LECTURE 10
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was nearly 99 years old when he died. He was born in the era of Disraeli and Gladstone–John Stuart Mill, the greatest British philosopher of the nineteenth century, was his godfather–and lived long enough to become the leader of Britain’s anti-nuclear movement and a principal critic of the Vietnam war in the 1960s. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, twice Prime Minister, had visited Napoleon on the island of Elba and led the fight for the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832. Bertrand Russell was already 42 years old when the First World War broke out, with his best work in philosophy arguably behind him. For much of the rest of his long life he was a public intellectual writing (approximately 3000 words a day) for the broadest possible audience rather than a professional philosopher addressing his peers. But his early work set the agenda for British philosophy in the twentieth century.
Russell’s parents, who were liberals and feminists, died when he was still very young, and he was raised by his grandparents. His grandmother was a strict yet politically liberal woman with a stern Puritan conscience and exacting standards. One of the Biblical texts Lady Russell taught her grandson sustained him in his crusades through the First World War and well beyond the Second: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." Russell eventually shed the puritanical personal morality–he was famous, from middle age onward, for his tireless pursuit of younger women–but applied the exacting standards to philosophy and the prophetic conscience to politics.
The English philosophical tradition, from Locke to Mill, is gloriously empirical in comparison with the rationalist philosophies of the Continent. But by the end of the nineteenth century the leading philosophical minds in Britain had gone over to the rationalist (Hegelian) side: reality is a whole whose resolution into parts must involve an element of falsification; true knowledge can only be knowledge of the totality. Russell reasserted the British empirical tradition: knowledge is a matter of a relation between individual minds and independent objects in the world. "Hegel had maintained that all separateness is illusory and that the universe is more like a pot of treacle than a heap of shot. I therefore said, ‘the universe is exactly like a heap of shot’" (Portraits from Memory).
Russell’s characteristic method in philosophy was to apply the discoveries that were made in formal logic to the analysis of propositions that we assert in our ordinary speech claims about the world. He took from his early work on the philosopher Leibniz–to whom he was attracted because of their common interest in the logical foundations of mathematics–the idea that there is a deep structure of syntax or grammar below the ordinary structure of spoken language. It is the task of philosophical analysis to reduce complex notions to their simple constituents. Philosophical insight "comes from separating out the elements of knowledge and experience, not by trying to represent them as aspects of some intelligible whole…. The technique is necessarily reductive and atomistic; existence, meaning and thought are to be reduced to their primitive elements and reconstructed from that basis up" (Alan Ryan).
In the years before the war Russell’s philosophical work culminated in a three-volume work, written in collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead, entitled Principia Mathematica, a titanic effort to reduce the principles of mathematics to a few central notions of logic. He later judged the effort a failure, but the quest for certainty in logic and mathematics was characteristic of his philosophical temperament.
3. ARISTOCRATIC LIBERALISM
At the same time Russell was very interested in political issues. His first major book was a study entitled German Social Democracy (1896); it remains one of the most insightful studies of socialism in both its Marxist and reformist varieties. He ran for Parliament on a free trade and pro-women’s suffrage platform. And he followed the course of foreign affairs with increasing concern: Britain’s quasi-alliance with France and Russia, he believed, made a collision with Germany and therefore a European war a likely prospect. And during the Boer War he had had a sort of conversion experience. He had seen Mrs. Whitehead in terrible pain from a heart attack; the experience activated a powerful chord of sympathy not only with her but with all of suffering humanity. (Did the experience also recall the helplessness he felt at the loss of his mother in early childhood?) This most cerebral of philosophers now revealed a powerful sentimental side.
He also became involved with Lady Ottoline Morrell, a politician’s wife and fellow aristocrat, as well as the hostess of a famous salon at her country house, Garsington. At Garsington Russell met members of the Bloomsbury group, a set of Cambridge-educated middle class intellectuals, including the brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes, with the Stephens sisters (the writer Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell) at their center. Russell himself had little direct influence on the Bloomsbury group, but his friend and colleague G.E.Moore was a huge influence on Keynes, Woolf, and E.M. Forster. The novelist D.H. Lawrence was a frequent guest at Garsington, and Russell developed an intense relationship with him. (The philosopher was even more strongly attracted to Joseph Conrad, after whom he named his son Conrad Russell, now a leading historian of early modern Britain.) During the war Garsington became a headquarters for conscientious objectors and Russell abandoned a secure fellowship at Cambridge to lead the anti-war movement. And it was at Garsington that he met the young poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Was there a connection between Russell’s philosophy and his politics? There does seem to be some deeply rooted connection between empiricism and liberalism, but Russell himself did not regard his forays into political and social theory as philosophical enterprises. Philosophy was about the quest for certainty; politics for him was about diminishing unnecessary human suffering. Russell doubted whether ethics and political theory were in fact branches of philosophy. But he pressed on in his anti-war work, in spite of the loss of his fellowship and a six-month prison sentence (during which he wrote two books and read 200). His Principles of Social Reconstruction, his most extended and profound contribution to political theory, was a product of this period. Here he divided human impulses into the creative and the possessive, and argued of that it was the task of social reform to increase the scope for creative impulses. Russell showed the book to Lawrence, who hated it, and the novelist’s negative response caused an emotional crisis for Russell. He found comfort in an affair with an actress, Lady Constance Malleson ("Colette"), and gives a memorable account of that relationship in his Autobiography.
Russell saw the outbreak of war as the result of German envy of British success in acquiring an empire, and of British fear of German power. This was essentially a psychological explanation: rational governments, he thought, would have little difficulty in reconciling their interests if they could be brought to think in terms of negotiable self-interest rather than national pride. In any case it was self-evident to Russell that, given the unimaginably awful consequences of a general European war, no rational set of foreign policy goals could possibly justify it. His critique of the war combined the strongest impulses in his nature: the philosopher’s disgust with the irrational, and the humanitarian’s sympathy with suffering humanity.
In July 1917, encouraged by H.W. Massingham, editor of the liberal weekly The Nation, and by Russell, whom he fictionalized as "Thornton Tyrell" in his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sassoon published his famous manifesto against the war:
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldier. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to imagine.
The document was signed by Sassoon, but the wording was largely Russell’s. Sassoon hoped that the publicity surrounding his expected court-martial would add force to the still tiny public sentiment in favor of ending the war through a negotiated peace. Instead, as we have seen, his friends (including fellow poet Robert Graves) contrived to have him sent to Craiglockhart.
The denunciation of wicked authority that we find in Sassoon’s manifesto was the model for subsequent campaigns by Russell. One hears echoes of his grandmother’s favorite Biblical text in each of Russell’s crusades, from the opposition to the Boer War to the campaign against nuclear weapons: "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." There was in Russell a powerful combination of aristocratic confidence in his own judgment and puritan against corrupt authority. And this makes him one of the great examples, in Britain, of the engaged intellectual. It’s remarkable that Russell and Sartre, who had nothing in common as philosophers, came together in the 1960s as leading opponents of the war in Vietnam–this in spite of the fact that Russell had always been a critic of the doctrine of the "superior virtue of the oppressed" which Sartre embraced wholeheartedly.
Sassoon died at the age of 80 in 1967. Russell, who was half a generation older than the poet, outlived him by three years.
RECOMMENDED:
Bryan Magee, "Conversation with Stuart Hampshire: The Philosophy of Russell," in Modern British Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1971).
S.P. Rosenbaum, "Bertrand Russell in Bloomsbury," in Intellect and Social Conscience, ed. Margaret Moran and Carl Spadoni (Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University Press, 1984).
George Lichtheim, "The Birth of a Philosopher," in Collected Essays (1967).
Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988).
Benjamin Barber, "Solipsistic Politics: Bertrand Russell and Empiricist Liberalism," in The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times (Princeton, 1988).