Science & Tech Quote by Stendhal

Stendhal’s line lands like a slap at the salon: logic, that supposedly clean instrument of truth, is recast as a social maneuver. Calling it a “dodge” doesn’t deny that reasoning exists; it denies its innocence. In his world of ambition, vanity, and courtly performance, argument often functions less as discovery than as self-defense: a way to justify desire after the fact, to tidy up motives that would look ugly in daylight.

The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Neither an art nor a science” refuses logic the prestige labels of the 19th century, when science was hardening into an institution and “art” still implied cultivated mastery. Stendhal rejects both the romantic halo (logic as elegant craft) and the Enlightenment halo (logic as reliable method). What’s left is a word from the street: “dodge,” quick and a little contemptuous, suggesting lateral motion, evasion, a practiced sidestep. It’s the rhetoric of someone who has watched people argue not to be right, but to win, to seduce, to maintain status.

Subtextually, it’s also an author’s flex. Novelists like Stendhal trade in interiority, in the messy collisions between impulse and pretense. By demoting logic, he elevates psychology: the real engine of human behavior is not syllogism but self-interest masquerading as principle. The line anticipates modern suspicion of “rationality” as branding - a pose that signals seriousness while quietly laundering bias. Logic as a dodge is not anti-thought; it’s anti-alibi.