PHILOSOPHY PATHWAYS Issue 42

II. 'Continental Community of Inquiry' Edited and Introduced by
Matthew Del Nevo

Opinions about the merits of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche have varied greatly during the century following his death in the year 1900. He had already achieved cult status in Germany at the time of his death and it was possible for his devoted friend Peter Gast to end an effusive oration at Nietzsche's gravesite by saying, "Peace be on your ashes! Holy be your name to all future generations!" The continuous outpouring of books about Nietzsche, the existence of numerous Nietzsche societies all over the world and the prevalence of his writings in bookstores indicates that, while his memory may not have reached the level of a religious icon, there remains an enduring interest in his ideas. But there is another viewpoint about Nietzsche. Anacleto Verrechia, one of his many biographers, expressed the view that excessive interest in Nietzsche is a type of sickness in itself. A London bookseller during the First World War called that disastrous conflict the Euro-Nietzschean War. The Nazi era has been regarded by many as having its intellectual origin in the ideas of Nietzsche and in 1981 an issue of 'Der Spiegel' carried a cover page with a gun-wielding Hitler back to back with a reflective Nietzsche. The caption read, "Tater Hitler, Denker Nietzsche" (perpetrator Hitler, thinker Nietzsche).

To what can this enduring fascination with Nietzsche's ideas--his ethics one might say because most of Nietzsche's thoughts represent his own unique ethics--to what can this fascination be attributed? He has often been described as a master of German prose style but he is rarely read because of his stylistic brilliance, which besides does not translate easily into other languages. His concepts are hardly those that would command him a wide audience, for example, the will to power, the relativity of values, Christianity as the bete noire of European civilization, his notions of the 'Ubermensch', the ultimate political incorrectness in our day as well as his. He mocked the principal metaphysical dogma of western culture--the belief in God--and went a step beyond Heine in sarcasm by saying that God was not only made sick by his creative product man, but had died of grief over man's condition. He would have nothing to do with ideas of immortality, separateness of soul or any kind of revelatory knowledge. But he was no more entranced with scientific materialism, which he saw as the manifestation of limited and self-serving minds. Socialists and nationalists he viewed as simple-minded 'canaille'. He thought compassion to be the principal danger to a developed mind. His comments about the female sex are best left unreported. For all these ideas, he has been regarded as the ultimate nihilist of Europe. Nihilism is rarely a point of view that attracts many adherents.

Then why, one may ask, does Nietzsche continue to attract such interest a century after his death. I submit that it is because he is the individualist par excellence --existentialist, one might say--who was committed to the primacy of the mind in all its dimensions and demanded the development of its potential. The noble soul, he stated, has reverence for itself. The Ubermensch to Nietzsche is not the man of political or military might, not a scientist or a scholar, not a religious leader and certainly not a plutocrat; he is a superior personality whose superiority resides in the workings of his mind. The cultural traditions within which individuals are so prone to become entangled are relegated by him to the category of traps for the unwary. One has to recognize the enormous difference in reading about Nietzsche and reading Nietzsche himself. Scholarly commentators who analyze his works give their judgements within the context of scholarly analysis. But Nietzsche reveals his inner self while still retaining an intellectual awareness. He writes with his blood to use his own phrase. Walter Kaufmann said that Nietzsche creates his own special world in the tension between analysis and existentialism. His thoughts, intuitions, dislikes and positive passions are expressed personally. The reader who experiences his Geist, his spirit--the German term is more inclusive--has made contact with a writer who has risen above the trappings of society and is communicating his own uniquely personal perspectives. Such an author is very rare. It is not surprising that he inspires both extreme positive and extreme negative feelings in his readers.

During the first week of 1889, while living in Turin, the forty-four year old Nietzsche suffered a total nervous breakdown. He had been exhibiting some signs of nervous instability in the previous months but the abruptness and severity of his breakdown surprised his family and few friends. Franz Overbeck, his faithful former colleague from his Basel days as professor of philology journeyed to Turin to provide assistance. In a fateful judgement, Overbeck decided to bring him back to Basel and arranged for his admission to a local institution for the mentally deranged. After a few days of observing Nietzsche, who was by then totally manic in his behavior, the chief psychiatrist made the diagnosis of 'Progressive Paralyse', general paresis in English. This diagnosis was sustained by the physicians who subsequently cared for him and has been accepted by those concerning themselves with Nietzsche's medical history. Fourteen months after his institutionalization, he was released to the care of his mother. Gradually he sunk into a total apathy. His mind, to use a term from Emil Kraepelin, father of German psychiatry, had become a devastated field. He died ten years later.

It is necessary to say a few words about the diagnosis general paresis. It refers to the development of dementia and loss of motor functions in an otherwise well adult, usually in his middle years. Megalomania, agitation and delusions of grandeur may be associated features, symptoms that many thought fitted Nietzsche perfectly. Paresis was one of the most common diagnoses during the nineteenth century among patients admitted to mental institutions. One might compare its importance then with that of schizophrenia today. It was only late in the nineteenth century that it was recognized that individuals with general paresis usually revealed a history of syphilitic infection, although this occurred many years before the onset of the general paresis. It might be compared with the temporal relationship of AIDS to HIV infection. Now it is regarded as a late manifestation of syphilis due to spirochetal infestation of the brain. Strangely, paresis is a very rare disorder today, although the same is not true of syphilis as a disease entity.

Nietzsche's diagnosis of syphilitic brain disease was known during his life only to the few physicians involved with his care. Nothing had been said to the family. It was not until 1902, two years after his death, that a long article was published by the noted neuropsychiatrist Paul Mobius which let the cat out of the bag. It was entitled "Nietzsche's Pathology" and revealed that Nietzsche had suffered with general paresis, a disease of the brain. Mobius did not mention the word syphilis, which carried the same social stigma then as it does now. However, given the association of paresis with syphilis, Nietzsche's detractors were soon able to label him as a syphilitic.

The major part of Mobius' monograph analyzed Nietzsche's writings with the purpose of showing how they were affected by his brain disease. This method of literary analysis came to be known by the name of "pathography", an approach that was used by Mobius and others for the enlightenment of readers. He believed that all of Nietzsche works published after 1880, virtually encompassing his entire output as an independent philosopher, showed the effects of general paresis. Later, pathographic writers did not necessarily believe that Nietzsche's writing was adversely affected by spirochetes in the brain; on the contrary, it was proposed by some that a "disinhibition" was induced allowing free flow of Nietzsche's thoughts. Today, no serious student of the effects of brain damage would subscribe to this view.

Subsequent to the pronouncements of Nietzsche's psychiatrists and later ones who concurred with the diagnosis, much information has become available that casts serious doubt on the diagnosis and, in fact, makes the existence of syphilitic brain disease in Nietzsche highly unlikely.[1] The widespread availability of blood tests for syphilis after 1913 forever altered the diagnosis of this condition. It became evident that general paresis was an over diagnosed disorder. The psychiatric manifestations once thought to be specific for paresis revealed themselves to be present in many other psychiatric disorders. With the advent of laboratory testing, the diagnosis of paresis became more and more infrequent until its virtual disappearance in current times.

Furthermore, there are a number of features in Nietzsche mental illness that contradicts a diagnosis of organic brain disease of any type. The writings of 1888, Nietzsche's last year of creative literary activity, reveal the presence of exceptional cognitive capacity at a time when spirochetes were supposed to be devouring his brain cells. The hallmark of organic brain disease is the loss of cognitive capacities. 'Ecce Homo', completed just before his breakdown, displays a lucid and vigorous thought content and is composed with Nietzsche's usual masterful prose style. For example:

     "Whoever knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows
     that it is an air of heights, a strong air. One must be
     made for it, otherwise there is no small danger to become
     chilled by it. The ice is near, the solitude is
     immense--but how calm lies everything in the light! How
     free one breathes! How much one feels to be below oneself.
     Philosophy, as I have until now understood and lived it, is
     the voluntary life in ice and high mountains--the seeking
     out of everything strange and questionable in existence,
     everything that up to now has been banned by morality. From
     long experience with such wandering in the forbidden, I
     discovered that the fundamental causes, which up to now has
     given rise to moralizing and idealizing, seem very different
     than might be expected: the concealed history of the
     philosophers, of the great names in psychology, was
     revealed to me. How much truth can a mind endure, how much
     can a mind dare? Increasingly for me, that has become the
     real measure of value. Error is not blindness, error is
     cowardice...every accomplishment, every step forward in
     knowledge follows from courage, from strength in oneself,
     from purity toward oneself."

Whatever one may think Nietzsche's metaphors and ideas, and the hyperbole present on virtually every page of 'Ecce Homo', it cannot be denied that he was in charge of his material.

There were other features of his illness that did not fit the diagnosis of general paresis. These were the extremely slow progression of his disorder beyond the experiences of the time and the absence of dysarthria and other motor losses characteristic of paresis. Nietzsche's physicians were aware of these discrepancies but preferred to believe that Nietzsche was an atypical case.

There can be little doubt of how Nietzsche would have been managed by psychiatrists of today. He would have been diagnosed with manic depressive psychosis (current terminology uses the less meaningful term bipolar disease). He would have been loaded with drugs from the armamentarium of psychotropic medications, which no doubt would have suppressed some of the more bizarre symptoms that he displayed during his fourteen months of institutionalization. If, in spite of medications, Nietzsche continued to show signs of psychosis, his diagnosis would have been changed to chronic schizophrenia, a common switch in long term manifestations of psychosis. In either case, Nietzsche's unique creative life would have come to an end, as it did in the actual course of his illness.

However, facile utilization of psychiatric jargon does not explain anything in the case of Nietzsche. One is still left with the question: what happened to Nietzsche? I believe that one must look to his life not to his brain to understand what happened to him. Nietzsche had broken with all his professional, family and social connections. He was single, lived alone in constantly changing circumstances, had no friends in his vicinity and possessed an inadequate grasp of the languages spoken where he lived. Additionally, he had a severe visual handicap that significantly interfered with his life. His small income was increasingly precarious. Added to all these pressures was his mode of thought, which was idiosyncratic to an extreme. He had created values that set himself against the entire cultural and religious framework of his era. The ever-increasing sarcasm and hyperbole of his writings reveal the extreme tension within which he lived. Franz Overbeck, who knew him best, commented that his whole life was a preparation for madness.

Thus what is surprising is not that Nietzsche lost contact with reality but that the break took as long as it did to occur. But the fact that he could not sustain his equilibrium does not mean that his thoughts expressed prior to the breakdown can be discounted as the megalomania of one with brain disease. Nietzsche valued the creative capacities of the human mind. A key to this value system can be found in a passage in 'Beyond Good and Evil' in the section entitled, 'What is Noble'.

     "The greatest events and thoughts--but the greatest
     thoughts are the greatest events--are comprehended last;
     the generations that are contemporaneous with them do not
     experience such events--they live right past them."

Perhaps the best commentary on Nietzsche was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson before Nietzsche was born. "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end." Nietzsche had read Emerson and used one of his sentences as an epigraph for the first edition of 'The Gay Science'.

One should not make an idol of Nietzsche nor did he wish to become one. He had character faults, he could be boastful, deceptive and self-pitying. Amor fati for him was a goal to be sought, not a part of his normal temper. Ultimately the discrepancy between Nietzsche's ideals and the realities of his psychic structure became so great that he collapsed into psychosis. He should not be regarded as a martyr but as a human being whose personal capacities could not keep pace with his aspirations. He is more Icarus than Satan or Jesus, his life proves that there are limits to one's capacity to create oneself in an integrated manner. But madness fascinated Nietzsche. He refers to it over and over again in his writings and regarded it as a necessary condition for spiritual progress in society. He did recognize the price to be paid. In a letter to a friend in July 1888, six months before his breakdown, Nietzsche commented: "I have given men the deepest book they possess, my Zarathustra...however, how one must atone for that! Must pay for it! It almost ruins one's character. The cleft has become too great. Since then I really only carry on clowning (Possenreisserei) in order to keep control over an unbearable tension and vulnerability."

Henry David Thoreau whose life and thoughts have many similarities to Nietzsche's--albeit Thoreau possessed a more integrated personality--observed that most men live lives of quiet desperation. It is unlikely that his judgement would be different today. Perhaps this is why so many individuals resonate empathetically with Nietzsche whose desperate state is clearly manifest in his writings. The problems of Nietzsche are still the problems of today. Of course, there are not many who suffer with them as much as Nietzsche did just as there are few who possess his genius and capacity for self-expression. The focus of western societies--particularly U.S.A. society--is often on a self-serving "ethics" indiscriminately imposed on others. But in the long run according to Max Weber, founder of scientific sociology, the only really significant factor in human society is the free, value-creating initiatives of the individual personality. That is why interest in Nietzsche persists and his legacy lives on today.

1. Schain, R. 'The Legend of Nietzsche's Syphilis' Westport: Greenwood Press,
2001

II. 'THE CONTINENTAL COMMUNITY OF INQUIRY' EDITED AND INTRODUCED BY
MATTHEW DEL NEVO

We are pleased to announce that the Continental Community of Inquiry workbook by Matthew Del Nevo is now available for free download from the Pathways web site at:

Here are two sections from Matthew Del Nevo's Introductory discussion. Below, in III. we have reproduced one of the three extracts by Friedrich Nietzsche included in the collection.

To become philosophers we need to learn to state, as clearly and convincingly as possible, what we believe and what we believe in. To do this we must first learn how to examine what we believe and believe in. Such examination will take the form of philosophical investigations. These investigations are attempts to work out our ideas against those of others and to see and understand all their implications and complications. There are two prongs to such investigations. On the one hand, we test our ideas against those of our contemporaries, and on the other hand, we measure them against the classic statements of the great philosophers of the past.

It is the effort to appreciate the differences between one's own views and other's views, to be able to argue with someone who disagrees and resolve difficulties that may light our path.

Working with the texts in this book students will not only have the opportunity to read real philosophers, they will encounter established and honoured philosophical ideas. In the Continental Community of Inquiry students will be able to test their ideas against those of their contemporaries and also against some of the decisive ideas of the recent past.

The Continental Community of Inquiry, which is the way philosophy is best taught in schools, prevents:

     "...dialogue from being a theoretical and dogmatic account
     and forces it to be a concrete and practical exercise,
     because, to be precise, it is not concerned with the
     exposition of doctrine, but with guiding an interlocutor
     [or interlocutors guiding each other] to a certain settled
     mental attitude: it is a combat, amicable, but real. We
     should note that this is what takes place in every
     spiritual exercise; it is necessary to make oneself change
     one's point of view, attitude, set of convictions,
     therefore to dialogue with oneself, therefore to struggle
     with oneself." [1]

Nevertheless, in a Continental Community of Inquiry the text remains a basic object and reference point. It is as if it symbolises a commonality, a locus, by which a culture or tradition identifies itself, and which it preserves and reveres for this reason.

If a lot of modern philosophy easily degenerates into reflective abstract understanding and its derivative, formal logic, then Continental philosophy aims to revive philosophy herself. As Hegel and every prominent philosopher reminds us, real philosophy, since its commencement in Greece, aimed at transforming one's vision of the world and thereby the world. The goal of philosophy was the art of living. The texts chosen for this book face us toward that goal.

The concept of 'inquiry' is not self evident and is understood differently in a Continental Community of Inquiry than in a Community of Inquiry.

First, a bit of background: The philosophical Community of Inquiry pioneered by Mat Lipman and others is based on a certain view of philosophy that has prevailed in English-speaking countries in the modern era, which, perhaps, can be traced as far back as Bacon. This approach to philosophy is characterised by an analytical emphasis on semantics and linguistic elements of meaning. 'Philosophy for Children' (p4c) and 'Philosophy in Schools' use what is called 'a Community of Inquiry' as a method by which participants - that is, students - can learn to think by the actual practice of it. It is a great idea that works well with all age groups, from Primary School children through to Adult Education.

The way in which the philosophical Community of Inquiry is facilitated, however, is in accordance with the protocols of a certain style of logic. This is the style of a standard logic text-book used in English-speaking countries.

Yet these English language logicians do not represent the mainstream history of philosophy. This is philosophy as practised in continental Europe, particularly in France and Germany. From a more European perspective, it seems as if English-language philosophy is characterised by a literalism with respect to language - so prominent in its Philosophy of Religion - and, furthermore, is contaminated by an empiricist and positivist ethos, which manifests itself in a categorical pragmatism, utilitarianism and rationalism. While English-language philosophy frequently invokes the name of Kant, from a more European perspective it seems as if "Kant" is a cipher for the collapsing of ontology into epistemology, so that any question about the nature of things automatically becomes a question about how we can know. Then, with empiricist presuppositions the question of knowledge is judged in terms of so-called "cognitive processes". This is hardly philosophy any more.

Philosophy demands breadth and freedom, but some ways of doing philosophy restrict what is meant by "reason" and stifle true freedom of thought and speech.

If one is running philosophy as a Community of Inquiry, it is crucial that what one is facilitating is genuinely philosophical and not anything less, let alone anything else.

As a rule, Anglo-American philosophy believes in the "laws of thought" and reasons accordingly, not so the Continental philosopher. The laws of thought, for those unfamiliar with them, may be stated as follows and restated algebraically:

     1. "The Law of Identity": A is A (where A stands for
       anything whatsoever)

     2. "The Law of Non-contradiction": nothing can be both A
       and not-A.

     3. "The Law of Excluded Middle": Everything is either A or
       not-A.

     In short:

And yet, writing as long ago as 1827 the great German philosopher, Hegel, had this to say of the "laws of thought":

     "It is asserted that the Law of Identity, though it cannot
     be proved, regulates the procedure of every consciousness,
     and that experience shows it to be accepted as soon as its
     terms are apprehended. To this alleged experience of the
     logic-books may be opposed the universal experience that no
     mind thinks or forms conceptions or speaks, in accordance
     with this law, and that no existence of any kind whatever
     conforms to it. Utterances after the fashion of this
     pretended law (A planet is -- a planet; Magnetism is --
     magnetism; Mind is -- mind) are, as they deserve to be,
     reputed silly. That is certainly matter of general
     experience. The logic which seriously propounds such laws
     and the scholastic world in which alone they are valid have
     long been discredited with practical common sense as well as
     with the philosophy of reason."[2]

This book aims to redress the balance and bring Continental philosophy to the Community of Inquiry. It aims to bring a different ethos to the Community of Inquiry and to present a new way of conducting such a Community.

2. Hegel, G.W.F. 'The Logic of Hegel', 2nd Edn. tr. W. Wallace 1932 Oxford University Press, pp.213--4

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) has had an extraordinary influence on twentieth century philosophy, arts and politics. Coming from a strong Lutheran background he studied classical philology in Bonn and Leipzig and was made a professor at the early age of 24. In 1879, after taking an early retirement on a small pension, Nietzsche lived in cheap boarding houses in the Alps and along the Italian seaboard, becoming increasingly estranged from the world. He eventually went insane in 1889 and lived out the rest of his life in mental darkness. Nietzsche was a great literary stylist and most of his works are collections of highly unsystematic aphorisms. His best known works are 'The Gay Science' (1882/9); 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' (1883-5); 'Beyond Good and Evil' (1886) and 'The Twilight of the Idols' (1888). He is often regarded as a 'dangerous' thinker. Our text is taken from the early essay 'Schopenhauer as Educator' (1876)--a tribute the nineteenth century renegade German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer--published in 'Untimely Meditations' (1893).

A traveller who had seen many lands and peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what quality in men he had discovered everywhere he had gone. He replied: 'They have the tendency to laziness.' To many it will seem that he ought rather to have said: 'They are all timid. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.' In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience--why? From fear of his neighbour, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbour, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveller spoke. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to the very last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious. The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: 'Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.'

Every youthful soul who hears this call day and night trembles when he hears it; for the idea of its liberation gives the soul a presentiment of the measure of happiness allotted it from all eternity--a happiness to which it can by no means attain so long as it lies fettered by the chains of fear and convention. And how dismal and senseless life can be without this liberation! There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity. And if it true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, that is to say in private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion; for which reason our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known, because least human, portion of human history.

I go along the new streets of our cities and think how, of all these gruesome houses which the generation of public opinion has built for itself, not one will be standing in a hundred years time, and how the opinions of these house-builders will no doubt by then likewise have collapsed. On the other hand, how right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they too would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it--while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life.

I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which did not yet exist a couple of thousand years ago? All that is not you, it says to itself. No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself: you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead?

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is: your educators are your liberators.

And that is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles--that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. Culture is liberation, the removal of all the weeds, rubble and vermin that want to attack the tender buds of the plant, an out-streaming of light and warmth, the gentle rustling of nocturnal rain, it is imitation and worship of nature where nature is in her motherly and merciful mood, it is the perfecting of nature when it deflects her cruel and merciless assaults and turns them to good, and when it draws a veil over the expressions of nature's step-motherly mood and her sad lack of understanding.

The much admired way in which our German men of learning set about scientific pursuits reveals above all that they are thinking more of science than they are of mankind, that they have been trained to sacrifice themselves to it like a legion of the lost, so as in turn to draw the next generations on to the same sacrifice. If it is not directed and kept within bounds by a higher maxim of education, but on the contrary allowed to run wilder and wilder on the principle 'the more the better', traffic with science is certainly as harmful to men of learning as the economic principle of laissez faire [profit before people] is to the morality of whole nations. Who is there that still remembers that the education of the scholar is an extremely difficult problem, if his humanity is not to be sacrificed in the process? Where are we scholars and unscholarly, high placed and low, to find the moral exemplars and models among our contemporaries, the visible epitome of morality for our time? What has become of any reflection on questions of morality--questions that have at all times engaged every more highly civilised society? There is no longer any model or any reflection of any kind; what we are in fact doing is consuming the moral capital we have inherited from our forefathers, which we are incapable of increasing but know only how to squander.

www.geoffreyklempner.net

klempner@fastmail.net

International Society for Philosophers

Wisdom begins with wonder