Few authors like Andrea Camilleri have been able to condense the fundamental trait of a character's character into a colorful and effective expression. One such expression is that of partial mind.
The partial mind designates a mindset that looks at and interprets reality through an exclusive filter that acts independent of context, circumstances and purpose. The intuition of being faced with the action of a partial mind allows Inspector Montalbano to solve otherwise unsolvable cases.
Well. Kurt Gödel was something of a partial mind. His exclusive filter was logic, a way of interpreting reality that he applied in any circumstance and environment he found himself acting.
Wanting to put it on a more noble level, and appropriate to the intellectual stature of the character, one can certainly say that the identity between universal moral conviction and action is the core of the categorical imperative, the cornerstone of Kant's moral philosophy. And Gödel's categorical imperative was logic, always and everywhere.
A perhaps improbable episode in his life is the almost mathematical proof of this.
Journey to the end of reason
A new "vibrant" (NYT) biography of Kurt Gödel written by science writer and ethologist Stephen Budiansky who was inspired by Celine for the title of the book has been in bookstores for a few days: Journey to the Edge of Reason. The Life of Kurt Gödel.
Gödel's journey, told by Budiansky, is truly a journey to the Pillars of Hercules of reason and even beyond, where there is only its negation.
The author clearly shows this right in the Prologue of the book presenting the notes of Dr. Philip Erlich, the psychiatrist who treated Gödel from March 1970 until his death due to starvation in 1978.
From the Vienna Circle to Princeton's "Quaint Idyll".
Despite having approved the Anschluss (that is, the incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich), in 1940 Kurt Gödel decided to leave the oppressive climate of Vienna to expatriate to the United States, which welcomed him in a manner congruous with his reputation as a brilliant thinker. “The greatest logician since Aristotle”, Einstein was saying about Gödel.
The two loved to take long walks back home from theInstitute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Of these walks in the green we have photographic documentation and a book written by John Holt, When Einstein took a walk with Gödel. Journey to the edge of thought (Mondadori, 2019). Another Celinian title!
Despite being welcomed to America as a head of state, Gödel was asked to take the US citizenship exam in 1947. Gödel prepared for this test with his usual seriousness and meticulousness to discover, in the end, that in the institutional system of the United States designed by the founding fathers there was a logical vulnerability that could open the doors to dictatorship and fascism.
The logical contradictions in the American Constitution
Looking at some recent events that have shaken this great democracy, Gödel's discovery no longer appears as extravagant as it must have seemed then even to Princeton colleagues. But that's not what matters here.
What is truly unusual is the use that Gödel wanted to make of this discovery. A use that reveals his nature and his vision of the world.
It seemed to him that accepting American citizenship without explaining this flaw in the US Constitution was an unsustainable and even immoral act.
And the most suitable venue seemed to him to be the Trenton (NJ) courtroom where on December 5, 1947, in the office of judge Philip Forman, the hearing for the citizenship of Kurt Gödel and his wife Adele was held.
Despite the attempts of an incredulous Einstein - one of the two witnesses at the hearing together with Oskar Morgenstern - to silence him, Gödel presented to the judge his discovery on the fatal internal logical contradictions of the American constitution. “I can prove it,” he told the judge.Herr Warum” (“Mr. Why”, ed.) the serious nickname that Gödel had earned at the age of 4.
Emotional intelligence
Well, Gödel only had to go through a routine interview to obtain citizenship, which would have opened up new opportunities for him in his adopted homeland, but the categorical imperative of logic was something sacred to him, alien to any compromise, such as not to be able to overlook it even in a circumstance that could never have influenced the outcome of its discovery, if not damaging it.
Naturalization, fortunately, went in the desired direction. The complicity of looks between the judge and Einstein helped to weaken the meaning of Gödel's statement. Einstein and Forman had already met and got to know each other during Einstein's citizenship hearing.
You can read here the excerpt from Budiansky's biography of Gödel on the episode of citizenship.
It is not known, however, whether it is an episode that really happened or one of the many more or less legendary curiosities that are told about the life of Kurt Gödel.
Fortunately, Gödel's partial mind met the emotional intelligence of Judge Forman and Einstein who managed to contextualize it. But in the end it was the good Gödel who saw clearly in crying "wolf" with respect to the flaws in the American institutional system, because 23 years later, on January 6, 2021, the wolf really showed up on the Capitol.
We hope that Cortina Raffaello editore or Garzanti will offer us an Italian edition of this excellent biography of Kurt Gödel, as Mondadori did for Holt's work.
