Godel, Manifest and Katla

 If Godel received his breakthrough insights through a sort-of poetic inspiration and felt about them in the same terms in which poets have described their best poetry, namely that the poems weren't created by the poets but by their poetic muses, then he wasn't going to be impressed with the Logical Positivists.  The Logical Positivists subscribed whole-heartedly to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and discount his ladder as combat fatigue or something like that.  But Wittgenstein himself never subscribed whole-heartedly to the beliefs of the Logical Positivists. 

As proper atheists, the Logical Positivists believed that man would eventually know everything -- that there were no limits to man's capabilities.  The poets and Godel benefited from inspirations they could neither explain, duplicate nor cause to work at their behests.  And while not necessarily crediting God, though some did, they knew better than to sign up to the Logical Positivist narrative.

I am only 35% through the biography of Godel and so don't know to what extent he credits God, nor any of the reasons he believed himself to be a failure, nor the reasons he felt incapacitating guilt.

Setting Godel aside off and on this past week I watched the first two seasons of Manifest.  An airplane takes off and then disappears for 5 1/2 years -- and then it lands.  The 159 passengers and crew aren't aware of a time lapse.  The world muddles about and draws all the wrong conclusions.  The passengers hear voices, but only a few realize these voices are "callings" -- sort of like the Biblical Holy Spirit urging a person to do the right thing.  "Right" in the Manifest sense isn't exactly Biblical.  It has a Karmic twist to it.  If you do it wrong you will suffer consequences.   The Biblical Holy Spirit if resisted has consequences by definition, i.e., if you resist doing the right thing then you will be doing the wrong one and doing things wrong usually have negative consequences.    

What Scientific theory is Manifest building upon?  Parallel Universes, some of which are mentioned in this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org but they don't fit Manifest very well.  What seems to be happening is the abandoning of an atheistic parallel universe for a supernatural karmic parallel universe.

In the Netflix Icelandic series Katla, one perhaps instead, thinks (instead of a scientific theory) of Jung's conclusion in his book on Flying Saucers, i.e., that they were mandalas created by man's oversoul (man confined in each sighting to the people who claimed to see the Flying Saucers).  That is, the clones being created covered in volcanic dust would be (in this theory) created by an Icelandic oversoul.  This theory while probably not fitting whatever the Netflix-Katla writers have written (I've only watched 2 seasons and 4 seasons exist), fits best (in my opinion) as far as I've watched.  A really poor story line would involve the ingredients in the Katla volcanic ash doing the cloning.

Godel as a sick soul

alsoI ordered Journey to the Edge of Reason, the Life of Kurt Godel both in Kindle and in the hard copy. 

Godel was mentally unstable late in life.  Several poets that I have liked have been mentally unstable, but their brand of instability, for most of them, was manic-depression, bipolar disorder; which fits well with the writing of poetry.  One cannot write in an inspired mode continuously; so when that mode is gone, one is bound to feel a bit depressed.  Anyone, perhaps, would feel a bit of mild depression, but the ones I have in mind entered into extremes.  

Some however descended into extreme depression which seems from the little I've thus far read to have been Godel's situation.  He didn't seem to have a manic mode.  The fact that he was being deserted: Einstein's death, Roth's suicide among others who died, but especially his wife's hospitalization affected him strongly.  He believed someone was trying to poison him and so would only eat food that she prepared.  After she was hospitalized he wouldn't eat anything and so starved himself to death.

Leo Depuydt's opinions are interesting.  He thinks that if someone has deep feelings of failure, you should take him at his word.  I thought, when I read Depuydt, of William James' Varieties of Religious experience.  James classed people into two categories: Healthy and Sick souls.  Godel would be a sick soul.  Depuydt sounds as though he is a Healthy soul.  Perhaps people with healthy souls aren't very good judges of people with Sick souls.  

Ray Monk on Russell Volume II

In the May 17, 2001 issue of the NYROB is a review of Ray Monk's Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970.  Years ago I read Monk's biography on Wittgenstein and enjoyed it; so I was tempted by Monk's book on Russell -- until I got into the review:  Monk's first volume on Russell ends in 1921.  "Monk describes how Wittgenstein totally and finally destroyed Russell's confidence in his philosophical program, and in effect expelled him from his own Garden of Eden, which was mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics.  Wittgenstein had argued that there could be no complete foundation for human knowledge, whether in mathematics or in other domains."

I bought a used copy of Volume one, partly because I like Monk, but decided to pass on Volume II (even though a used "acceptable" copy is available for 96 cents from Amazon  The reviewer, Stuart Hampshire, writes "Monk's disillusionment and disgust pervade the last three hundred pages of the book, and many readers will feel that the long account of all the legal squabbles within the family is wearisome and excessive.  Russell knew that he had totally failed as a parent when John became estranged and finally went mad, and when his second son . . . was forbidden by his mother to speak to him after a divorce.  In Monk's family history the final horror came when Russell's granddaughter, Lucy, who was first loved and then neglected by him, burned herself alive after recording in detail the stages of her despair."

"D. H. Lawrence had told Russell that he was consumed by hatred and contempt and only passed as a man of peace.  Lawrence wrote early in the war: 'You are really the super war spirit.  What you want is to jab and strike, like the soldier with the bayonet, only you are sublimated into words. . . .  You are simply full of repressed desires, which have become savage and anti-social. . . .  As a woman said to me, who had been to one of your meetings, "It seemed so strange, with is face looking so evil, to be talking about peace and love.  He can't have meant what he said."'"

"Lawrence again: 'It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you.  It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. . . .  Why don't you own it?"

In preparation for moving to Idaho (which will probably be delayed, but even so) I've been rather ruthless in getting rid of books.  There are certain subjects and writers I expect never to return to -- for different reasons, but I haven't gotten serious about the book case that contains my library of philosophy.  I don't think there is anything in there from Russell; so this volume by Monk will be the only one but Monk will be writing about Wittgenstein in it which I shall be more interested in, probably, than anything he has to say about Russell.  I'll keep the volumes I have by and about Wittgenstein.  After spending time with him I ended up with a view of his (or of my own developed after reading him) I am comfortable with: there is the truth of the Tractatus, but there is also a realm that one must pull a ladder up to -- if one chooses to do so.  In my case I choose it.  I'm not sure I could ever again associate myself with a branch of organized Christianity, but neither could I follow any particular philosopher.   The philosophers  I like best weren't looking for followers.  I make take with me to Idaho, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (because of the poetry), Plato, and several that have written about philosophers like Hayden White, Joel Weinsheimer, and Ray Monk.

My Irish Terrier, Jessica, chewed up a volume by Spinoza: good girl!

I've gotten rid of everything on the American Civil War and the "War on Terror."  As to the latter which I was quite worked up about for a time, I'm reminded of the Cold War while I was working for McDonnell Douglas: there were critics writing that the Military and the industries supporting them were building up the formidability of the USSR unrealistically in order to get congress to approve weapons purchases.  Yeah the USSR was out there and they were doing mischief but historians have looked back at them and now know that they weren't as tough as they and we (in the military-industrial complex) argued.  At the present time our military-industrial complex does not seem to be so much after the sorts of weapons they were looking for when I worked for MDC and Boeing.  Now it is technological sophistication, better and more sophisticated spying equipment and drones.  But will Iran or a paramilitary group like ISIS every invade the US?  No.  If I were still working for Boeing I might be working on RFPs (Requests for Proposals) asking us to bid on electronic devices used for spying on terrorist organizations, and drones for bombing them.  I'd probably enjoy working on the proposals, but I'm not interested in that sort of thing now, in retirement, as I am in training my new pup (now 6 months old) and thinking about Idaho.

Idaho though isn't thinking of me quite yet.  My son will be undergoing an operation which will delay the move -- give me a bit more time to work on maturing Jessica, weed out books, kitchen utensils, silk plants (Susan liked them, I didn't), etc.

Popper seen through the eyes of McGinn

From the 11-21-02 issue of the NYROB I read Colin McGinn's review of four books by and about Karl Popper.  The entire review isn't available on line, only the beginning, but you can at least see the books reviewed: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/11/21/looking-for-a-black-swan/

I found the review interesting but McGinn was coming across as an authority and I had never heard of him so I decided to see who he was.  I was shocked to find that he was forced out of his job at the University of Miami because of a sexual harassment charge.  In true Lit-Ideas fashion I went off on a tangent and read several articles about the charges against him.  Here is one of them:

http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/is-it-ok-for-a-um-professor-to-burden-a-student-with-sexual-advances-7581424

Though McGinn professes his innocence, I tend to think from what I've read that he behaved badly against Clair, but I advance this as only a tentative hypothesis and if anyone chooses to falsify it I shall of course not object.