Logic of the Void — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

01 / 06

TEE-SCI-CN-GOD-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

Logic of the Void Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Gödel proved in 1931 that every sufficiently powerful formal system contains truths it cannot prove. In 1978 he died of starvation, at twenty-nine and a half kilos, convinced he was being poisoned: he ate only what his wife tasted first, and she had been in hospital for months.

A Author

Kurt Gödel

B Subject

Mathematics

C Aesthetic

Photocopy · Collage

Exploration

The 1931 theorem says that a formal system capable of arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from inside. To certify itself it has to step outside itself, and outside itself there is nothing that is not another system with the same problem.

The temptation is to tie that to his death: the man who proved that nothing certifies itself, dead from not trusting his food. The symmetry is perfect and that is exactly why it should be distrusted.

Gödel had an illness, and illnesses do not argue. What does stand, with no need for biography, is how uncomfortable the result is: it does not describe a limit of human knowledge, it describes a limit of systems, and we keep building more and more systems that we ask for precisely what they cannot give.

Details