Gottlob Frege: The machine in the ghost

Frege's mind was the most powerful motor in modern philosophy. But as a human being, he was a narrow man who left little mark

by Ray Monk / September 12, 2017 / Leave a comment

Published in October 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine

By common consent, the three founders of the modern analytic tradition of philosophy are, in chronological order, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The biggest project in my professional life has been to write biographies of the second and third of these men. But of the three, it is Frege who is—100 years on from his retirement—held in the greatest esteem by the philosophers of today.

His essay “On Sense and Reference” (1892) offered a philosophical account of linguistic meaning that broke new ground in sophistication and rigour, and it is still required reading for anyone who wants to understand contemporary philosophy of language. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he invented modern logic: he developed the basic ideas (if not the symbols now in use) of predicate logic, considered by most analytic philosophers to be an essential tool of their trade and a required part of almost every philosophy undergraduate degree programme. His book The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) is still hailed as a paradigm of the kind of crisp, rigorous prose to which every analytic philosopher should aspire.

Frege’s insights have been influential outside philosophy, in areas including cognitive science, linguistics and computer science. Among the public, however, he is almost completely unknown, especially when put beside Wittgenstein and Russell. Most people have some idea who Russell was. Many have seen clips of his frequent appearances on television, can picture his bird-like features crowned with his mane of white hair, and recognise his unique voice, high-pitched, precise and aristocratic in an impossibly old-fashioned way (one imagines that no-one has spoken like that since the Regency). Even better known is Wittgenstein, the subject of a Derek Jarman movie and several poems, whose name is dropped by journalists, novelists and playwrights, confident that their audiences will have some idea who he is. But Frege? How many people know anything about him?

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Comments

Peter Simons
September 14, 2017 at 16:52
Thanks to Ray for this nice sketch. In truth it may be that Frege was that kind of academic whose immersion in his subject and whose introversion left very little for biographers to comment on, and there might have been little more to go on had his papers survived. What we know from his wartime letters to Wittgenstein is that he was an ardent German nationalist, and what we know from his interaction with contemporaries like Hilbert is that he was as ungenerous towards contemporary rivals as he was happy to praise long-dead predecessors. Dummett was right: an intellectual genius but a nasty if understandingly embittered little man.
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OS
September 14, 2017 at 19:58
The article concludes: “That just leaves us with his work, which, apart from his poisonous but private remarks about the politics of 1920s Germany (which remain difficult to connect to anything else he said or wrote), is all that survives of the man.”Regarding that parenthetical, there is actually an interesting connection between Frege’s intellectual concerns and his political preoccupations as evidenced in those 1924 diary entries. (This occurred to me in the 1990s in conversation with Paul Gilroy after a talk he gave at Brown University about the ugly underbelly of the enlightenment.) In the 1924 diary entries Frege seems particularly obsessed with sharpness for concepts. Fregean concepts are supposed to deliver a yes/no verdict upon any (suitable) input. Frege appears to be particularly troubled by the lack of sharp definition for x-is-Jewish (and x-is-German).Indeed, unpleasant political overtones aren’t unheard of in Frege’s theoretical work. Consider this excerpt from §1 of The Foundations of Arithmetic (which again concerns sharpness for concepts):“After deserting for a time the old Euclidean standards of rigour, mathematics is now returning to them, and even making efforts to go beyond them. In arithmetic, if only because many of its methods and concepts originated in India, it has been the tradition to reason less strictly than in geometry, which was in the main developed by the Greeks…. Later developments, however, have shown that in mathematics a mere moral conviction, supported by a mass of successful applications, is not good enough. Proof is now demanded of many things that formerly passed as self-evident.... In all directions these same ideals can be seen at work – rigour of proof, precise delimitation of extent of validity, and as a means to this, sharp definition of concepts.”
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Kurt Wischin
September 15, 2017 at 20:01
I don´t quite understand. Is this just an abstract of the real thing? How come there is a subtitle in the middle "Hear Monk discusses..." - isn´t this him, discussing? Overall Monk proves that he is more about spectacular writing than the truth. Frege had personal views he shared with most of his fellow countrymen and a lot of them with most contemporaries in other countries as well. How hard is it to understand that someone is a loyal subject to the Emperor at the heights of the II German Empire? Women back then needed everywhere a tutor for any little legal issue they had to settle and nobody thought of letting them vote. Antisemitism was quite a normal phenomenon back then, among all Europeans, from Russia to Great Britain, passing of course over Austria, Germany, and France. Frege backed this as a political issue, but he never expressed any antisemitism personally and I hear he had Jewish friends (as far as he may have friends). If Professor Monk characterizes Frege as a "narrow man" because he doesn't share his own narrow, decadent liberalism, all the worse for him. This account is very unbalanced, to say the least, and smacks heavily of pure hypocrisy.
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1. Kilgore Reinhardt
  September 25, 2017 at 09:11
  Quite so! A moralizing vertigo seems to grip every surveyor of the past. All who have ever lived are under a trial, as is history itself, from which deliverance is possible if only everyone adopted the right opinions.
  Reply
barry hindess
September 19, 2017 at 22:44
fragment of a diary "transcribed by" Frege's adopted son seems scant basis for all the opprobrium heaped on Frege. There is other evidence he was not a nice guy, as Peter Simons notes, but what of his racism?
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Harvey shoolman
October 4, 2017 at 17:27
The timing of Ray Monk's piece is piquant. For early next year CUP is publishing a biography of Frege by the recently deceased Dale Jacquette. The biography runs to over 700 pages and it will be interesting to discover if Jacquette's evidently omniverous research had led to a genuinely fresh appraisal of Frege's life and personality or whether this considerably weighty tome falls prey to the same problems as Kreiser's.
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