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Logic Sometimes Makes Monsters, But It Also Never Does

Alex Sayf Cummings

Logic sometimes breeds monsters… If logic were the teacher’s only guide, he would have to begin with the most general, that is to say, with the most weird, functions. He would have to set the beginner to wrestle with this collection of monstrosities.

…

French mathematician Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (1902)

I had a professor in college for Deductive Logic, the class that humanities-types took to get out of their general ed requirement for quantitative reasoning or whatever (you know, ummm… math). Dick Toenjes was a great teacher, and he said one thing I’ll never forget about an invalid argument. If a syllogism is invalid, NOT EVEN DIANA ROSS COULD MAKE IT VALID. Even the great Supreme falls before the iron will of logic.

Dr. Toenjes has since passed, and I’m somewhat heartened to know he didn’t have to see our current merriment of illogic — a nearly Bakhtin-esque festival of goofball nihilism. Much do we long for the days when Anthony Scaramucci was the most ridiculous thing going in American politics, though the Mooch is reportedly waist-deep in some kind of bawdy crypto scheme as we speak. The evil logic of Trumpism is to make everything both sillier and much more deadly serious than any of us could rightly have imagined before — much more on both counts.

We live in a time where seemingly everyone has given up on a grand explanation, as the philosophers, sociologists, economists, or linguists of the early twentieth century once pursued. That was a mug’s game, dummy; we are all post-post-post-structuralist now. Trump and his lead-brained pedophile cronies somehow came across Baudrillard at Wharton or TPUSA Summer Camp, and nearly everyone in today’s politics seems to intuit that the only thing left to do is criss-cross over the most superficial, devilishly empty signifiers imaginable, because reality is old hat.

I’ve been reading Karen Olsson’s The Weil Conjectures (2019), which is a dazzling combination of biography and memoir and math. It’s mainly about the entwined lives of Simone Weil, the utterly unique French philosopher, activist, and mystic, and her brother André, one of the most celebrated mathematicians of the twentieth century. Olsson weaves her own peripatetic love affair with math into the Weil siblings’ own musings on justice, ontology, religion, and the meaning of life in an elegant and empathetic manner.

Both Weils sought some kind of elusive structure in the world that could unlock the great secrets, with a purpose and intensity that seem practically quaint today. There was André, threading his ways through the mazes of math he and his peers mutually constructed, searching for hidden passageways or chutes or ladders to a greater crystalline truth (which Olsson often refers to as an “architecture,” even though she also frequently doubts whether advanced mathematics corresponds to anything real in the world at all).

Yet the brother was earthly as a sailor on shore leave compared to his sister. Simone wandered through Marxism to the Upanishads and Greek epics to Catholic theology in search of something that she — almost undoubtedly — was convinced was unfindable. The fact that it (God, really) existed distant from us, apart from its own creation, might have been what made it so priceless. (One collection of Weil’s posthumously published writings was dubbed Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us.) She relentlessly pressed to pierce the membrane of reality and find a Goodness or Reason or Love that is outside the universe itself, perhaps beyond the ken of human comprehension entirely. Simone had a habit of speaking and writing in Zen koan-like aphorisms that confound the mind, but which nevertheless seem to point to something greater than she (or certainly I) could fathom, and to this day still feels suspiciously real.

Anyway, we don’t have to worry about anyone trying to discover anything numinous or extraordinary nowadays, so — problem solved!

But in case they do, we have a bevy of reading recommendations from our editors this week:

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