Experimental Blog #96

Comments on the books "Incompleteness" - The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel and "Betraying Spinoza" - The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity by Rebecca Goldstein

The first book, "Incompleteness", is about Kurt Godel, who was born into a Sudenten German family in Brno, Moravia, but he "considered himself always Austrian and an exile in Czechoslovakia". Perhaps the most stimulating part of this book is Rebecca Goldstein's vivid description of Vienna, especially its unsurpassed intellectual life and culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
However, this is a book about mathematics, which Rebecca Goldstein seems to understand very well. For a "math challenged" reader to summarize the "Incompleteness Theorem" and say that Kurt Godel mathematically proved that, "There are some things that are true, but they can not be proven to be so," probably mostly reveals the reader's lack of ability to follow so much abstract and abstruse mathematical reasoning.


Rebecca Goldstein's second book, "Betraying Spinoza", also provides quite a lot of vivid history, especially Jewish history in Western Europe. The author's account of how the Inquisition was mostly directed at Jews is especially informative. Other accounts, by comparison, tend to minimize this interpretation. The resulting formation of the Jewish community of mostly former "Marranos" from the Iberian Peninsula in the Netherlands is described in great detail.
In this book of philosophy the philosophical works of Baruch, or Benedictus{which means blessed} Spinoza are quoted and enlarged upon many times. However, Rebecca Goldstein never very clearly explains just how or why she is "betraying" Spinoza. Besides that, when she defines and writes about the meaning of "modernity", Rebecca Goldstein gives the impression that "modernity" is not the "good thing" that most people probably assume that it is.
As for things that can not be proven or things that can not be rationally understood; is it or is it not true, that nobody really ever escapes from their fate or destiny? And that history always is confirmed, every day and in every human life, one day and one life at a time?