Gurdjieff and Gödel, part II

 

Prout's Neck, Maine

It’s the inevitable proclivity of the biographers of spiritual figures to focus more on the ways they influenced others than to examine the influence others had on them. Historical influences on spiritual charismatics are to be investigated and acknowledged, of course; but the mythology of gurudom, especially when examined uncritically and from the inside, always tends to elevate the status of the guru to an ivory tower from which influences only flow outward. 

Thus, in discussions about Gurdjieff, far more is generally said about his influence on A. R. Orange, Thomas de Hartmann, Jeanne de Salzmann and P.D. Ouspensky than is ever said about their influence on him. Yet their influence on him was profound indeed; even a casual review of the few remaining handwritten first drafts of Beelzebub’s Tales (and yes, I’ve seen them in their original) leaves no doubt as to how much of the book’s final form can be owed to Orage. A very great deal indeed, as it happens. Equally so the “Gurdjieff” music: its DNA may be Gurdjieff’s, but the organism it gives rise to is emphatically de Hartmann’s, as any serious review of his own oeuvre quickly reveals. And as to the movements? What they are today is very nearly owned by Jeanne de Salzmann, as are the increasingly tattered remnants of the work Gurdjieff left behind when he died. This is not to say that the work as it stands is in any way invalidated; but it is a garment, and every garment eventually wears thin enough that patches cannot repair it, and it needs to be replaced. This is why a spiritual work needs, ultimately, to produce weavers and seamstresses and tailors… not leaders and gods.

In evaluating Gurdjieff’s work, it emerges in its own right as something “perfect,” at least as viewed through the powerfully internalized mythology of its followers. Yet this is a mythology that does not serve it well, because the romance of the perfect system, the “unified field theory” of spiritual Being, was born of the same romanticism that birthed such ideas about mathematics and the sciences. From the perspective of the sciences, it turns out, it’s permissible to have spiritual systems that are flawed; that is expected. But to have mathematical systems that are flawed would be unforgivable.

Yet that is of course exactly what Gödel proved to be the case. And Gurdjieff himself was, as I have pointed out before, the “Master of the Broken System,” the progenitor of a cosmology in which creation itself was broken and had to be rearranged with “lawful inconsistencies” in order to function as originally planned. (See my book Novel, Myth and Cosmos.) 

If this situation seems to be oddly reminiscent of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, perhaps it’s a not a coincidence. It seems frankly impossible that a man of Gurdjieff’s formidable intellectual capacity would have missed the major developments taking place in that field during his lifetime, and, in point of fact, before he wrote Beelzebub’s Tales. Here, in Gödel, was the mathematical proof that the universe was broken… it had to be. Gurdjieff’s universe is intentionally incomplete — from necessity, and not by accident. The existence of systems themselves comes with the inevitability of “lawful inexactitudes;” and the idea of shocks, influences coming from outside the system, is applicable here as well. No system with inherent flaws at its root can exist or function without a deus ex machina, an outside influence that supports it.    

Let us consider here the proposition that that outside influence may be…

Faith.

If a system, whether mathematical or cosmological, must be used despite the fact that it can’t be fully trusted, faith is necessary. Thus generation after generation has put their faith in the discipline of mathematics, conveniently ignoring the fact that it has an irreconcilable flaw in it. 

This is not dissimilar to man’s relationship to God in Gurdjieff’s cosmology. In the case of the cosmos, God is the system… and yet Gurdjieff’s God is, uniquely, fallible. He does not foresee the consequences of a cosmos constructed in the way He originally envisioned it… perfect, mechanical, with all of its parts logically accounted for and functioning automatically. The consequences are… well, fallible. They come at the expense of the very thing that God is. His own Being is compromised by the results of a perfect system.

This is of course an analogy for our own mechanical nature, yet it’s far more. It is a critique of the nature of machines themselves. 

Machines as they are are incomplete. 

Mathematical systems are incomplete.

Self-referential systems can never be complete.

Pause for a minute and consider the idea that God created the universe in order to introduce an inexactitude in His own Being that could overcome the self-referential incompleteness which constrained him in his existence as a single entity.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.