In pursuit of truth
Logicomix | Author: Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H Papadimitriou | Publisher: Bloomsbury | Price: Rs 999
This graphic novel depicts the search for truth with the help of mathematics and logic by the 20th century genius,Lord Bertrand Russell. Don’t miss the read, recommend Prafull Goradia and KR Phanda
Logicomix is an extraordinary experiment of a graphic novel with Lord Bertrand Russell, a most outstanding intellect of the 20th century, as its hero. It is the work of four Greek people of proven talent, two in Mathematics and two cartoon and animation artists. Employing graphics to portray such a tall intellectual must have been difficult enough. To then lucidly tell the story of his epic search for truth with the help of mathematics and logic is indeed commendable.
Across the 347 pages of the book, the moral of the story of Russell’s search is told with the help of some 1400 colour cartoons drawn across 332 pages. The volume has been printed in Italy on art paper to bring out the colours as well as to hold the interest of the youthful reader. Russell is known to have generally written in a layman’s language but the subjects he tackled were the most complex. The Greek artists have succeeded in portraying his struggle in simple, interesting cartoons, almost like in children’s comic books.
Anyone interested in trying to understand life, its reality and its meaning for human beings should read this extraordinary work on Bertrand Russell. The novel or the story, neither a biography nor history, begins with a university lecture in the US. The second World War had just begun and the American audience was apprehensive of Russell pleading for US help and involvement in the fighting in Europe. They were surprised when he declared that war was a most irrational phenomenon. He had consistently been anti-war. He was one of the few Britons who had supported Chamberlain and Daladier, premiers of Britain and France, in September 1939 when they let Adolf Hitler gobble up Sudetanland, the western district of Czechoslovakia. This proxy surrender was hailed by these premiers as “peace in our time.” Within 10 months the world conflagration was inaugurated with the invasion of Poland by Hitler and Josef Stalin. In 1940, took place the defeat of France by German tanks and the Battle of Britain by Nazi bombers. Yet Russell, the British mathematician-cum-logician-cum-philosopher, stuck to his anti-war platform of assumed rationality.
To the dismay of Russell, since the advent of Hitler, violence had begun to escalate, whether against the Jews in Germany or the recapture of the Rhineland in the face of Anglo-French anger or the take over of Sudetanland first and then the rest of Czechoslovakia, followed by the Anschluss or the inclusion of Austria in Germany. Then, as we have said above, began the actual war. In the course of the early years of the war, Russell was arrested and had to stay in prison. He had repeatedly made statements against the war which to the British government sounded unpatriotic and anti-national. It was with the progress of the war that Russell realised the alternative to war would be the hand over of Europe to the barbaric heels of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. His mind continued to battle between the search for truth and the reality of war which was not rational. In the end, the great logician had to admit that there was no royal road to truth. To quote Russell: “If even in Logic and Mathematics, the paragons of certainty, we cannot have perfect assurances of Reason, then even less can this be achieved in the messy business of human affairs — either private or public.”
What a disappointment this was to Russell who had placed so much faith in truth and reason. An illustration of his value for truth was the famous Russell’s Paradox which pulled the carpet from under mathematician Gottlok Frege’s landmark work called ‘Foundations of Arithmetic’. Frege’s reaction after he remembered the Paradox, was to put an addendum to the book. It reads in his own words: “Hardly anything more unfortunate can befall a scientific writer, than to have one of the foundations of his edifice shaken after the work is finished. I was placed in this position by a letter of Mr Bertrand Russell, just when the printing of this volume was nearing its completion.
The collapse of one of my laws, to which Mr Russell’s paradox leads, seems to undermine not only the foundations of my Arithmetic but the only possible foundations of Arithmetic as such.”
On seeing the addendum, Bertrand Russell commented, “There cannot be greater intellectual courage than this: to put the Truth above all else.”
From the beginning, the great philosopher’s was a quest for the foundation of mathematics. But studying the subject he had hoped to penetrate the essence of truth. Mathematics to him was he queen of sciences and Euclid had taught him to abhor contradiction. Geometry had showed him the way towards reality and Reason was the royal road to truth. To Russell, religion was a house on sand and was sinking; he had become an atheist despite his grandmother’s efforts to inculcate in him some faith in God. Inspite of his genius, the great man lost his way; for example, the World War proved inevitable despite being utterly irrational. Could it be that he might not have lost his way had he also studied eastern, especially Hindu philosophy? He had written a very successful book called The History of Western Philosophy but he appeared to have made no mention of eastern philosophy which has relied more on inductive logic whereas the West placed its reliance on deductive logic. The ultimate and absolute premise of the Semetic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — was that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The religions flow from this great premise set out at the beginning of the Old Testament. In Russell’s own words, used in another context, “If the premise is weak, so is all the rest.”
In the West, logic has been called the study of methodical thinking, deduction and demonstration. The father of logic, Aristotle’s classic Organon has discussed the study of deductive patterns called syllogisms which were synonymous with logical thinking. In simple terms, deductive logic argues from the premise above to conclusions and corollaries below; and rejects any contradictions on its path. For example, if the logician has seen only red roses, he would not accept roses of other colours as roses. To him, the pink, white or yellow are either other flowers or weeds. To the Hindu, all the colours would be possible roses. A Bengali might have seen only white roses, a Punjabi only pink ones, a Maharastrian only yellow and the Andhrite only red roses. Each would insist that he has seen only one colour. But instead of rejecting the other colours, he would say grant the other’s their respective experiences. That’s inductive logic which argues from data at the bottom to the conclusion above.
Had Bertrand Russell given some space to Hindu philosophy, his search for truth might have been more fruitful. Without data, the Hindu tradition does not assert. Contrast the Semetic assertion of the world’s birth with the Hindu view anaadi anant or there is no beginning, no end. Or the Hindu concept of God, tatatram asi or the atma or the soul and parmatma or total soul (God) are the same. Nevertheless, don’t miss reading Logicomix if you are interested in the pursuit of truth !
