Issue 8: Layers of Loss and Lingering Beauty

Essay

From Abstraction to Image: Symbol and the Photographic Mind

Reading Nicola Abbagnano’s History of Philosophy, I encountered Thomas Hobbes’ ideas on reason and language, which prompted me to explore their resonance with photography. Hobbes posits that reason is not a divine gift but a calculative faculty—an arithmetic of thought that manipulates names, concepts, and their consequences. For Hobbes, this faculty hinges on language, where words act as artificial signs enabling structured thought. This framework of reason, which I’ll call its calculative structure, allows humans to abstract: to build concepts upon concepts, detaching ideas from immediate perception to create meaning that transcends the present moment.

I believe this capacity for abstraction sets human thought apart from animal perception. Animals perceive, remember, and anticipate, but they do not abstract recursively, layering concepts to form new meanings. In Hobbes’ view, language is the tool that makes this possible—words, like artifacts, can be detached from their origins in nature, gaining new significance over time. I see a parallel in photography: a photograph, like a word, is an artifact extracted from reality, becoming an object with its own presence and meaning.

This parallel manifests in the distinction between propositional reasoning and artistic composition. Propositional reasoning, as in science, constructs precise, measurable arguments—syllogisms with calculable validity that aim to uncover universal truths about the world. Artistic composition, however, operates differently. It is precise in its own way, not through measurement but through subjective expression, structuring elements to convey a particular way of seeing. Photography embodies this compositional precision. It begins with perception but abstracts through deliberate choices—framing, isolating, sequencing, and recomposing—to create a symbolic artifact that is not the world itself but a synthesis of experience, a new object imbued with internal presence.

Every photograph carries two dimensions of meaning: the empirical, denotative content—what is depicted, such as objects or scenes identifiable to the viewer—and the aesthetic, structural form—how those elements are arranged through composition, light, and contrast. Consider Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941). The denotative content includes a village, a sky, and a moon. Yet the aesthetic structure—achieved through stark contrast, precise framing, and the interplay of light and shadow—creates a relational balance that evokes isolation and vastness. The village, small against the expansive sky and mountains, becomes a graphic element defined by shape, scale, and light. Adams does not argue a conclusion; he configures relations among these elements, inviting viewers to see the world anew through this structured arrangement.

This relational process is photography’s form of reasoning—not deductive like science, which seeks resolution through conclusions, but suggestive, opening meaning through tensions between presence and absence, moment and duration. A photograph, like Hobbes’ linguistic signs, is a constructed artifact that mirrors our ability to abstract beyond the immediate. Through this lens, photography emerges as a philosophical act, crafting meaning not with words but with images—through the arithmetic of light, form, and free association. It reveals not just what we see, but how we, as individuals, structure and interpret the world.