Peculiar aesthetics

This is essentially, well, entirely, quotes from the Master...

Fact and theory, like particular and universal, were not opposites. According to Goethe they ‘are not only intimately connected, but … interpenetrate one another … the particular represents the universal, “not as a dream and shadow, but as a momentarily living manifestation of the inscrutable”.’ The particular metaphorises the universal. Goethe deplored the tendency for us, like children that go round the back of a mirror to see what's there, to try to find a reality behind the particularity of the archetypal phenomenon...

Goethe wisely wrote, however, that ‘we are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves, turned outwards, and working upon the world which surrounds us.’ We see ourselves, and therefore come to know ourselves, only indirectly, through our engagement with the world at large...

My thinking is not separate from objects’, wrote Goethe: the elements of the object, the perception of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it …

My perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception. Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.

This last, perhaps somewhat cryptic, sentence suggests that for us truly to experience something it has to enter into and alter us, and there must be something in us which specifically responds to it as unique. A consequence of this, as Thomas Kuhn recognised, will be that those phenomena with which we have no affinity, and which we are not in some sense ready to see, are often not seen at all. Theory, in the conventional sense of the term, can restrict one's capacity to see things, and the only remedy is to be aware of it. Understanding, then, is not a discursive explanatory process, but a moment of connection, in which we see through our experience – an aperçu or insight. All seeing is ‘seeing as'; not that a cognition is added to perception, but that each act of seeing, in the sense of allowing something to ‘presence’ for us, is in itself necessarily an act of understanding.

Back to the title and this is an example of my peculiar aesthetics.

I brought the stick home then, sadly, trod on it and broke it in two. Need some gold to fuse it together like a Japanese bowl.