The soul-mood of astonishment in which the world becomes a question, the first stirring by which thinking reaches toward what it does not yet know.
Wonder in Anthroposophy is the soul-mood of astonishment that opens a person to knowledge, the inner stillness in which the world becomes a question before it becomes an answer. Rudolf Steiner treats it within his 1909 Berlin lecture cycle Metamorphoses of the Soul-Life (GA 58), where the soul that meets the world as a great and worthy whole comes to stand in wonder at the summit of its own being and becoming. Wonder is not idle marvelling but the first movement of cognition, the feeling-gesture by which thinking reaches toward what it does not yet comprehend. Steiner draws on Goethe to show wonder as the response of a healthy human nature at the height of conscious knowing, a mood that belongs to the awakening Consciousness Soul. Today the same astonishment is studied in phenomenology, where it is named the birth of philosophy.
Ask a young child why the sky is blue, and the question is not really about light. It is the sound of astonishment finding words. Steiner places that astonishment, the mood we call wonder, at the doorway of all real knowing. Before the soul can think a thing through, it must first be struck by it, held for a moment in the open question the world has set.
In Steiner's Own Words
if the healthy nature of man works as a unity, if he feels himself within the world as in a great, beautiful, noble and worthy whole, if harmonious ease offers him a pure and free delight: then the universe, if it could become conscious of itself, would rise in exultation at having reached its goal and would stand in wonder at the climax of its own being and becoming.” And again: “Man, placed at the summit of Nature, is again a whole new nature, which must in turn achieve a summit of its own. He ascends towards that height when he permeates himself with all perfections and virtues, summons forth order, selection, harmony and meaning, and attains in the end to the creation of a work of art.
What it Means Today
The mood Steiner describes was, for the ancient Greeks, the very doorway into knowing. Plato has Socrates tell the young geometer Theaetetus that wonder is the only beginning of philosophy and that the philosopher is precisely the one who feels it (Theaetetus, 155d). Aristotle agrees in the opening book of the Metaphysics: it is through wonder, he writes, that people both now and at the first began to philosophise (982b12). Astonishment is not a decoration on knowledge. It is the gap that knowledge then moves to close.
Twentieth-century phenomenology took this seriously again. Edmund Husserl, founding the movement at the University of Freiburg in 1913, asked his students to suspend their settled opinions and meet the world as if for the first time, a discipline of fresh astonishment he called the epoché. His pupil Eugen Fink later named wonder the basic mood of the phenomenological reduction. The point in both Freiburg and Steiner's Berlin is the same. We see almost nothing of what stands in front of us because habit has dulled the asking. Wonder lifts the habit. A child meeting frost on a window, a researcher who lets a strange result stay strange rather than explaining it away, a reader who pauses over a sentence instead of consuming it, each is practising the same gesture. Cognition, in this reading, does not begin with the answer. It begins with the willingness to be astonished, and then to think.
Where to Read More