The Achievement of Bertrand Russell

“I see, in my mind’s eye”, observed Bertrand Russell, “a world of glory and joy, a world where minds expand, where hope remains undinned, and where what is noble is no longer condemned as treachery to this or that paltry aim.” That was the vision of the only Renaissance figure of our century. Just as the physicist Galileo composed poetry, so was the mathematical philosopher Russell an artist in words. Russell, with his ‘History of Western Philosophy’ added a classic to English literature. Seldom in philosophical writing, has such lucid and witty prose enlivened the pages of professional philosophers since Berkeley and Hume.

“Mathematics, rightly viewed”, he wrote, “possesses not only truth but supreme beauty–a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” In this sense, Russell’s finest prose is the nearest approximation to mathematical clarity. Here is an example from his essay ‘The Free Man’s Worship’, which is not only a piece of literature, but also a self-revealing analysis in the intellectual unfolding of his personal philosophy: “United with his fellowmen by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a good that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long...for Man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day, disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life, proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment his knowledge and condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.”

Russell was pre-eminently a philosopher who made fundamental contributions to mathematical logic and epistemology. He was also an elegant popularizer whose writings range from his brilliant expositions of modern physics to ‘popular’ forays into political philosophy. However, he cannot be regarded as a mathematician in the formal sense of the term. In fact he began his professional career as an exponent of the philosophy of Leibniz whom he regarded as “one of the supreme intellects of all time”. For Russell recognized Leibniz as “a pioneer in mathematical logic, of whom he perceived the importance when no else did.” Russell’s investigations in the wake of Leibniz, Peano and Frege, resulted in his ‘Principles of Mathematics’, whose purpose was “first to show that all mathematics follows from symbolic logic, and secondly, to discover, so far as possible, what are the principles of logic itself.” This led on to the ‘Principia Mathematica’ in collaboration with Prof. A. N. Whitehead. And the ‘Principia Mathematica’ which Russell himself termed as a contribution to ‘Logical Atomism’ is a landmark in the history of logic.

The grandson of Lord John Russell of the Reform Bill of 1832 and a descendant of the Lord Russell who was executed on the scaffold during the time of Charles II, Bertrand Russell was one of the greatest bridge-builders of the twentieth century. For he not only constituted a link between anceltral memory and the English tradition of the aristocratic rebel, but also bridged some of the territories between the ‘two cultures’. Indeed Russell’s comment on Byron in his ‘History of Western Philosophy’ projected him as the aristocratic rebel of his time: “The aristocratic rebel, of whom Byron was in his day the exemplar, is a very different type from the leader of a peasant or proleterian revolt. Those who are hungry have no need of an eleborate philosophy to stimulate or excuse discontent, and anything of a kind appears to them merely, an amusement of the idle rich. They want what others have, not some intangible and metaphysical good...A rebel of this type, if like Marx, he invents a philosophy, invents one solely designed to demonstrate the ultimate victory of his party, not one concerned with values. His values remain primitive; the good is enough to eat and the rest is talk.”

Russell, the aristocratic rebel of the twentieth century, was once known as ‘Prisoner No. 2917’ on the Brixton register. His views on pacifism deprived him of his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge and led to his imprisonment at Brixton. While there, he finished his ‘Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy’ and a review of Dewey’s essays in experimental logic, besides some initial reading for his projected book, ‘The Analysis of Mind.’ And he found himself in the same prison after a 43 years’ interval for pursuing the problem of Vietnam in the streets of London. In fact Russell never forgot that he was an aristocrat. Possibly his ‘Marriage and Morals’ symbolizes the aristocratic rebel’s protest against the moves of middle class society.

In a letter to Sir Charles Snow, Russell made an interesting comment on the ‘two cultures.’ “The separation between science and culture is very much greater than it used to be. In the time of Charles II it did not exist, and in the early nineteenth century there were still many bridges from one territory to the other.” It is well to recall here that Snow, who concerned himself with the widening gap between science and the rest of our culture in his Rede Lecture sparked off an interesting controversy. Sir Charles had not made a plea for universal dilettantism but an attempt to put an end to the cold war between the sciences and the humanities. And Sir Charles’s central observation that literary men did not know such concepts as the second Law of Thermodynamics, which to him constituted the scientific equivalent of “Have you read a play by Shakespeare?” was characterized as a cheap journalistic infelicity by Dr. F. R. Leavis in his polemical Richmond Lecture. The irony of the situation lies in the fact that both Sir Charles and Leavis missed the significance of entropy in referring to the Second law of Thermodynamics. The entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorder. Indeed human achievement itself is based on an aesthetic endeavour to release patterns or negative entropy as the physicists may term it. The release of patterns or negative entropy may range from F. R. Leavis’s reasoning to logic. This leads us on to the scope of scientific reference in modern literature, which paradoxically enough is less concerned with science than was literature in the previous eras. (In fact Lord Russell stated in his book, ‘Has Man a Future?’ that we are suffering from undigested science, and argued that just as the Ptolenaic system of astronomy found its best poetic expression in Dante, so does the modern world await a master mind who could create new epics with poetic feeling.

Aldous Huxley explained the dilemma in his ‘Literature and Science’ by shrewdly remarking that in this scientific age it is enough if science enters poetry by philosophic implication, but nevertheless stressed the case for science as a personal-metaphysical concern of the poet. However, it is necessary to recognize a fundamental point of difference. At its purest, scientific language turns into mathematics, which must be obvious to those who are familiar with the ‘Principia Mathematica.’ Similarly, at its sublimely pure, poetry acquires metaphysical associations. And Gertrude Stein’s oft-quoted line, “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” may be RNA, DNA, polypeptide chains of amino acids to the biological scientists, but is transfigured into a perceptual image in Yeats’s ‘Rose of all roses.’

The man of letters and the scientist are equally concerned with what Huxley termed as the need to “give a purer sense to the words of the tribe.” And Russell’s distinction lay in his formulation of the theory of descriptions, which was an attempt to comprehend “the utility of philosophical syntax in relation to traditional problems.” This theory, originally published in ‘Mind’ in 1905, was neatly summarized by Russell in his ‘History of Western Philosophy’. “By a ‘description’, I mean a phrase such as ‘The Present President of the United States’, in which a person or thing is designated, not by name, but by some property which is supposed or known to be peculiar to him or it. Such phrases had given a lot of trouble. Suppose I say ‘The golden mountain does not exist’, and suppose you ask ‘What is it that does not exist?’ It would seem that, if I say ‘It is the golden mountain’, I am attributing some sort of existence to it. This seemed to imply that the golden mountain is one thing and the round square is another, although neither exists. The theory of descriptions was designed to meet this and other difficulties.”

According to this theory, when a statement containing a phrase of the form ‘the so-and-so’ is rightly analysed, the phrase ‘the so-and-so’ disappears. For example, take the statement ‘Scott was the author of Waverlev.’ The theory interprets this statement as saying:

‘One and only one man wrote Waverley, and that man was Scott’. Or, more fully:

“There is an entity c such that the statement ‘x wrote Waverley’ is true if x is c and false otherwise: moreover c is Scott.”

The first part of this, before the word ‘moreover’ is defined as meaning: ‘The author of Waverley exists (or existed or will exist)’. Thus ‘The golden mountain does not exist’ means:

‘There is no entity c such that ‘x is golden and mountainous’ is true when it is c, but not otherwise.’

With this definition the puzzle as to what is meant when we say ‘The golden mountain does not exist’ disappears. ‘Existence’ according to this theory, can only be averted of descriptions. We can say ‘The author of Waverley exists’ but to say ‘Scott exists’ is bad grammar, or rather bad syntax. This clears up two millenia of middle-headedness about ‘existence’, beginning with Plato’s Theaetetus”

As a popular writer on scientific subjects. Russell was justly famous for the following works: ‘A. B. C. of Atoms’ and ‘A. B. C. of Relativity.’ However, these works do not approach the class which includes the works of men like Eddington, Jeans and Lovell. For ‘The Nature of the Universe’ by Sir Arthur Eddington, ‘The Mysterious Universe’ by Sir James jeans and ‘The Individual and the Universe’ by Prof. Lovell are scientific as well as literary classics. Again Russell’s work on ‘The Analysis of Matter’ is the work of a philosopher who perceived the frontiers of modern physics and philosophy.

Russell’s books on education such as ‘On Education’ and ‘Education and the Social Order’ are not unduly impressive. Equally unimpressive are his works on social questions like ‘Marriage and Morals’ and ‘Conquest of Happiness.’ Here the emphasis is on entertaining the readers; and it is natural for the reader to get a trifle bored in the wake of the initial euphoria. Again Russell cannot be regarded as a political philosopher. For instance, Russell’s ‘power’ and his Reith lectures entitled ‘Authority and the Individual’ are disappointing. Although they are examples of good writing, it is clear that Russell lacked the depth of a Barker or even the virtuosity of a Laski. For Russell lacked the equipment of a political philosopher to reflect deeply on the problem of power in a twentieth-century setting.

“The only philosophy”, commented Russell in ‘Philosophy and Politics’, that affords a theoretical justification of democracy and that accords with democracy in its temper of mind in empiricism. Thus, according to Russell, “The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held but in how they are held; instead of being held dogmatically they are held tentatively.” It is unfortunate that this precept was not followed by the philosopher. To cite an example, Lord Russell’s ‘Unarmed Victory’ is not only a reliable guide for followers of what is euphemistically known as ‘neutralism’ but a masterpiece of Pyrrhonic logic. Like Pyrrho of Elis who came to the conclusion that he could not come to a conclusion, Russell could not distinguish between the aggressor and the victim in his assessment of the Sino-Indian war of 1962–a strange inability on the part of a philosopher who extended the frontier of logic since Aristotle and George Boole. The New Delhi disciples of this modern Pyyrrho had not realized the intrinsic importance of this primer for ‘neutralists’, since in this case India was the victim and not the judge. However, it would be interesting to cite a few examples of Pyrrhonic logic–which must be divorced from symbolic logic. For otherwise it would be an uneasy case of marriage and morals!

“India” wrote Lord Russell had ceased, in fact, though not in form, to be neutral as between East and West and had merely increased the chance of world war.” What was India’s mistake? India’s mistake according to Lord Russell, was that she turned to the West for arms. According to this new Pyrrhonic logic of Bertrand Russell, Egypt and Indonesia, which turned to Russia for arms did not “increase the chance of world war”. Lord Russell believed it was logical to conclude that “rapidly increasing war hysteria” in India. Naturally enough, “the Chinese cease-fire and withdrawal strongly suggested that China was more anxious to put an end to the conflict than is India.”

Lord Russell’s major premise was: “Whenever the question of peace or war is relevant, the merits of either side become insignificant in comparison with the importance of peace.” Ironically enough, the celebrated author of ‘Mysticism and Logic’ evolved a new concept of Pyrrhonic justice, derived from a strange combination of Pyrrhonic logic and the mystique of communism which is even more mystifying than crypto-communism. This Pyrrhonic position resulted in a state of non-debate, since fundamental issues were neither raised or discussed. But the tragedy of the Pyrrhonic position became most apparent in his formulation of the concept of justice. For this concept of Pyrrhonic justice was an extension of his earlier essay in Pyrrhonic logic. Indeed it is a supreme irony that Lord Russell conceived of an International Tribunal which had already deliver red its ‘verdict’. He had also announced that his intention was to give us (an exhaustive portrayal of what happened to the people in Vietnam”. This ‘portrayal’ dramatized Lord Russell’s concept of Pyrrhonic justice. For it gave us a glimpse of what was envisaged by George Orwell in ‘Nineteen Eighty-four’.

It is unfortunate that Russell composed his autobiography at a time when his intellectual powers registered a sharp decline. His autobiography is certainly one of the most valuable social documents of our time. However, these autobiographical volumes lack the sparkle of his earlier works such as ‘Freedom and Organization’, ‘History of Western Philosophy’ and ‘Portraits from Memory.’ While reflecting on this tragic situation, one is reminded of the immortal lines of Shakespeare:

“Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to now.”

Russell’s chief title to fame is based on his fundamental contribution to mathematical logic. Just as the ancestor of Lord Russell lost his head during the reign of Charles II, so did Bertrand Russell lose his head on many occasions in a different sense! Yet, despite his aristocratic waywardness, Russell will be gratefully remembered for having introduced the scientific method in philosophy. And the concluding paragraph in Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy’ could well be his epitaph: “In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and his temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings. To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member. The habit of careful veracity acquired in the practice of this philosophical method can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, whenever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual of understanding. In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.”