ABSTRACT
Philosophy has to find its place between the inarticulate amazement of the child and great verbal contraptions, built out of sentences well-carpentered and ill-formed. To cultivate a state of wonder is to attempt to escape the net of togetherness established and maintained on the basis of the 'taken-for-grantedness' that wonder tries to wake out of. The very passivity of wonder, so that it is something that suddenly overcomes a person, a state of supreme cognitive grace, makes cultivating it a rather delicate matter, requiring extraordinary tact if the person is to avoid self-contradiction. philosophy can be truly adult wondering, something that remains in touch with reality but puts into question what people accept without question, enabling a widened sense of possibility that is equally remote from the passive saucer-eyed wonder of the child and the idle wondering of the idly curious or the narrow active institutionalized wondering of scientific enquiry.
