Bertrand Russell
From Philosopedia.org
Russell, Bertrand Arthur William [3rd Earl] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970)
Lord Russell was a mathematician, philosopher, and social critic. In 1950 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950), inasmuch as there is no prize for philosophy, leading some critics to joke that the judges must never have read his Collected Stories.
Principia Mathematica (1903), which he co-wrote with Alfred North Whitehead, is generally considered the major work on the subject of mathematical logic. “I personally cannot see,” Paul Edwards has wittily remarked, “how Principia Mathematica could ever have been completed if Russell and Whitehead had not started on it long before they were born.”
In 1905, Russell became a president of the prestigious Rationalist Press Association. His election to the Royal Society pleased him, as did his becoming one of the dozen distinguished British personalities who received the Order of Merit. In his later years, he invariably added FRS and OM to his letterheads.
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The Early Years
Russell came from a distinguished family. One of his ancestors had died on the scaffold, accused of having plotted the assassination of Charles II and his brother, the future James II. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was twice prime minister (1846–1852; 1865–1866) and author of the Reform Bill of 1832. His father (John, Viscount Amberley) was a Liberal, but both his grandfather and father had died by the time he was six, so it is his grandmother who was the major adult influence in his life. His life was a model of liberalism, one in which he fought for such causes as those of women’s suffrage, birth control information for the poor, free trade, defense of the civil rights of conscientious objectors, eliminating the scourge of imperialistic war, and combating governmental tyranny.
In his three-volume Autobiography (1967–1969), Russell wrote that as a boy he rejected personal immortality, that after reading John Stuart Mill he abandoned the first-cause argument and with it all belief in God. “I see no reason whatsoever to believe in immortality,” he wrote to Lord Milford (19 May 1952). “I think that a person is an organization like a cricket club and that one might just as well expect a cricket club to go to heaven when it is dissolved as expect the same thing about oneself.” In the same letter, he commented about his use of his title: “Like Lord Trent I avoid it for trade purposes as my old name has a certain monetary value. Except for trade purposes, I use my title.”
In the Hibbert Journal (October, 1912), Russell used the word “God” as his concept of a sort of world-soul, but thereafter he regretted using the term and discarded all religious language from then on. Russell wrote A History of Western Philosophy (1945), one of his best-known works. His dissident moral and religious views, besides being found in Why I Am Not A Christian (1927), are contained in The Analysis of Mind (1921), The Analysis of Matter (1927), Skeptical Essays (1928), Marriage and Morals (1928), and “Greek Exercises” in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1. Not accepting that Jesus was the most perfect of men, he wrote, “I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put the Buddha and Socrates above him in those respects.” In “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?”, he stated in 1930, “My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.” For him, “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free man. . . . A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.” In a 1947 broadcast, “The Faith of a Rationalist,” he decried “hatred of Jews, oppression of Negroes, contempt for all who are not white,” concluding that it is important that “no supernatural reasons are needed to make men kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.” His essay, “The Free Man’s Worship,” included: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” For Russell, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” He was a member of the British Humanist Association.
The Marriages
Russell’s first marriage in 1894 to an American Quaker friend of Walt Whitman, Alys Pearsall Smith, consisted of a simple London Quaker meeting “without being congratulated by a host of silly fools who don’t think in their hearts that we are to be congratulated.” None of the Russells attended, and Lady Russell in a cool letter announced she had disinherited him.
Although divorced in 1921, and despite his three other marriages, Alys arranged his 78th birthday party in 1950 and wrote him, “I am utterly devoted to thee, and have been for over 50 years.”
When Russell's marriage with Dora broke up, he took as his third wife in 1936 the attractive Oxford undergraduate, Patricia ("Peter") Spence. She had been his children's governess in the summer of 1930.
Russell’s marriage to Ottoline Morrell had been expected to bring him some degree of sexual happiness, for he told friends of his having been disappointed sexually with Alys Pearsall Smith. Russell later wrote that his pyorrhea and bad breath were in part responsible for their breakup. With Ottoline, he tore up “dusty old growths in my mind” and lovingly refused to let her “hide under shady sentimental willow trees,” their little problem being that she believed in God and he did not. At one time, according to Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1993) by Miranda Seymour, she tried convincing Russell that God existed, and in his determination to explain their differences on the subject he started to write a book, The Religion of Contemplation. It was about reverential atheism, but when Ludwig Wittgenstein told him the book was rubbish and its first chapters on the theory of knowledge were untenable, Russell tried to suppress the book.
Ottoline, who found much she liked in both Wittgenstein and in Siegfried Sassoon, also discovered they were not interested in her sexuality, both being homosexual. She then became lovers with “Tiger” Gomme, who had been working on plinths in the garden at a time when she and Russell were not on speaking terms. (Seymour speculates that D. H. Lawrence may have had her in mind when he wrote Lady Chatterley.)
His belief in open marriage led him to Lady Constance Malleson, whose stage name was Colette O’Niel. Although they scarcely knew each other, he wrote, “The first time that I was ever in bed with her (we did not go to bed the first time we were lovers, as there was too much to say), we heard suddenly a shout of bestial triumph in the street. I leapt out of bed and saw a Zeppelin falling in flames.”
The war, he found, had further distracted him, and in 1915 he recalled the moment: “The thought of brave men dying in agony was what caused the triumph in the street. Colette’s love was in that moment a refuge to me, not from cruelty itself, which was unescapable, but from the agonising pain of realising that that is what men are.”
Russell later married Dora Black (1920) and became a father of John and Katharine. With Dora, he founded the Beacon Hill School, which was progressive in avoiding authoritarianism along with democratic in encouraging students’ individuality.
He then married Edith Finch, who had taught at Bryn Mawr (where his first wife, Alys, had been a cousin of one of its presidents)
Caroline Moorehead’s biography, Bertrand Russell, A Life (1933), states that his most enduring lovers were Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lady Constance Malleson but that he had slept with Miriam Brudno, Helen Dudley, Celeste Holden, Katherine Mansfield, and (probably) Barry Fox and T. S. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne.
His multiple marriages and controversial views led to his being denied a teaching position at the City College of New York (CCNY), for he was challenged by a parent, the Episcopal bishop, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy as one who likely would undermine the “health and morals” of his students.
The Later Years
In his later years, he was active for nuclear disarmament, using civil disobedience to draw attention to his campaigns. In 1967 he organized an international tribunal, with Jean-Paul Sartre as chairman, which tried the U.S. government on charges of participating in war crimes in Vietnam. The tribunal found the United States government guilty, and Russell regarded American foreign policy as a detriment to world peace. As his biographer, Alan Wood, has said, the world was never again the same once Russell had set the minds of men on the march.
Moorehead, however, tells how Russell in 1960 was “Svengalied” by Ralph Schoenman, an American graduate student at the London School of Economics, who she describes made Russell into something of a puppet for his own causes. Schoenman was a left-wing graduate student at the London School of Economics, managed Russell’s affairs for eight years, wasted large amounts of money, destroyed a number of old friendships, and led to a decline in Russell’s reputation among many scholars.
As for Russell’s ever being a Communist, he was not. In China he described himself as a “Marxist,” never a Communist, Royden Harrison has pointed out in Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives (Summer 1995).
Nicholas Griffin, of McMaster University in Canada, has edited Russell’s letters, the volume I (1992) of which contains tales of his “ferocious” longing for Lady Ottoline, thoughts to Santayana, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s devastating criticism of Russell’s theory of knowledge. T. S. Eliot, reviewing Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, remarked, “Mr. Russell supposes that he is not a Christian, because he is an Atheist. . . . As we become used to Atheism, we recognize that Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity. In fact, several varieties. There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism of our friend Mr. J. M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr. Russell,” concluding that Russell’s book “is a curious, and a pathetic, document.”
James Thrower, however, expresses the popular view in his Short History of Western Atheism (1971): “Russell’s atheism is classic, not to say monumental.”
McMaster University is home for the Bertrand Russell Archives.
Upon his death, Russell was cremated and his ashes were scattered "over the hills" in Wales.
On Humanism
In 1951, when asked specifically about humanism, he wrote Warren Allen Smith]:
- You ask me whether I call myself a Scientific Humanist or a Naturalistic Humanist. I am not in the habit of giving myself labels, which I leave to others. I should not have any inclination to call myself humanist, as I think, on the whole, that the non-human part of the cosmos is much more interesting and satisfactory than the human part. But if anybody feels inclined to call me a Humanist, I shall not bring an action for libel.
In 1956, he wrote Smith, who had been told by Corliss Lamont that Russell was a naturalistic humanist:
- I do not object to your classifying me as a “naturalistic humanist,” though it is not a description I should ever think of calling myself. When I have to describe my own philosophy I call myself a “logical atomist.” I have read the material that you sent with your letter, but I have nothing to add except that my reason for not liking the word “humanist” is that I regard human beings as a trivial accident which would be regrettable if it were not so unimportant.
(Antony Flew in A Dictionary of Philosophy, noted that both Wittgenstein and Russell later abandoned the logical atomist label.)
- Original letters are in the Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Russell's Key Role in the Development of the Peace Symbol
- Photographer Ken Kolsbun and journalist Mike Sweeney, in Peace: The Biography of a Symbol (National Geographic, 2008), document that Russell, while working in the mid-1950s with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (C.N.D.), encouraged the organization to create a unifying symbol.
- Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector and textile designer from Twickenham who died in 1985 at the age of 71, "had been toying with the idea of using a Christian cross motif, which he presented at the inaugural C.N.D. meeting on Feb. 17, 1958."
Steven Heller, reviewing the book, wrote,
- But [Holtom] soon altered his plan, after the police violently disbanded a protest rally, preferring to design a symbol without religious connotations — one that would leave in the public mind an indelible image signifying only nuclear disarmament.
- According to an article in The Spectator, [Holtom's] design was a circle with a “cross inside it, only the arms of the cross had slipped and were drooping against the lower sides of the circle.” This motif (also known as a crow’s foot) combined the semaphore letters “N” (for “nuclear”) and “D” (for “disarmament”). But not only did he design the symbol, he also choreographed the marches. And he helped develop banners, streamers and poles on which the circle symbols (affectionately called “lollipops”) were mounted. “I intended the lollipops to be stuck into the ground on their wood laths at stopping places so that they would appear like a Field of Remembrance in which a great family picnic was taking place,” Holtom wrote in a 1961 article in Peace News.
Kathryn Westcott of BBC News has elaborated about Kolsbun's biography of the symbol:
- American pacifist Ken Kolsbun, who corresponded with Mr Holtom until his death in 1985, says the designer came to regret the connotation of despair and had wanted the sign inverted.
- "He thought peace was something that should be celebrated," says Mr Kolsbun, who has spent decades documenting the use of the sign. "In fact, the semaphore sign for U in 'unilateral' depicts flags pointing upwards. Mr Holtom was all for unilateral disarmament."
- Mr Kolsbun charts how it was transported across the Atlantic and took on additional meanings for the Civil Rights movement, the counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s including the anti-Vietnam protests, and the environmental, women's and gay rights movements. He also argues that groups opposed to those tendencies tried to use the symbol against them by distorting its message.
- How the sign migrated to the US is explained in various ways. Some say it was brought back from the Aldermaston protest by civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, a black pacifist who had studied Gandhi's techniques of non-violence.
- Mr Kolsbun describes how in just over a decade, the sign had been carried by civil rights "freedom" marchers, painted on psychedelic Volkswagens in San Francisco, and on the helmets of US soldiers on the ground in Vietnam.
- The peace sign was adopted by the counter-culture movement. "The sign really got going over here during the 1960s and 70s, when it became associated with anti-Vietnam protests," he told the BBC News website. As the combat escalated, he says, so did the anti-war protests and the presence of the symbol. "This, of course, led some people to condemn it as a communist sign," says Mr Kolsbun. "There has always been a lot of misconception and disinformation about it."
- As the sign became a badge of the burgeoning hippie movement of the late 1960s, the hippies' critics scornfully compared it to a chicken footprint, and drew parallels with the runic letter indicating death.
- In 1970, the conservative John Birch Society published pamphlets likening the sign to a Satanic symbol of an upside-down, "broken" cross.
- While it remained a key symbol of the counter-culture movement throughout the 1970s, it returned to its origins in the 1980s, when it became the banner of the international grassroots anti-nuclear movement.
- CND has never registered the sign as a trademark, arguing that "a symbol of freedom, it is free for all". It has now appeared on millions of mugs, T-shirts, rings and nose-studs. Bizarrely, it has also made an appearance on packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes. A decade ago, the sign was chosen during a public vote to appear on a US commemorative postage stamp saluting the 1960s.
- The symbol that helped define a generation of baby boomers may not be as widely used today as in the past. It is in danger of becoming to many people a retro fashion item, although the Iraq war has seen it re-emerge with something like its original purpose.
Humor Of
Trevor Banks, claiming that Russell was "by far the wittiest of the major philosophers, admitted with a smile that this “is a bit like saying Margaret Thatcher was the prettiest of the British Prime Ministers.”
Banks, at an annual conference of the Bertrand Russell Society, gave examples of Lord Russell's humor.
His Views
As for belief, Russell wrote, “I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.” Critics have lamented certain of Russell’s views. In 1918, for example, he wrote to Ottoline Morrell, “I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where no one reads. Prison is horribly like that. Imagine if you knew you were a delicious book and some Jew millionaire bought you and bound you uniform with a lot of others.”
Caroline Moorehead has pointed out that his opinions on blacks were equally disagreeable. As for another minority, he had “little but contempt for homosexuals. . . . Like [D. H.] Lawrence, Russell came to dislike and disapprove of homosexuality: ‘Lawrence has the same feeling against sodomy as I have,’ he wrote to Ottoline in 1915. ‘You had nearly made me believe there is no great harm in it, but I have reverted; and all the examples I know confirm me in thinking it sterilizing.’ The examples were Strachey and Keynes; and they knew it.”
David E. White of St. John Fisher College, in a paper on "Russell and Horace Liveright" that was read at Monmouth University in June 2007 at the annual meeting of the Bertrand Russell Society, described how Bertrand Russell stayed with Liveright during his 1927 and 1929 lecture tours. He then describes Russell's use of nigger:
- Russell's letter to Dora of 11 October 1927 gives an account of the evening [at the Ebony Club in Harlem, attended also by Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Dorothy Peterson]. The letter is omitted from the Griffin collection, quoted in a sanitized form by Ray Monk, and more fully, but still misleadingly, by Dardis. The offending passage (part of a longer letter on various other matters) begins by explaining to Dora that Harlem is "where the rich niggers live." After naming the participants as best he can recall, Russell tells Dora that he wanted to enjoy himself but fond to his surprise tht when he was expected to dance and flirt with "black ladies" brought to his table, "the mere idea was unspeakably revolting" so he left and went home. In a third racial reference Russell calls the women "negro ladies got up like Americans," and then tells Dora that although he felt "jungle poison" invading his soul, "I believe you would have enjoyed it. I am too old." [Tom Daris, Firebrand: the Life of Horace Liveright, Random House, 1995, p. 147]
- The first point to remember in reading this letter is it was written barely a fortnight after Russell informed Dora of his having done a "silly thing," of having sex with a member of the staff at their school and letting the cook find out. Nicholas Griffin, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, London: Routledge, 2001), 26 August 1927]. Things were not going well at the school, and Russell, an ocean away, had to try to convince Dora he was not actually suffering since that would depress her only more, but also that he had brought his lusts under control despite Liveright's efforts to show him a good time. There is no denying Russell's racism, but the point of the anecdote as told to Dora has more to do with his having to leave right after is indiscretion than with racial prejudice.
- Daris quotes Russell in such a way that the Harlem anecdote seems almost unrelated to the point about not taking up with women, whereas in Russell's telling the anecdote is offered as proof to Dora that he has not taken up with women. Griffin omits this letter entirely, and Monk quotes only part of the passage regarding Liveright, leaving out Russell's use of the N-word (Monk, 92). Only a few a pages later (104) Monk quotes the passage on the inferiority of Negroes from Marriage and Morals, acknowledging tat Russell had it changed in later editions. What concerns Monk with regard to the Harlem anecdote is that Russell seemed to be putting Down by suggesting she would enjoy what he found disgusting.
- The other point of relevance regarding the Harlem episodes is that whatever may be the case with Russell's racism and sexism, Liveright was an important figure in what came to be called the Harlem Renaissance and encouraged a number of black authors. For example, Liveright published Jean Toomer's Cane, the first purely literary book by an American black (Dardis, 270), at a loss long before the public was prepared to accept it as a classic.
His Impact
Richard Rorty has written that Russell “is arguably the most influential philosopher to have written in English in this century,” adding that John Dewey and Thomas Kuhn are his only plausible rivals for that position. However, in light of Wittgenstein’s, Quine’s, and Sellars’s undermining of Russell’s logical atomism, Rorty has written that “historians are more likely to describe [Russell] not as the Galileo of his discipline, but as the founder of a relatively short-lived and provincial school of thought.”
Dr. Paul Edwards, who wrote the Introduction to his Why I Am Not A Christian (1957), wrote of Russell in 1957,
- Russell is widely regarded as the greatest living philosopher. He has made important contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics, the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of science, and almost every other department of philosophy. He is also renowned for the graceful and witty style in which he expresses his ideas.
- Philosophy has not by any means been the only interest in Russell's life. He is the author of important books on education, partly based on his own experimental school which he founded in 1927. His book Marriage and MOrals (1929) created a great stir by its advocacy of a sexual moral code very much opposed to that officially sanctioned in our society. For his radical views in politics and morals and his outspoken criticisms of religion Russell has been bitterly denounced and persecuted. During the First World War he was an ardent pacifist. He was dismissed from his positions at Trinity College, Cambridge, and sentenced to six months in prison. In 1940 he was invited to become Professor of Philosophy at City College, New York. This appointment was judicially annulled on the ground that Russell was likely to undermine the "health and morals" of his students. Elsewhere, however, Russell's work has received due recognition. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and holds numerous distinguished awards including the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
An indication that future critics will continue to find fault with Russell is found in a 1996 work by Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921, in which the author presents the sage as a sage but one who was disturbed, not merely egoistical and cold, was blind to others’ sufferings, and wore out his lovers with his obsessions. A follow-up work, however, helped indicate that future critics can be expected to find fault with Monk.
In keeping with one of his statements, “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite,” a group of devotees publishes a quarterly: (Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, Carman Hall, Rm. 360 Lehman College-CUNY, 250 Bedford Park Blvd West, Bronx, NY 10468, USA) and has a webpage. They also meet annually, toasting “Bertie” with his favorite scotch, Red Hackle. In addition, Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives is published twice a year by the McMaster University Library Press.
Archives and Audio Materials
Russell can be seen and heard online discussing the following topics: :
- "Present Perplexities"
- "Obsolete Ideas"
- "The Modern Mastery of Nature"
- "The Limits of Human Power"
- "Conflict and Unification"
- "Achievement of Harmony"
- "Reflections on Being 80"
Sveinbjorn Thordarson's website has a thorough collection of Russell speeches, interviews, and audio recordings, including a Woodrow Wyatt interview, Russell's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and various video recordings. (Site may temporarily not be working.)
History Channel] has a video of Russell's being interviewed
The Bertrand Russell Archives are at McMaster in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
The online Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography has an article by Wesley Hromatko about the Russell Family.
(See entry for Baker Brownell. Also, see Bertrand Russell, Humor of); the Wikipedia entry; and the Bertrand Russell Society pages.)
{CE; CL; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; EU, John L. McKenney; FUK; HAB; HNS2; JM; PA; RAT; RE; Richard Rorty, The New Republic, 2 December 1996;TRI; TSV; TYD; WAS, 24 February 1951 and 9 May 1956}
