SOURCE: “Leonardo and the Philosophers,” in Leonardo da Vinci: Aspects of the Renaissance Genius, edited by Morris Philipson, George Braziller, 1966, pp. 350-71.

[The following essay was first published in French as the preface to Leo Ferrero's 1929 work, Léonard de Vinci, and reprinted in slightly revised form in Valéry's Variété III (1936).The translation by Malcolm Cowley originally appeared in volume 8 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews (1956-75). In this essay Valéry seeks to determine why Leonardo is not often recognized as a philosopher, despite his penetrating intellect. He proposes that it is because Leonardo“does not separate understanding from creating. He does not like to distinguish theory from practice, or speculative thought from an increase in external power.”]

This essay was written to serve as preface to a first book by Leo Ferrero, and I cannot let it be reprinted here without saying, to those who never knew the young writer, how much the loss of his person meant to Letters.¹

Invoking Leonardo da Vinci almost at the beginning of your career, you have placed beneath his name a treatise and meditation on pure aesthetics. Many philosophies have finished or even perished in that field of speculation. Nothing could be nobler than your undertaking, or more venturesome.

With remarkable precision and subtlety you have examined some of the most delicate points in the endless researches that aim to render the Beautiful almost intelligible and to give us superior reasons for being moved by it.

But you are venturing into still more dangerous territory when you ask me to introduce your work to the public. It is not that I have failed to encounter problems of the sort on many divergent paths, or have failed to reflect on them at sufficient length; it is rather that my reflections have echoed one another and that my lights have been confined and confused as if between parallel mirrors. Between nature and artifice, between the pleasures of sight and those of power, the exchanges are infinite. Soon intelligence is lost in a maze. Intelligence, which undertakes and continually resumes the task of reorganizing that which exists, while arranging the symbols of all things round itself as the unknown center, grows weary and loses hope in this realm where answers precede questions, where caprice gives birth to laws, where we are privileged to take the symbol for the thing and the thing for the symbol, and where that liberty can serve as the means of achieving an inexplicable sort of rigor.

Uncertain as I am, you would still like me to prepare the minds of others for your dialectic. All I can offer them is the somewhat confused notion I hold of speculations concerning the Beautiful.

It must be confessed that aesthetics is a great and even irresistible temptation. Almost everyone with a strong feeling for the arts has something more than that feeling; he cannot escape the need for going deeper into his enjoyment.

How can we bear to be enchanted by some aspect of nature or by certain works of man without trying to explain this accidental or contrived delight? On the one hand it seems to be independent of the intelligence—although it may be the principle and hidden guide of the intelligence—while on the other hand it seems to be quite distinct from our ordinary feelings—although it may include and transfigure their variety and depth.

Philosophers could not fail to be puzzled by emotions of this curious type.² Moreover, they had a somewhat less naive and more systematic reason for examining such emotions and for searching out their causes, operation, meaning, and essence.

The vast enterprise of philosophy, as seen in the philosopher's own heart, consists, after all, in an effort to transmute everything we know into what we should like to know, and the operation has to be effected, or at least presented, or at the very least presentable, in a certain order.

Philosophies are characterized by the order of their questions, for, in a philosophic mind, questions do not and cannot exist in complete independence and substantial isolation. On the contrary, what one finds in such a mind, as a sort of ground bass, is the feeling or fundamental tone of a latent though more or less close interdependence among all the ideas it contains or might ever contain. Awareness of this deep coherence imposes order; and the order of questions necessarily leads to a sovereign question, which is that of knowledge.

Now, as soon as a philosopher has postulated or founded or justified or depreciated knowledge (whether he has exalted and developed it ultra vires by potent logical or intuitive combinations, or whether he has measured knowledge and, as it were, reduced it to limited dimension by criticism), he always finds himself tempted to explain—that is, to express in his system, which is his personal order of comprehension—human activity in general, of which intellectual knowledge is only one of the modalities, although it stands for the whole.

Here we come to a crucial point in any philosophy.

A system of thought that had been so pure and central, one that had actually pursued (whatever its contents and conclusions might have been) the ideal of a uniform distribution of concepts round a certain attitude or characteristic preoccupation of the thinker, must henceforth try to recover the diversity, irregularity, and unexpectedness of other manners of thinking; and its order must regiment their seeming disorder.

It must reconstitute the plurality and autonomy of other minds as a consequence of its own unity and sovereignty. It must legitimize the existence of things it had convicted of error and so ruined; it must recognize the vitality of the absurd, the fruitfulness of contradictions; and at times it must even acknowledge that in itself, for all its sense of being informed with the universality from which it seems to proceed, it is no more than a particular production or the individual tendency of a certain person. Here is the beginning of wisdom, and likewise the twilight of a philosophy.

The truth is that other existences are always disturbing to the splendid egotism of a philosopher. He cannot fail, however, to come against the great riddle presented by the inconsequences of others. The thoughts, the feelings, the actions of another always seem to us arbitrary. The partiality we always show to what is ours has been strengthened by our feeling that we are agents of necessity. But the other does exist, and hence the riddle is forced upon us. It invades our minds under two forms: one consisting in the different types of conduct and character, the great variety of decisions and attitudes, in all that touches on the preservation of the body and its possessions; the other manifested by the diversity of tastes, expressions, and creations of the sensibility.

Our Philosopher cannot resign himself to not absorbing into his own light all the realities that he would like to assimilate to his reality, or at least reduce to being its possible possessions. He wants to comprehend, that is, to comprehend them all in the full meaning of the word. Hence he will dream of building himself a science of the values of action, and another science of the values of expression or of creating emotions—an ethics and an aesthetics³—as if his Palace of Thought would be imperfect without these two symmetrical wings, in which his omnipotent and abstract self could imprison action, passion, emotion, and invention.

Every philosopher, when he has finished with God and the Self, with Time, Space, Matter, the Categories, and the Essences, turns back toward men and their works.

Just as our Philosopher had invented the True, so he invented the Good and the Beautiful. Just as he had invented rules to harmonize isolated thought with itself, so he undertook to prescribe other rules designed to harmonize action and expression with precepts and models that were shielded from everyone's caprices and doubts by the consideration of a unique and universal principle, one that must first of all, and irrespective of any particular experience, be defined or designated.

Few events in the history of thought are more remarkable than this introduction of Ideals, in which may be seen an essentially European achievement. The decline of ideals in men's minds coincides with that of the virtues typical of Europe.⁴

We are still rather firmly attached, however, to the idea of a pure science rigorously developed on the basis of local evidence, but having properties that may be extended indefinitely from identity to identity. In the same fashion we are still half convinced of the existence of a single Morality and a single Beauty, both independent of times, places, peoples, or persons.⁵

Each day, however, the ruin of this noble edifice is a little more clearly revealed. We are witnessing an extraordinary phenomenon: that the very development of the sciences is tending to weaken the concept of Knowledge. I mean that a seemingly impregnable area of science, one that it shared with philosophy (in other words, with faith in the intelligible and belief in the inherent value of mental acquisitions) is gradually yielding ground to a new fashion of conceiving or evaluating the function of cognition. No longer can the efforts of the intellect be regarded as converging toward an intellectual limit, toward the True. A moment of self-examination is enough to reveal in ourselves this modern conviction: that any form of knowledge, unless it corresponds to some effective power, has only a conventional or arbitrary importance. The value of any knowledge consists only in its being the description or the means of exercising a verifiable power. From this it follows that any metaphysical system and even any theory of cognition, whatever these may be, are ruthlessly cut off and set apart from what is regarded more or less consciously by all as the only real knowledge—payable in gold.

By the same process and apparently of their own volition, ethics and aesthetics are dissolving into problems of legislation, statistics, history, or physiology … and into lost illusions.

Moreover, what excuse could we offer for making and elaborating plans to “do an Aesthetics”?—A science of the Beautiful? … Do modern people still use that word as a noun? It seems to me that they never pronounce it without a hint of apology or disdain, unless they happen to be thinking of the past. Beauty is a sort of corpse. It has been supplemented by novelty, intensity, strangeness, all the shock values. Raw excitement is the sovereign mistress of recent souls, and works of art are at present designed to tear us away from the contemplative state, the motionless delight, an image of which was at one time intimately connected with the general notion of the Beautiful. Art is more and more penetrated by the most immediate and unstable moods of psychic and sensual life. The unconscious, the irrational, the instantaneous—which are, as their names indicate, privations or negations of the voluntary and sustained forms of mental activity—have replaced the models expected by the mind. Seldom do we encounter anything produced by a desire for “perfection.”—Let us observe in passing that this antiquated desire was bound to be destroyed by the blind striving and insatiable thirst for originality. The ambition to perfect a work of art comes close to being a project for making it independent of any era; but the effort to be new is also an effort to make the work of art a remarkable event by virtue of its contrast with the passing moment.⁶ The former ambition admits and even requires heredity, imitation, or tradition, these being stages in an ascent toward the absolute beauty it dreams of attaining. The latter ambition rejects them, while implying them still more rigorously—for its essence is to differ from.

In our days a “definition of the Beautiful” has become scarcely more than a historical or philological document. This illustrious word has lost its ancient richness of meaning. Soon the numismaticians of language will put it away in their cabinets, with many another verbal coin that has passed from circulation.

Nevertheless, certain problems remain, and certain others might well arise, that cannot be assigned to any of the well recognized scientific disciplines and have no connection with any particular technique.⁷ They have also been neglected by the philosophers, although they keep reappearing—however vaguely or strangely they may be expressed—in the gropings and uncertainties of artists.

Take, for example, the general problem of composition (that is, of the different types of relationship between the whole and the parts); or take the problems resulting from the manifold functions of each element in a work; or the problems of ornament that border simultaneously on geometry, physics, and morphology without finding a definite center—although they permit us to glimpse a vague sort of kinship among the forms of equilibrium of physical objects, the figures of musical composition, the structure of living creatures, and the half-conscious or fully conscious productions of human activity when it endeavors to fill an empty space or time, as if in obedience to something like a horror of the void.

Questions of the sort do not obtrude themselves on abstract thinking. They take rise and acquire their strength from the creative instinct, at a moment when the artist has gone beyond the point of setting down what first occurs to him.⁸ He begins to look for solutions in a process of meditation that appears to be speculative, even assuming a philosophic form, and he hopes it will lead to some decision that will determine the form and structure of a concrete creation. It may well happen that the artist follows the same path as the philosopher, at least for a time, in his effort to formulate principles than can justify and clarify his intentions by giving them more than a merely personal authority; but what he achieves in this direction is only a biased sort of philosophy, one that aims beyond his principles at a set of particular consequences for the work in hand. The true philosopher regards what is as the limit to be attained and the object to be recovered at the extreme point of his mental excursions and operations. The artist, on the other hand, is at home in the possible and makes himself the agent of what is to be.

The clearest difference between the aesthetics of a philosopher and the reflections of an artist is that the former proceeds from a system of thinking that regards itself as foreign to the arts and of another essence than the thinking of a poet or a musician—in which respect it may well be mistaken, as I hope to show later. To a philosopher's mind works of art are accidents, or particular cases, or the effects produced by a busy sensibility as it gropes blindly toward a principle that Philosophy sees as a whole and possesses as an immediate and pure concept. The practice of the arts does not seem necessary to the philosopher, because its supreme object is one that should belong immediately to philosophic thought, or should be directly accessible to such thought as a result of the attention that philosophers apply to understanding, or to creating a system that jointly explains the perceptible world and the intelligible world. The philosopher does not feel a particular need for artistic activity; he underrates the methods and values of execution and the importance of materials, since he instinctively tends to distinguish these from the idea. He finds it distasteful to think of an incessant, intimate, and even-handed exchange between the desired and the possible, between what he judges to be accident and what he judges to be essence, between “form” and content, between consciousness and automatism, between circumstance and design, between “matter” and “spirit.” Now, it is precisely the great custom and acquired freedom of making such exchanges; it is the existence in the artist of a concealed standard of measurement applying to elements of radically different natures; it is the inevitable and indivisible collaboration, the coordination at every moment, in all his acts, of the arbitrary and the necessary, of the expected and the unexpected, of his body, his materials, his decisions, and even his fits of absence—it is all this that finally enables him to add something to nature considered as a practically infinite source of subjects, models, means and pretexts; to create some object that cannot be simplified and reduced to an abstract idea, since it owes its origin and its effect to an inextricable system of independent conditions. We cannot summarize a poem as we might summarize … a “universe.” To summarize a thesis is to preserve what is essential in it. To summarize a work of art, or replace the work with a diagram, is to lose what is essential. When we grasp the implications of this principle, it is easy to see that the analytical work of the aestheticians is largely an exercise in self-delusion.

The fact is that we cannot extract from an object, or from a natural or artificial arrangement, any group of aesthetic characteristics that can be found elsewhere and subsequently used as the basis of a general formula applying to beautiful things. Such an attempt has often been made, but those who make it are unaware that the method applies only to things “already found.” Moreover, the object under consideration cannot be reduced to a few of its traits without losing its intrinsic emotive power.

It is hard for a philosopher to understand that the artist passes almost indifferently from form to content and from content to form; that a form may occur to him before the meaning he will assign to it; or that the idea of a form is the same for him as the idea that asks to be given a form.⁹

In short, if aesthetics could exist as a philosophy, the arts would melt away before it, that is, before their own essence.

What I have just said does not apply to technical studies concerned only with methods or particular solution—those aimed more or less directly at the production or classification of works of art, but not proposing to attain the Beautiful by paths that lie outside its proper domain.

The truth may be that we cannot form a clear conception of anything unless we might also have invented it. Pascal tells us that he would not have invented painting. He did not see the need for duplicating the most insignificant objects by making laborious copies of them. And yet how often this great artist in words took pains to draw, that is, to make a spoken portrait of his thoughts! It is true that he seems to have ended by including all desires save one in the same gesture of rejection, and by regarding everything but death as something painted.¹⁰

What was Immanuel Kant really doing when he based his Ethics and his Aesthetics on a myth of universality, on the latent presence of an infallible and unanimous feeling about the universe in the soul of every man coming into this world? And what about all the other philosophers of the Good and the Beautiful?—The answer is that they were creators in spite of themselves, Creators who believed that they were merely substituting a more exact or complete notion of reality for a crude or superficial one, when, on the contrary, they were inventing—one by subtle division, another by an instinct for symmetry, and all by a profound desire for a certain state, by a profound love for that which might be. What did they do but create when they added problems to problems, entities to entities, and new symbols, new forms and formulas of development, to the existing treasury of intellectual pastimes and arbitrary constructions of the mind?

Philosophy marched out to grapple with the artist, to “explain” what the artist feels and does; but something quite opposite took place and is coming to light. Far from its enveloping and assimilating the whole domain of creative sensibility into the concept of the Beautiful; far from its becoming the mother and mistress of aesthetics, what now appears is that philosophy proceeds from aesthetics and no longer finds its justification, an answer to its qualms of conscience, or even its veritable “depth” save only in its constructive power and its freedom as abstract poetry. An aesthetic interpretation and that alone can shield the venerable monuments of metaphysics from the collapse of their more or less hidden postulates or from the destructive effects of semantic and logical analysis.

At first it may seem quite difficult for philosophers to approach certain problems as artists when they were accustomed to thinking about them as seekers of truth, or to regard the products of a desperate sincerity as beautiful lies and inherent fictions. “What a splendid past,” they will say, “and what a sad present!” They should set their minds at rest about this change, which after all is only a change in customs. I do not look on it as anything more than a reform demanded by the course of events, one for which a sort of model can be found in the history of the plastic arts. There was a time when the likeness of a man or an animal, even if people had seen the craftsman making it, was regarded not only as a living thing, motionless though it was, but as being endowed with supernatural powers. Many of the gods fashioned out of stone or wood did not even resemble men, yet people nourished and venerated these images that were scarcely images. The more formless they were, the more they were adored—a curious fact that is also to be observed in the relation of children to their dolls and of lovers to the beloved; it appears to be a deeply significant trait. (Perhaps we believe that the more life we are obliged to give to an object, the more we receive from it.) But little by little, as the communicated life grew weaker and was withdrawn from such rude images, the idol became Beautiful. Impelled by criticism, it lost its imaginary power over events and persons in order to gain a real power over men's eyes. Sculpture became free, and became itself.

Without shocking or cruelly wounding the philosophic sentiment, might I compare its idolized truths—its Principles, its Ideas, its Being, its Essences, its Categories, its Noumena, its Universe, the whole tribe of concepts that seemed indispensable each in its turn—with the idols of which I was speaking?—At present we might ask ourselves what sort of philosophy would stand in the same relation to traditional philosophy that a Greek statue of the fifth century b.c. stands to the faceless divinities of very ancient times.

I sometimes think that little by little, as it becomes possible and permissible to compose with ideas as with tones or colors—to make abstract constructions without having illusions about them and without recourse to hypostasis—it may become evident that this type of untrammeled philosophy is more fruitful and more true than the type that attached itself to a primitive belief in explanations, as well as more human and appealing than the type demanded by a rigorous critical aptitude. Perhaps it will then be possible to resume—in a new spirit and with quite different ambitions—the speculative work that was undertaken by the great metaphysicians, whose goals, in the course of time, have been sadly undermined by criticism. An example from another field might prove illuminating. Long ago mathematics made itself independent of every aim that was alien to the concept of itself created by the pure development of its technique and by its awareness of the intrinsic value of that development. Today everyone knows to what extent its freedom as an art, which had promised to carry it far from reality into a world of pastimes, difficulties, and useless elegance, has made it marvelously flexible, besides equipping it to come to the aid of the physical scientists.

An art of ideas—an art of the order of ideas, or of the multiple orders of ideas—is that a wholly vain conception? I find it permissible to think that all architecture does not exist in space, that all music is not heard. There is a certain feeling for ideas and their analogies that seems to me capable of acting and being cultivated in the same fashion as a feeling for sound or color; and I might even be inclined, if I had to propose a definition of the philosopher, to make it depend on the predominance in his person of this mode of sensibility.¹¹

I also believe that one is born a philosopher, as one is born a musician or a sculptor, and that this innate gift, which has always taken the pursuit of a certain reality or truth as its theme and pretext, might henceforth confide in itself and, instead of merely pursuing, might create. The Philosopher would then expend in full liberty the forces he had acquired through discipline; and there would be an infinite number of questions, an infinite number of forms, on which he could lavish his vigor and the faculty proper to his nature: that of giving life and movement to abstract things.

Thus it would become possible to save the Noumena, by simple delight in their intrinsic harmonies.¹²

Finally I might say that there exists an excellent demonstration of what I have so far been proposing in a tentative way. It was no more than a possibility, but we have only to consider the fate of the great philosophic systems to find it already realized. In what spirit do we read the philosophers, and who consults them in the true hope of finding anything else than enjoyment or an exercise for the mind? When we now set out to read them, is it not with a feeling that we are submitting for a time to the rules of an admirable game?—What would happen to these masterpieces of an unverifiable branch of knowledge if it were not that we accepted these conventions out of love for an exacting pleasure? If we disproved a Plato or a Spinoza, would nothing remain of their astonishing constructions? Absolutely nothing—if there did not remain a work of art.¹³

Meanwhile, quite apart from philosophy, in certain stratetic areas of the search for understanding, there have appeared a few extra-ordinary beings of whom we know that their abstract thought, highly developed as it was and capable of the greatest subtlety and depth, never lost its concern for figurative creations or tangible applications and proofs of its attentive power. They seem to have possessed I cannot say what inner science that made it possible to effect a continual interchange between the arbitrary and the necessary.

Leonardo da Vinci is the supreme type of these superior individuals.

What is more remarkable than the absence of his name from the list of recognized philosophers, grouped as such by tradition?¹⁴

Doubtless the lack of finished texts of a specifically philosophic nature might pass as a reason for this exclusion. Moreover, the quantity of notes he left behind is a simultaneous mass of observations that leaves us in doubt regarding the order of questions in his thinking. One hesitates to say which of his curiosities and intentions stood first or last, since Leonardo himself seems to have lavished his ardor on the greatest variety of subjects, depending on circumstances and the mood of the hour—so much so that he gives the not unpleasant impression of being a sort of coniottiere in the service of all the Muses turn by turn.

But, as has already been said, the visible existence of a certain order of ideas is characteristic of the recognized philosophers whose qualities permit them to figure in the History of Philosophy (a history that can be written only with the help of certain conventions, including first of all a necessarily arbitrary definition of philosophy and the philosopher).

It follows that Leonardo would be excluded for lack of an explicit order in his thinking, and—let us not be afraid to say—for lack of an easily summarized statement that would enable us to classify his essential conceptions and compare them with other systems, problem by problem.¹⁵

But I should like to go farther and distinguish him from the philosophers by more tangible characteristics and for more substantial reasons than these purely negative considerations. Let us see—or imagine—in what respects his intellectual activity differs sharply from theirs, while closely resembling it at moments.

The philosopher, to the eyes of an observer, has a very simple purpose: to express in speech or writing the results of his meditations. He tries to constitute a body of knowledge that is completely expressible and transmissible by language.

But for Leonardo, language is not all. Knowledge is not all; perhaps he regards it only as a means: Leonardo designs, computes, builds, decorates; he makes use of all the concrete methods and materials that are subject to ideas, serve as a test for them, and give them an opportunity to rebound in an unexpected fashion, since the materials offer an alien resistance to ideas and provide the conditions of another world that no previous knowledge or degree of foresight would make it possible to encompass in a purely mental elaboration. Knowledge is not enough for this strongly willed and many-sided nature; what matters to him is power. He does not separate understanding from creating. He does not like to distinguish theory from practice, or speculative thought from an increase in external power, or the true from the verifiable, or the true, again, from that modification of the verifiable manifested in the construction of works of art and machines.

In that respect, this man is an authentic and immediate ancestor of science as it exists today. Who does not see that science is coming more and more to identify itself with the acquisition and possession of power?¹⁶ Hence I would venture to define it in this fashion—for the definition is within us, however we may protest. Science consists, I would say, in all the formulas and all the processes that are always successful, and it is coming progressively closer to being a table of correspondences between human actions and the resulting phenomena—an always longer and more definite table of such correspondences, recorded in the most precise and economical systems of notation.

Infallibility in prediction is, in simple fact, the only characteristic that modern man regards as having more than a conventional value. He is tempted to say, “All the rest is literature”; and the rest would include all explanations and theories. It is not that he fails to recognize their utility, even their necessity, but rather that he has learned to consider them as means and instruments, intermediate operations, steps in the dark, provisional methods that furnish him with logical formulations, with combinations of signs and images, in order to clear the way for the final decisive perception.

In the course of a few decades he has seen the successive and even simultaneous reigns of contradictory theses that proved equally fruitful; of doctrines and methods opposed in principle and making theoretical demands that canceled one another, while all of them produced positive results to be added to his stock of acquired powers. He has heard laws described as more or less helpful conventions; and he also knows that a great number of those laws have lost their pure and essential character, being reduced to the modest level of simple probabilities—in other words, to rules that apply only in the field of our observations. Finally, he understands the increasing and by now almost insuperable difficulties that inhere in any attempt to represent a “world” that we postulate; a world that imposes itself on our minds, but also a world—revealed as it is in a roundabout fashion by a series of relays and by its indirect effects on the senses; constructed as it is by a process of analysis with disconcerting results when these are translated into common language; excluding as it does any sort of images, since it must be the substance of their substance and must provide, in some sort, a basis for all the categories—that exists and does not exist. But all these terrifying indeterminate principles, these inhuman hypotheses, this knowledge incompatible with the knower, none the less leave behind them an always increasing and incorruptible treasure of achievements and modes of producing achievements—in other words, of powers.¹⁷

All the labors of the mind can no longer have as their object a final contemplation, even the mental image of which has lost its meaning (or comes closer and closer to being a theological concept, demanding a contemplator different in essence from ourselves); but, on the contrary, those labors appear to the mind itself as an intermediate activity connecting two experiences or two states of experience, the first of which is given and the second foreseen.

Knowledge of this sort is never separated from action or from instruments of execution and control, without which, moreover, it has no meaning—whereas if it is based on them, if it refers back to them at every moment, it enables us to deny meaning to knowledge of any other sort, and specifically to that which proceeds from words alone and leads only toward ideas.

What then becomes of philosophy, besieged and obsessed as it is with discoveries so unexpected as to arouse the greatest doubts concerning the virtues or value of all the ideas and deductions put forward by a mind reduced to its own resources and trying to encompass the world? What becomes of it when—in addition to feeling beset, wounded and astonished at every turn by the furious activity of the physical sciences—it is also disturbed and menaced in its most ancient, most tenacious (and perhaps least regrettable) habits by the slow and meticulous work of the philologists and semanticists?¹⁸ What becomes of the philosopher's “I think,” and what becomes of his “I am”? What becomes, or rebecomes, of that neutral and mysterious verb to be, which has described such a vast circuit in empty space? From those modest syllables, to which a strange career was opened by the loss or attrition of their original meaning, very subtle artists have drawn an infinite number of questions and answers.

If, then, we take no account of our habits of thought and confine ourselves to what is revealed by a glance at the present state of intellectual affairs, we can easily observe that philosophy as defined by its product, which is in writing, is objectively a particular branch of literature, characterized by its choice of certain subjects and by its frequent use of certain terms and certain forms. This very special type of mental activity and verbal production nevertheless aspires to a supreme place by virtue of its universal aims and formulas, but since it is lacking in any objective verification, since it does not lead to establishing any power, and since the very universality it invokes cannot and must not be regarded as a traditional state, as a means of obtaining or expressing verifiable results¹⁹—we are forced to assign it a place not far from poetry.

But the artists of whom I was speaking fail to recognize themselves as artists and do not wish to be such. Doubtless their art, unlike that of the poets, is not the art of abusing words by putting too great a burden on their resonance and their occult sympathies; yet it gambles on a certain faith in the existence of an absolute value that can be distilled from the meaning of words. “What is reality?” the philosopher asks, or likewise, “What is liberty?” He finds it possible to ignore the partly metaphorical, partly social, and partly statistical origin of these nouns, while taking advantage of their tendency to slip into indefinable meanings, as a result of which his mind will be able to produce combinations of an extreme depth and delicacy. It would not serve his purpose to answer one of his questions with the simple history of a word through the ages, or again with a detailed account of all the misunderstandings, figurative uses, and idiomatic expressions thanks to the number and incoherence of which a mere word becomes as complex and mysterious as a living person, arousing an almost anguished curiosity as a person might do, eluding any sort of definite analysis and—in spite of its being the fortuitous result of simple needs, an age-old device to facilitate social intercourse and the immediate exchange of impressions—sometimes rising to the very high destiny of calling forth all the interrogatory power and all the resources for finding answers of a marvelously attentive mind.²⁰ This word, this nothing, this chance device created anonymously, altered in form and meaning by nobody knows whom, has been transformed by the meditation and dialectic of a few individuals into an instrument designed to torment the whole group or groups of ideas; it has become a sort of key that can wind all the springs of a powerful intellect, opening long vistas of possibility to the passion for conceiving everything that exists.

Now, every operation of an artist consists in making something out of nothing. Could there be anything more truly personal, moreover—anything more significant of a person and his separateness as an individual—than what is done by a philosopher when he inserts a thousand difficulties into a common expression in which those who invented the expression could see none whatever; or when he creates doubts and perturbations, discovers paradoxes, and disconcerts the minds of others by overawing them with an imposing interplay of substitutions—could there be anything more personal under the appearance of being universal?

The word, that means an end of the philosopher; the word, that handful of dust into which he breathes life, was for Leonardo only the least of his resources. We know that he even regarded mathematics, which, after all, is essentially a language with exact rules, as little more than a provisional device. “Mechanics,” he said, “is the paradise of the mathematical sciences.” The idea is already quite Cartesian, as is also his unending concern with the physics of physiology.²¹

From that point he went forward along the path in which our minds are now engaged.

But he belonged to an age less interested than ours, or at any rate less practiced, in identifying the useful, or the comfortable, or the exciting with that which induces a state of resonance and of harmonic reciprocity among sensations, desires, movements, and thoughts. What seemed most desirable to men of Leonardo's day was not something to increase the comfort of the body, save it time, and spare it from fatigue; or something to surprise and stimulate merely the soul of the senses; rather it was anything that multiplied sensual enjoyment by means of intellectual artifice and calculation, while adding to such a rare delight by the introduction of a certain specious and delightful “spirituality.” Between fauns on the one side and angels on the other, the Renaissance had mastered the art of making very human combinations.

And that brings me to the most difficult point for me to explain, one that may also prove the hardest to understand.

Here, then, is what means to me more extraordinary in Leonardo, something that both opposes him and joins him to the philosophers in a much stranger and deeper fashion than anything I have so far alleged of one or the others. Leonardo was a painter: I say that painting was his philosophy. The fact is that he said so himself, if not in exactly those words, and he talked painting as others talk philosophy, which is to say that he made everything depend on it.²² He formed an excessively high opinion of this art, which seems so specialized in comparison with abstract thought and so far from being able to satisfy the whole intelligence: he regarded painting as a final goal for the efforts of a universal mind. So it was in later days with Mallarmé, who held the curious notion that the world was made to be expressed, and all things would eventually be expressed, by the methods of poetry.

To paint, for Leonardo, was an operation that demanded every form of knowledge and almost all the scientific disciplines: geometry, dynamics, geology, physiology. A battle to be portrayed involved a study of whirlwinds and clouds of dust, and he refused to depict such phenomena before observing them in a scientific spirit, with eyes that had been impregnated, so to speak, with understanding of their laws. A human figure was for him a synthesis of researches extending from dissection to psychology.²³ With exquisite precision he noted the bodily attitudes according to age and sex, as he also analyzed the movements proper to each trade. All things were as if equal before his will to perceive and grasp forms through their causes. It seems to have been the outward appearance of objects that set his mind in movement; then he reduced, or tried to reduce, their morphological features to systems or forces; and only after those systems had been learned—felt—and reasoned out did he complete or, one might better say, resume the movement by executing the drawing or painting, as a result of which act he reaped the harvest of his toil. In this manner he projected or recreated an aspect of his subjects by means of analyzing all their properties in depth.

But what part did language play in this process?—It served him only as an instrument, just as numbers did. It was no more than an accessory means, a working auxiliary, one that advanced his passionate enterprises in much the same way that sketches in the margin sometimes help those who write to sharpen a phrase.

In short, Leonardo found in the painted work all the problems that could be proposed to the mind by an effort to make a synthesis of nature—and many other problems as well.²⁴

Then was he or was he not a philosopher?

If it were merely a question of the word! … But there is much else involved besides the choice of a rather vague appellation. What stops me at the point where the high title of philosopher might or might not be conferred on one whose name was rendered illustrious by so many works not in writing, is the problem of the connection between the total activity of a mind and the mode of expression it adopts—the connection, that is, of the mind with the sort of work that gives it the most intense sensation of its power and with the forms of external resistance it accepts.

The particular case of Leonardo da Vinci offers one of those remarkable coincidences that demand a reconsideration of our intellectual habits and something like a rebirth of awareness in the midst of ideas that had been passed on to us.

It can be affirmed of him, I think with some degree of assurance, that the place occupied by philosophy in the life of other minds—with the profound need to which it bears witness, the generalized curiosity that accompanies it, the hunger for facts to be retained and assimilated, and the constant search for causes—is the exact place occupied in Leonardo by his lasting preoccupation with painting. Here is something to disturb us in some of our long-standing distinctions, while tormenting both philosophy and art under the forms in which they had figured separately in our thinking.

Compared with what we are used to seeing, Leonardo appears to be a sort of monster, a centaur or a chimera, because of the hybrid species he represents to minds that are bent on dividing our nature into compartments. Philosophers, to them, are lacking in hands or eyes, and artists have such small heads that there is no room in them for anything but instincts.

We must make an effort, however, to grasp what is implied by this strange adoption of the cult of a plastic art as a substitute for philosophy. Let us start by observing that there can be no question here of arguing about the more subjective states or occurrences, since, in the depths or at the moment of psychic life, the difference between the philosopher and the artist are plainly indeterminate or even non-existent. We must therefore have recourse to what can be seen and distinguished “objectively”; and at this point we again meet with the essential problem of the part played by language. If philosophy is inseparable from its expression in words, and if that expression is the goal of every philosopher, then Leonardo, whose goal is painting, is not a philosopher in spite of his meeting most of the other requirements. But having offered this judgment, we are obliged to accept all its consequences, some of which are far-reaching. I shall try to suggest what they might be.

The philosopher describes what he has thought. A system of philosophy can be reduced to a classification of words or a table of definitions. Logic is only our method of using such a table in its permanent form.²⁵ We take this condition for granted, and as a result of it we cannot but accord a quite special and central place in our intellectual life to articulated language. There can be no doubt that the place is deserved and that language, although composed of innumerable conventions, is almost ourselves. We can scarcely “think” without it, nor can we direct, preserve, or recapture our thought, or above all … foresee it in some measure.

But let us look at the matter a little more closely; let us consider it in ourselves. At the moment when our thinking starts to go deeper—that is, when it comes closer to its object, trying to operate on things in themselves (so far as its activity might be regarded as things), instead of on signs that merely suggest a superficial idea of things—at this moment when we start to live our thinking, we feel that it is drawing apart from any conventional language. No matter how closely woven into our lives the language may be; no matter how densely its “chances” are distributed, or how sensitive this acquired organization may prove in ourselves, or how quick it may be to intervene, still, by a process of enlargement, or under the pressure of continued attention, we are able to separate it from our mental life of the moment. We feel that words are lacking, and we know there is no reason why words should be found to answer us, that is … to replace ourselves—for the inherent power of words, from which comes their utility, is to carry us “into the neighborhood” of states already experienced; to systemize, or to establish, repetition; whereas at this point we are penetrating into a mental life that never repeats itself. Perhaps that is the real nature of “thinking deeply,” which does not mean thinking more usefully, accurately, or totally than we usually do; it is simply thinking far, thinking as far as possible from verbal automatism.²⁶ We feel at such moments that vocabulary and grammar are alien gifts: res inter alios actas. We have the direct perception that language, organic and indispensable as it may be, can fully express nothing in the world of thought, where there is nothing that corresponds to its nature as an intermediary. Our rigor and our fervor both set us against it.

The philosophers, notwithstanding, have tried to bring language into a closer relation with their deepest feelings. They have tried to reorganize it, adding new words and meanings to meet the needs of their solitary experience, so as to make language a more flexible instrument, better adapted to cognizing and recognizing their cognition. We might picture philosophy as the attitude of concentration and restraint owing to which someone, at moments, thinks his life or lives his thinking in a sort of equivalence, or in a reversible state, between being and understanding—while he tries to suspend all conventional expression and waits eagerly for a combination much more precious than the others to take shape and reveal itself, a combination of the reality he feels impelled to offer with the reality he is able to receive.²⁷

But the nature of language is not at all in keeping with the happy outcome of this great endeavor to which all the philosophers have devoted themselves. The strongest of them have worn themselves out in the effort to make their thoughts speak.²⁸ In was in vain that they created or transfigured certain words; they could not succeed in transmitting the inner reality. Whatever the words may be—Ideas or Dynamis or Being or Noumenon or Cogito or Ego—they are all ciphers the meaning of which is determined solely by the context; and so it is finally by a sort of personal creation that their reader—as also happens with readers of poetry—gives the force of life to writings in which ordinary speech is tortured into expressing values that men cannot exchange and that do not exist in the realm of spoken words.

It can be seen that by basing all philosophy on verbal expression, and at the same time refusing it the liberties and even the inconveniences proper to the arts, we run the risk of reducing it to the different sorts of brayer offered by a few admirable and lonely figures. Moreover, we have never known, nor can we even imagine, two philosophers compatible with each other, or a doctrine open at all times to only one interpretation.

There is still another point to be noted about the relation between speech and philosophic activity, a simple matter of fact I should like to mention.

Merely by looking about us we can observe that the importance of language is steadily diminishing in every field of activity in which we also observe an increasing degree of precision. Common speech will doubtless continue to serve as the initial and general instrument for establishing relations between external life and internal life; it will always be the means of teaching us the other languages that have been consciously created; it will accommodate those potent and accurate mechanisms to the use of still unspecialized minds. But gradually, by contrast, it is coming to be regarded as a first crude means of approximation. Its function is being restricted by the development of purer systems of notation, each better adapted to a single purpose, and any new step in this direction leads to a further shrinking of the ancient horizons of philosophy.²⁹ … Everything that becomes more precise, in a world where everything tends toward precision, escapes from its primitive means of expression.³⁰

Today, in a number of truly remarkable cases, even the expression of things by means of discrete signs, arbitrarily chosen, has given way to lines traced by the things themselves, or to transpositions or inscriptions immediately derived from things. The great invention that consists in making the laws of science visible to the eyes and, as it were, readable on sight has been incorporated into knowledge; and it has in some sort overlaid the world of experience with a visible world of curves, surfaces, and diagrams that translate qualities into lines we can follow as they rise or fall, so gaining an impression of values in transition. The graphic method has a continuity of movement that cannot be rendered in speech, and it is superior to speech in clearness and precision. Doubtless it was speech that commanded the method to exist; doubtless it is now speech that assigns a meaning to the graphs and interprets them; but it is no longer by speech that the act of mental possession is consummated. Something new is little by little taking shape under our eyes; a sort of ideography³¹ of plotted and diagramed relations between qualities and quantities, a language that has for grammar a body of preliminary conventions (scales, coordinates, base lines, etc.), and for logic the relative size of figures or portions of figures and their situations on a chart.

An altogether different system of representation, but one that has certain analogies with the graphic method, is offered by the art of music. We know what an untold depth of resources exists in the “universe of sounds”; we know what immediate presence of all the affective life—what intuitions of the labyrinthine patterns and superpositions of memory, doubt, and compulsion; what forces, what lives, and what fictive deaths—are communicated, are imposed on us, by the artifices of the composer. Sometimes the design and modulation are so in accord with the inner laws of our changing moods that they make us dream of their being exact auditive formulas of those moods, capable of serving as models for an objective study of extremely subtle subjective phenomena. In this type of research, no verbal description could approach the effects produced by these auditive images, for they are transformations and restitutions of the vital states they transmit, even if they are presented—since we are dealing with an art—as the arbitrary³² creations of an individual.

From such examples we see that simultaneous groups and continued series of auditive sensations can be linked with what are supposed to be the “deepest” modes of philosophic thought—that is to say, those farthest from language. And we see that the most previous part of all that might be contained or perceived by philosophic thought—the part it communicates so imperfectly—is if not transmitted at least suggested by what are not in the least its traditional methods.

Philosophy has always sought, however, and will put forth greater and greater efforts, to protect itself against the danger of seeming to have a purely verbal aim. “Consciousness of the self,” which, under various names, is its principal means of existence (as well as an always convenient occasion for skepticism and a gateway to perdition), keeps reminding philosophy of its inner vigor and necessity, but also keeps revealing the weakness from which it suffers as a result of its dependence on speech. That is why almost all philosophers insist, in their different manners on distinguishing their thoughts from any accepted convention. Some, being particularly sensitive to what is produced and continually transformed in their inner worlds, are concerned with a region on the hither side of language, where they discover the nascent inner form that can be described as “intuition”—for our apparent real spontaneity includes among its other contributions a number of immediate illuminations, leading to instantaneous solutions and unexpected impulses or decisions. Other philosophers, less inclined to consider the eternally changing than intent on that which endures, try to entrench their thought in the language itself.³³ They put their trust in formal laws, finding in them the true structure of the intelligible; and they hold that this is the source from which any language borrows its discontinuity and the typical forms of its propositions.

The first sort, if they further developed their tendency, might imperceptibly be carried toward the art of time and hearing; they are the musicians of philosophy. The second sort, who give language a framework of reason and a sort of well defined plan; who contemplate, one might say, all its apparently simultaneous implications and try to reconstruct it on a new foundation, or to complete this product of everyone and no one as though it were the work of one man—those other philosophers might be compared with architects.

I do not see why both sorts should not adopt our Leonardo, for whom painting took the place of philosophy.

Notes

1. While [Leo Ferrero] was making a long trip abroad, a motor-car accident deprived us of that precious life. I have known few minds as precocious as his, and very few more subtle, quick, or sensitive. Depth, with the Italians, is not at all incompatible with liveliness and high spirits. That combination of qualities—not so much opposed to each other as they are rarely united in certain cultures—was strongly developed in Leo's case. He had a thoroughgoing knowledge of our language and an intuitive understanding of French authors and French ways of thought. Paris was adopting him as a son, when misfortune would have it that he must visit America, and there he was overtaken by death—of which he had written, “It is the thing that happens only to others.”

2. We might define the philosopher as a specialist in the universal, his function being expressed by a sort of contradiction.

   Moreover, this “universal” appears only in a verbal form.

   These two considerations naturally lead to our classifying the philosopher under the species “artist.” But this artist will not admit to his being one—and here begins the drama, or the comedy, of Philosophy.

   Whereas the painters and the poets have only their rank to quarrel about, philosophers quarrel with one another about their existence.

   Does the philosopher think that an Ethics or a Monadology is something more serious than a Suite in D Minor?

   It is true that certain questions presented by the mind to the mind are more general and more natural than most works of art, but there is nothing to prove that the questions are the right ones to ask.

3. —which are invariably the weak points of a philosophy.

   In my opinion, every philosophy is a question of form. It is the most comprehensive form that a certain individual can give to the whole of his internal and external experience—and this without respect to the knowledge he might possess. In his search for this form, the closer he comes to finding a more individual expression, one better adapted to his own nature, the further he will be from the deeds and works of others.

4. Leonardo is one of the founders of a distinct Europe. He resembles neither the ancients nor the moderns.

5. It is clear that the “Good” and the “Beautiful” have gone out of fashion.

   As for the “True,” photography has shown us its nature and limits. The recording of phenomena by means of the phenomena themselves, with as little human intervention as possible—such is “our Truth.”

   To this I can testify.

6. It must be admitted that a positive or “practical” conception of life leads inevitably to a search for immediate effects and to the end of craftsmanship. We are living in the Twilight of Posterity.

7. There is nothing more surprising to the innocent mind than certain problems that philosophers insist on placing foremost—nothing except the absence of other problems that the innocent mind would regard as being of fundamental importance.

8. I mean to say: when an artist undertakes to produce a work that is so vast or complicated, or so new to him, that his plans for it and his choice of methods are not immediately determined by their mutual compatibility, he often starts by inventing a “theory” that appears to have a general application. He explores the resources of abstract language to find an authority opposed to himself, one that will simplify his task under pretense of subjecting it to universal conditions. Anyone who lives among artists and listens to what they say can observe this phenomenon, besides hearing many a wise precept.

9. A type of sentence may precede the sentence as written. The masses of a picture may be established before the artist has decided on a subject.

10. It is quite easy to demonstrate by a certain chain of reflections that all is vanity. Pascal was finding new words to adorn the subject of countless sermons. What lies behind it is usually no more than a feeling of revulsion that is purely physiological in its origin, or a wish to make a resounding impression at no great expense.

    It is as easy to evoke a horror of life, to picture its fragility, its hardships, and its folly, as it is to arouse erotic ideas and sensual appetites. All one needs is a different vocabulary. (But we can take for granted that the first exercise is of a nobler sort.)

    I might add (if only for some) that the determination not to let oneself be manipulated by words has something to do with the goal to which I gave, or thought I was giving, the name of pure Poetry.

11. That is why courses in philosophy—unless they also teach the freedom of every mind not only with regard to doctrines but even with regard to the problems themselves—impress me as being antiphilosophical.

12. In the intellectual life—so it seems clear to me—philosophical works occupy the same place for those who admire them that works of art occupy for those who admire them. There are art lovers of Spinoza, just as there are of Bach.

    Sometimes we find significant resemblances between the two species—as note Wagner and Nietzsche.

13. For that matter, what else could be hoped for by thinkers of that grand sort?

14. Nor is Montaigne in that same list.

    He would give the same answer, “I do not know,” to all the questions in a philosophical catechism, and therefore he could hardly be called a philosopher. And yet …

15. Let us not forget that the broadest fame is based on the sort of merit that can be called to mind in a few words.

16. Science in the modern sense of the word consists in making knowledge depend on power. And it has reached the point of subordinating the intelligible to the verifiable. Our confidence in science is entirely based on the assurance that a certain phenomenon will be produced again or observed again as a result of certain well defined acts. As for the manner of describing the phenomenon—of “explaining” it—that is the arguable, changeable, and perfectible part of the development or exposition of science.

17. Such is the foundation of what we regard as true knowledge. The propositions of this true knowledge should be simply directions for performing certain acts: Do this, do that. All this amounts to power, in other words, to an assured external transformation that depends on a conscious internal modification.

18. This is an age when metaphysics has been surprised by the sudden changes in science, some of which have produced a truly comic dismay.

    Hence it has sometimes occurred to me that, if I were a philosopher, I should apply myself to making my philosophic thought independent of all forms of knowledge that might be overturned by some new experiment.

19. —but demands to be taken as an end in itself.

20. It seems to be characteristic of the greatest philosophers that they add problems of interpretation to the immediate problems raised by observation.

    Each of them imports a terminology, and there is no case in which the terms they introduce are so definite that the argument about the value of their principles can be clearly separated from the other argument about their meaning.

21. The idea of the animal as a machine expressed by Descartes and forming a remarkable element of his philosophy had been carried farther by Leonardo, who reveals it not only in verbo but in acto. I doubt whether anyone before his time had thought of observing persons with the eye of a mechanical engineer. For him the support of the body, its propulsion, and its respiration were problems in mechanics. He was more the anatomist and more the engineer than Descartes. The dream of creating a mechanical man and hence of achieving knowledge by construction was paramount in his thinking.

22. For it was a condition of his painting that he should make a minute preliminary analysis of the objects he planned to represent, one that was not in the least confined to their visual properties, but went deep into their organic life, involving questions of physics, then physiology, then psychology—so that finally his eye would, as it were, expect to perceive the visible accidents resulting from the hidden structure of the model.

23. Benvenuto Cellini tells us that Leonardo was the first to admire the adaptation of organic forms to mechanical functions. He revealed the special type of beauty possessed by certain bones (the omoplate, for example) and articulations (like that of the arm with the hand).

    A very modern system of aesthetics is based solely on this principle of functional adaptation. The Greeks had thought chiefly of optical effects, and they did not isolate the pleasure resulting from the virtual function of forms. Yet the men of every age have created perfect weapons and utensils.

24. When circumstances led me to consider da Vinci, I approached him as the archetype of those who perform each task so consciously that it becomes both art and science, inextricably mingled; as the exemplar of a system of art founded on general analysis and demanding that every particular work should be created only out of verifiable elements.

    As a result of Leonardo's analysis, his desire to paint merged into a curiosity about all phenomena, whether or not they were visual; he felt that nothing was alien to the art of painting, which in turn seemed precious to perception in general.

    Another characteristic of Leonardo is the extraordinary reciprocity between making and knowing, as a result of which the second is guaranteed by the first. This reciprocity stands opposed to any purely verbal science and has become dominant in the present era—to the great detriment of philosophy, which now appears to be something incomplete, speech without action.

25. Logic has only a limited value when it employs ordinary language, that is, a language without absolute definitions.

26. It also consists in reconsidering the values of our thinking as originally given—by extending the conscious duration of the given thoughts.

27. All thinking involves taking one thing for another: a second for a year.

28. There is not a single problem in philosophy that can be stated in such a form as to banish all doubt concerning the existence of the problem.

29. Although it must be observed that the accommodation is often very far from being satisfactory—as note the definitions of point, line, relation, etc.

30. There has been no philosophy (till now) that could withstand a precise examination of its “definitions.”

31. —as well as a sort of “analogistics.”

32. There is much to be said about the arbitrary.

    Everything we do that is arbitrary in our own eyes—as, for example, letting the hand make random designs on a scrap of paper—is a more or less separate activity of some organ. Thus, we close our eyes in order to draw a card from a hat at random. Such acts, in which the attention is relaxed, are in contrast with our supervised activities.

    A briefer way of saying the same thing is to remark that the degree of consciousness required by an act can be measured by the number of independent conditions imposed on it.

33. They have never done so, however—or not to my knowledge—by starting with an analysis of language that would reduce it to its statistical nature, and hence would permit them not to attribute verbal creations (including “problems”) to “the essence of things”—when their origin may have been innocence, or the poetic sentiment, or the gropings and fumblings of generations.

    A disregard of these humble beginnings is doubtless the precondition of more than one philosophic problem.

    In particular the existence of “notions” capable of being interpreted in different fashions, or the accidental coexistence of terms created independently of one another, opens a way for antinomies and paradoxes that favor a rich development of misunderstandings and highly “philosophic” subtleties.