Bertrand Russell

Towering Apostle of Rationality

With the death of Bertrand Russell, a dazzling flash of light on the contemporary horizon is extinguished. It marks the end a ninety-seven year career of “one of our time’s most brilliant spokesmen of rationality and humanity, and a fearless champion of free speech and free thought in the West,” as the committee for Nobel Prize for Literature in making the award described him. Mathematician at 30, philosopher at 50, apostle and prophet at 80 Russell was a sociologist and a historian and was hailed as one of the world’s greatest pacifists.

Bertrand Russell was born at Trelleck, in Monmouthshire, on May 18, 1872. His father was Viscount Amberley, son of Lord John Russell famous for the first Reform Bill of 1832. His mother was Kate Stanley, daughter of Barn Stanley of Alderly. His earliest love was mathematics. His interest shifted to philosophy particularly theory of knowledge, and then to science education, sociology and, finally, politics. In each of these subjects Russell has written books of great originality and incisiveness. He developed a style of his own, distinguished by urbanity, lucidity and genial wit. He became, one of the most widely read of authors and wielded an all-pervasive influence on the climate of thought.

Logic which he prefers to call “logical atomism” is the basis of Russell’s philosophy. He was a consistent monist and a philosophical materialist, with some leaning toward behaviourism and pragmatism. Russell became an unbeliever and agnostic at a very early age and remained so to the end. This agnosticism, however, left room in him for a large measure of what can only be termed the essence of the religious spirit. Russell was educated at home by tutors and later went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took the Tripos in moral science in 1894.

In Cambridge, his friends included McTaggart, G. E. Moore, the three Trevelyan brothers and G. Lowes Dickinson. Alfred North Whitehead was his teacher, and later, his collaborator in the writing of that monumental work, the “Principia Mathematica”. Between 1900 and 1910, was his arduous work on Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes from 1910 to 1913. In 1908, Russell was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of England’s highest bodies dedicated to advanced knowledge. He was intensely interested in the politics of his time and was active in the Fabian Society, Free Trade Movement and Women’s Suffrage. On three occasions, he stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate
for the Labour Party.

Always outspoken in the expression of his views, Russell got into trouble with the authorities during the First World War. He was fined £ 400 and was dismissed from his college post for criticising a two-year prison sentence on a conscientious objector. In 1918, he was himself sentenced to six months imprisonment for writing a pamphlet containing pacifist views and criticising the American army for suppressing workers’ strikes.

In 1920, Russell visited Russia, meeting Lenin, Trotsky and Gorki. In 1920-’21, he visited China and saw the people in travail. His book, “The Problem of China”, reveals his passionate love for the Chinese people and his concern for the preservation of political freedom in that country. The following years were spent in travelling and lecturing in England and the United States. His longest stay in United States was from 1938 to 1944. His professional reputation in mathematics was firmly established by this time and his writings during the twenties and thirties were on a wide variety of subjects, bringing him world-wide acclaim and renown.

In his lifetime Russell published over a hundred books and articles. The range and diversity of his interests on which he wrote–politics, economics, ethics, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, the history of philosophy, the logic and philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science, epistemology, education and religion. An inspiration to millions, his own articles, broadcasts, speeches, pamphlets and recent books, arguing the insanity of a nuclear war had become a veritable river of reasonable words.

In 1944, Russell was again appointed Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and he continued to write and lecture and propagate his views with unabated energy. England conferred on him every distinction it could bestow. He received the Order of Merit in 1949. At the end of 1950, Russell went to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prizefor Literature for his book “Marriage and Morals”. “1950”, observes Russell, “beginning with the OM and ending with the Nobel Prize, seems to have marked the apogee of my respectability.” Later, during fifties and sixties, Russell was increasingly drawn into the crusade against atom bomb and was a vigorous participant in the ‘Ban the Bomb’ demonstrations. From classroom and lecture platform, no matter how serious his subject, he has kept innumerable audiences from going to sleep for fear of missing the fun. When he speaks, his sentences are apt to be short and his words clipped. He gets to the point with no extra verbiage, either in talk or writing.

His matrimonial life however has been stormy. He married the sister of Logan Parsall Smith in 1894 who divorced him in 1921. The same year he married Dora Winnifred Black who too divorced him in 1935. His third wife Patricial Helen Spence had been his Secretary, who also divorced him in 1952. The same year he married Edith Finch of New York. In 1931, his brother Frank died and he succeeded to the peerage as the third Earl Russell.

Russell has been likened to Voltaire for his polemical wit and deed, like Voltaire, Russell waged a relentless war on superstition, muddle-headedness, bigotry and intolerance. He was always on the de of the individual as against the hard, in favour of creativity as against conformity, promoting life and growth instead of stultification and death.

No number of quotations can suffice the reader to show the range of his mind or the play of his intelligence. Here is one from his “Nightmares of Eminent Persons.” “Every isolated passion is, in isolation insane; sanity may be defined as a synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its nonfulfilment. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others.” Here are three more: “There are infinite possibilities of error and more cranks take up unfashionable errors than unfashionable truths.” There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.” “To save the world requires faith and courage, faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.”

On May 18, 1962, Russell’s ninetieth birthday was celebrated. In the speech which Russell gave at Festival Hall, he said: “I have a very simple creed; that life and joy and beauty are better than lusty death.” In fact it is this zest for life that moved Russell to act at great personal sacrifice in the cause of public interest.

Tremendous acclaim greeted the publication in March 1967 of the first volume of his Autobiography. Two other volumes soon followed. The Autobiography was not intended by him to be published untll after his death, but the publishers prevailed on him to change his mind since he had outlived most of the people named in it. In the Prologue to his Autobiography he says three passions had governed his life: “The longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the verge of despair.”

To read Russell is to like him and to return to him again and again. No writer that I know of is so consistently rational and stimulating. The picture of him as an old metaphysician stimulates each and everyone alike. His very piercing eyes emit philosophical luminosity. His work, in the words of A. E. Taylor gives a magnificent example of the reduction of mathematics to rigorous deduction from expressly formulated logical principles by exactly specified logical methods. It is a scrutiny of thought, a self-criticism and self-correction of thought to which Plato gave the name, dialectic.

Bertrand Russell! The name evokes magic for me: not the magic which the magician tries to perform at maidan; but a magic of supreme clarity of vision and courage of expression. The magic first entered my life in 1956 with his book “What I Believe”. It has stayed with me ever since and comforts and sustains me. It will sustain generations of men to come. It is a trite thing to say that we have lost Russell. No, we have gained Russell. His life and work are now complete and perfect. His books enshrine a priceless and a peerless heritage. As long as his books are read, as long as the English literature lives, so long will his books live.