Having Said That,

Gödel was legitimately nuts, subject to paranoid delusions, hypochondria, depression, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Of course, this doesn't affect the validity of the theorems, but it may impact his opinions about them -- about the kind of world they imply. 

When depressed he dwelled on the fact that "all of his contributions" to philosophy "were of a negative kind -- proving that something cannot be done, not what can be done." 

About this he is correct: the theorems tell us only what definitely cannot be the case, not necessarily what is the case. 

They tell us, for example, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself," but they do not tell us what truth is. Likewise, they tell us a formal system cannot be both consistent and complete.

Gödel's leap to a Platonic conception of truth is in no way entailed by his own theorems. For example, postmodernists go to the other extreme and say the theorems bar us from knowing any truth at all, enclosing us in language about a reality we can never reach.

Thus, before he was a logician, mathematician, or anything else, Gödel was a seeker of truth, which already implies a worldview -- one in which truth exists and is accessible to man. He would have rejected the alternative a priori. 

Again, he regarded mathematics as not only a search for truth, but for "pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind." He was likewise "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning."

But his forays into *mere* philosophy 

dismayed more than a few of his mathematical colleagues, who did not hide from him their disappointment that he seemed to be squandering his genius on trivialities.

Now, the mind is designed to detect connections between things, but for this reason man can be prone to the over-detection of agency -- thus the sometimes fine line between genius and madness. 

Gödel found "hidden meanings, or mystical significance in things large and small," for example, in "the incorrect listings of movies shown on television." ("One has the impression it is sabotage.")

Ironically, this means that, although he considered himself a seeker after extra-mental truth, he was often very much confined to his own intra-mental projections. Even more ironically, such delusional ideation could crystallize into a kind of rigidly consistent and pseudo-complete system the theorems forbid.

Nevertheless, he argued that the human mind "could not have come about through any mechanistic process," and disagreed "with the entire worldview that 'regards the world as an unordered and therefore meaningless heap of atoms.'" But it seems his paranoia made him vulnerable to finding too much meaning, and in all the wrong places.

On the one hand, a possible interpretation of the theorems is that mathematics -- and by extension, language -- is "a mere game played with symbols according to certain rules." Again, this would be the postmodern view. But this is not how Gödel saw it; rather, he believed

that the human mind can literally see mathematical realities through a kind of perception, no different from the direct sensory perceptions that the empiricists decreed to be the only valid basis of physical laws.

Here again, this latter interpretation is in no way a necessary consequence of the theorems. Moreover, it begins to converge upon someone like Schuon, for whom the necessary truths of existence are indeed directly "perceived" via intellection:

Intellectual intuition comprises essentially a contemplativity which in no way enters into the rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative.... 

[Rationality] perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whilst Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition (Schuon). 

Gödel saw no reason "why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception" than in the lower kind, and he's not wrong. Nor was he wrong to wonder

what kind of sense would there be in bringing forth a creature (man), who has such a broad field of possibilities of his own development and of relationships, and then not allow him to achieve 1/1000 of it.

In other words, what kind of irrational -- not to say perverse -- Creator gives infinite potential to a finite being? Gödel thought this was sufficient proof of an afterlife: 

it follows directly that our earthly existence, since it in and of itself has at most a very dubious meaning, can only be a means to an end for another existence.

Again, he had little use for religions but was very much open to Religion, perhaps one that hadn't yet been discovered. He thought that the great majority of philosophers were as guilty as "bad churches" in turning people away from these deeper questions.

"Gödel's public renown continued to grow after his death" in 1978, partly because "The general idea that there are truths that cannot be proved has an irresistible appeal." 

But in his own way he has been misappropriated for as many dubious agendas as quantum physics: "probably more wrong things have been said about his proof than any other mathematical theorem in history."

Interestingly, his ideas seem to inspire two kinds of skeptics, those who recognize "that their knowledge is limited," which "troubles them deeply." The other kind acknowledge "the same thing but find it liberating." Gödel was in the latter camp, believing that

Humans will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition..., that can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine....

In place of limits on human knowledge and certainty, he saw only the irreplaceable uniqueness of the human spirit. 

So, having said all this, where does it leave us?

A Pleasurable Journey to the Edge of Reason, and Beyond

What is beyond reason? Madness? Or Truth? Or both?

All other animals are confined to the fixed nature assigned by heredity. Only in human beings do we see the peculiar combination of a fixed "species nature" with an open-ended process of personal development -- as if the task of each man is to become his own species, so to speak. 

Which they say is true of angels, each being its own unique species. But aren't we a little like that -- as if freedom is individuality lived or actualized? 

In any event, human nature doesn't change on a collective basis, but we never stop changing on an individual one. What's going on here? How did we escape genetic necessity? And I wonder if Gödel has anything to say about it? (I'm reading a biography of him called Journey to the Edge of Reason.) 

If passing along one's genes is the Prime Directive, how to explain someone like Gödel, for whom "the highest aim" of his life was the "pleasure of cognition"? It seems he was a hedonist, but on an immaterial plane which isn't supposed to exist, certainly not in any real way (i.e., as real as the material/biological realm to which it may be reduced.) 

Nevertheless, in college Gödel was increasingly drawn "away from the more practical worlds of physical science to the ethereal realms of pure thought."  

How does pure thought get detached from pure biology, anyway? Or even pure physics, from which Gödel decided to turn away because the discipline was "logically so messy to him."  

I wish I had thought of that one back in 11th grade physics. "These equations are all very nice, Mr. Lamberth, but isn't this whole subject of physics a bit of a mess compared to pure thought?" 

For Gödel's "abiding interest" was "in getting to the very root of things," in both "science and in life." So he switched majors from physics to logic, and why not?

Gödel could never reconcile himself to the positivist standpoint that knowledge derives solely from empirical observations of natural phenomena. Mathematical objects and a priori truth were as real to him as anything the senses could directly perceive.

He regarded mathematics as

a search for truth, and more specifically a search for pre-existing truths that inhabited a reality separate from the human mind. 

Then -- to the embarrassment of all and sundry -- he went and proved it, i.e., that "it is impossible ever to prove the consistency of a consistent system" from within the system, or in other words, that "it is impossible to define the concept of truth within a formal system itself." For him this meant that

the human mind can perceive evident axioms of mathematics that can never be reduced to a finite rule -- which means the human mind "infinitely surpasses the powers of any finite machine."

Therefore "If the human mind is not a machine, then the human spirit cannot be reduced to the mechanistic operation of the brain, with its finite collection of working parts consisting of neurons and their interconnections."

But it's a catch 22, because supposing the mind "is nothing but a calculating machine," then it too "is subject to the limitations of the Incompleteness Theorem," so we once again escape its presumed completeness. Thus, "if I am not mistaken," there is

a whole world which is the set of mathematical truths, into which we gain access only through intelligence, just as there is a world of physical realities...

Gödel was "committed to accessing the immaterial world of higher philosophical truths through the power of sheer abstract logical reasoning." 

So, Plato wins again? For what is this "immaterial world of higher philosophical truths" but the light streaming in from outside the cave? 

Here are some of his bottom line truths:

--There are other worlds and rational beings, who are of the other and higher kind.

--The world in which we now live is not the only one in which we live or have lived.

--Materialism is false.

--There is a scientific (exact) philosophy (and theology)... which deals with the concepts of the highest abstractness.

He also concluded that "Religions are for the most part bad, but not religion." (His early religious exposure was pretty inadequate, as is true for most people.)

Perhaps such-and-such a religion is the attempt to symbolize Religion as such? And religion as such "deals with concepts of the highest abstractness?"

Exact philosophy and theology. I don't know about you, but this is something I'm always thinking about. As things stand, it seems that both philosophy and theology are a bit messy. Is it possible to clean them up via pure thought? 

I don't know, but it would be a pleasure to try.

A Few Words About the Wordless

If we -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- are 75,000 years old, and philosophy doesn't get underway until a few thousand years ago, what did we argue about for 70+ thousand years? 

We all know about the so-called "axial age," which involved "broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE." New symbols for new experiences, apparently.

I remember reading a book by William Irwin Thompson called The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, in which he claims that "at the edge of history is myth," such that "the matrix out of which events arise does not appear to be an event at all." 

Which reminds me of dreaming, which we can also never trace to a "beginning." Rather, we always already find ourselves in the middle of the dream, before which is.... 

Whatever it is, words can't go there. Rather, they can only come out of there. It is pregnant with language, even while being beyond speech. Like the Logos-Tao or something: once you name it, it is no longer the thing -- or experience -- named.

Or Eckhart's ground, which he symbolizes in various paradoxical ways, for example "The naked God is without a name and is the denial of all names and has never been given a name." And "For the intellect to be free, it must become naked and empty and by letting go return to its prime origin."

But let's not get carried away, at least yet. Supposing we could drill down to the bottom of the psyche, what might we find there? Or is it like quantum physics, whereby our perceptions are conditioned by what we expect to see, i.e., wave or particle?

Grad school was much like this, involving various theories of the mind which were all plausible and consistent within themselves, even if they contradicted every other theory.

Now do religion.

It's difficult to do religion for the same reason one cannot know the beginning of a dream. Dreams must start somewhere, or come out of something, but we cannot go there, at least while awake. Joyce of course tried, but that's another post.

Voegelin refers to this mysterious and inexhaustible matrix as the unKnowable depth which we symbolize in more or less adequate ways. 

The depth itself is "beyond articulate experience"; it is "the one depth underlying all reality experienced in the primordial field of God and man, world and society," and "a mode of participation in the process of reality as a whole." This participation is the "site" where the depth "becomes consciously luminous."  

Now, is any of this helpful? Does it have any practical implications? Or is writing about this just a weird way to spend one's retirement? Back before Mr. Google changed the comment box, there was a quote there by Voegelin to the effect that

The quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. 

If this is true, then we need to do something about it, because man has been going about things in the wrong way.

What Was the Question?

This essay on Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History is just too obscure. I'm moving on to the next one, called The Gospel and Culture, in which Voegelin discusses one of our perennial concerns, which is

the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.  

It seems I already wrote a number of posts on this very essay, so let's find out if any of it still makes sense.

***

Voegelin takes a "scientific" approach to revelation, seeing it as a long historical process of successive insights into the ground of being: thus, "in the end,"

the Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long "historical drama of revelation."

 ***

Now, if we are still trying to make sense of the Word in our historical time and cultural context, this is no different from what the early fathers did; and furthermore, if they hadn't -- if 

the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history. 

At the time of the early church, "the culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

***

If Christ is the answer, what is the question?

Voegelin cites the Dutch Catechism, which "begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist?"

We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence (Dutch Catechism).

Now, there is a kind of answer that is technically correct but existentially wrong, or at least incomplete. It is the difference between, say, knowing how to swim and actually diving into the water and doing so; the former is abstract and secondary, the latter embodied and primary.

Except this relation can often be reversed, such that one begins living in the abstract theory, so everything one sees is conditioned by it. Such a one has all the answers but has forgotten the Question. 

In this way, the Answer becomes a kind of existential defense mechanism -- a matrix or second reality superimposed on the first. (Which is reminiscent of how ideologies are lodged in the LH, to such an extent that they can eclipse RH contact with reality.)

***

One of Voegelin's main themes is how we deploy symbolism in order to capture and convey a more primary experience. Again, whatever the field or discipline, this relation can be reversed, such that the dogma displaces the experience:

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man (Voegelin).

Harsh, but we all know the type. This process occurs when

the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as "non-Christian attitude." 

*** 

The very "life of reason" is 

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer... 

Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however..., can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible.... 

The answer will not help the man who has lost the question, and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer...

***

Back to the present, I suppose we need to recover the question to which Christ is still the answer.  

Seems to me that the Question of questions is always the same -- pardon my French, but it is a startled  WTF?! in the wake of the raw experience of being. And many layers of superficial, ideological, conventional, and defensive answers must be peeled away before we get down to the experience of this Question.

An extreme question calls for an extreme answer? 

"Existence," says Voegelin, "is not a fact." Rather, "if anything," it

is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.

Only "in this In-Between of darkness and light arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life."

So, where does this leave us? I don't know, but it calls to mind the alcoholic who must hit bottom before putting his faith in a greater power that can restore him to sanity. Come to think of it, there's an aphorism for that:

We should not believe in the theologian's God except when He resembles the God Who is called on in distress.