Kurt Godel, Romantic Theist, Part 2

 Continued from Part 1 

    Godel was also friends with John Von Neumann and their later careers form an instructive contrast.  The mathematician Paul Erdos was once asked in an interview who was one of the best mathematicians whom he had met and he picked two: John Von Neumann and Kurt Godel.  Erdos said that they both understood everything, even topics not in their areas of specialization.  However, while Von Neumann's later work was more applied and practical, Godel turned to the study of philosophy.  Erdos said something like, 

    "He spent a lot of time studying Leibniz for some reason.  I told him, you became a mathematician so people could study you, not so you can study Leibniz."

    In an earlier post about Von Neumann, Bruce Charlton left a comment saying: 

    "Jacob Bronowski was a friend of JVN - and also a mathamatician. He rated JVN's intellectual gifts very highly, and that potentially he ocould have been one of the all-time greats, a first-rate world historical genius.

But Bron. believed that JVN wasted in talents by pusuing other goals (politics, money, power, glamour) - and therefore never left behind the great work of which he was capable."

    This is an insightful observation.  I had heard that Oskar Morgenstern and other of Von Neumann's friends were concerned that Von Neumann became too enamoured with people from the "military-industrial complex" and was persuaded to work on their problems, but I had not heard the angle that this prevented Von Neumann from doing truly world-historical work.  It is worth thinking about because it relates to the issue of destiny and choice.  Von Neumann was so talented that he could work on almost any problem and make some progress, but he did not have to work on these men's problems.  He could have done something completely different and by doing so, the military industrial complex would have lost some of its power, which would not have been a bad thing.  

    By contrast, Godel published very little.  He spent time thinking about philosophy and theology.  Some of his views are are worth quoting: 

    In 1950, Godel wrote to his mother: 

    "You are right about sadness: If there were a completely hopeless sadness, there would no more be anything beautiful in it. But I think that from a rational point of view there cannot be any such thing at all. For we understand neither why this world exists, nor why it is constituted just as it is, nor why we are in it, nor why we were born in just these and no other external circumstances. Why then should we fancy that we know precisely the one thing for sure, that there is no other world and that we never were nor ever will be in another?"

    and in 1961 in response to his mother's question of whether they would see each other again after death, he said: 

    "About that I can only say the following: If the world is rationally organized and has a sense, then that must be so. For what sense would it make to bring forth a being (man) who has such a wide range of possibilities of individual developmentand of relations to others and then allow him to achieve not one in a thousand of those? ...But do we have reason to assume that the world is rationally organized?
I think so. For the world is not at all chaotic and capricious, but rather, as science shows, the greatest regularity and order prevails in all things; [and] order is but a form of rationality."

    In addition, Kurt Godel wrote an unpublished essay called "The development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy" where he seems to be calling for something like a development of conciousness: 

"But not only is there no objective reason for the rejection [of phenomenology], but on the contrary one can present reasons in its favor. If one considers the development of a child, one notices that it proceeds in two directions: it consists on the one hand in experimenting with the objects of the external world and with its [own] sensory and motor organs, on the other hand in coming to a better and better understanding of language, and that means—as soon as the child is beyond the most primitive designating [of objects]—of the basic concepts on which it rests. With respect to the development in this second direction, one can justifiably say that the child passes through states of consciousness of various heights, e.g., one can say that a higher state of consciousness is attained when the child first learns the use of words, and similarly at the moment when for the first time it understands a logical inference.

Now one may view the whole development of empirical science as a systematic and conscious extension of what the child does when it develops in the first direction. The success of this procedure is indeed astonishing and far greater than one would expect a priori: after all, it leads to the entire technological development of recent times. That makes it thus seem quite possible that a systematic and conscious advance in the second direction will also far exceed the expectations one may have a priori."

    Godel was a very careful writer and did not like to make speculative statements in print, however, I believe he hit upon by another means and expressed in different language similar ideas to Rudolf Steiner's.  And should we not expect this?  If it is indeed possible for people to know reality directly by thinking and if it is intended that humans beings should develop their consciousness, then different people according to their education and capacities should be able to perceive this fact.