“Thinking about something that is not in the program is the same as lazing around.

“The sentence is perhaps not surprising if you know who it is from.

But the immediately following addition in brackets: "(even if it concerns the basics of mathematics)".

Because the man who wrote this down in a notebook sometime between March 1938 and July 1940 was Kurt Gödel, the Austrian logician who in the early 1930s thoroughly shook these very foundations of mathematics with his two incompleteness theorems.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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    The depth and theoretical scope of this insight in connection with Gödel's eccentric personality make him appear today at times as the prototypical nerd.

    His nerves were not very resilient, he didn't manage to emigrate from Germany to America until the beginning of 1940 - at the very last minute - and died in 1978 at the age of 71 of malnutrition, which was in fact the result of a progressive mental illness.

    What is less known is how broad his interests were.

    This was revealed, for example, by the edition of the first volume of his philosophical notebooks, which the Konstanz philosophy professor Eva-Maria Engelen published in 2019 on behalf of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

    Basics on the to-do list

    Engelen has now presented a second volume. Like the first to open up records on questions of theoretical philosophy, Gödel's notes, mostly in Gabelsberger shorthand, were transcribed and commented with great care, and a translation into English was added. Unlike in the first volume, however, thoughts that were certainly not written down as a possible preparation for philosophical publications are made public here. Rather, it is very private, often downright intimate, remarks in which Gödel looks at his everyday life. "Timing" and then in brackets "Max" (for "maxims") are written on the two booklets, which have been edited here together with fifteen "Addenda", mostly consisting of single sheets, with notes on the same topic.Engelen assigns the material to individual ethics, but makes it clear in her introductory essay that Gödel is concerned here with his own life and actions, with an effort to “self-perfect”, with which he stands in a long tradition dating back to antiquity.

    A main motif is the time division that gives the title and the maxims, i.e. guidelines that Gödel gives himself, mixed with sentences preceded by the words “comment”, “question” and, last but not least, “program”, although in the latter case it is often the case is what we would call “to-do lists” today. These include principles and projects of all ranks: from the actual principle ("Thinking about: What do I know and what do I believe?") And the ambitious ("Learning languages: Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, Italian") to the completely everyday (" Maxim: Drink a lot of tea with lemon on the ship. ”), And the logician can be recognized again and again:“ The advantage of a maxim is that it makes a myriad of individual decisions superfluous. For a manwho has decided on a sufficient number of maxims, the individual decisions are logical questions (deductions from the maxims). "