Why did Gödel believe in the immortality of the soul?

Samuel Geiger

University of Vienna

In a series of correspondences with his mother, Kurt Gödel professed his belief in an afterlife. His reasons for believing so had to do with his conviction that the world exhibits a rational order. In a letter from July 23, 1961, he writes: “is there reason to assume that the world is arranged rationally? I believe so. For it is by no means chaotic or arbitrary; rather, as science shows, the greatest regularity and order prevail in everything. But order is a form of rationality.”
In the same letter, he asserts that personal death disrupts the rational order he sees everywhere else, “for what meaning would [the world] have to bring forth a being (or a human) that has such a wide field of possibilities for development and relationships with others, and then not even allow him to realize one thousandth of it?”
The philosophical content of Gödel’s letters bears remarkable similarity to Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul, especially as it appears in the Critique of Judgment and his Lectures on Metaphysics. Alexander Englert (2024) has recently reconstructed Kant’s argument thusly:
P1 Nothing in nature is gratuitous.  (Kant, Lectures on Metaphysics 28:687)
P2 Our predisposition to morality is a part of nature. (KU 5:468)
P3 This predisposition cannot be realized in this lifetime. (KrV A569/B597; KpV 5:43)
C There must be a future life wherein we can bring this predisposition to its completion.
In this paper, I intend to demonstrate the Kantian roots of Gödel’s insistence to his mother that they would one day be reunited after death. Likewise, I contend that Gödel’s plainspoken reconstruction of Kant’s argument can provide insight into Kant’s complex and often overlooked moral theology.
This paper will be structured according to an analysis of Gödel’s letters concerning life after death, a reconstruction of Kant’s postulate for the immortality of the soul, and a discussion about the connection between the two. 

Chair: Kotryna Elijosiute

Time: 14:00-14:30

Location: SR 1.007