by Tang Huyen

Bertrand Russell spent years writing the Principia Mathematica — a rigorous logical foundation for mathematics — and declared it a failure at the end of his life. For a logician to situate himself in a world with thought, and a world without thought, and maintain balance between the two: that is a perilous job. Tang Huyen uses Russell's case as the point of entry into a wider argument: that logic, mathematics, and thought itself arise not from a special virtue of the human mind, but from its weakness. An omniscient mind would have no need of universals or laws. Thought is a workaround for finitude. And Buddhist teachings, which make logical errors freely, are redeemed by a simple fact: they are means, not ends — and when the means has done its job, it is let go.

For a logician to situate himself in the world of thought (and a world without thought) with balance and perspective would be a perilous job.

Logicians are fascinated with possibilities, logical possibilities especially, and the fiction of God exerts a mesmerising effect, to say the least, even if it is only a fiction (and logicians with a realistic bent are wont to make such fictions real and deal with them accordingly).

A Mind That Needs No Logic

Jules Vuillemin, in his essay on Gödel's negative theorems, writes: "A mind which would be powerful enough to represent to itself simultaneously all the singular states of things would know all that is without bothering with logic or mathematics." (Vuillemin, "Les théorèmes négatifs de Gödel," in Nef and Vernant, eds., Le formalisme en question. Le tournant des années trente, Paris: Vrin, 1998, 188.) That is, a contentually omniscient mind would not need universals like patterns, laws, structures, etc. to help it set to order the numberless particulars — because the latter are already fully known.

At the Davos debate of 1929, Heidegger stated: "It is because the intuition of man is finite that it needs thought, which, as such, is itself finite through and through." (Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, Débat sur le Kantisme et la Philosophie, Davos, mars 1929, Paris: Beauchesne, 1972, 23.) The idea of an infinite thought is a non-sense — thought is finite to its core.

The Weakness of the Human Mind

Ernst Mach, in Geschichte und Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit, stated: "Because the capacity to comprehend and remember details is limited, the material must be arranged in order." He went further: a physical law or principle has no independent cognitive value above immediate perception. It merely repeats, in abridged form, what perception furnishes directly — and consequently better and more faithfully. A law is no more than a catalogue of isolated facts; a principle no more than a register of laws. The strange corollary:

"The necessity of thinking in general concepts and laws did not represent a special virtue of the human mind but actually originated in its weakness. An intellect broad and inclusive enough to grasp all details as details would require no such roundabout method — nor would there be any science for it. If all single facts, all separate phenomena, were as directly accessible to us as we demand that knowledge of them be, Mach expressly declared, science never would have arisen." (Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem, vol. 4, German 114–115 / English 108)

Mach and Heidegger agree: thought actually reflects a human weakness and is not a human glory. Thought is needed because our mind is finite and cannot handle the whole mass of data that it faces, and thought with its concepts and categories helps us set that mass to order and make it manipulable. It is a necessary evil.

Logic Is of Thought, Not of Reality

Russell and Frege each, in his way, broke the circle of self-predication — much indulged in by Plato. But self-predication and all other logical errors and fallacies are only within thought. Those (like God, real or not) who don't use thought don't fall into them and don't need Russell and Frege to help them think correctly — simply because they don't think.

On the Buddhist boards of talk.religion.buddhism, Dzogvi Gzboli once observed: "If ALL is a category, it cannot contain itself (viz; the set-of-all-sets). Consequently, the question is without meaning." He was referring to the proposition "all is empty."

The redeeming feature of Buddhist teachings is that they are only meant as means and not as ends, and that once the end that they point at is attained they can be let go of — so even if logical errors are made, they are made only as means and not as ends.

Coming back to what Dzogvi said: God intuits everything but does not think, and therefore does not run into any paradox. Dzogvi himself says "If ALL is a category" — and I call attention to his "if." A better rephrasing: "If one thinks, then ALL is a category, and therefore ALL cannot contain itself, and the question is without meaning." If one does not think, no paradox.

So logicians and logic have to contend with an imaginary competitor or adversary that does not need them and that relegates them to utter uselessness: God. And since God can deal with reality without the benefit (or handicap) of logic, logic is of thought, not of reality. Good logic — the kind fostered and promoted by Russell and Frege — spares one errors of thought, not errors of reality. Hence, with regard to dealing with reality, logic is a mere superfluity, as useful as adding legs to a painting of a snake.

Thus regardless how successful a logician is and how much he contributes to his discipline, there planes on him and his discipline the suspicion that they are dealing with air — clean, antiseptic air, but sheer air nonetheless. They may fight the errors of thought, but they are only fighting with shadows.

Colophon

Written by Tang Huyen and posted to alt.philosophy.zen, alt.zen, talk.religion.buddhism, and alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan on 26 May 2004. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a regular contributor to Buddhist Usenet groups through the 2000s, distinguished by rigorous citation of Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese canonical sources alongside Western scholarship. This earlier essay (2004) shows him working in his other mode: engaging Western philosophy of science and logic — Mach, Heidegger, Cassirer, Vuillemin, Gödel — to arrive at the Buddhist conclusion from a Western angle. The title alludes to Ecclesiastes: all this labor in thought, and in the end it is vanity.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

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