder

My colleague Jonathan McIntosh writes the following in response to my post quoting Aristotle’s statement about wonder as the beginning of philosophy:

“on your quote from Aristotle on wonder, I like to juxtapose this with another passage from a little later in the  Metaphysics in which he writes: ‘It is necessary, however, for the possession of it [i.e., knowledge] to settle for us in a certain way into the opposite of the strivings with which it began. For everyone begins, as we are saying, from wondering whether things are as they seem, such as the self-moving marvels, or about the reversals of the sun or the incommensurability of the diagonal . . . But it is necessary to end in what is opposite and better, as the saying goes . . . ’ (i.2.983a, Joe Sachs translation). In other words, philosophy may begin in wonder, but for Aristotle the goal is ultimately to transcend this wonder and exchange it for something ‘opposite and better,’ namely knowledge that is less human and more divine, fixed, and ‘certain.’ The Christianized Aristotelian tradition of Aquinas, of course, by seeing all things as having their origin in a God who can never be fully known, succeeds in prolonging and even perpetuating the sense of wonder that Aristotle admitted only at the beginning of the philosophical enterprise, as when Aquinas, for example, famously writes ‘all the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.’”