Bertrand Russell: Philosophy in an Hour

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007466245
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Russell in just one hour.

Russell’s Life and Works

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 into one of the most distinguished aristocratic families in England. This was the height of the Victorian era, when the British Empire was approaching its apogee. Hypocrisy was the order of the day, amidst widespread social and psychological repression. However, both Russell’s parents held enlightened liberal views – his father lost his seat in Parliament for espousing the cause of birth control.

Young Bertrand’s childhood was overshadowed by death. Both his parents, and his sister, died by the time he was five. His parents had instructed that their two sons be placed under the guardianship of an atheist friend, but this was contested in the courts by young Bertrand’s powerful grandfather, Lord Russell, who had twice been prime minister. The court overruled the parents’ will, so Bertrand and his older brother were taken to live with Lord and Lady Russell at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, on the outskirts of London. Queen Victoria herself wrote to congratulate Lady Russell, adding, ‘I trust that your grandsons will grow up all that you could wish.’ (As Bertrand Russell wryly commented many years later, this wish ‘was denied her’.) Within a year Lord Russell himself was dead. Young Bertrand lay in bed dreading the moment when Lady Russell too would die, an event that he childishly assumed was bound to happen soon. He focused his mind on the thought of his beloved parents, a fading picture of certainty, sweetness, and light.

Life at Pembroke Lodge was very different. Lady Russell was a willful puritan, though paradoxically she retained the liberal political views of her husband. Her ‘angel child’, as she called Bertrand, was brought up under a regime of cold baths before breakfast and blinkered morality. Such matters as sex and trade were simply not mentioned. Lady Russell decided that her angel should remain uncontaminated by contact with other children. He was educated at home by tutors, with occasional lessons from his amiable elder brother Frank, who was seven years Bertrand’s senior and evidently considered a lost cause, for he was sent away to school.

It was Frank who introduced Bertrand to the subject that would transform his life. Russell describes how at the age of eleven he began studying geometry under his brother’s tuition. They started working their way through Euclid’s Elements, and, in Russell’s telling words, ‘I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world.’ Even when they came to Euclid’s difficult fifth proposition, Russell found no difficulty, prompting a surprised comment from Frank. Again in Russell’s own words: ‘This was the first time it had dawned upon me that I might have some intelligence.’ In his isolation he had simply had no one with whom to compare himself. But for the adolescent Bertrand this was something more than the rapturous discovery of some hitherto undreamed of wonder. The way that Russell regarded mathematics was characteristically original from the start. Frank explained to Bertrand that Euclid had established the whole of geometry by proof, thus making its theorems utterly certain and incontestable. But Bertrand was disappointed to discover that Euclid had in fact based his geometry upon a series of basic axioms. What about proofs for these? Frank replied that there weren’t any. Bertrand obstinately refused to go on until Frank produced some. Frank explained to Bertrand that he just had to accept these axioms or they would not be able to progress further. Because Bertrand was dying to learn more of this wonderful geometry, he reluctantly accepted. This love of the formal beauty and certainty of mathematics, as well as the pressing desire for these to be based upon some bedrock of unquestionable truth, would keep Russell alive for the next thirty years.

This is no fanciful exaggeration. Russell’s life at Pembroke Lodge remained unhealthily solitary, his feelings for his fellow human beings almost entirely sublimated. He relates how he would frequently go into the garden to look down over Richmond Park and the far vista of the Thames valley. Here he would gaze at the sunset and think about committing suicide. The only thing that prevented him from taking his life was the wish to discover more about the ‘delicious’ abstract beauty of mathematics. He explains how he was searching ‘for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite… it’s like a passionate love for a ghost…. I have always desired to find some justification for the emotions inspired by certain things that seemed to stand outside human life and to deserve feelings of awe.’

The psychology of these words would seem transparent. But Russell’s unconscious desire to be reunited with his parents does not explain away his passionate involvement in mathematics. From his earliest years he exhibited an exceptional clarity of thought which was ideally suited to mathematics. Yet this clarity often masked near impenetrable complexities, and not only in mathematics. Russell would always feel the need to give clear and candid expression to his thoughts, yet things would seldom be as clear-cut as he wished them to appear. His solitary cogitations soon led him to reject any woolly notion of God, especially the personal God so beloved by his grandmother. Throughout his life Russell would profess, with rational and persuasive clarity, his atheistic belief – his ‘vain search for God’ – yet at the same time retain an attitude toward mathematics that he expressed in terms of mystic religiosity. He believed in the abstract world of mathematics and was driven to search in it for the certainty that had, during his early childhood, vanished from his life.

At sixteen Russell was sent to a London crammer, where he was a boarder for almost two years. The pupils were mainly being crammed for the army exams, and Russell found them a decidedly coarse and ignorant lot. This accurate assessment of most potential army officers would unfortunately colour Russell’s entire view of humanity to the end of his days. Despite his much avowed concern for the plight of his fellow beings, Russell would always find it difficult to disguise a certain aristocratic aloofness. This would intensify into disdain when he found himself confronted by those who chose to devote their lives to less noble pursuits, such as soldiers, statesmen, and authorities of any sort.

In 1890, at the age of eighteen, Russell won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where Isaac Newton had studied and taught. For Russell’s first three years he studied mathematics, which proved a bitter disappointment. For the most part, British mathematics had languished in the 150 years since Newton’s day, and nowhere was this more apparent than at his alma mater. The celebrated ‘wrangler’ examinations, designed to discover the finest mathematicians in Cambridge, required little more than formidable rote learning and ever more ingenious mathematical conjuring tricks. This was a mockery of the abstract beauty which had so inspired Russell, and in his fourth year he turned in disgust to philosophy.

Here he discovered the abstract world to end all abstract worlds, in the form of the all-embracing metaphysical system first conceived by the early-nineteenth-century German philosopher Hegel. A modern variant of Hegel’s Absolute Idealism was taught at Cambridge by J. M. E. McTaggart. According to this, both time and matter were unreal. Only the Absolute Spirit, which contained everything, had reality. This ultimate reality was a whole, whose parts were all interrelated. Russell would liken this whole to a jelly: the moment you touched one part of it, the whole quivered. Yet unlike a jelly, this whole could not be cut up into separate parts. According to McTaggart, although this ultimate reality existed in an idealistic world above and beyond the so-called reality we experienced, it was still possible to deduce its nature. This could be done by starting from certain self-evident truths and just two empirical premises – namely, that something exists, and that it has parts. As is evident, this Absolute Idealism not only uncannily resembled the world of mathematics, it also went beyond it, subsuming the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Russell’s Life and Works
• Further Information
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher