Gurdjieff and Gödel, part III

 

Prout's Neck, Maine

Beneath the Stones:

Here in our own present lie buried the raptures and conceits of the maturation of the Enlightenment (if it did indeed ever mature): dogmatic belief in the perfection of the sciences and the process of science itself; a heady blend of romanticism incongruously mixed with hard data, as though the two were not oil and water inevitably destined by their very nature to separate at some future date. This is exactly what the beginning of the twentieth century brought us in terms of world views: incompatibilities adopting each other out of both exuberance and expedience. It produced a kind of intellectual drunkenness. 

On the one hand, Gurdjieff produced his own antidote to this absurdity with an arch-absurd anti-absurdity, Beelzebub’s Tales, which seeks to explain the inexplicable nature of the non-perfect system by way of myth. On the other hand Gödel, presumably on the other side of the question—although was he really?—sought to explain that very same thing with a mathematical proof of insufficiency.

I say, was he really on the other side of the question, because Gödel was at heart a metaphysician… just a mathematical one. We’ve encountered this type in the Gurdjieff universe before, in Ouspensky—a kindred demon, albeit of a lower order than Gödel, at least intellectually. 

Gödel’s metaphysics were a transapalnian perturbation; world-breaking: mathematical systems themselves, as they already were, were unable to prove their own consistency. Weeping and gnashing of teeth: what do you do when you discover the very tool crafted and expected to certify perfection is imperfect?

This is a form of metaphysical self-awareness: an awakening, as it were, of mathematics to its own nature which can be likened to the awakening of the mechanical, sleeping human being to their own nature as proposed by Gurdjieff. 

In each case, that awakening is to the lack of a previously assumed and taken-for-granted self-perfection; and it was exactly so that Gurdjieff described it when he explained, for example, that a man who thinks he already has will does not work to obtain it.

The collapse of the “perfect world” of European Enlightenment, a singularity of science and mechanistic rationalism consuming all the mass in its path, into the chaos of the First World War was the initial wake-up call to the western world that things had always been broken and were going to remain that way; but the sciences came late to this particular party, out of the arrogance and presumption that they somehow existed as pure things apart from the societies they arose and existed in. 

And, of course, the conceit that they were the only thing that wasn’t  already broken.

Segue to Purgatory, Gurdjieff’s perfect planet, to which all Beings throughout our Great Universe must eventually go. The very atmosphere is infused with the scent of God Himself, who deigns to drop in from time to time to offer scant rays of hope to the denizens trapped, seemingly forever, in this perfect residence for the ultimate results of imperfection. 

A close examination of the situation reveals that it isn’t just Gurdjieff’s universe that’s broken… the fix is broken as well. 

God does not have an answer as to how those with the flaws instilled by their existence itself can be purified; and Gurdjieff never offers a resolution to this problem.

As to the nature of the flaw… essentially, it is the subjectivity of the denizens of purgatory. A subjective element that can’t be eliminated, no matter what. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same issue revealed in Gödel’s incompleteness theorem: a mathematical system that cannot prove all its own axioms through its own internal logic is myopic, unable to completely know itself. 

It can only be called objective if it attains the unattainable: purity through uncompromised consistency of reason. 

We can note here that the single reason God no longer admitted the “results” of his evolving creation into heaven itself was because their very existence was imparting a new, subjective element to God’s Being. It all leaves the intellect beating the bushes for birds that simply will not fly out, no matter how bright the plumage or sweet their meat. 

Nonetheless, the hunter must ever hunt; and eventually learn to be satisfied with the hunt itself, and not the elusive prey it forever promises… 

someday…

 to yield.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.