Kurt Gödel: Logic, Exile And Insanity

Kurt Gödel: Logic, Exile And Insanity Landon D.C. Elkind Stephen Budiansky. Journey to the Edge of Reason: the Life of Kurt Gödel. New York: Norton, 2021. Pp. xi, 350. isbn: 978-1-324-00544-5; us$30, cdn$40. This is a good book for anyone with interests adjacent to Kurt Gödel (1906–1978). This includes many subscribers to this journal, who have an interest in Russell, Principia Mathematica and the work that it inspired, or the foundations of mathematics generally. Unsurprisingly, there are a few inaccuracies in the presentation of Russell (and Wittgenstein)—more on that below—but Budiansky has drawn a detailed picture of Gödel’s intellectual life and influences. Budiansky has produced an excellent and complete portrait of Gödel. The biography provides a narrative of Gödel’s life from start to finish, and contextualization of Gödel (as a person and not just as a logician or a philosopher) is the unifying theme of Budiansky’s work. This includes a first chapter on the broader historical and political context in which Gödel was raised. The rich cultural and intellectual milieu of Vienna in the 1920s is discussed: during this period there were a cornucopia of circles (discussion groups) around all kinds of topics. Budiansky’s vivid portrait of Gödel’s university life gives the impression that Plato was wrong about geometric objects: perfect circles can exist on Earth, and they roamed the cafés of Vienna. The most perfect of these was of course the Vienna Circle (though this was not Gödel’s opinion). At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, there was a similarly rich environment. But Vienna and Princeton were quite different places and Budiansky helpfully illustrates both the palatial campus buildings of the former university and the pitfalls of small-town life at the latter. And some nasty interpersonal quarrels probably made life at the Institute for Advanced Studies less happy in many ways for Gödel than before he became a full professor (at least he got a raise). [End Page 177] The various persons that Gödel met are also contextualized—Carnap, Einstein, Hilbert, Russell, Alfred Tarski, Olga Taussky, Hao Wang, and of course Wittgenstein, among many others—and his family relations are woven into the narrative, too. These thinkers’ ideas are explained to the extent necessary to situate Gödel’s reaction to them. Happily, the forest is never lost for the trees: these asides are very succinct, ensuring that the overarching narrative and aims of the book, presenting the life of Gödel, are centered. After Gödel died, his wife, Adele, left his papers to the Institute for Advanced Studies, but only after destroying many of the letters that Gödel received from his brother Rudi and from his mother Marianne—his father died while he was studying in Vienna. Adele also destroyed all the letters between them. These are great losses, but Budiansky seems to have marvellously overcome these gaps in our information about Gödel’s family. The book opens with a prologue based around Gödel’s therapist’s notes. This was entirely appropriate considering that Gödel died of starvation because he could not trust that others, including doctors, would not poison him. The biography is thus bookended by Gödel’s mental maladies. The only person he seemed to trust fully was Adele, who saved Gödel’s life too many times to count. When he checked into a mental institute in 1936 and refused to eat for fear of being poisoned, “Adele patiently sat with him hour by hour, coaxing him to eat by first tasting each spoonful of food that she personally prepared and brought to him every day” (p. 175). When Adele could not prepare his food anymore, Gödel simply could not bring himself to eat anything at all. It is a tragedy that such a clear, deductive thinker was so powerfully mentally afflicted, and poor Adele likely suffered through a great deal that we will probably never know fully. Budiansky’s book is well-written. Even where some Russell specialists might groan about longstanding and long-debunked...

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