Truth for beginners

A graphic novel about logic? The idea is not as far-fetched, or as innovative, as one might think. Back in the 1970s, the publishing company Writers and Readers began producing a series of comic books (as they were then called) which sought to provide entertaining and instructive introductions, both to individual philosophers (Marx for Beginners, Wittgenstein for Beginners) and to intellectual movements and disciplines (Postmodernism for Beginners, Economics for Beginners). The series was extremely successful and many of these books are still in print.

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Like those earlier books, Logicomix is written with the earnest intention to make an important but difficult body of work accessible to ordinary readers and a conviction that the way to do that is through comic-book art. In this case, though, the artwork and its reproduction (in full colour, on quality shiny paper) are a considerable improvement on the black and white line drawings of the … for Beginners series. Logicomix is a delight to look at.

The story it seeks to tell is that of Bertrand Russell’s quest for certainty and how that quest shaped the development of logic and computer science in the 20th century. Whether this is a story with a happy ending or not is something about which the authors of the book appear to be divided. Doxiadis (a novelist with a training in mathematics) takes his view from Russell himself, who said repeatedly that his quest for certainty had been a failure. The ten years he spent working on Principia Mathematica, in which he presented a system of logic he hoped to use to demonstrate with absolute certainty the truths of mathematics, he came to think had been a waste of time. This is because, under the influence of Wittgenstein, he came to believe that the ‘truths’ of mathematics were not, as he had previously imagined them to be, eternal verities concerning immutable, abstract objects; they were, rather, mere tautologies.