Chapter 17 - On Humanity’s Metaphysical Need

Summary

With the exception of humans no being feels a sense of wonder at its own existence; in fact, all other beings consider it so self-evident they do not even notice it. The wisdom of nature still speaks from the tranquillity of the animal's gaze, because in animals the will and the intellect are not yet far enough apart that they can find one another surprising when they encounter one another again. The whole of appearance still hangs tightly onto the trunk of nature from which it sprouted, and is part of the unconscious omniscience of the great mother. – Only after the inner essence of nature (the will to life in its objectivation) has advanced vigorously and cheerfully through the two realms of beings that lack consciousness and then through the long and wide series of animals does it finally, with the onset of reason (which is to say in the human being), reach the point of awareness: then it is surprised by its own work and asks itself what it is. But its sense of wonder is all the more serious since this is its first conscious confrontation with death, and along with the finitude of all existence, the futility of all striving becomes more or less evident. Thus together with this awareness and this sense of wonder there arises the need for metaphysics that is distinctive to humans alone; a human being is, accordingly, a metaphysical animal. At the beginning of his consciousness of course he takes himself as something self-evident as well. But this does not last for long: very early, at the same time as the first act of reflection, we already find that sense of wonder that some day is to become the mother of metaphysics. Accordingly, Aristotle says at the beginning of his Metaphysics: ‘For it is due to this sense of wonder that people begin to philosophize now as before.’a And the truly philosophical state consists in the first instance in being able to entertain a sense of wonder about habitual and everyday things, since this causes one to problematize the universal aspects of appearance; researchers in the sciences of the real, meanwhile, only wonder about contrived and rare appearances, and for them the problem is just to reduce these rare appearances to more familiar ones.