Abstract
This is a story about certain times or cases in the human life when expression through language seems inescapably inadequate, when words seem bound to fail us, and meaning to escape. Such a case is the experience of astonishment. I use the word “astonishment” to describe the experience of being struck by something that appears to be extraordinarily significant and which can have a positive emotional tone or a negative emotional tone. Dating back to 1300, the word “astonishment” comes from the old French word estoner that means “to stun, daze, deafen, astound,” which originates from the Latin verb attonare or extonare that literally means to leave someone thunderstruck, to strike with lightning. In its root, then, the word “astonishment” is neutral: it can be positive or negative, but in both cases, it has a profoundly unsettling, dazing effect. Examples of positive astonishment may include an experience of overwhelming beauty, or kindness. Examples of negative astonishment may include an experience of the absurdity of death, of a terrifying evil, or of absolute guilt; in the face of these, one feels anxious and saddened, and perhaps left with a sense of despair. Although I offer here examples of cases in the face of which one might experience astonishment, positive or negative, the principal aim of this book is not to examine what triggers an experience of astonishment; hence I will not address questions such as: “are there certain things in life that are more likely to astonish us?,” or “can anything appear to be astonishing?” These are not my questions. Rather, the book focuses on a central trait of that experience, namely, the way it appears to resist expression in language.
Aesthetic wonder is: that the world exists. That what exists does exist.
Wittgenstein, Notebooks
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
My aim here is not to create boundaries around words, but to make a conceptual distinction. Most of these words—wonder , bewilderment, astonishment , surprise—come with their own history and philosophical baggage. The word “wonder ,” for example, has been used to translate different ideas in the history of philosophy, from the Platonic and Aristotelian versions of thaumazein (θαυμάζειν), through to the Aquinas’ admiratio, the Cartesian l’ admiration, the Hegelian Verwunderung, and the Heideggerian Erstaunen, and often the differences in these philosophical takes on wonder connect to the question about the nature of the puzzlement involved and whether it is in principle resolvable. Although a discussion on this exceeds the book’s purposes, Heidegger’s Erstaunen (extreme wonder) is closer to what I want to describe, for one of its traits is, as he puts it, that it knows no way neither in nor out of the unusualness of what is most usual (1994, 143–146). I picked the word “astonishment ,” mainly because of its etymology (to strike with lightning), to describe what one could also call “extreme wonder” and decided to not call it “extreme wonder” because of the complex conceptual baggage that the term “wonder ” comes with.
The term “wonder ” therefore carries different conceptual aspects, some of which are closer to what I want to describe here, and some of which are further away. For a discussion on the history and grammar of wonder , see Llewelyn (2001), Vassalou (2015), and Rubenstein (2008).
- 2.
My reader might wonder why I haven’t chosen to call these experiences that I am interested in “experiences of absolute value.” The answer is that the word “absolute value” can come with a conceptual baggage that I do not want, and that it also fails to address the affective element of the experience.
- 3.
At first sight, there is a difference between the two cases: the second case seems to be a case of relative value, a case of wonder rather than astonishment , since we do learn a new fact , namely, that it is possible to grow a lion’s head. However, Wittgenstein is interested in how one can treat the case of growing a lion’s head (a case that according to what I have said so far would be described as a case of wonder ) in terms of absolute value, a case of a miracle.
- 4.
Wittgenstein connects all three experiences to God (as the creator of the world, as the source of absolute safety, and as someone in the eyes of whom I am absolutely guilty). However, introducing God is not meant to explain away the sense of astonishment . Rather, the concept of God encapsulates the sense of astonishment ; it is the absolute of which one cannot speak.
- 5.
Paul Tillich (1952) describes this as an anxiety in front of losing one’s moral self-affirmation: “Man’s being […] is not only given to him but also demanded of him. He is responsible for it. […] This situation produces the anxiety which, in relative terms, is the anxiety of guilt. […] The anxiety of guilt can drive us toward complete self-rejection, to the feeling of being condemned not to an external punishment but to the despair of having lost our destiny” (1952, 51, 53).
- 6.
As I suggested earlier, the stunning element of these experiences is inextricable from the difficulty of expression that accompanies them.
- 7.
The blurring of a distinction between what comes from within and what comes from without finds its most radical manifestation in delirious discourse, where a phrase appears with such intensity as if it was uttered by some external voice (in the Schreber case by God or an internal voice or someone else in a telepathic way).
References
Bouwsma, O. K. (1986). Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951 (J. Craft & R. Hustwit, Eds.). Indianapolis: Hackett.
Diamond, C. (2008). The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. In: S. Cavell, C. Diamond, J. McDowell, I. Hacking, & C. Wolfe (Eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life (pp. 43–91). New York: Columbia University Press.
Dostoyevsky, F. (2003). The Brothers Karamazov (D. McDuff, Trans.). New York: Penguin Classics.
Fischer, P. (2003). Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1994). Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected ‘Problems’ of ‘Logic’ (R. Rojcewitz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics (G. Fried & R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kluger, R. (2001). Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Albany: SUNY Press.
Lacan, J. (1997). Seminar III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Llewelyn, J. (2001). On the Saying That Philosophy Begins in Thaumazein. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 4, 48–57.
McDowell, J. (2008). Comment on Stanley Cavell’s Companionable Thinking. In: Cavell et al. (Eds.), Philosophy and Animal Life (pp. 127–138). New York: Columbia University Press.
Plato. (2010). The Last Days of Socrates. London: Penguin Books.
Rovatti, P.-A. (1996). The Peace of the Evening. JEP, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 3–4.
Rubenstein, M.-J. (2008). Strange Wonder: The Closing of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tarkovsky, A. (1994). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986 (K. Hunter-Blair, Trans.). London: Faber & Faber.
Tillich, P. (1952). The Courage to be. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Vassalou, S. (2015). Wonder: A Grammar. SUNY Press.
Weil, S. (1977). The Simone Weil Reader (G. A. Panichas, Ed.). Moyer Bell Ltd.
Wittgenstein, L. (1993). A Lecture on Ethics. In J. Klagge & A. Nordmann (Eds.), Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951 (pp. 37–44). Indianapolis & Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Balaska, M. (2019). Introduction. In: Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16939-8_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-16938-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-16939-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)