I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference
‘One might think Aesthetics is a science that tells us what’s beautiful — it’s almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose this science would also be able to tell us what sort of coffee tastes good’
‘If I say A has beautiful eyes someone may ask me: what do you find beautiful about his eyes, and perhaps I shall reply: the almond shape, long eye-lashes, delicate lids. What do these eyes have in common with a Gothic church that I find beautiful too? Should I say they make a similar impression on me?’ (CV 24)
Here Von Wright seems to be following Wittgenstein’s own lead that ‘philosophy’ shades into ‘poetry’ and vice-versa. But how and why? Some early entries in Culture and Value (see pp. 2-7) may be apropos:
Each morning you have to break through the dead rubble afresh so as to reach the living warm seed.
A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.
When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e. the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all simply views of one object seen from different angles.
The thread that runs through these aphorisms and propositions is on the need for what Gertrude Stein had already called, in her ‘Composition as Explanation’ (1926), beginning again and again . Truth is not something that can be uncovered; it can only be re-discovered , day after day. The value of breaking through the dead rubble each morning and in viewing each object from as many angles as possible is that one keeps one’s mind open, that conclusions are always tentative, and that the process of discovery is always more important than any particular end result.”
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