Russell - A Very Short Indroduction (5 page)

Russell travelled widely in the 1950s – to Australia, to India, to America again, as well as to continental Europe and Scandinavia – lecturing all the while, and enjoying considerable celebrity. Three years after separating from Peter Spence he married his long-standing American friend, Edith Finch, and they made a honeymoon to Paris; but even on sightseeing jaunts around the city – which neither had ever explored as tourists, for the good reason that both had previously lived there – Russell was recognized and crowds clustered round him.

Travelling and lecturing, as always with Russell, turned into books. The Reith Lectures appeared as
Authority and the Individual
. In 1954 he published
Human Society in Ethics and Politics
, which included his Nobel Prize oration. Because his Nobel Prize was for Literature (the citation nominated
Marriage and Morals
) Russell was prompted to write fiction. In 1912 he had written a novel but not attempted to publish it; now he wrote two collections of short stories, more accurately fables, all with philosophical or polemical intent, called
Satan in the Suburbs
and
Nightmares of Eminent Persons
. In 1956 he published
Portraits From Memory
, a series of sketches of eminent people he had known, and in 1959 he gave the world his intellectual autobiography,
My Philosophical Development
, which summarizes the progress of his views from childhood onwards.

But any idea that Russell had finally entered the Establishment fold, and would subside into grandly respectable and quiescent old age, was mistaken; for Russell saw that the world was beset by a horrifying and rapidly growing danger which he felt it imperative to resist. This was the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. From the mid-1950s until his death in February 1970 he campaigned against weapons and war with the passion of a young man, among other things earning another prison sentence – commuted, in the light of his great age (he was by then in his nineties), to a week in a prison hospital – and in his very last years again earning dislike and hostility, especially for what seemed to be intemperate, ill-judged, and even hysterical opposition to American actions in the Vietnam War. It later transpired that his accusations of war crimes against the United States were based on largely correct information. In the course of these endeavours Russell became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), published two books
– Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare
and
Has Man A Future? –
and was instrumental in establishing the Pugwash Conference and later, with Jean-Paul Sartre, the International War Crimes Tribunal in opposition to the Vietnam War.

The political struggles of Russell’s last 15 years are canvassed in chapter 4 below. By the close of his life, despite bodily age and some infirmity (but he was spry and alert until the end, dying in his 98th year) Russell seemed to have grown younger with time; his grandmother sent him into the world a middle-aged Victorian, and he metamorphosed into an eternally young knight-errant; honest, indomitable, equipped with a formidable intellect and great ability as a writer, who used his gifts – not least among them his extraordinarily incisive powers of reason and wit – to do battle with dragons.

The perspective of time either enlarges or diminishes those who have occupied the public view. Most dwindle into foothills (which is to say, footnotes); a few rise to Himalayan majesty. Among their peaks Russell stands high.

Chapter 2 Logic and philosophy

Introduction

By his own account, Russell’s chief philosophical motive was to find out if anything can be known with certainty. This ambition, identical to that of Descartes, had risen in him as a result of two early intellectual crises: his loss of religious faith, and his disappointment at having to accept unproven axioms as the basis of geometry. His first truly original philosophical endeavour was to show that mathematics rests on logic. Success in this enterprise would have provided a grounding of certainty for mathematical knowledge. The project failed, but a number of important philosophical advances came out of the attempt. Russell then turned to the problems of general philosophy, where certainty is even harder to find. He worked at constructing theories which he hoped would, despite the elusiveness of certainty, provide satisfactory solutions nevertheless. He returned to these problems again and again, developing and changing his views but keeping faith with the analytical techniques derived from his logical work. He felt able, in the end, to claim a measure of success, although he knew that few of his fellow philosophers agreed with him.

When one surveys Russell’s philosophical work, ignoring the fact that it evolved over a very long span, frequently and lengthily interrupted by many other activities, one is surprised at how continuous and logical an evolution it represents. In his own account of his philosophical development Russell states that his philosophical life divides into two, the first part consisting in an early and short-lived flirtation with idealism, the second, inspired by his discovery of new logical techniques, dominating his outlook from then on:

There is one major division in my philosophical work; in the years 1899– 1900 I adopted the philosophy of logical atomism and the technique of Peano in mathematical logic. This was so great a revolution as to make my previous work, except such as was purely mathematical, irrelevant to everything that I did later. The change in these years was a revolution; subsequent changes have been in the nature of an evolution.

(
MPD
11)

The evolution that followed the revolution was considerable, but at every point it was driven by a need to solve problems thrown up by preceding phases, or, if the problems were too great, to find alternative routes forward. This dialectical continuity of concerns shows that Charles Broad’s witticism, ‘Mr Bertrand Russell produces a new system of philosophy each year or so, and Mr G. E. Moore none at all’, although perhaps true of Moore, is not true of Russell, least of all in its hint that there was something capricious about the steps in Russell’s philosophical pilgrimage.

In the years between taking his degree and discovering Peano – roughly, the decade of the 1890s – Russell was under the influence of German idealism as favoured by his teachers at Cambridge. The published version of his Fellowship dissertation was a Kantian account of geometry, but his main allegiance was to Hegel. He wrote a Hegelian account of number, and planned a complete idealist dialectic of the sciences aimed at proving, in Hegel’s style, that all reality is mental.

Russell later dismissed this work, with characteristic robustness, as ‘nothing but unmitigated rubbish’ (
MPD
32). The revolution in his philosophical approach occurred, as we have seen, as a result of his joint revolt against idealism with Moore, and his discovery of the logical work of Peano. This last was particularly significant because it galvanized Russell’s ambition to derive mathematics from logic, and offered the means of doing so. The years between 1900 and 1910 were principally devoted to this task, much valuable philosophical work arising in the process. The project is mooted in
The Principles of Mathematics
(1903), and the detailed attempt to carry it out constitutes
Principia Mathematica
(1910–13). Among the classic philosophical papers produced by Russell on the way is ‘On Denoting’ (1905), some of the ideas in which have been immensely influential in the subsequent history of philosophy.

The philosophical work of these years continued after the associated logical work was brought to an end by the publication of
Principia Mathematica
. Russell set about applying the techniques of analysis developed in this work to the problems of metaphysics (enquiry into the nature of reality) and epistemology (enquiry into how we get and test knowledge). His enduring little classic,
The Problems of Philosophy
(1912), sketches the metaphysical and epistemological views he then held. He proposed to give them more detailed treatment in subsequent writings, and began in 1913 by drafting a large book, posthumously published as
Theory of Knowledge
(1984). But he was dissatisfied with aspects of it, so instead of publishing it in book form he broke it up and published part of it as a series of papers. At the same time a suggestion by Whitehead inspired him to apply logical techniques to the analysis of perception; the result was a set of lectures delivered at Harvard and subsequently published as
Our Knowledge of the External World
(1914). This book, together with a paper entitled ‘The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics’ published in the same year, represents an excursus by Russell into something like phenomenalism. ‘Phenomenalism’ is the view that perceptual knowledge can be analysed in terms of our acquaintance with the fundamental data of sensory experience. (I say ‘something like phenomenalism’ because although Russell half a century later described these views as phenomenalistic, in the original writings they are not unambiguously so; this point is discussed in the appropriate place below.) Four years later, in another series of lectures, Russell applied his analytic method to objects and our talk of them. He called this the ‘Philosophy of Logical Atomism’. At the same time he published what is in effect a popular version of
Principia Mathematica
, setting out the basic ideas of the philosophy of mathematics. This book is entitled
An Introduction
to
Mathematical Philosophy
(1918).

In the 1920s Russell sought to extend and improve the application of his analytic techniques to the philosophy of psychology and physics. The first fruit of this was
The Analysis of Mind
(1921) in which his version of quasi-phenomenalism is applied to the analysis of mental entities. The second was
The Analysis of Matter
(1927), where Russell seeks to analyse the chief concepts of physics, such as force and matter, in terms of events. The argument of this book is strongly realist; Russell did not think it feasible to analyse the basic concepts of physics without admitting that certain entities exist independently of perception of them, which marked the end of any dalliance with phenomenalism. It might also be described as a ‘return’ to realism, because Russell had been committed to a rather swingeing form of realism before writing
Our Knowledge of the External World
.

Having made this return journey from a version of phenomenalism or something close to it, Russell reconsidered problems which he now felt had not been properly dealt with under his phenomenalist assumptions. The result was
An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth
(1940) where he again discusses the relation of experience to contingent knowledge, and
Human Knowledge
(1948), where, among other things, he returns to a matter left inadequately discussed in earlier writings: the important question of non-demonstrative (non-deductive) inference, of the kind generally supposed to be employed in science.

7.
Frontispiece of
The Principles of Mathematics
, published in 1900, with the premiss that mathematics and logic are identical.

Each of these phases in the development of Russell’s thought merits extended discussion, to be found in the works cited in Further reading below. In the following sections I give a summary account of them.

The rejection of idealism

Idealism takes a number of variant forms, but its basic tenet is that reality is fundamentally mental. ‘Idea-ism’ would be a more informative version of the name. It is a technical term of philosophy, and has nothing to do with ordinary senses of the English word ‘ideal’. In one of its forms, as held by Bishop Berkeley, idealism is the thesis that reality ultimately consists of a community of minds and their ideas. One of the minds is infinite, and causes most of the ideas; Berkeley identifies it as God. In later views of the kind espoused by T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, both of whom were much influenced by German idealism, the thesis is that the universe ultimately consists of a single Mind which, so to speak, experiences itself. They argue that our finite, partial, and individual experience, which tells us that the world consists of a plurality of independently existing entities – many if not most of which are material rather than mental – is contradictory or at very least misleading. This plurality of things is mere ‘appearance’, which obscures rather than represents the true nature of reality. This implies an important concomitant of the idealist view, as Russell had learned to accept it: that because plurality is a misleading appearance, the truth is that everything is related to everything else in the universe, and therefore the universe is ultimately a single thing – everything is One. This view is called ‘monism’.

When Moore and Russell rejected idealism in 1898 (the event was marked by publication in that year of Moore’s article ‘The Nature of Judgment’) they opposed both of the chief theses of idealism: that experience and its objects are inextricably mutually dependent, and that everything is one. They thereby committed themselves to ‘realism’, which is the thesis that the objects of experience are independent of experience of them, and to ‘pluralism’, which is the thesis that there are many independent things in the world.