This essay was written in 1953.
Logic can be seen as the getting to truth through seeing the differences and samenesses in reality and in one’s mind. Art, likewise, is an arrangement of differences and samenesses. Relation in logic shows where things have to do with each other, what they have in common; relation in art is the showing of how objects have to do with each other.
To show a relation among the Napoleonic wars, the price of corn in Scotland, the moods of Robert Hodge, a farmer in Scotland, and the actions of Mrs. Hodge, his wife, is like showing the relation in a painting among a tree, a table, a little girl, and a blue sky with light clouds. Differences and samenesses are in action in both perceptions; both situations; both procedures. Logic gets to truth by showing that if both the Duchess de Grignan and Jean Vitot, brewer, are in France, and were born there, they likely have something in common, because they talk French. Art shows that if a track of railroad and a cow are both near a bush, the track and the cow have something in common by being near the bush.
Relation is addition and subtraction, both in art and logic. The cow loses something of its cowness by being made one with the railroad track by means of the bush; it also gains something of railroad trackness as the railroad track gains something of cowness. The bush is both more and less, too. And in the syllogism:
- The Duchess de Grignan talks French;
- Jean Vitot, brewer, talks French;
- Jean Vitot is like the Duchess de Grignan
—we have the Duchess and M. Vitot related, made akin through their talking French. A syllogism is an accenting of difference and sameness, particular and general, part and whole.
When we look at the statement of Coleridge I have quoted, we can see where logic is art. The “seclusion” of the syllogism is the seeing of a thing by itself; the “inclusion” is the making it one with, or related to, something else; the “conclusion” is what arises out of the distinction and the kinship. Coleridge’s word conclusion corresponds to composition.
“Pursuit of Truth”
Logic is what the mind does in its “pursuit of truth.” If logic gets to truth and art gets to truth, they certainly are alike. There is judgment in logic and there is judgment in art. The artist surely uses as much judgment as does the debater. Where art is unconscious, it is unconscious reason, too. There is a judgment which is unconscious; there is an appraisal of feelings which we don’t know is going on. In the same way as mathematics has gone on unconsciously, art has. The mind compares thoughts; it sees relations among objects.
Four things are in play in mind: what is and what isn’t, what one is for and what one is against (or the pleasing and displeasing, good and bad). The artist makes a true one of what is and is not, and of what one should be for and not be for. In the long run, he shows that the best form is the best truth. At the moment the artist sees reality as most real, he also sees it as the most pleasingly effective. Honesty makes a one with delight.
But judgment as to what can delight when perceived is like the judgment the statistician uses, or the lawyer, or the farmer. Deeply, art can fall into the idea of logic “as the study of the general conditions of valid reasoning” (A. Wolf, Recent and Contemporary Philosophy, 1931). Does the artist reason, and is he supposed to reason well? How does he select, leave out, arrange? On what principle? Certainly, we don’t have to know we’re being grammatical at the time we speak a sentence but certainly, too, some reasoning or grammar is present in each sentence. Whether the process of judgment through which an artist gets to his effects is seen or not, it is still a process of judgment.
Including, Relating, and Leaving Out
Everywhere in the history of logic (and of philosophy, too) we can see statements, attitudes of rich relevance to art. Take a statement from Hegel’s Logic:
Substance manifests itself in the origination and vanishing of its accidents.
This concerns the fact that art, through its including, relating, and leaving out, gets more to what a thing is, its essence, its substance, as Hegel might say. “The vanishing of its accidents” is a phrase very close to economy in art, to that aspect of style which gets to centrality, completeness, through a harsh, right attitude to superfluity.
Hegel says elsewhere in his Logic, with a little less, perhaps, of the Hegelian idiom:
The thinking activity is, in general, the apprehension and bringing together of the Manifold into unity. The Manifold as such belongs to externality in general—to feeling and sensuous intuition.
The composition of art is the “bringing together of the Manifold into unity.” Certainly showing a “Manifold” in unity—with the way of mind the showing implies—as is done by Ruysdael, Poussin, Brueghel, Delacroix, Utrillo, is just as much of logic as the bringing together of various economic conditions of Europe in 1822.
Artists Have Wanted to Be Logical
Artists themselves have wanted to be logical, thoughtful, intellectual. Their work has sometimes been described as if it were a resplendent logical achievement. When Reinach in his still praiseworthy Apollo (1904) says this of a work of da Vinci:
The Last Supper at Milan shows with what deep attention to the underlying thought Leonardo grouped his figures
—the question arises, was Leonardo’s thought true thought? Did it have reason in it? Did it have logic? What kind of thought did, after all, go on? To say that Leonardo is less logical than Donald Piper, eminent collegiate debater-whose logic has dazzled various judges, and mightily impressed all who have heard him—to say that Leonardo does not do so well with Hegel’s Manifold as the controversial, serried, symmetrical Donald Piper—is certainly imprudent.
Thought Goes On in Art
Thought goes on in art, and it is the very basis of art; it is art itself. It is thought that makes the hand right, and if the hand and eye help thought, why, then, hand and eye help logic: there is no reason why our bodies or senses should be seen as inevitably against logic.
In recent times there has been more of an accent on logic in art than ever. Sometimes indeed there have been such things as “the logic of the unreal,” but still it has been logic. Cubism has its logic, and a most interesting one; dadaism, here and there, is more logical than dons or history professors or various commissioners—dadaism at its best presents the winsome, stunning drama in logic; surrealism had its lengthy logic, and gave logical reasons for the utilitarianism of dreams.
However, abstractionism is that aspect of contemporary art which seems most to use logic in its customary—if incomplete—sense, as something akin to mathematics, different from the lure of Cleopatra, and the smell of woodbine. The abstractionists sound more like legitimate, no-nonsense scientists than any other artists, as a group, history has had. Yet, what the abstractionists seem to call for has gone on, is to be found, in art anytime. Every painter, however wild, unrestrained, not like John Stuart Mill he may seem, has had something of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), who—though, as Vasari tells us, he “practised painting”—was also an “excellent mathematician and geometrician” and wrote a “treatise on traction and on measuring elevations.”
Logic ls of Emotion
The more logical art is, the greater it is. For logic is of emotion, too, of what man is for or against, of what he sees as good or bad. Reinach, in his Apollo, in the following passage calls for more logic from Pinturicchio:
His large compositions, such as the series in the Libreria at Siena and the frescoes of the Borgia Rooms in the Vatican, are decorative and seductive, though not powerfully conceived.
The word conceived in the phrase I have italicized has much to do with the word concept, a word of philosophy or logic. Anyway, Reinach says that Pinturicchio could have seen more clearly, arranged more correctly certain of his compositions. The Umbrian Pinturicchio is asked by the French critic to be more logical.
Reinach describes Fra Bartolommeo as standing for impressive, scientific, logical things:
Fra Bartolommeo (1475-1517) had another merit, the instinct for rhythmic composition, scientifically balanced and pyramidally arranged.
Put otherwise, Fra Bartolommeo had an instinct for scientific balance, which is, surely, in the logical field. Instinct, then, can be logical.
Reinach says elsewhere that Michelangelo had a predilection for general types. The general and particular, as I said, are big matters both in logic and art. Reinach’s words are:
But Michelangelo’s genius had nothing in common with antique art save the predilection for general types.
What We’re For and Not For
In Reinach’s Apollo, a world history of art, there are more instances of logic being art, art being logic; and these instances can be found in all histories of art. Art shows that reason is about what we’re for and not for. Judgment, like art, is about both what is and isn’t, what we should be for and what not. Judgment, in other words, is in emotion, too—emotion being about the “for and against.”
When art is seen as logic, the unconscious in all its grandeur will be seen as being order, good sense, the architecture of the mind, not just its darkness. Art tells us what the full logic of our minds is doing.