alogism

alogism (countable and uncountable, plural alogisms)

1. (art) An early 20th century movement in painting and writing, emerging from the Russian avant-garde, which made use of antirational or nonsensical elements.
   • 1974, Canadian Slavonic Papers - Volume 16, page 5:

     His right eye was black; the left, for some strange reason (alogism), green. Black eyebrows, but (alogism) one higher that the other. In short a foreigner (alogism).

   • 2000, Nina Gurianova, Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-garde, 1910-1918, →ISBN, page 95:

     The formal composition in all of these works done in the style of alogism is structured with mathematical precision approaching that of a blueprint.

   • 2014, Helen Palmer, Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense, →ISBN, page 10:

     According to Firtich, the alogism that links Carroll's and Kruchenykh's nonsense is made up of three aspects, of which the linguistic experiment of 'nonsense' is but one. Also linking these figures is the concept of alternative metaphysical realms being explored, and an artistic épatage against the dominant contemporary social and cultural institutions.

2. (art) An absurd or nonsensical element deliberately added to a work that belongs to the alogism movement.
   • 1968, The Cresset - Volume 32, Issue 1, page 9:

     The theatricality of logic is, then, at least as effective in such speeches as are the meanderings of many an avant-garde playwright whose comic alogisms tend, sometime, to detract from the gravity of the situation described.

   • 1976, Henryk Baran, Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, page 288:

     In the puppet show he also found the style of discourse of the puppet-show barker, which breaks into the course of the action, with its tones of ironic publicity and praise, its alogisms and deliberate absurdities.

   • 1982, Per Dalgård, The Function of the Grotesque in Vasilij Aksenov, page 18:

     Mann's division of alogisms into 1 . alogisms as a basis and 2. alogisms as overtone (style), together with his account of the generalising (all-embracing) nature of the grotesque is convincing, and using these theories H. Gunther takes the discussion further.

   • 1984, Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, →ISBN, page 423:

     But many verbal absurdities and alogisms are scattered throughout the book.

   • 1997, Osip Mandelʹshtam, Jane Gary Harris, The complete crítical prose, →ISBN, page 345:

     The dadaists emphasized that the basis of the creative process stems from alogisms.

3. Irrationality; the rejection of logical thinking as a means of approaching truth.
   • 1976, Bernard Bykhovskii, Kierkegaard, →ISBN, page 10:

     Dialectics degenerates into its contrary (as it does later in neo-Hegelian irrationalism), into alogism.

   • 1981, Paul Tillich, The System of the Sciences According to Objects and Methods, →ISBN:

     Mere logism does not do justice to the import of being, and alogism does not do justice to the forms of thought. The former leads to formalism, the latter to arbitrariness.

   • 2004, Wilbur Marshall Urban, Valuation: Its Nature and Laws - Volume 16, →ISBN, page 396:

     This general tendency to alogism appears especially in connection with the problem of illusions and disillusionment which has become so prominent with the development of the causal or scientific point of view.

   • 2012, Sergius Bulgakov, Thomas Allan Smith, Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations, →ISBN, page 44:

     The principal reproach that Hartmann makes against Schleiermacher's theory is religious alogism, the blindness and amorphousness of naked feeling.

4. An irrational statement or line of argument; a logical error.
   • 1825, Granville Penn, A comparative estimate of the mineral and Mosaical geologies:

     so the pen of Moses, of which the former may be regarded as in some manner symbolical, will confound all the physical sophisms and alogisms which have been advanced, in contradiction or perversion of the record which that pen was commissioned to inscribe.

   • 1990, Alexander Spirkin, Fundamentals of Philosophy, page 238:

     The only means of discovering alogisms in thought is concrete dialectical analysis of reality reflected in the utterance.

   • 1996, Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov, The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists, →ISBN, page 98:

     All of the contradictions and alogisms in Schopenhauer's philosophy can be reduced to this basic misunderstanding.

   • 2014, Maksim Gorky, The Shield: The Shield, →ISBN:

     From the very moment I assumed a conscious attitude towards life until this very day I have lived in its noisome atmosphere, breathed in the poisoned air which surrounds all these 'problems,' all these dark, harrowing alogisms, unbearable to the intellect.

5. An inconsistency or arbitrary situation that follows no logical pattern.
   • 1974, Evgeniĭ Panteleĭmonovich Borisenkov, A Dyubkin, Automation of the collection and analysis of scientific information in the problem of the interaction of the atmosphere and ocean, volume 801:

     Thus, in order to develop a system or automatic monitoring of the results of observations abourt the vessels of the GUGMS, it was necessary to conduct a statistical analysis of the data in the operational regions for the purpose of determining locally uniform regions, with respect to variability of the elements to be analyzed and to develop algorithms of the alogisms for all forms of observation.

   • 1991, Lydia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose, →ISBN, page 268:

     From the multitude of his "equivalent thoughts" a person may, depending on his psychological "attitude," select and combine the most “comfortable” ones, tolerating the rest as unavoidable alogisms that must be circumvented if they cannot merely be swept aside.

   • 2005, Richard C. Smith, Teaching English As a Foreign Language, 1936-1961, →ISBN, pages 46–47:

     In English, I am is simply reversed to Am I to give it the sense of a question. In Japanese, the subject is often omitted, but understood. These are alogisms. What is expressed specifically in one language may be expressed by specific silence in another and vice versa.

• Maglios, gliomas

Borrowed from German Alogismus.

alogism n (uncountable)

1. alogism