Einstein's Genius Club (13 page)

Even with this seriocomic finale, Russell's career as a war protester makes Einstein's antiwar efforts pale by comparison. The anti-war movement energized Russell and propelled him forward. He saw in the future “infinite possibilities.” It would be hard to guess from this excited language that he meant teaching philosophy to “working-men who are hungry for intellectual food…. Think of building up a new free education not under the State!… I could give heart & brain & life to that.”
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The day World War I ended, Russell in victorious London was depressed: Millions had been pointlessly slaughtered, but people were wildly celebrating in the streets. Russell had spent the war
years in feverish political activity. Almost fifty years would pass before he plunged again into antiwar protests, against the nuclear bomb and the Vietnam War.

During the last half of his life—from 1920 on—Russell's affection for his country grew in tandem with his popularity. He became the plain-speaking oracle, the dauntless opponent of injustice and folly, the philosopher with a gift for connecting to the common people. Russell the philosophical popularizer blossomed after the First World War. Had he not been radicalized by that war, he would likely have returned to teaching philosophy and logic, his works known only to an inner circle of specialists. The oracle and gadfly would have been stillborn. As it was, he never returned to a full-time academic career. He became, instead, a freelance writer, an educational innovator, and a prophet of social change.

In crucial part, Russell's popularity stemmed from his passionate belief in the usefulness of philosophy. Unlike many of his fellow academics, Russell had taken up philosophy to find consolation and meaning in life. For him it was no academic exercise. “I wish to understand the hearts of men,” he wrote in his
Autobiography
. This desire may have led him to abstruse mathematics, but it was nonetheless ordinary and human. On his journey, he experienced a “failure” that was yet a “victory…. I may have conceived theoretical truth wrongly, but I was not wrong in thinking that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance.”
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Russell has been consigned to history, rather than philosophy, by a modern tradition that prefers the technical to the metaphysical. Yet, notes Frank McLynn,

Russell was that rare bird, a professional philosopher who actually tried to answer the questions that ordinary people naively imagine can be answered by philosophy. He was in fact a “philosopher” in a sense that would be recognised by the man in the pub. This was why he, alone of his breed, could move between the worlds of Whitehead and Wittgenstein and those of Conrad and Lawrence.
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And, as Michael Foot writes, “[a] particular, persistent reason” for his “appeal, throughout his ninety-odd years, especially to the young, was the trouble he took to write plain English.”
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In recent years, it had become not only fashionable but occupationally imperative for academic philosophers to write for other academic philosophers rather than for a general reader. Despite his ability to write (with the more mathematically adept Whitehead) the
Principia Mathematica,
Russell was no technician. Alan Wood has described him as “a philosopher without a philosophy. The same point might be made by saying that he is a philosopher of all the philosophies.”
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In later years, he came to believe in philosophy writ large—in other words, philosophy that is concerned with “matters of interest to the general educated public, and loses much of its value if only a few professionals can understand what is said.”
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The aristocratic Russell had one thing in common with the populace for whom he wrote: He was perennially short of money. He was fifty when John, his first son, was born. Delighted as he was with the novel sensations of parenthood, he faced the “inescapable responsibility” of providing financial support. To that end, he churned out potboilers on sex, marriage, and divorce; on conquering happiness and praising idleness; on atoms and relativity. He became a regular columnist for the American Hearst newspapers. He lectured across the United States several times in the 1920s and 1930s, and in his seventies was a popular voice on the BBC.

In 1938, badly needing a steady income, he did try to return to teaching, but not in England. He moved his family to the United States to find a suitable university position. A series of small fiascos ended in two big ones. He taught at Chicago (they wouldn't keep him) and Los Angeles (where he quarreled with the chancellor), and then was appointed in 1940 to teach philosophy at the City College of New York. There, the political and religious establishments blocked the appointment, accusing him of immorality, incompetence, degeneracy, godlessness, anti-Americanism. His works were damned (in the words of one lawyer) as “lecherous, venerous,
lustful, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful and bereft of moral fiber.”
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Einstein, Whitehead, John Dewey, and even Charlie Chaplin rose to his defense, but in vain. After months of fighting, with hate mail pouring in, Russell's position was simply eliminated. He lectured at Harvard (an engagement that predated the City College debacle), but thereafter American universities shunned him. Compounding his dire financial straits was his escalating disdain for America. He was homesick for England, which had survived the Battle of Britain but still faced great danger.

Russell was rescued by an eccentric millionaire in Philadelphia. Dr. Albert Barnes, a chemist, had spent his fortune (made on the drug Argyrol) amassing French Post-Impressionist paintings. His private museum housed hundreds of Picassos, Cézannes, Matisses, and Van Goghs. It was open only to a select few, those whose taste suited him. In late 1940, on the recommendation of John Dewey, Barnes offered Russell a handsome salary to give popular lectures on philosophy at the museum. Russell began what was to be a five-year term in January 1941. At first, Barnes was enthusiastic. Within a few months, however, he began meddling in Russell's classes. There were quarrels. Barnes's ego was further bruised by Russell's wife, Peter, whom he deemed “imperious” and banned from the museum. Barnes fired Russell a few days after Christmas 1942. Russell sued for breach of contract and won, but was forced to wait months for payment. Beginning in 1943, he tried to find transport back to England, but it was the spring of 1944 before he, his wife, and their young son Conrad finally embarked. Meanwhile, he kept busy writing his
History of Western Philosophy
.

As always, he planned ahead. What would become his last work of philosophy,
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits,
was in its planning stages. Throughout October 1943, Russell delivered a series of five lectures on successive Fridays at Bryn Mawr College. The lectures were received by an enthusiastic audience who braved “torrential rain.” Their titles are notable to us, for they suggest
what was on Russell's mind at the time: (1) “Limitations of Deductive Logic,” (2) “Probable Inference in Practice,” (3) “Physics and Knowledge,” (4) “Perception and Causality,” and (5) “Induction and Analogy.”
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Human Knowledge
was to be, in the words of Ray Monk, Russell's “last major philosophical work.”
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His purpose was “to examine the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge”—in sum, the age-old dialectic between the concrete and the abstract, applied in particular to the world of science. Philosophy flourishes as an adjunct of science, especially physics. The problem is to find the link between what we see and what is there (always the problem in epistemology), or, in other words, the common world around us and the world described by science. It is telling that “individual experience” comes first in his thesis. For, again, Russell held always to the world of experience, however desirous he was of an overarching certainty. Yet, as the philosopher A. C. Grayling remarks, “he was… critical of certain forms of empiricism” because a focus on “sensory experience,”
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the very definition of empiricism, cannot account for scientific knowledge. Thus,
Human Knowledge
takes up the problem of “non-demonstrative inference,” the primary method by which science works, and the difficulty of finding structures to ensure truth-finding in science.

Pondering these questions, in late 1943 or early 1944, Russell rented a lakeside house near Princeton. There, once a week, he walked in the bitter cold to 112 Mercer Street and chatted with Einstein, Gödel, and Pauli.

Einstein's closest friend at Princeton was Kurt Gödel. The wonder is that they were friends at all, so different were they in temperament and style. Einstein was twice Gödel's age. He loved jokes and laughter. He was generous, down-to-earth, and the epitome of
sanity. Gödel was distrustful of people's motives, a hypochondriac, often depressed and paranoid. In the end, he starved himself to death, convinced that his doctors were trying to poison him. One cannot imagine Gödel enduring what Einstein took in stride—wearing an Indian war bonnet for photographers, chatting with Charlie Chaplin or Winston Churchill, trading cookies with a neighbor's child. Einstein loved Bach and Mozart. Gödel said that Bach made him “nervous” (his taste ran to “O Mein Papa” and “The Wheel of Fortune”).
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Einstein played the bohemian. When he lived alone in Berlin, he cooked soup and eggs all together in the same pan to save time. Gödel was a thorough and contented bourgeois, living snugly with his wife in a Princeton bungalow full of kitsch. When his wife set a pink flamingo on the lawn, Gödel thought it “terribly cute.”
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Einstein felt compelled to fight injustice, though it cost time and energy away from physics. Gödel, though he had fled Nazi Vienna, never so much as glanced up from his equations.

How could their friendship thrive? Clearly, it did. Late in his life, Einstein told a friend that when he felt old and his own work no longer meant much, he came to the Institute mostly for the privilege of walking home with Gödel.
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The word “privilege” salutes the younger man with Einstein's typical generosity. It also hints at Einstein's isolation from the greater scientific community. Gödel helped fill that void in Einstein later years. Gödel believed that Einstein liked him because he was willing to argue. But intellectual stimulation is hardly the sole basis for a close friendship. The intriguing question is: Why did Einstein
enjoy
Gödel's company?

Some light is shed by Ernst Straus, Einstein's mathematical assistant in 1944. He wrote that although the two men differed “in almost every personal way,” Gödel “in some ways strangely resembled [Einstein] most…. They shared a fundamental quality: both went directly and wholeheartedly to the questions at the very center of things.”
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They were also, as Palle Yourgrau notes, equally
“unapproachable” because of the “sheer size of their reputations.”
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They shared a common language, German, and common interest in each other's fields—Einstein had finally awakened to the importance of mathematics, and Gödel had once dabbled in physics. They were strangers together, philosopher-kings in the brave new world of technophysics. When it came to understanding intellectual questions—indeed, to tackling them in the first place—Gödel had the requisite audacity and inner freedom.

Gödel's towering reputation was built on two theorems, collectively known as “incompleteness.” The audacity of incompleteness is best illustrated by a story about John von Neumann, a mathematician of prodigious output, far exceeding Gödel's in number and range. In 1930, von Neumann—only three years older than Gödel—was pondering the same questions as Gödel. But he failed where Gödel succeeded. For in proving his theorems, Gödel disproved David Hilbert's mathematical formalism. Hilbert was not only the greatest mathematician of the time, but von Neumann's mentor as well. Had von Neumann ventured to conceive of incompleteness, he would have had to imagine the towering Hilbert capable of error.
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Gödel—like Einstein—was never awed by eminence, and never had nor wanted a mentor. In such intellectual matters, Gödel was as self-contained and self-confident as Einstein.

Outside mathematics and philosophy, Gödel was helpless, even infantile. He needed care and attentiveness and, at times, nursing. His wife, Adele, mothered him from the beginning. During their engagement, he was terrified of being poisoned. She loyally tasted all his food to reassure him and patiently fed him “spoonful by spoonful” to build up his weight.
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He found in Einstein another protector. Gödel's frailty evoked in Einstein both sympathy and tenderness. Perhaps Einstein, nearly twice Gödel's age, saw in Gödel something resembling a son, brilliant and troubled. Einstein's youngest boy, Eduard, was schizophrenic and confined to a Swiss sanatorium.

Few would mistake either Einstein or Russell for a mere professor: Einstein looked like a wild-haired sage; Russell might have stepped out of the House of Lords. But Gödel looked the part, un-worldly and abstracted. Nothing in his life corresponds to Einstein's commitment to Israel or Russell's antiwar crusades. Great minds are not necessarily great men. Einstein and Russell lived their greatness in the public eye. Gödel, their intellectual peer, was otherwise fragile and somewhat diminished.

He was born in 1906 in Brunn (“Brno” in Czech), a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and attended schools there. Then he moved to the University of Vienna and took his doctorate in mathematics in 1930, at age twenty-four. That same year he found the breakthrough to the epochal proof that any system that is logical and consistent must be incomplete, which was published the next year. His life seemed ordinary in many respects. He took classes, went on vacations with his family, spent time in Vienna cafés, and had an eye for the girls. His father died in 1929, and his mother moved in with Gödel and his brother in Vienna. He had severe rheumatism at age eight, a nervous attack of some kind at five, and several depressive or psychotic episodes in his late twenties.