Tag: Rebecca Goldstein

OB: As a fan of philosophy I’ve been delighted to see the rave reviews for Plato at the Googleplex in major media – the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Slate, NPR, The Atlantic. This has to be a good thing: a sign that philosophy can be made interesting to the reading public, and itself a step to getting more people interested in philosophy. It’s all the more gratifying because part of your point, as I understand it, is to show readers that philosophy has value and has not been rendered superfluous by science. Can you tell us a little about why philosophy does indeed have value?

RG: I’ve been delighted to see the rave reviews, too.

Okay, why is philosophy of value?  The short answer is that it addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.  There are of course, technical, narrow philosophical questions of concern to only professional philosophers, and I don’t mean to disparage them, since I’ve spent a good part of my life on them. But what I’m speaking about here are problems that just about all of us confront in virtue of our being thinking humans: What—if anything— are our lives about?  Even if they’re not really about anything—goodbye to the old monotheistic usurpation of this question—can we find answers that will allow us to maximize our own flourishing and—of equal if not greater importance—reasons to care about the flourishing of others?  (Caring about ourselves comes kind of naturally to us.) Philosophy has been addressing such questions and making significant, if invisible, progress with them almost ever since there’s been philosophy.

Elaboration on short answer: Philosophy emerged in the ancient Greek world contemporaneously (800-200 BCE) with the emergence of the major religious and spiritual traditions that have survived into our day: Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and the Abrahamic religion.  Confucius, the Buddha, Ezekiel, and Pythagoras were all contemporaries of each other. Obviously there was some profound existential self-questioning going on during this period, in all the parts of the world that had attained a certain degree of political organization and stability (all the areas involved in this normative ferment minted coins, as the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber points out in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years) and thus met basic survival needs (all the areas involved had a high energy-consumption).  So it seems that once basic survival wasn’t continuously occupying the mind, questions about putting our survival to some kind of meaningful purpose began to emerge. I like to put these questions in terms of “mattering.”  Do we matter? Is there something we have to do or be in order to achieve mattering, or is mattering something that we’re born into?

Greek philosophy didn’t address these questions in religious/spiritual terms, but rather in human, secular terms, applying reason to problems of mattering.  And systematically applying reason as opposed to appealing to dogma, so-called revelation, and authority, it’s the only one of the normative systems that emerged during that ancient age to have actually made progress.  I have, in the imaginary dialogues I scatter throughout the book,, Plato being amazed by how far he’s been left behind—not just scientifically and technologically, but philosophically, ethically and politically—by the field that he helped create.

Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it’s time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.  Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter—self-centered means of numbing the questions of mattering. And given the self-centeredness of the kind of conclusions we’re gravitating toward, it’s no wonder that issues of social justice are not at the center of our attention. Our culture has relapsed back into the kind of self-aggrandizing, self-glorifying answers that the Athenians had presumed, which had Socrates railing against them until he got so annoying that they killed him.

OB: It’s a truism of sorts that people do philosophy all the time, it’s just that they do it badly. Would you say that’s one of the themes of Plato at the Googleplex? Are Roy McCoy and Dr. David Shoket and the rest doing philosophy but doing it badly? Or are they doing something entirely different, which they would do better if they had some education in philosophy?

RG: If forced to choose, I’d say they’re not even doing philosophy badly, but rather seeking to foreclose the very possibility of doing philosophy.  Of course, they put forth arguments—bad arguments—for this foreclosing, and one might want to count these bad arguments against the very possibility of philosophy as engaging in philosophy—really bad philosophy, because internally incoherent: using philosophical arguments to argue for the futility of all philosophical arguments.  My character Roy McCoy would foreclose philosophy by appealing to religion as answering all the questions, while my character Dr. Shoket, would foreclose philosophy by appealing to science as answering all the questions. Both are tone-deaf to the (bad) philosophy they’re putting forth.

OB: It’s a good moment for public education via mass media, with Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s remake of Cosmos airing. I think it’s quite apt that your book is making a stir at the same time. But Carl Sagan was frowned on and even sneered at for doing so much public outreach. It’s well known that academics tend to think popularization is infra dig. Is that still true? Do you ever get the hairy eyeball for writing novels and accessible books about philosophy?

RG: How do I even begin to tell that sad story? I think it’s particularly egregious when it’s philosophers who are doing the sneering.  Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don’t realize it’s philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.  If philosophers have special expertise here, if through their natural talents and their training, they can shed some light on the questions that perplex people not trained as they are, then they damn well ought to do it.   Yes, we analytic philosophers love precision, and yes the best philosophical thinking demands a precision that lost on—that loses—most non-philosophers.  But I think that a certain compromise can and should be struck between absolute precision and general accessibility.  Scientists who write for popular audiences have brilliantly struck such compromises..  Why can’t philosophers? Well, I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise.  After all, all people—not just philosophers—have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better.  So philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn’t recognize their special credentials.  It’s the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that’s accessible to the general public.

OB: I must say, I see the MacArthur grant as a glorious vindication of doing the kind of thing you do; of doing academic philosophy and literary writing. Has it made it easier for you to combine things any old way you want to?

RG: The MacArthur grant came to me when I was in career-despair, feeling both spurned by the community of philosophers for being a novelist and cold-shouldered by the literary community for being a philosopher. I was actively considering a third career, one which would have involved educating young children.  The MacArthur gave me encouragement to continue with my experiments in writing about philosophy in non-academic ways. I’ve  always felt that playfulness is essential to good thinking, and so that’s always been involved in my experiments, the non-fiction and the fiction.  I have my Plato talk a great deal about the importance of play in thinking.

OB: What about Plato himself? Would he be pleased to see A C Grayling on the Colbert Report? Or would he think it was far too vulgar to mix up philosophy and television. In the Protagoras, Socrates seems down on the very idea of trying to teach arête, and perhaps anything else that’s not purely how-to. Do you think Plato loaded the dice against the sophists? Or was he making a good point about the marketing of canned wisdom?

RG: I’m going to answer your question first for Socrates and then for Plato. Socrates plied his trade in the agora, the Athenian marketplace, and he was a sly old fox, willing to use all kinds of tricks to try and wake his fellow Athenians out of their habitual ways of thinking and acting.  Now Plato went and created the Academy, separating himself from the non-philosophical populace.   Perhaps, after the trial and execution of Socrates, carried out by the restored Athenian democracy, he just threw up his hands at trying to figure out ways of speaking to the general population. But maybe not.  After all, he created the dialogues, which were read by the general population. The dialogues are great art and they’re often extremely entertaining, even hilarious—to us, who live 2400 years later. How much more  entertaining they must have been to his contemporaries, who got all the in-jokes, and knew about the real-life characters he peoples his dialogues with.  And it was Plato who gives us, in the dialogues, that sly old fox Socrates.

OB: I encounter a lot of people who have an annoyingly philistine attitude to philosophy, claiming that it’s just a lot of useless pretentious verbiage. I urge various titles on them in hopes they will learn better. Do you have any favorites for this purpose?

RG: Ah, Ophelia, you and I probably encounter many of the same people.  I would say Spinoza’s Ethics, though the book is almost impenetrable without a good background or teacher.  But that book probably did more to bring about the European Enlightenment than any other single work, as beautifully demonstrated by Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, which I also enthusiastically recommend to those who think philosophy does nothing.

Here is the thing about philosophical progress: it changes what we take to be “intuitively” obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes.  We don’t see these changes, because we see with them.

OB: Even worse than that, I think, are the people who think Sam Harris wrote a revolutionary book on moral philosophy, and one that has made all other books on moral philosophy pointless. Do you ever encounter such people, and if so, what do you say to show them their error?

RG: No, I’ve never encountered such people. But I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers—whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete—that it takes an awful lot of philosophy—philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second—even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences.

Another review of Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex, this time at NPR, by Marcelo Gleiser.

(Don’t forget, she’s a speaker at Women in Secularism 3, a mere two months from now.)

The man who gave us philosophy as we know it is back, walking among us, going to TV talk shows, visiting Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., having his brain examined by a naïve reductionist neuroscientist, engaging with our current struggles.

For this we must thank Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s inventiveness and intellectual courage. Her book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, has just been published to rave reviews by people such as philosopher Colin McGinn. Goldstein’s goal is clear: to show to the “philosophy-jeerers” — those who claim philosophy has no value whatsoever — how absurdly wrong (and mostly ignorant) they are.

To show, that is, not to tell.

Philosophy has changed much since Plato, as it should. After all, its purview is precisely to examine and re-examine itself as a precondition to growth. No advance would be possible without this openness to criticism. (Incidentally, and not surprisingly, this is also how science functions. Plasticity is an essential property of any evolving knowledge system.) Goldstein’s brilliantly constructed narrative, combining Plato’s original texts with current-day events, shows how timely the central questions of philosophy remain, as the answers multiply.

Answers are never final, or, if they seem to be, they shouldn’t be interpreted as such. Yet, while in science it is easy to identify progress, in philosophy the task is harder. As Goldstein reflects upon Plato’s legacy, she offers a portrait of the shifting nature of our philosophical inquiries and our search for meaning:

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared by intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don’t see it, because we see with it.

Philosophy provides the goggles with which we make sense of reality.

And you want to know something about those goggles.

Colin McGinn reviews Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex in the Wall Street Journal. It’s a pity they chose Colin McGinn of all people, but oh well.

Plato is brought marvelously to life, and, as a welcome corollary, philosophy is vindicated against what Ms. Goldstein aptly labels the “philosophy-jeerers”—those who rashly claim that philosophy has no intellectual substance or future in this scientific era.

Philosophy-jeerers should read some Rebecca Goldstein. Seriously.

“Plato at the Googleplex” consists of chapters of scholarly discussion followed by fictional accounts of Plato appearing in various contemporary venues. Thus we see Plato at Google headquarters on a book tour, Plato in a panel discussion at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, Plato as a consultant to an advice columnist, Plato interviewed on cable news and Plato’s brain being examined in a neuroscience laboratory. Here Ms. Goldstein employs her novelistic skills to sparkling effect by weaving abstract concepts into concrete modern narratives. At a cable news station, he is grilled by one Roy McCoy, who is not a bit intimidated by his distinguished Greek guest: “Okay, so they tell me you’re a big deal in philosophy, Plato. I’m going to tell you up front—because that’s the kind of guy I am, up-front—that I don’t think much of philosophers.”

Well Anthony Grayling has actually been on the Colbert Report, twice, so it all makes sense.

Goldstein also outlines religious and secular responses to the existential questions of the so-called Axial Age, the period (circa 500 B.C.) when the key questions of human civilization began to be crystallized. When people began seriously to wonder what makes human life worthwhile, one group (represented by the Hebrews) conceived the idea of a single God to whom all human life matters, while another group (the Greeks) conceived of human life having meaning on terms internal to itself. As Ms. Goldstein observes, this fundamental choice is still being played out today: Do the Abrahamic religions have the right view of the good life for human beings or were the Greeks onto something better?

The Greeks were onto something better.

 

 

 

Now enough kvetching, it’s time to say how great the conference was, and why.

As I mentioned on Saturday morning, Rebecca Goldstein’s talk was brilliant. Miri did an incredible job of liveblogging it, so you can just read her post to learn what RG said. Ditto Jason and his post.

From Miri’s:

In preparation for this talk, I polled some very prominent women and asked them if they ever feel that their gender undermines them professionally. Virtually all of them reported saying something in a discussion or meaning and being completely ignored–until the comment is picked up and reported by a man. Then, suddenly everyone jerks to attention.

Obviously it’s true that compared to more violent manifestations of misogyny, being ignored/interrupted/talked over is easy to dismiss because it’s an experience of privileged women. We privileged women can feel petty and ashamed voicing complaints about these things.

Indeed. Especially when an important dude comes along and says out loud that what we’re talking about is not just trivial in comparison to stoning (which of course is undeniable) but also just plain zero harm.

Happily, someone actually asked Maryam about that in the Q and A after her talk. Maryam is the ideal person to ask, obviously, because her focus is on the worst kind of oppression and violence. You know what she said? She rejected the whole idea. “I don’t like those comparisons,” she said firmly. We do get to talk about being dismissed even though other women are being beheaded. Yes we do.

Psychologists call these experiences “microaggressions,” and they cite evidence that for women (and other marginalized groups), these small attacks take a greater toll than the more outright expressions of misogyny.

Derald Wing Sue, a researcher on microaggressions, says that it’s easier for marginalized people to deal with the more outright expressions of bigotry because there’s no guesswork involved. You can easily dismiss them as bigotry.

While if you point out a microagression you may get called a Nazi McCarthyite inquisitorial witch hunter.

Here’s one bit that was a light bulb moment for me – it’s what I was talking to Dave Silverman about while doing all that gesturing.

4:35: What is it that keeps intellectually sophisticated people clinging to propositions about the world so improbable that they can be described–if you’ll allow me to use the technical terminology of epistemology–as crazy-ass shit?

These beliefs extend at least 30,000 years to Cro Magnon man, whose cave paintings are interpreted as expressions of spiritual beliefs. But the religions that still resonate with people were all originally forged during the period called “the Axial Age“–between 800 and 200 BCE. At the same time, secular philosophy and tragic drama emerged in ancient Greece. This period is called “the axial age” because these traditions still extend into our own age, including among the secularists who are the inheritors of Greek tradition.

What they have in common is a preoccupation with the issue of mattering.

Some lives achieve mattering and others don’t. Perhaps there’s something a person can do that will make the difference when it comes to his or her mattering. The question is, what is the human life that matters?

That makes a great deal of sense, and helps to explain a lot. I particularly liked it because the novel (her first) in which she presented the idea of the mattering map (see Miri’s post for more) is one of my favorite novels, I’ve read it many times, and the mattering map always struck me with its explanatory power. It doesn’t suprise me that it’s a Thing in social science now. (It did surprise Goldstein though.)

Tying it together at the end:

Back to microaggressions. What do they do? They undermine a person’s sense that they matter. And they’re even worse when they come from someone who matters to you, who can’t be dismissed as the ranting bigots and slobbering misogynists.

4:50: Without sensitivity to the will to matter and how it gave rise to religion in the first place, we fail to understand the secular ethical progress to which we are the heirs, and upon which we wage an assault, macro or micro, every time we undermine a person’s sense that he or she matters.

Yes. It applies to us as objects but also as perps.

She got a huge standing ovation. It was an absorbing, exhilarating, inspiring talk.

 

I actually did an email interview with Rebecca Goldstein once. Yes really! You didn’t know that, did you. I’m not just some shlub with a blog. [struts] I did an interview with Rebecca Goldstein once.

Here.

Rebecca Goldstein has a new book out: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel.

Readers at Science Daily call Incompleteness ’Outstanding’ and ‘Superb’.

Butterflies and Wheels: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont call chapter 11 of their book Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science: ‘Gödel’s Theorem and Set Theory: Some Examples of Abuse.’ They give a quotation from Régis Debray as an epigraph: ‘Ever since Gödel showed that there does not exist a proof of the consistency of Peano’s arithmetic that is formalizable within this theory (1931), political scientists had the means for understanding why it was necessary to mummify Lenin…’ The chapter’s first sentence starts, ‘Gödel’s theorem is an inexhaustible source of intellectual abuses…’

Sokal and Bricmont go on to quote more such abuses, from Debray, Alain Badiou, and Michel Serres, who wrote, ‘Régis Debray applies or discovers as applicable to social groups the incompleteness theorem valid for formal systems…’

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt examine literary critic (or ‘theorist’) Katherine Hayles’ musings on Gödel in Higher Superstition: ‘Hayles then cites the Gödel incompleteness result as the deathblow to the Russell-Whitehead program…This is  intended to figure the movement away from post-Enlightenment ideals of “universal” knowledge to postmodern skepticism…’

Is this a widespread view of Gödel? Is it a view held solely by people who don’t actually understand Gödel’s work? Are there any mathematicians or logicians who think Gödel is a social theorist or a postmodernist?

Rebecca Goldstein: I’m not sure that there is a “widespread view of Gödel.” While I was writing “Incompleteness” and people asked me what I was working on these days, I usually drew a blank stare when I said his name. Sometimes mentioning the title of Douglas Hofstadter’s popular book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” brought on a faint gleam of recognition.    So, by and large, Gödel – unlike his soul-mate, Einstein – is strangely unknown, and this anonymity is in itself something I wanted to address. I say in the book that Gödel is the most famous person that you probably haven’t heard of, and that if you’ve heard of him you probably have, through no fault of your own, an entirely false impression of what it was he did to the foundations of mathematics.

Which brings me to the crux of your question.  Among “humanist” intellectuals who do invoke Gödel’s name, he is often associated with the general assault on objectivity and rationality that gained such popularity in the last century.  I’d often find myself pondering which would be the preferable state of affairs regarding Gödel, anonymity or misinterpretation.  Which would Gödel have preferred?  I’m going to indulge in “the privileged position of the biographer” to presume I know the answer to the latter question, at least: Gödel, who was so passionately committed to the truth, would have far preferred utter oblivion to the falsifications of his theorems that have given him whatever fame he has in the non-mathematical world.

And what falsifications!  He had meant his incompleteness theorems to prove the philosophical position to which he was, heart and soul, committed: mathematical Platonism, which is, in short, the belief that there is a human-independent mathematical reality that grounds our mathematical truths;  mathematicians are in the business of discovering, rather than inventing, mathematics.   His incompleteness theorems concerned the incompleteness of our man-made formal systems, not of mathematical truth, or our knowledge of it.  He believed that mathematical reality and our knowledge of mathematical reality exceed the formal rules of formal systems. So unlike the view that says there is no truth apart from the truths we create for ourselves, so that the entire concept of truth disintegrates into a plurality of points of view, Gödel believed that truth – most paradigmatically, mathematical truth – subsists independently of any human point of view.  If ever there was a man committed to the objectivity of truth, and to objective standards of rationality, it was Gödel.  And so the usurpation of his theorems by postmodernists is ironic. Jean Cocteau wrote in 1926 that “The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”  For a logician, especially one with Gödel’s delicate psychology, the tragedy is perhaps even greater.

I’ll give you just one example of misinterpretation, not only because it’s quite typical, but also because it had a personal effect on me.  The summer before entering college I was told I would have to read, in preparation for honors English, the then-influential book, by William Barrett, called “Irrational Man” published in 1964. Gödel’s name is linked by Barrett with thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, destroyers of our illusion of objectivity.  After correctly stating the first incompleteness theorem (there are in fact two theorems, the second a consequence of the first, so long as one presumes that arithmetic is free of contradictions) Barrett draws this conclusion: “Mathematicians now know they can never reach rock bottom; in fact, there is no rock bottom, since mathematics has no self-subsistent reality independent of the human activity that mathematicians carry on.”  If you negate the conclusion that Barrett draws from Gödel’s work, you end up with precisely the conclusion that Gödel himself drew!  How often does that happen? A man sets out to prove a philosophical position mathematically, so that there can be no doubt.  And he does prove it, but people draw precisely the wrong conclusion from it.

So, returning to your question as to whether “it [the rejection of objective knowledge] is a view held solely by people who don’t actually understand Gödel’s work?” I would answer, unequivocally: yes.

B and W: Are there any mathematicians or logicians who think Gödel is a social theorist or a postmodernist?

Rebecca Goldstein: I don’t personally know of any, and it’s hard to imagine any either.  Since mathematical logic is not the most central part of mathematics, there are mathematicians who don’t pay all that much attention to Gödel’s work and may not be terribly familiar with its details.  But it’s hard to imagine – even for me, with my overworked novelist’s imagination – a mathematician who would draw the sloppy conclusions that others have regarding the incompleteness theorems.

The same, by the way, can be said about Einstein’s relativity.  These very names – “incompleteness,” relativity” – have encouraged very fanciful extrapolations that stand in direct opposition to the views of the scientists connected with these important results.  Einstein was as little committed to the “relativity of truth” as his good friend Gödel was committed to the view that  mathematics is the result of “the human activity that mathematicians carry on.”

The two of them had, by the way, a legendary friendship. Einstein was an old man and Gödel was relatively young when they became friends in Princeton, both of them refugees from Nazified  Europe.  (Gödel, by the way, was not Jewish, though even Bertrand Russell made the mistake of assuming that he was.) The two of them would regularly walk home from the Institute together. In fact, toward the end of his life, Einstein confided that his own work meant little to him now, and that he went to his office primarily to “have the privilege of walking home with Gödel.” They were very different in terms of their personalities – Einstein sagacious and worldly, Gödel quite hopelessly unworldly and seriously neurotic.  I interviewed people at the Institute who used to watch them making the trek home each day, wondering what it was that they spoke to one another about.  In my book I speculate about this deep bond, speaking of the philosophical commitments that both men shared, commitments which were so often either dismissed or misunderstood.  It’s yet another irony – the story I write is full of somewhat sad ironies – that the two intellectual titans of their age should have felt marginalized, their own work often cited as the most persuasive of reasons for making the subjectivist turn.  After Einstein died, Gödel really had no one else to speak with.  This isolation certainly contributed to the psychological troubles that deepened and darkened over the years.

B and W: Is your book partly intended to correct the misinterpretation of Gödel’s work?

Rebecca Goldstein:Today I got an email from a professor of English at a prestigious university saying, among other things: “By the way, I too was assigned to read William Barrett’s The Irrational Man, but in my Freshman year at Saint Joseph’s College (now University), and from that and other references to Godel’s work over the years, I came to assume that it was a sort of proto- deconstruction of the edifice of modern math and science.”

B and W: Edward Rothstein said in the New York Times: “It is difficult to overstate the impact of his theorem and the possibilities that opened up from Gödel’s extraordinary methods, in which he discovered a way for mathematics to talk about itself. (Ms. Goldstein compares it to a painting that could also explain the principles of aesthetics.)”.

Can you tell us a little about that impact?

Rebecca Goldstein:Before Gödel, logic was considered more a branch of philosophy than of mathematics, the discipline associated with Aristotle rather than, say, with Gauss.  Gödel developed extraordinarily powerful tools in the course of proving his theorems which both opened up new areas of mathematical research (recursion theory, for example) and also provided the means for solving more standard problems in mathematics.  Mathematical logic now, as a result, has far more mathematical respectability.  As Simon Kochen, a Princeton mathematical logician, told me, “Gödel put logic on the mathematical map.” But there are many other ways in which the impact of his famous proof is felt.  In the course of proving  the limitations of formal systems, Gödel sharpens the very concept of a formal system, as well as a whole interrelated family of concepts: The concepts of a mechanical or an effective procedure, of recursive and computable functions, of combinatorial processes and of an algorithm: this family of concepts all pretty much come down to the same thing, centering around the idea of rules that are applied to the results of prior applications of rules, with no regard to any meanings or interpretations except for what can be captured in the rules themselves.  In other words, these concepts all have to do with procedures that can be programmed into computers.  There’s a sense in which Gödel’s proof, especially as it was filtered through the work of Turing, helped to invent the computer.

And then there’s the more philosophical fallout from his theorems, the light they shed not only on the nature of mathematical knowledge – the fact that it can’t be captured in a formal system – but also on the nature of the mathematical knower herself.  If computers run according to formal systems and our minds provably don’t, not even in knowing arithmetic, then does this mean that our minds are provably not computers? Gödel himself, rigorous logician that he was, was reluctant to draw so conclusive a conclusion; he hedged it in logically important ways.  Other important thinkers, however, have drawn precisely this conclusion.  Just such an argument served as the basis, for example, of Roger Penrose’s two celebrated books, “The Emperor’s New Mind” and “Shadows of the Mind.” He used Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to argue that our minds’ activities exceed what can be programmed into computers.

B and W: We’re in something of a Golden Age of intellectual biographies of philosophers. Wittgenstein, Russell, Ayer, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza and others have had rich biographies in the past decade. What sort of work do you think biography can do? Were you inspired by any biographies in particular?

Rebecca Goldstein:I didn’t think of “Incompleteness” as a biography.  The aim of the book – the aim of the entire Norton series of which this book is a part – is to fit the scientific results into a “narrative framework.”  I could have chosen the biographical story as my narrative arc. That strategy was the one that my editor kept encouraging me to take. He kept urging me to begin the book with Gödel’s birth in 1906 and go on from there.  But I resisted him.  I wanted the intellectual passions of Gödel to supply the narrative framework.  Here’s the story I wanted to tell:  Gödel, like many of us, first fell in love when he was an undergraduate, and that love forever changed him. Only it wasn’t a person that Gödel fell in love with but rather an idea, a grand philosophical vision that has attracted thinkers, and most especially the mathematically inclined, since the very first Platonist in the fifth century B.C.E..  Gödel met this great love of his in a philosophy class. (So much for the claim that philosophy can have no practical results: from Plato to – by way of Gödel and then Turing – google. )  He had been a physics major until his introductory course in philosophy,  but he changed his major to mathematics under the influence of his impassioned Platonism.  Devoted lover that he was, he resolved to find a way of proving – mathematically proving – mathematical Platonism.  This was a daunting ambition.  (The dichotomy between the outward timidity of this man, prey to terrible paranoid worries, and the inner vaulting intellectual confidence is one of the most fascinating things about his personality.) And then the amazing thing was that he actually went and did it, he actually produced mathematical theorems that had the philosophical consequences he was after;  and then he lived to see his ideas twisted around so that they served the very viewpoint that he had hoped to conclusively refute.  The drama I wanted to create, the story I wanted to tell, was all contained in this love story, a tragic love story (as almost all gripping love stories are).

B and W: Philosophers are sometimes drawn to fiction because fiction is a kind of thought-experiment. Does this aspect of fiction interest you?

Rebecca Goldstein:Well, of course, fiction is, in a certain sense, a kind of thought-experiment, but unlike the thought-experiments we use in, say, analytic philosophy in order to tease out implications or make conceptual distinctions or provide counterexamples to theses, the thought-experiments of fiction are not deliberately put forth in order to figure something out. Sure, there’s plenty of figuring out going out, for both the reader and, even more so, for the writer, but figuring out is not the paramount aspect of the deep experience of participating in fiction. I resist the view that the pleasures of fiction derive from its purely thought-experimental aspects. And yet I do think of the narrative imagination as a cognitive faculty;  but its cognitive aspects are far more complicated than “thought-experiment” suggests.  I’m fascinated by the unique phenomenology of reading and, of course, writing fiction, the fact that we’re drawn  into a world that we know isn’t real but that we participate in almost as if it were.  I think fiction manages to tamper temporarily with the boundaries of our own personal identity – we inhabit identities not our own –  and also with our sense of time – narrative time is measured out in units of significance, unlike regular time which is generally just one damned insignificant thing after another – and that this tampering puts us in the way of deep insights to which we’re not usually privy.  How else to explain the fact that novelists are so much smarter when they’re writing novels than at any other time, which is why it’s often such a profound disappointment to meet a revered writer in person!

B and W: Do you agree with for instance Martha Nussbaum that fiction is one of the best ways for people to learn empathy? Do you think such a view of fiction can be in tension with aesthetic judgments? If a novel has its heart in the right place but is badly written, which do you think matters more?

Rebecca Goldstein:Yes, I do think that storytelling is the basic way that we make our way into others’ psychology, which is of course central in regarding them as people just like oneself, in all the morally relevant aspects, an observation that ushers one into the moral point of view.  The narrative imaginative is not only a cognitively significant faculty but a morally significant one as well.  I don’t, however, think that the moral benefits of storytelling provide us with aesthetic standards.  What makes art great has little to do with its uplifting tendencies – aside from the fact that great art is intrinsically uplifting.

B and W: Did you find in writing the biography that you missed the novelist’s license to assume inside knowledge of the protagonist’s thoughts? Did you find yourself wanting to bridge gaps in the evidence with Perhapses and conditionals, or were you more interested in making clear where there was evidence and where there wasn’t?

Rebecca Goldstein:In some ways Kurt Gödel was like some of the fictional characters I’ve created. I’m thinking of, say, Noam Himmel, in my first book, “The Mind-Body Problem,” or Samuel Mallach,  in my last novel, “Properties of Light.” I’ve always been interested in geniuses, especially of the mathematical or scientific sort.  Even within this small sub-set there’s a particular type of personality that fascinates me, one that’s characterized by both the intellectual heroism of thinking one’s way where no man or woman has thought before coupled together with a marked lack of heroism in any matters removed from the intellectual high ground. It’s easy to make fun of helpless and/or lunatic geniuses; but I find the dichotomy between intellectual grandeur (and in mathematics the grandeur can seem almost superhuman) and “human-all-too-human” smallness to be touching and very telling of our uneasy human position.

I came to feel extremely close to my subject while I wrote “Incompleteness.” Of course it wasn’t that all-penetrating closeness that a writer feels with her characters, but there was something sometimes approximating it.  Again, this was not a biography in the usual sense of the word; I was interested in Gödel’s life only insofar as it related to his theorems: what they meant to him as well as to others, and how the latter facts affected him.  (Ludwig Wittgenstein’s hostility to Gödel’s theorems is of particular importance here.)  But you can see that, given what I came to believe about the man and his most famous results, there was a great deal of pathos that I saw in his story, and – the payoff of the narrative imagination – a great deal of empathetic participation in it that then helped to further along  my understanding.  So I did feel quite often that I’d penetrated into the soul of the man.  He was an unusually reticent person in life. Aside from those animated walks to and from the Institute with Einstein, that others watched in wonderment, he eschewed social intercourse as much as possible.  He mistrusted, more and more, our ability to communicate with one another.  Even when he was very young, before the historical result, and its historical misinterpretations, he remarked  to one of his acquaintances that the more he considered language, the less likely it seemed to him that we ever understood one another. This is the statement of a profoundly lonely person, someone in some sense constitutionally lonely, and this, too, touched me and made me all the more eager to hear what he’d wanted to say.  He had wanted to communicate through his proofs, to let his deep mathematics do the speaking for him; so again, the fact that the mathematics was heard to say the very opposite of what he’d meant by it is poignant.  He did write some letters protesting others’ misinterpretations of his works, particularly Wittgenstein’s.  Wittgenstein had been an enormously influential figure in the Vienna that Gödel inhabited before his move to Princeton; part of the story I reconstruct is that Gödel resented Wittgenstein’s influence, especially after Wittgenstein dismissed Gödel’s theorems as ”logische Kunststücken,” logical conjuring tricks.  Gödel, being the outwardly timorous man he was, never sent these letters off, but they’re there in his literary remains, in the basement of Princeton’s Firestone Library.  Those unsent resentful missives – both their content and the very fact that they were unsent – played a role in my constructing a partial model of Gödel’s psychology.  But about his more terrifying demons – and unfortunately it’s very clear that he had them in abundance and, in the end, they did him and his intellectual grandeur in – I would never dare to speculate.  I never deluded myself into thinking I’d arrived at the sort of access a novelist has toward her fictional characters (who, strangely, also develop something of an independent life).

B and W: Does writing a biography bring up interesting epistemological issues? Do you think people with philosophical training are more aware of such issues than, for instance, historians and journalists? Or, perhaps, aware of them in different ways? As interesting issues in themselves rather than as methodological problems?

Rebecca Goldstein:I think that anyone who tries to write a biography, even a modified biography such as mine, comes smack up against the “interesting epistemological issues.”  It’s a good exercise for a biographer to consider the question of how much of her own life’s narrative, at least as she tells it to herself, could even her very best friends reproduce. I was able to read the memoirs of those who had known Gödel and to make use of their observations and speculations; and I was fortunate to have met him once, though only very briefly, during a small window of his life when he was somewhat more outgoing than usual.  But in the end what I was trying to do was come up with a story that would make sense of the rather small number of external facts about his life that he left us.   It was a story that made much sense to me, as I hope it will to my readers.  But in the end, no story about a person can be true.  We are all of us, not to speak of mathematical/philosophical geniuses, far too complicated and self-contradictory to be contained in a “narrative framework.”  The biographer, as much as the mathematical logician, is keenly aware of the incompleteness necessarily inherent in her project.

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel .

Rebecca Goldstein’s web page is here.