Routes to Artistic Perfection: To Question, To Philosophize

In the essay on Winckelmann, he writes

Again, it is easy to indulge the commonplace metaphysical instinct. But a taste for metaphysics may be one of those things which we must renounce, if we mean to mould our lives to artistic perfection. Philosophy serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life.

Walter Pater. The Renaissance.

And so for day 1804
21.11.2011