Det er interessant at vi i det hele tatt stiller oss spørsmålet. Som Erwin Schrödinger skriver i kapittelet "Philosophical Wonder" i sin profunde og vakre bok My View Of The World (Meine Weltansicht):

"It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from θαυμάζειν, philosophical wonder. The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy—and has, by the way, little cause to worry. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment; indeed, one might almost say that it is the fact that anything is experienced and encountered at all.

It seems to me that this second type of astonishment—and there is no doubt that it does occur—is itself something very astonishing.

Surely astonishment and wonder are what we feel on encountering something that differs from what is normal, or at least from what is for some reason or other expected. But this whole world is something we encounter only once. We have nothing with which to compare it, and it is impossible to see how we can approach it with any particular expectation. And yet we are astonished; we are puzzled by what we find, yet are unable to say what we should have to have found in order not to be surprised, or how the world would have to have been constructed in order not to constitute a riddle!

Perhaps the lack of any standard of comparison can be felt even more strongly than over θαυμάζειν in general, when we are confronted with the phenomena of philosophical optimism and pessimism. There have been, we know, very notable philosophers—such as Schopenhauer—who have declared that our world is a sad and ill-made place, and there have been others—like Leibniz—who have declared it the best of all conceivable worlds. But what would we say of a man who, having never in all his life left his native village, chose to describe its climate as exceptionally hot or cold?

These phenomena of value judgement, wonder and riddle-finding, which do not refer to any particular aspect of experience but to experience as a whole, and furthermore have impressed themselves not on idiots, but on highly competent minds, seem to me to indicate that we encounter, in our experience, relationships which have never (at least so far), even in their general form, been grasped either by formal logic or, still less, by exact science: relationships which keep forcing us back towards metaphysics; that is, towards something that transcends what is directly accessible to experience—however much we may flourish a death-certificate bearing no less valid a signature than that of Kant himself."