One of the greatest minds of the
twentieth century, our friend Bertrand Russell has received a fair share of our
attention throughout several sections of this book, including this one. It will
be fairer still, if we devote the last entry in the Russell series here
to a brief overview of his philosophy. Seeing the merit of making it a stock
entry, for the time being, we shall follow Britannica’s narrative on
this subject (no harm in that, as Britannica’s narrative follows the
ultimate authority in this matter, which is Russell’s own autobiography).
Turning it into an original entry will have to be the task of the next stage of
my work.
Like myself, Russell fell in love
with mathematics at a very early age, but already at the tender age of 11 he
was up for a major disappointment, when he learned that not only was logical
certainty unattainable in the empirical matters, but that the delightful
certainties of mathematics were in fact bogus certainties, because the great
axioms of geometry for instance could not be proven, but had to be accepted on
trust. Later in his life he would come up with a supremely instructive dictum
concerning mathematics: Mathematics may be defined
as a subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what
we are saying is true. For the record, I learned the very same fact
only around the late age of fourteen, and rather than being disillusioned by
the revelation, found it very comforting, bringing mathematics down for me from
the lofty pedestal, where seated, she had started to look rather frightening,
but thus dethroned could become a friend, instead of an idol.
Russell’s particular situation
set the pattern of his philosophical career. He was resolved not to be beguiled
by man’s pretensions to knowledge, or by unbacked assumptions either about the
foundations of knowledge or about what may be said to exist. Henceforth, one of
his primary aims was to inquire “how much we can be
said to know and with what degree of certainty or doubtfulness.”
In 1898, with G. E. Moore (G. E.
stand for George Edward, but Moore detested the full name and preferred
his name to be introduced by just the two letters) leading the way (see my
entry on Moore in the Significant section), he rebelled against
Idealism, and became an Empiricist, a Positivist, and a physical Realist, for
the rest of his philosophical career.
His career may be said to have
involved three main aims, under the premise that the scientific view of the
world is largely the correct view. The most fundamental and pervasive aim was
the one already mentioned of paring down to a minimum and to their simplest
expression the pretensions of human knowledge. (This aim manifested itself in
such books as An Inquiry Into Meaning And Truth, 1940, and Human
Knowledge: Its Scope And Limits, 1948.) The second aim involved the linking
of logic and mathematics, as in his first major work The Principles of
Mathematics (1903), with the aim to show that mathematics can be
deduced from a very small number of logical principles. The third aim was analytic:
assuming that it was possible to infer something about the world from the
language in which it is (correctly) described, Russell analyzed that language
down to its minimum requirements, atomic facts, in order to avoid unnecessarily
postulating the existence of the objects denoted by descriptive phrases, such
as “The present king of France.” This
aim manifested itself in the so-called Theory of Descriptions, in the
philosophy of Logical Positivism, and in a number of books, such as The
Analysis of Mind (1921) and The Analysis of Matter (1927),
the main thesis of which is that mind and matter are different structurings
of the same “neutral” elements.
After an interlude of work on A
Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), Russell
embarked on his major work on logic and mathematics, culminating in the three
volumes of Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), written in
collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead (see a separate entry on him in the Significant
Others section).
Being a trained mathematical
linguist, as one of my several professional pursuits, needless to say, I
studied Russell’s mathematical and linguistic theories at Moscow University,
and I am anxious to write about them at length, but only in the future, when I
am done with the first sustainable working draft of this giant work.
Regrettably, I shall not be able to dwell on this subject here and now, as I
have to move on. Talking about Russell’s other literary pursuits, I need to
mention his 1927 Why I Am Not A Christian, which I discuss in another
place; his ubiquitous History of Western Philosophy, which I quote and
discuss in numerous other places, and his priceless Autobiography, in
three volumes, published at the very end of his long life, which I intend to buy,
reread, and comment on, at a later time.
One thing that can’t be omitted
in any discussion of Bertrand Russell is his internationally famous pacifist
passion, which first revealed itself at the beginning of the twentieth century,
when he was strongly opposed to Britain’s Boer War, and later protested against
World War I, which landed him in jail for a while, where he wrote Introduction
To Mathematical Philosophy (published in 1919), and started work on The
Analysis Of Mind (1921). His political activism as a pacifist became especially
prominent in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, as he protested against the
development of the nuclear arms, and later for nuclear disarmament. His
activity was to land him in prison again, at the age of 89. He took part in all
anti-war activities of the times, including protests against the American war
in Vietnam. Resentfully dissatisfied with the final decision of the Warren
Commission on the assassination of JFK, he chaired an international commission
of his own on Who Killed Kennedy? (Guess
how successful that commission was in its findings!)
The personal bottom line of this
is that, despite all my differences with Bertrand Russell on a wide variety of
issues (including my deeply religious background against his materialistic
agnosticism), I have always had a profound admiration for him, since childhood,
and that admiration has never subsided. In practical terms, this means that as
soon as I come into extra time, having completed the working draft of this
book, I shall take time to write much more on him than I already have, and I
will enjoy every moment of getting back to my memories of Russell and onward,
to the realities of our present-day mystical communication.
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