Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
--
0-9 (New York), 1969, and Art-Language (England), May 1969Sol LeWitt
Let us, at least, dig and seek till we have discovered our own opinions. The dogmas we really hold are far more fantastic, and, perhaps, far more beautiful than we think. In the course of these essays I fear that I have spoken from time to time of rationalists and rationalism, and that in a disparaging sense. Being full of that kindliness which should come at the end of everything, even of a book, I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them. Some, with a sumptuous literary turn, believe in the existence of the lady clothed with the sun. Some, with a more rustic, elvish instinct, like Mr. McCabe, believe merely in the impossible sun itself. Some hold the undemonstrable dogma of the existence of God; some the equally undemonstrable dogma of the existence of the man next door.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Artists give us not conclusions but evidence.
Adelaide Crapsey
This is the great paradox of Russell. All his instincts were on the side of the "rationalists"; his greatest hatred was for those who exalted emotion, or any sort of mystic intuition, at the expense of reason. But because Russell was the greatest rationalist of all, he had to admit that reason cannot prove the mystics wrong. In fact, in some private moods he was a mystic himself.
Bertrand Russell
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another.
Rene Descartes
LeWitt, Sol
Lewontin, Richard
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