Biographer Appraises Bertrand Russell

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28370, 31 August 1957, Page 3

Biographer Appraises Bertrand Russell

(Reviewed by H.L.G.)

(ertrand Rimell. The Passionstr Sceptic. By Alan Wood. Allen and Unwin. 249 pp. The publishers of this biography of Lord Russell declare roundly: "This book is the first o f Its kind to be published about one of the only two present-day Englishmen certain to be remembered a thousand years hence.’* the biographer, equally roundly, jtates: “Less than half-way through his career Russell had already achieved immortality; his place was secure as a thinker who had made the greatest advances in logic since Greek times.” The layman must accept on trust the second statement, only asking that a biographer make as lucid and comprehensible an exposition as possible of Russell’s achievement as a logician. But before he agrees with the first, he will ask to have the whole of Russell’s thinking on less technical subjects—politics and pacificism, education, religion, marriage and morals—reviewed and related to each other, and to learn something of Russell the man. It must be said at once that Alan Wood—an Australian— meets these requirements very capably. As a student of philosophy himself, who has already written a study of the development of Russell’s philosophy from “The Foundations of Geometry” (1897) to “Human Knowledge” (1948), he is at home among the technical works, and can give as clear an outline of the contents of the celebrated "Piincipia Mathematica” written by Russell in collaboration with A. N. Whitehead -a work which he declares not

more than 20 persons have actually read—and as succinct a summary of Russell’s Theory of Descriptions as could be desired. In his presentation of the popular works, he is impartial, in spite of ■ general bias toward Russell's liberal rationalist outlook on life, and endlessly painstaking at sorting out and finding the most illuminating and important among the prodigious mass of publications. With the man he is personally acquainted, and again, though perhaps too enthusiastic an admirer to give a detached: interpretation of his character, not a totally uncritical one. The picture that emerges from his study is in many ways a familiar one in our period, and full of familiar paradoxes: a picture of an aristocrat who preached the socialism that would destroy the aristocracy, but expected that aristocratic virtues would somehow survive; of an atheist who preached the rejection of a divine Being or purpose for mankind, but presumed that the virtues attendant upon religious belief would somehow persist without divine sanctions; of a hater of totalitarianism preaching pacificism in the faee of the menace of Hitlerjsm; of an individualist preaching the extension of state control, while warning of the dangers of bureaucracy; of a Puritan who fiercely rejected his Puritan upbringing, preaching extreme liberalism in matters of marriage and sex relations, and proclaiming—in unmistakably Puritan tones—that university students should have temporary childless marriages to “afford a solution of the sexual Urge ... of such a nature that it need not take up time which ought to be given to work.”

It should be admitted, of course, that Russell’s powerful intellect, his uncompromising honesty, and his ultimate good sense, did often cause him to modify these conventionally unconventional views, and put him at variance with the ©■eat mass of Left-wing liberals. Unlike Shaw and the Webbs and ■o many others, he was never taken in by Soviet Communism •tier his visit to Russia in 1920, and his criticisms of the Soviet system have always been penetrating and prophetic. He was never afraid either to make public avowal of a change of opinion; the pacifism for which he jent to prison in the First World War was publicly renounced in the Second. None of his opinions, in fact, were ever fixed; he was always endlessly questioning his own conclusions. And, as time Jas gone on, there are signs in Mr Wood’s biography that age and experience have further modified •nd deepened many of his views; " e is less sure now that new Moralities, new systems of political or educational ideas, are cer~in to be better than old ones. Mr Wood hints that he is even Perhaps a little uneasy about his own three divorces. But his innuence has been very widespread and often—as many will believe—narmfui for minds less powerpn* less restrained by the savgraces of good sense and “jjnmur, than his own. As rebel iconoclast he demolished Much but found little to put in

its place. Mr Wood believes that because Russell was not a cynical sceptic but a “passionate” sceptic, his achievement and his influence have been great and beneficial. But some readers will wish that a little less of his lifelong passionate debating with himself had been done in public. Nevertheless, his wit,’ his candour and vitality and the brilliance of his writing are endlessly fascinating and Mr Wood’s book is full of excellent' anecdotes, some illustrating his charm, some against him. There is the story (probably apocryphal) of the younger Russell in the days when he and his second wife, Dora Hill, ran their very ‘modern’ and mcperimental school at Beacon

day the local rector came to th® .door of the school and was fTnthS? a without any •. Th^.rector spluttered: Th £. Birl retorted, closing the door: There is no God.” —or the story of the older and more mellowed Russell out walking with Bob Trevelyan and discussing theology: troohle is.” said Trevelyan, j *}£* quiet, ruminative way, “I just don’t seem ... to be able to get interested in God.” * "Perhaps it's reciprocal” said Russell promptly.

—and there are many stories of Russell demolishing with his downright wit the arguments of philosophers of whom he disapproved, like J. A. Smith of Oxford:

.°P ce after Smith had said that truth consisted of ideas in the mind * he , Absolute, Russell asked: Does that mean that, U the Absolute stops thinking about the hairs of my head. I will go bald?"

It is of great interest, too, to read of Russell’s occasional disillusionment with the study of philosophy in. his later years: ‘‘Oxford philosophers,” he said, “have shown philosophy is nonsense. I am now left regretting my illspent youth”; and again—“I have been painfully forced to the belief that nine-tenths of what is regarded as philosophy is humbug. The only part that it is at all definite is logic, and since it is logic, it is not philosophy.” It is this readiness, even in old age, to revise and re-think with unremitting honesty and freshness of approach that is Russell’s great genius. “The Great Quest” of our times, Mr Alan Wood calls him; but in many respects, with the superb range of his enquiries and the precision and wit of his mind, he seems to belong more to the eighteenth century than to modern times. The optimism with which he faces the appalling political problems of today is certainly in sharp contrast with the pessimism, cynicism, or apathy that have now overwhelmed most of the liberal rationalists who shared Russell’s theories in the ’twenties and 'thirties. Asked whether the human race can survive, he replies, “Beyond all reason, I am unconquerably persuaded that they will survive.” When the rationalist in such Churchillian or Johnsonian tones puts reason aside, many will be found to respond who quailed before the bleak and austere doctrines of “A Free Man’s Worship”—and perhaps, after all, to reach some measure of agreement with his publisher’s assessment of. Russell’s greatness in terms of millennia. ,