Volume 1, Issue 8: The Life or Work Frege

The Life or Work of Frege

Dale Jacquette, Frege: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. PP. xiv + 667. ISBN 978-0-521-86327-8. £35 (hbk)

Three years after his sudden and unexpected death, Dale Jacquette’s last book was published by Cambridge University Press. The volume is about one of his long-time heroes, Gottlob Frege, with a special focus on his life and philosophical development. To be more precise, it is a “philosophical biography”, as indicated in the book’s subtitle, the first one in English with such a broad range of topics, arguments, and interest. Jacquette had a deep knowledge of Frege, thus the volume will be invaluable for philosophers.

            Consisting of fourteen chapters on almost seven hundred pages, the book follows quite strictly Frege’s life from his birth, childhood, education, first publications, and marriage to the death of his loved ones. In each chapter, Jacquette takes our hand and guides us through the labyrinth of Frege’s life and formulas. As analytic philosophy is not filled with biographies of its major heroes, Jacquette’s efforts to bring Frege back to the table is more than welcome. Especially since Frege is considered to be the founding father of analytic philosophy and in this role, his English biography is indeed a huge step to understand the first days of analytic philosophy. Furthermore, Frege is a perfect candidate for being the subject of a historical biography as he lived through Germany’s rigid and remote system of institutional and scholarly hierarchy, so there is much to discuss about how Frege winded through himself the German educational network of exams, obligations, permissions, publications and bureaucratic system (p. 185). There is much to reveal to the English and contemporary readership; also many secrets, unknown, forgotten and well-kept information to be expected about an introverted boy, who became a whole movement’s grandfather. 

            What is that one shall discuss in the review of a biographical book? I shall not dwell upon the individual chapters, summarising their contents, that is, reconstructing the relevant milestones and character-forming events of Frege’s life. Jacquette had seven hundred pages for that and he succeeded in many respects. What I shall be interested in here is the possible motivations for writing such a biography, the way one sits down and brings together his/her material for such a biography, and the way one shall read such a biography.

            While symbolic logic had its predecessors in Boole’s, De Morgan’s and Peirce’s works, it is commonly assumed that Frege’s achievements meant the real revolution. He produced a complex, comprehensive formal language, the so-called Begriffsschrift (which was the title of his very first book as well), whose moves and rules expressed the most advanced form of logical thinking in mathematics and philosophy. Jacquette called Frege a genius repeatedly and emphasized his revolutionary role in the history of logic and philosophy for a reason.

            Frege had many characteristic features of a genius: he was not recognized in his time and even if he was taken note of, misunderstanding loomed around the critical reviews. This negligence and miscomprehension just strengthened Frege who was confident in the significance and correctness of his work (another sign of a genius, perhaps). And Jacquette repeated that point whenever he could (see e.g. p. 81). But the more interesting issue is that during their first semester, almost every undergraduate student learns easily the basics of formal logic. From their point of view, it is not at all obvious that it took a genius to establish the fundamental issues. We have to see the context and the development of ideas to understand the revolutionary character of Frege’s work.

            Unfortunately, that is often missing from Jacquette’s story. What we got is indeed helpful and enlightening; long sections about Frege’s childhood, the socio-economic description and historical location of his birth-town Wismar, the characterization of his family’s values and place in the social network. There is a lot to discuss here about Frege’s childhood illnesses, his early introverted character and his emotional ties to her mother. Jacquette’s discussion of these biographical details is very entertaining; we get really close to Frege, we see his personality and how he became that anguished old man who is known from book covers (e.g. from Jacquette’s).

            But seemingly Jacquette does not assume a closer or substantial relation between biography and philosophy. The book is divided into detailed story-telling biographical chapters and argumentative, philosophical ones. He often mentions that usually, we do not have the required material about Frege’s life and decisions, hence “where evidence does not rule” scholars often tended to follow the idea that “argument sometimes tries to make up for the shortage” (p. 619) and they provide thus unsupportive narratives. His main example is Michael Dummett’s work on Frege and how he follows the received stories and myth-like descriptions of Frege’s life. If data are lacking, then one shall construct entertaining stories, bring up new dimensions of the subject with some possible further topics given our background knowledge.

            But plausibility is not enough for Jacquette. As he says, the fact “that the interpretation has some plausibility is no proof of its truth” (p. 630). While it might be hard to question this credo, it poses particular challenges to Jacquette’s story. What shall the concerned reader do with similar passages as this: 

Frege was old. He was ill. His teaching was pathetically below the faculty’s standard. It was an embarrassment. The students had next to no interest in his logical foundations of arithmetic. They must have seen him in later years shuffling along the halls of the mathematics faculty as though he were already retired and was just wandering about aimlessly, returning to his former office out of confused senile force of habit. (pp. 632-633.)

Frege was ill for a long time; he seldom had more than a couple of students and none of them stayed for long. There were a few semesters when he did not have any students at his Begriffsschrift seminar and before his retirement in 1918, he was released from teaching due to health reasons. Given all of these (and the general negligence), it is entirely plausible to vision Frege as a wandering senile, scaring away all the students with his eccentric and hardly comprehensible drawings and boring manner of speech. This is plausible, but is it true as well?

            Turning back to the previous question, Frege’s life is discussed next to his scholarly achievements, but a connection is rarely sought. At one point, Jacquette mentions that during Frege’s youth, the telegraph with its binary codes opened up numerous new possibilities both for scholars and for the laymen, and it promised entirely new research agendas as well. After all, “the telegraph cable singling electrical signals from station to station was a syntactical way of transforming colloquial speech and writing into a two-valued symbolic dispatch” (p. 47). Thus Jacquette raises an interesting point: 

it is easy to read into this classroom exposure to the dots and dashes of telegraph transmission an appreciation for the potential expression of all propositions as exclusively either true or false. Such was then the optimistic expectation that a bivalent system of propositional values in a fully algebraic functional calculus would meet the requirements of G. W. Leibniz’s seventeenth-century proposal for a characteristica universalis [...]. (p. 47)

The author is cautious not to stretch the idea too far; he does not talk about any direct influence, but only about contextual connections that invite the historian to speculate about more substantial historical theses.

            But Jacquette had other interesting comparisons. Frege’s first philosophically and logically intended book was his 1879 Begriffsschrift, which was a book of strange and unknown two-dimensional formulas (some of which are reproduced and explained by Jacquette in his book). Contemporary readers, who are more familiar with the customary linear style of logical notation, might indeed find Frege’s special variant entirely unreadable. Even Frege’s contemporaries had troubles in decoding what he was talking about; neither his mathematical, nor his philosophically interested colleagues had a real clue about the significance of his system. Not even Bertrand Russell understood everything, as he admitted later. (Actually, Jacquette says at one point that most of Frege’s miseries came from the amiss move to publish Begriffsschrift as his very first work.) Nonetheless, Jacquette takes the reader’s hand and shows that Frege’s signs are not from the devil and they were quite logical, “permitting all essential logical relations to be scanned visually” (p. 152). Furthermore, says Jacquette, all the scholars back then who were not corrupted by the linear signs and whose eyes were quite untrained in symbolic writings, might have found Frege’s way even easier to read; it explicated neatly that “there is nothing in disguise” (p. 153).

            But the untrained eye was not that untrained, after all. Chemical modeling and multi-dimensional signs about equations were all available at that time and Frege was well-trained in chemistry (p. 115) so he might have been influenced by it as well. So, again, even if we are not talking about direct influences here (namely on his Frege’s symbolism), contextual connections might be relevant. Nonetheless, there are no discussions of the scholarly situation of drawing models, picturing relations and data in the period and how that would enable the general reader to understand Frege’s notation. Nothing about chemistry textbooks and their possible relevance to Frege’s visualization.

            It is just one thing that Jacquette distinguishes philosophical criticism from things that have “immediate biographical relevance” (p. 117), but it is another very important question that what does “philosophical biography” exactly means, if not seeking out connections between biographical events and philosophical substances. Jacquette says, “this biography of Frege aims at telling a plausible story about his life and the unfolding of his philosophical thought” (p. 6). Again, we see here the doomed “plausibility”, and find later nothing about how the biographical and philosophical dots could be linked. There are some hints and tries, though.

            The received fairy-tales about Frege emphasized that the isolation and scholarly negligence had a quite negative effect on him. He started to publish less and less, became even more introverted, careless, and finally sunk under the weight of being unrecognized. Russell’s famous letter in 1902 did not help at all; when Frege became aware of the paradox that Russell found in his system, his philosophical and logical vision was scattered into uninteresting pieces and he stopped publication. Jacquette goes against the current and claims that the public silence of Frege was caused first by personal tragedies (the death of his mother, his wife, and best friend and supporter Ernst Abbe), and later by his continuous and devoted work to find a non ad hoc solution to Russell’s paradox and to secure again his building of arithmetical reasoning by his algebraic concept-function logic. Instead of despondency, hopelessness, lassitude and fatal apathy, Frege was active for many years, produced influential works (the so-called Logische Untersuchungen) and secured many important ideas in his Nachlass. As Jacquette quotes from Frege’s note to his adopted son Alfred, “if all is not gold” in the Nachlass, “there is gold” (p. 598). Thus Frege never abandoned the faith that his work is important but wrongfully unrecognized. Jacquette indeed rewrites some of the unfair narratives about Frege’s life and work, that were “not borne out by the historical record” (p. 604).

            Nonetheless, most of his corrections and debates are about such minor things as Frege’s marriage and when did he practically and legally adopt Alfred as his son (p. 513). Jacquette beats up Dummett frequently for getting historical and biographical things wrong, and of course, he does that for good reasons. Analytic philosophy is still replete with oversimplified and misleading stories for which Dummett and other leading philosophers were responsible. But it would have been perhaps more ideal to learn more (and to correct the view) about Frege’s later reception in the Vienna Circle and other places instead of dwell upon family business.

            Furthermore, almost everything seems to be taken from Lothar Kreiser’s 2001 German book, Gottlob Frege: Leben – Werk – Zeit. The Austrian and German reception of Frege is huge, deep, and insightful both historically and philosophically. It is now more than helpful that the English-speaking community will get to know all of those data and facts about Frege’s life and work that were available hitherto only in German. But that also makes the reader wonder at which points bring Jacquette more into the discussions – it would have been nice to indicate somewhere, especially as long sections are just quotes of and commentaries on previous narratives.

            Because of this close relation and knowledge of the German secondary literature, Jacquette has written one of the strangest philosophical biographies of Frege in English. While we got to know much about the micro-history of Frege’s world (what courses he took, how many students attended his lectures, etc.), the philosophical parts still dominate most of the chapters. That is not a problem at all, quite the contrary since we have in our hand “A Philosophical Biography” of Frege. But the historically analyses are somewhat strange as (i) they are not pure rational reconstructions (as they were the leading type of histories in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, much in the fashion of Scott Soames), but (ii) still not such stories that are evaluated in a detailed manner in their own context, with references and discussions of contemporary opinions, situating Frege’s work in its original conceptual and philosophical setting.

            All in all, Jacquette’s book is a useful source for the historically interested reader as it provides insight into the ongoing research on Frege’s life and work. His style is lucid, easy to follow and brings Frege back to life from time to time. But after some engaging parts about how Frege lived and worked, philosophers shall not forget the book on their bedside table and should bring it to their writing desk and continue reading the more philosophical parts. Jacquette is seemingly even more at home when he has to safeguard Frege from criticism and misunderstanding and when he forges counterfactuals stories about how Frege could have reacted to others. Filled with stimulating philosophical arguments (that I could not discuss here) and fruitful historical descriptions, Jacquette’s Frege is an important milestone both for students and scholars. But you should not forget what to expect from it: more philosophy, than philosophical biography.

Adam Tamas Tuboly

Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Institute for Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of Pecs

Supported by the MTA BTK Lendület Morals and Science Research Group.