S. Budiansky, "Journey To The Edge of Reason" 에서

Stephen Budiansky, "Journey To The Edge of Reason:

The Life of Kurt Gödel" (2021)

 

 

Kurt Gödel 에대해서는, 그의 불완정성 정리

(Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems)

증명을 포함해서, 여기 저기 관심가는 부분만 조금 읽었다.

슬프게도, 64세 때의 Gödel 에 대해서 이렇게 쓰여 있다:

"But now he was tormented by demon, of failure and persecution."

 

Gödel 보다도 19세기 말 전후의 비엔나 이야기가 재밌다.

저자가 역사가이자 작가이어선지, Joseph Roth 의 The Emperor's Tomb

같은, 소설이나, Stefan Zweig 의 The World of Yesterday 같은, 에세이에서의

 인용이 많다. (우연히 산 Stefan Zweig의 저 책을 앞당겨 읽어야겠다.)

 

도서관에 반납하고 말 책이라서, 아래에, 좀 많이 인용한다.

오스트리아와 항가리에서 많은 유태인 학자들이 나온 데에 오스트리아

황제  Franz Joseph 의 기여가 컸다는 것에 주목하게 된다.

 

Though Gödel was not Jewish, it was no coincidence that growing

up ... and later studying at the great intellectual magnet of

the University of Vienna, he found that almost all of his

closest friends were Jews or Jewish descent. (P. 28)

 

Barred for centuries from the universities, professionals, and craft

guilds, subjected to punitive taxation and legal restrictions, ... Jews

responded to Franz Joseph's 1867 decree granting complete religious

freedom and equal civil rights in a burst of long-thwarted

enthusiasm. The traditional Jewish zeal for education made itself

felt almost instantly. By 1890s, although only 5 percent of the

empire's population and 10 percent of Vienna's, Jews made up

40 percent of the students who attended the city's rigorously

academic Gymnasiums.... Approximately 30 percent of students at

the University of Vienna were jews; in the medical school, the

figure was close to 50 percent. (p. 28-29)

 

Jewish boys from the earliest age acquired three or four languages:

the Yiddish spoken at home; Hebrew, which they learned to read and

write beginning at age three to study the Torah, followed by Aramic

for the Talmud; the local vernacular of Polish, Hungarian, Czech,

Ukrainian, or Romanian; and often German as well, the official

language of the empire's administration and top schools. The prestige

of study that was deeply ingrained in Jewish traditon transffered

itself readily to the secular world, along with a burning desire

to catch up on what has so long been denied them. (p. 29)

 

With their reverence for German literature and culture, jews

dominated Austrian journalism and letters; more than 50 percent

of the members of the journalists' society of Vienna circa 1900

were of Jewish ancestry, as were many if not most of the

leading novelists, operetta liberettists, and playwrights

of fin-de-siè·cle Vienna. (p. 30)

 

Austria's liberal intelligentsia reacted to the disaster of liberalism's

collapse in a characteristically Austrian way, retreating ever furthur

into the life of art, aestheticism, and a kind of high-minded

individualism, what the writer Hermann Broch termed the

"flight into the apolitical." (p. 35)

 

A great influence on the thinking of the intelligentsia of "Young

Vienna" was the philosophical ideas of the physicist Ernst Mach....

Rejecting all a priori truth, Mach took empiricism to new extremes:

knowledge is based only on appearance, he insisted, and

appearances are nothing but "the world of our own sensations."

Thus, there are no such things as objects, permanance, or even

realty in any objective sense.... The polymath Egon Friedell ...

asserted that in choosing to depict light over things, Klimt

and his fellow modernists had simply "painted Mach." (p. 37)