Logicomix: An Epic Search for the Truth by Apostopoles Doxiatis and Christos Papadimitriou (Bloomsbury) £16.99 (pb)

These days many people believe that Bertrand Russell’s reputation is in decline, but that is certainly not how Apostopoles Doxiatis and Christos Papadimitriou see it. On the contrary, they have chosen Russell as the hero of a new comic book, or graphic novel, as it is more properly known.

In Britain, we have no tradition of adult comic books that deal with serious subject matters, unlike the manga comics of Japan and the bandes dessinée of France. But here a writer, an academic and two graphic artists from Greece offer us a beautifully illustrated philosophical novel in which the logical and the psychological aspects of Russell’s life are represented side by side.

Doxiatis is a best selling author and trained mathematician and Papadimitriou is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. Together with their impressive illustrators, they have dramatised the story of Russell’s quest for the logical foundations of mathematics. This was a task Russell thought we had better be able to carry out if we were ever to achieve absolutely certain knowledge of reality, the reason being that science has to make use of mathematics, and if mathematics rests on shaky foundations, so does science. To shore up science, and to secure a means of arriving at truth and knowledge, Russell sought clear logical foundations for mathematics.

It’s an unlikely and possibly unpromising subject matter for a comic book, as the authors are well aware, and as they discuss at their meetings in Athens, which are also illustrated on the pages of the book. We meet the authors, Doxiatis and Papadimitriou, the artists, Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna, and Manga, the dog. It could all seem a little too cute at this point, and yet what we learn about the personality differences between the authors provides its own illustration of the book’s main theme, which is the tension between reason’s clean drive for precision and certainty, and the humane but messy world of the passions.

The struggle between the authors comes out in Papadimitriou’s concern to portray the logical points accurately and to represent Russell’s work as ultimately leading to progress and the development of his own subject, computer science. By contrast, Doxiatis is concerned to tell of Russell’s quest as an engaging and ultimately tragic tale. For Doxiatis, the story should be about the character of its main protagonist, while for Papadimitriou it should be about the ideas that animated Russell.

Here we see a classic struggle played out between different schools of philosophy: should we be interested in the thinker as much as the thought? Compromise is reached, and the result is a story grippingly told and nicely illustrated, using the device of having Russell narrate his intellectual life history in the course of giving a lecture to an audience at an American university on the role of logic in human affairs.

Much to Papadimitriou’s irritation, Doxiatis and the artists constantly stress the romantic theme of the finest insights of logic arising from the mind of a tormented genius. We are shown how Russell feared that the madness in his family would afflict him, and other logicians we meet in the course of the novel - Frege, Cantor, and Gödel - are all portrayed as having bouts of mental illness. But instead of the “Logic from Madness” theme that Doxiatis takes to be central, what we see emerging in the course of the novel is the opposite; namely, how an obsessive straining for the dizzy heights of logic can unbalance the mind and blind one to the needs of others.

The tale begins on a campus in the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War, where Russell is accosted by anti-war protesters who don’t see why their country should be asked to join a war in Europe that doesn’t concern them. Russell invites the protesters to attend his lecture in order to hear how logical reasoning can help them answer the question of what they should do. The protesters remember Russell’s pacifist stance in the First World War and imagine that he will support their cause. Instead, he tells them the story of his intellectual development and quest for logical certainty, against the background of his emotional development and personal history. This part of the story is quite believable given Russell’s penchant for making himself the subject of inquiry and his habit of combining his philosophical thinking with populist pronouncements.

Early on we hear from Russell in his own words, and the character of Bertie emerges strongly from one frame to the next. The facts of his childhood are set out and his isolation, anxiety and fear are offered as motivations of his quest for certainty. The psychoanalytic tone is enlivened with humour and intermittent audience reaction, reassuring us that these writers never forget they are writing an enjoyable comic caper.

Soon we learn of Russell’s pleasure in discovering the beauty of Euclid’s geometry and his desire to know more mathematics. As he progresses he seeks the same certainty in all branches of mathematics as he found in Euclid’s derivation of theorems from self-evident axioms. He is disappointed. The circular definitions and unjustified assumptions leave mathematics unfit for its role in the scientific enterprise. And so begins the epic quest to provide sure foundations for mathematics, building it on logical inferences and special definitions. We meet Alfred Whitehead, with whom Russell eventually writes Principia Mathematica, and the inventors of modern logic and set-theory, Frege, Cantor, Dedekind, and Hilbert. The light relief is provided by Bertie’s first wife Alys, who comments on the quirky and other-worldly manner of logicians.

In the course, of the story we meet Wittgenstein, and hear of the birth of the Tractatus. But we also have Russell attending meetings of the Vienna Circle, making the acquaintance of Schlick and Von Neumann, and listening to Gödel’s lecture on the incompleteness of arithmetic: events that never took place. Of course, events have been changed in the interests of producing a good story, as the authors coyly acknowledge in their end-notes. This is understandable but one wishes they had at least been accurate in the naming the famous texts by Russell and others. There is no Volume Two of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic. The book of Frege’s that was just going to print when Russell pointed out a logical contradiction in the formal system was the Basic Laws of Arithmetic. And Russell wrote The Principles of Mathematics and an Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, not The Philosophy of Mathematics. But these are minor quibbles compared to the Herculean efforts of raising such technical philosophy to the level of public interest.

The philosophy is well done and the authors succeed in explaining the passion, excitement and importance of the foundational quest. It was this task that drove logicians to greater and greater feats of ingenuity: defining their terms and testing their systems for consistency. Although as we see, Russell himself, with the discovery of his paradox, was to undermine all faith in firm foundations. (The paradox – along the lines of “every principle has an exception except this one” – is well-explained, as are some of the important ideas of logic, and readers should not fear that the book will go over their heads.) The quest is finally brought to a halt with Gödel’s proof of the unprovablity of certain features of formal systems within those systems themselves. The authors debate whether Russell’s work is a failure, and but back at the lecture, Russell’s moral is to question the anti-war protesters’ certainty that the USA should not help Europe fight the Nazis.

Because the authors are Greek, the novel’s denouement involves a staging of Aeschylus’s Oresteia: undoubtedly a tragedy, but one which ends with Pallas Athena creating the rule of law and establishing justice for the city of Athens.

In the end, this is a hugely pleasurable book, and it does philosophy, and in particular, a dauntingly formal branch of philosophy, a very large favour, rendering it both accessible and engaging. And it is clear, after this initial experiment, that there is plenty of scope for philosophy in comic form.

Barry C Smith is director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study