Clippings

When [the philosopher Morton White] had been on the faculty at Harvard, he had been instrumental in having Gödel invited to deliver the prestigious William James series of lectures and had been chagrined when Gödel declined. This would have been in the 1960s. When White himself came to the Institute as a permanent member in 1970, he remembers having asked Gödel why he had turned down the invitation. Gödel’s answer had come in two parts.

First of all, he’d said, the Harvard department was too “empiricist,” and he thought they’d have been critical of what he had to say. Second of all — and this part of the answer, White told me, had really interested him — Gödel felt he would have been doing an injustice to the ideas themselves, because he hadn’t yet completed them; to expose them prematurely to an unsympathetic audience would be acting unjustly toward them.

So it seems, at least from this story, that his reluctance to voice his unfashionable intuitions in any form that fell short of a proof was not only a matter of his own distaste for intellectual wrangling but also connected with a perceived ethical obligation toward the ideas themselves, which is appropriate for an impassioned Platonist.