Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (2 page)

geometry. Russell said the experience was ‘as dazzling as first love’ (
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30). After he had mastered the fifth proposition as easily as its predecessors, Frank told him that people generally found it difficult – it is the famous
pons asinorum
which puts a stop to many a budding geometrical career. ‘This was the first time’, wrote Russell, ‘that it had dawned upon me that I might have some intelligence.’ But there was a fly in the ointment: Euclid begins with axioms, and when Russell demanded proof of them Frank replied that they just had to be accepted, otherwise geometry could not proceed. Russell reluctantly accepted this, but the doubt raised in him at that moment remained with him, determining the course of his subsequent work on the foundations of mathematics.

In 1888 Russell went as a boarder to an army crammer to prepare for Cambridge University scholarship examinations. His time there was made unpleasant by what he viewed as coarse behaviour among some of the other youths. Nevertheless he won a scholarship to Trinity College and entered there in October 1890 to read mathematics.

He felt as if he had stepped into paradise. Alfred North Whitehead, with whom he later collaborated in writing
Principia Mathematica
, had examined his scholarship papers, and told a number of the more gifted undergraduates and dons to look out for him. He accordingly found himself in highly congenial company, no longer intellectually isolated, and with friendship, based upon a mutuality of interests and intelligence, at last open to him.

In his first three years Russell read mathematics. His fourth he devoted to philosophy, studying under Henry Sidgwick, James Ward, and G. F. Stout. The Hegelian philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart was at that time influential among Cambridge’s students and younger dons. He led Russell to think of British empiricism – represented by Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and John Stuart Mill – as ‘crude’, and gave him a taste instead for Kant and especially Hegel. Under Stout’s influence Russell became an admirer of the neo-Hegelian Oxford philosopher F. H. Bradley, and carefully studied his works, which promote a version of the philosophical view known as ‘idealism’.

But it was a younger contemporary who most decisively influenced Russell. This was G. E. Moore, who like Russell began as a Hegelian but soon repudiated that philosophy, persuading Russell to follow. Bradley had argued that everything believed by common sense, such as plurality and change in the world of things, is mere appearance, and that reality is in truth a single mental Absolute. With a heady sense of liberation Moore and Russell rejected this view. Although they thereafter developed in different ways, and although Russell in particular struggled hard to find satisfactory alternatives, the philosophical work of both was squarely premissed on realism and pluralism (see pp. 34–5 for an explanation of these terms).

But the Moore-led rebellion came later. Russell was awarded a First Class in the Mathematics Tripos in 1893, being placed seventh Wrangler, and a First Class with distinction in the Moral Science Tripos the following year (‘moral science’ used to be Cambridge’s name for subjects such as philosophy and economics). He then began writing a Fellowship dissertation on the foundations of geometry, a Kantian exercise representative of his outlook at the time. During the course of these excitements he came of age, and was therefore free to do something he had been planning in the face of his family’s strong disapproval, namely, to marry Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker five years his senior. He had met and immediately fallen in love with her in 1889, although she had not reciprocated his sentiments until four years later. Russell’s family thought her highly unsuitable, and told him that in any case he should not have children because there was insanity in his family – both his Uncle William, who was in an asylum for the insane, and his Aunt Agatha, who had experienced delusions and was growing increasingly eccentric with age, were cited as proof.

3.
Alys Pearsall Smith, an American Quaker, was Russell’s first love. He met her when he was seventeen and married her four years later in 1894.

In an attempt to detach him from Alys, Russell’s family arranged for him to serve as honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. They no doubt hoped that the allurements of the Naughty Nineties’ capital might satisfy whatever impulses were driving him to a matrimonial bed. But the puritan education imposed on him by his grandmother had been altogether too effective; it scuppered the plan, as shown by the letters – paradigms of priggishness – in which Russell wrote home complaining of Parisian life. ‘In Paris everybody is wicked,’ he wrote, ‘and every time one looks around one sees some blasphemy against love – they make me quiver with disgust.’ As soon as he was in control of his own finances (he had a comfortable patrimony of £600 a year, and his bride had money too) Russell married Alys, and to begin with they were happy.
Russell’s dissertation earned him a fixed-term research Fellowship at Trinity with no duties attached, which meant that he had neither to teach nor to reside in Cambridge. Accordingly he and Alys went to Berlin where Russell studied German social democracy and wrote a book about it. This was his first book – the first in an extraordinary total of 71 books and booklets (leaving aside countless articles) published during his lifetime. While in Berlin he conceived the idea of undertaking a vast project of research, in which two lines of enquiry, one into the natural sciences and the other into social and political questions, would eventually converge to form a ‘grand encyclopaedic work’. Russell was still then influenced by Hegelianism, of which such a project is typical; but the plan survived his radical change of philosophical outlook, although it did not take so systematic a form, for among his many works Russell indeed wrote much on both theoretical and practical questions.

German Social Democracy
was followed a year later by the published form of his Fellowship dissertation,
An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry
. Then in 1900 Russell published
A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz
. It was an accident, but an important one for him, that he came to write this book. A Cambridge colleague who usually lectured on Leibniz asked Russell to stand in for him one year, and Russell, who had not had an opportunity to study Leibniz in detail, welcomed the challenge. The book grew out of his lectures. Although Russell disagreed with the main tenets of Leibniz’s philosophy, aspects of it remained influential in his thought.

By the time he was giving his Leibniz lectures Russell had been persuaded by Moore to abandon idealism. Shortly afterwards his interest in the philosophy of mathematics – specifically, in the question whether mathematics can be supplied with logical foundations, and thus be rendered certain – was given powerful impetus by his encounter with the Italian logician Giuseppe Peano at the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in July 1900. Peano was responsible for certain technical developments in logic which suggested to Russell ways of carrying out the desired reduction of mathematics to logic. He avidly read Peano’s works, then began to improve, extend, and apply the methods they contained. In the first flush of excitement, and in just a few months, he wrote a complete draft of what was to prove his first major treatise,
The Principles of Mathematics
. He worked on revisions and improvements for another year, and the book was published in 1903. In writing a Preface for a new edition in 1937 Russell said that he remained convinced of the truth of the book’s fundamental thesis, which is ‘that mathematics and logic are identical’.

The intellectual intoxication felt by Russell in 1900 never thereafter returned. For one thing, events in his private life during the following years brought dark clouds. He found that he had lost his love for his wife, and told her so. ‘I believed in those days (what experience has taught me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should speak the truth,’ he later wrote (
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151). The result was great misery for them both in the nine further years during which they shared an address. At nearly the same time a revolution was wrought in his emotional life by witnessing the suffering in illness of Evelyn Whitehead, wife of his former teacher Alfred North Whitehead. Seeing her in the intense isolation endured by one in agony, his view of the world suddenly changed; to that moment he subsequently dated his pacifism, his longing for children, the beginnings of a heightened aesthetic sensibility, and a profound sense that each of us is ultimately and irremediably alone. The experience is movingly described in his
Autobiography
.

In his mathematical work, which otherwise might have afforded him consolation, there occurred a similarly grave upheaval. This was the discovery of a contradiction at the very heart of the project Russell was trying to carry out. The contradiction and its importance is described in its due place in chapter 2 below. Its effect was to stall Russell’s work for over two years, during which he stared at a blank sheet of paper wondering how to proceed. By this time he was at work on
Principia Mathematica
, which began life as an intended second volume to
The Principles of Mathematics
. This putative second volume was to have contained the technical working-out of the ideas sketched in
The Principles
, together with a fuller treatment of a number of difficulties left over from it; but it quickly became apparent that much more was needed if he was to achieve the project’s aim, which was ‘to show that all pure mathematics follows from purely logical premisses and uses only concepts definable in logical terms’ (
MMD
57). Russell therefore invited Whitehead’s collaboration, and from then until 1910 most of his mental energies were devoted to the production of this monumental work. Its philosophical aspects, and the actual writing out of the technical material, fell to Russell; Whitehead, among other things, made significant contributions to the notation and a great deal of working out of proofs.

Russell reports that he worked at
Principia Mathematica
for eight months each year, and from ten to twelve hours a day. When the manuscript was at last delivered to Cambridge University Press it was so huge that it had to be transported there in a four-wheeler carriage. The Syndics of the Press calculated that the book would bring them a loss of £600, and said that they were willing to bear only half that sum. Russell and Whitehead persuaded the Royal Society to help by voting a £200 grant, but the remainder had to be supplied from their own pockets. As a result, their financial reward for years of work on this vast project was a loss of £50 each.

But the true rewards were great. In the course of the endeavour, and arising from it, Russell published some very important philosophical papers. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the unusually young age of 35. His place in the history of logic and philosophy was secured. Much that Russell later attempted and achieved in his many spheres of activity was made possible by his having earned the Olympian stature conferred by authorship of
Principia
.
Russell was not idle in other respects during these years of intellectual labour. His interest in politics remained lively; he campaigned for free trade, and stood as a parliamentary candidate on behalf of female suffrage at the Wimbledon by-election of 1907. Votes for women was an intensely unpopular cause whose champions regularly suffered abuse and even violence. Russell might eventually have entered Parliament had his agnosticism not stood in the way; he was about to stand as a candidate for Bedford in the 1911 election when his local campaign organizers learned that he would not conceal his agnosticism from the electors, and would not go to church. They accordingly chose another candidate.

But something much more congenial then offered: Trinity appointed him to a five-year lectureship, so Russell assumed the life of a don, and turned his attention to writing a little book that became a classic:
The Problems
of
Philosophy
, which remains to this day one of the best short introductions to the subject.

One unexpected result of Russell’s political activities was romance. In 1910, while living near Oxford, he helped canvass for the local candidate Philip Morrell whose wife Lady Ottoline Morrell he had known in childhood. Their re-encounter blossomed in the following year into a love affair. Russell wished to marry her, which would have meant his divorcing Alys and Ottoline’s divorcing Philip. But Ottoline did not wish to leave Philip, so the affair remained adulterous, with the compliance of Philip but the bitter opposition of Alys and her family. Russell and Alys separated and did not meet again for 40 years, although they were in the meantime divorced, early in the 1920s.

Ottoline was indisputably good for Russell. ‘She laughed at me’, Russell wrote, ‘when I behaved like a don or a prig, and when I was dictatorial in conversation. She gradually cured me of the belief that I was seething with appalling wickedness which could only be kept under by iron selfcontrol. She made me less self-centred and less self-righteous’ (
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214).