In the world of art, one may often see many ‘illogical’ paintings, yet they create meaning and convey messages – without logic. Many artworks are creative in the sense that they ‘destroy’ the traditional logical views of things. For example, Picasso’s masterpiece ‘Time’ contained thin, twisted, flat-lying clocks all over the place. By tradition, clocks are solid and are usually hung on walls. In ‘Time’, the clocks are ‘illogically’ left twisted and lying on bare land in the middle of a deserted area. When I first saw the painting I suddenly felt a strong connection with it and admired the way Picasso presented the concept of time. I could feel the hopelessness, despair and loss of time behind the lifeless clocks in an unexplainable way. It seemed that, by intuition, not logic, I felt the painting ‘come alive’ and tell me a message I could understand.
If we only use logic to explain the painting, then it is unlikely that we get the message behind such creation. Artists often break through the traditional boundaries of logic and create meaning through ‘the unusual’. Although one will never be able to understand the exact meaning behind a piece of art, one can still be close to the artist’s intentional message. However, logic may at times suppress our natural intuition, and hence be a barrier to the understanding of art.
It is within our human nature to seek belief, love, hope and so on. Not only in the world of art may logic become a barrier to our understanding, it may also be a barrier to our religious views of the world. Sometimes Christians who believe that God had created the world may fall into a post hoc fallacy. For instance if a Christian secretly prayed to God that his brother who is seriously ill can get well soon, and eventually his brother recovers in the hospital, the Christian may think that it was God who had saved and cured his brother instead of the medical treatments his brother was probably having. In this way, logic may become a barrier to our search for belief, for religion. In an extreme sense, if we logic as an only mean to understand the world, we may never be able to have something to believe in, or to explore a whole new internal world – the religious world.
In addition to religion, love is also something logic may suppress, or become a burden to. Many say that love is blind or love is irrational, and I believe so because it is almost impossible to use our logic to feel and to love someone or something. If we always use logic to weigh the qualities of another person and then reach a conclusion that the person is worth ‘loving’, then the so-called love between the two would be unnatural and surreal because love is a concept that stands beyond logic.
In many ways logic can assist our understanding of the world, but at times it may become a barrier to our knowledge of the emotional world involving beliefs, religions, love and also the intuition we may experience when appreciating art.