Logic - comic (graphic novel with Bertrand Russell)

A few weeks back, my Wesley Seminary colleague Brannon Hancock mentioned a couple of graphic novels to me, one largely focused on Bertrand Russell and the second on Richard Feynman. I finished the one on Russell yesterday and wanted to report.

1. The one on Russell is called Logicomix. It's a whopping 352 pages. It gives you a taste of Russell, along with an important collection of others working on logic in the late 1800s and first part of the twentieth century: Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, etc. One theme that runs throughout the novel is the frequent connection between the obsession of some of these for logic and a certain madness many of them skirted with.

Russell's family itself had a fair amount of schizophrenia in it. Georg Cantor and Kurt Gödel both had serious mental health issues. Frege turned out to have horrible Nazi sympathies. Wittgenstein himself, like Russell, had seriously obsessive tendencies.

The setting of the graphic novel is the writers of the novel writing the novel, in Greece, nonetheless. This allows the narrators to step into the story at various points to explain things and to reflect on the overall themes. An interesting backdrop is that one of them is also in a play being performed from Greek tragedy, the Oresteia. This is a series of blood obligations started when one Greek king killed the children of another.

Then ensues a series of revenge obligations that ends with Orestes on trial before Athens with Athena arguing that the blood debt needs to stop and the Furies insisting that he must die for killing his mother. This backdrop fits with the madness theme.

2. The setting of the story itself is Russell giving a lecture in America in 1939 while America is on the brink of war. He had taken a pacifist stance on WW1 and the group to which he was speaking was hoping he would do so again with WW2. In response, he presents his life story.

The story is largely one of his obsession and the obsession of others to ground mathematics on a firm basis. He and Alfred North Whitehead spend 10 years writing volumes meant to ground mathematics firmly on logic. Russell considered the work a failure. But as an example, they spend some 250 pages proving that 1 + 1 = 2.

Wittgenstein enters the scene as someone who undermines Russell's whole enterprise. "Whereof we cannot speak, we must be silent," and Wittgenstein would include the ultimate foundations of logic and math in that category. The climax of the novel, it seems to me, is Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which demonstrated that you could not ultimately prove anything as a self-contained system. Nothing can be completely grounded in itself.

(This is a major qualification to sola scriptura--the meaning of the Bible as a whole cannot hold together without some axioms which are ultimately outside of the Bible itself.)

3. The tortured point of the novel seems to be that extreme positions and obsessions--on logic, on war, on communism or capitalism--all seem to invite madness and insanity. Russell wrestles with how Frege could be so brilliant and yet froth at the mouth at the murder of Jews or how Hilbert could completely disown his schizophrenic son. Not long after Gödel's breakthrough, Moritz Schlick was gunned down by a Nazi in Vienna (1936).

In the graphic novel, Russell tells the pacifist crowd that they would have to make up their own minds about World War 2. In the novel he says, "The thought of Hitler and Stalin taking over Europe is too hard to bear" (296), despite his distaste for war. This doesn't seem to be a completely accurate picture of Russell, since he supported Chamberlain's appeasement policy.

4. I would say that as a graphic novel on such heady topics, it held my attention. It shows that there is a market for such things. This collection of eccentrics were, more or less, the founders of analytic philosophy. I have some admiration for them, whose goals were clarity and certainty. Gödel took the latter away from them, but I am nonetheless thankful for these accountants of philosophy.

I believe that the thinking of the world right now, including America, could use some serious house cleaning. I would love to break down our thinking into "atoms of principle" and try to help us find clarity on the most important issues of the day.

It remains as hard as ever to do that, though, because of the politics of knowledge and the persistence of our individual intuitions. The "preaching" I hear in person, page, and social media often seems oh so irrelevant, destined to continue the marginalization of Christianity within society. The rich and powerful play jacks with each other while the world burns. Their resources have nothing to do with truth, only perpetuating self-interest. But they have the power to make it happen. The public runs rampant with madness, convinced that its ignorance is true insight.

Who will free us from this body of death?

Bertrand Russell on Aristotle

Not a long note here but just my observation that as much as Russell liked Spinoza, he really can't stand Aristotle. On the one hand, he recognizes Aristotle's greatness: "... after his death it was two thousand years before the world produced any philosopher who could be regarded as approximately his equal" (159).

With regard to his predecessors too, "Aristotle's merits are enormous."

Then we get a hint of Russell's frustration: "almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine; in logic, this is still true at the present day" (160). Since logic and such were Russell's babies, this was his battle at the time.

But he has some interesting "snide" remarks throughout several chapters on Aristotle:

With regard to Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great: "I cannot imagine his pupil regarding him as anything but a prosy old pedant, set over him by his father to keep him out of mischief" (161).

"Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense" (162).

"If, therefore, I have failed to make Aristotle's theory of universals clear, that is (I maintain) because it is not clear" (164).

After Russell has quoted at length Aristotle's sense of the best individual, he writes (perhaps correctly), "One shudders to think what a vain man would be like" given how Aristotle portrays a magnanimous one (176).

Again perhaps rightly, Russell writes, "When we come to compare Aristotle's ethical tastes with our own ... we find ... an acceptance of inequality which is repugnant to much modern sentiment. Not only is there no objection to slavery, or to the superiority of husbands and fathers over wives and children, but it is held that what is best is essentially only for the few--proud men and philosophers" (183).

"There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy."

Then Russell gets to Aristotle's logic and the gloves come off.

"Even at the present day, all Catholic teachers of philosophy and many others still obstinately reject the discoveries of modern logic, and adhere with a strange tenacity to a system which is as definitely antiquated as Ptolemaic astronomy. This makes it difficult to do historical justice to Aristotle. His present-day influence is so inimical to clear thinking that it is hard to remember how great an advance he made upon all his predecessors... Aristotle ... is still especially in logic, a battle-ground, and cannot be treated in a purely historical spirit" (195).

"I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines with which we have been concerned in this chapter are wholly false, with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant. Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples" (202, italics mine!).

Finally, with regard to Aristotle's physics, Russell concludes with a number of observations:

"This theory provided many difficulties for later ages... Galileo's discovery that a projectile moves in a parabola shocked his Aristotelian colleagues. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had to combat Aristotle as well as the Bible in establishing the view that the earth is not the centre of the universe, but rotates once a day and goes round the sun once a year" (207).

"Aristotelian physics is incompatible with Newton's "First Law of Motion," originally enunciated by Galileo."

"Finally: The view that the heavenly bodies are eternal and incorruptible has had to be abandoned. The sun and stars have long lives, but do not live forever. They are born from nebula, and in the end they either explode or die of cold... the Aristotelian belief to the contrary, though accepted by medieval Christians, is a product of the pagan worship of sun and moon and planets."

Bertrand Russell on Spinoza

Today has been almost completely a philosophy day, as I've buried myself in the particulars of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza. I've largely relegated them to a textbox on famous rationalists (which I'll probably post later tonight).

Anyway, I was skimming through Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy on this triad of rationalists. I find him very readable today, although I didn't twenty years ago.

Russell (early 20th century) was of course an atheist, but a friendly one. What I mean is, there does not seem to be an edge to his thought. Spinoza (1600's) was not an atheist proper, but a pantheist. In other words, he did not believe in a personal God.

I was just struck by a number of comments Russell makes in his chapter on Spinoza, and when the striking hit a critical mass, I felt like sharing some excerpts. Keep in mind that he published this history in 1945 around the age of 73, having been a professor at Cambridge, the second most glorious university in the world after the University of Durham :-) World War 2 was just winding up.
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"Spinoza (1634-77) is the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers. Intellectually, some others have surpassed him, but ethically he is supreme. As a natural consequence, he was considered, during his lifetime and for a century after his death, a man of appalling wickedness. He was born a Jew, but the Jews excommunicated him. Christians abhorred him equally; although his whole philosophy is dominated by the idea of God, the orthodox accused him of atheism" (569).

"... The whole of this metaphysic is impossible to accept... And the concept of substance, upon which Spinoza relies, is one that neither science nor philosophy can nowadays accept" (578).

"But when it comes to Spinoza's ethics, we feel--or at least I feel--that something, though not everything, can be accepted...

"Take for instance, death: nothing that a man can do will make him immortal, and it is therefore futile to spend time in fears and lamentations over the fact that we must die... What should be ... avoided, is a certain kind of anxiety or terror... The same considerations apply to all other purely personal misfortunes.

"But how about misfortunes of people whom you love? Let us think of some of the things that are likely to happen in our time to inhabitants of Europe or China. Suppose you are a Jew, and your family has been massacred. Suppose you are an underground worker against the Nazis, and your wife has been shot because you could not be caught. Suppose your husband, for some purely imaginary crime, has been sent to forced labour in the Arctic, and has died of cruelty and starvation. Suppose your daughter has been raped and then killed by enemy soldiers. Ought you, in these circumstances, to preserve a philosophic calm? (578-79)

"If you follow Christ's teaching, you will say, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.' I have known Quakers who could have said this sincerely and profoundly, and whom I admired because they could. But before giving admiration one must be very sure that the misfortune is felt as deeply as it should be. One cannot accept the attitude of some among the Stoics, who said, 'What does it matter to me if my family suffer? I can still be virtuous' ... the Christian principle does not inculcate calm, but an ardent love even towards the worst of men. There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most of us to practice sincerely.

"The primitive reaction to such disasters is revenge... Nor can it be wholly condemned... But on the other side it must be said that revenge is a very dangerous motive... A life dominated by a single passion is a narrow life, incompatible with every kind of wisdom. Revenge as such is therefore not the best reaction to injury."

"As we saw, he believes that hatred can be overcome by love... I wish I could believe this, but I cannot, except in exceptional cases where the person hating is completely in the power of the person who refuses to hate in return... (580)

"The problem for Spinoza is easier than it is for one who has no belief in the goodness of the universe" [like Russell himself].