The Press WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1970. Bertrand Russell

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32213, 4 February 1970, Page 18

The Press WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1970. Bertrand Russell

Lord Russell ranks as one of the great men and great thinkers of this century; he was also one of the most abused for the views he expressed so forthrightly. He often spoke wittily, and always wrote lucid, compelling prose. His compassion for human beings was beyond question, but his challenges to authority and to the conventional wisdom aroused as much antagonism as support Like many intellectual giants he had little grasp of politics or the day-to-day problems of politicians. His main difficulty in attempting to give effect to his aspirations was probably defined by Lord Keynes, who said that Russell sustained simultaneously “a pair of opinions- “ ludicrously incompatible. He held that human “affairs were carried on after a most irrational “ fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and “ easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on “rationally”. Russell many times expressed the idea that rationality must eventually prevail. In his authoritative, but individualistic classic, “History of “ Western Philosophy ”, he wrote: Until Rousseau, the philosophical world had a certain unity. This has disappeared for the time being, but perhaps not for long. It can be recovered by a rationalistic reconquest of men’s minds, but not in any other way, since claims to mastery can only breed strife.

Philosophy, as Russell saw it, should “suggest “ and inspire a way of life ”. He rejected religion and mvsticism. In these matters he was more than a “ passionate sceptic ”. He searched for impersonal, objective truth; as he once said: “ I wanted certainty “ in the kind of way in which people want religious “faith”. It is hardly surprising that a man whose "randfather was twice a Liberal Prime Minister and whose parents were disciples of John Stuart Mill should have faded from his youth to find complete satisfaction in his studies of mathematics and symbolic logic. His radical instincts and wide-ranging mind led him to life-long interest in social and political questions. He has left a body of philosophical writing that secures him a high place among thinkers: and he revived the role of the philosopher as a public figure, exciting ordinary men and women about important questions facing human beings. Although he may have often answered wrongly the questions he posed so pointedly, his use of journalism, radio, and television has been likened to the way in which Socrates walked and talked in the streets of Athens. Socrates was revered yet condemned to death; Lord Russell was abused and declared foolish, corrupting, and mistaken. His own claim to importance as a philosopher is the injection of “scientific truthfulness” into “the welter of conflicting fanaticisms.” “I mean”, he wrote, “the habit of basing our beliefs upon “observations and inferences as impersonal, and as “ much divested of local and 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 ”. Paradoxes must abound in the life and work of a man who searched and wrote so widely, who adjusted his opinions according to experience and fresh observations. In spite of Lord Russell’s professed—and undoubtedly sincere—regard for tolerance, and in spite of his denunciation of cruelty and bigotry, his own single-mindedness often seemed to be the mark of an intolerant and stubborn man. His tendency to overrate the intellectual side of men led him to misunderstand the ways in which most people behave. While demanding cool and unbiased judgment from intellectuals he could describe Macmillan, Kennedy, and Khrushchev as “ the “wickedest people in the history of man”. The failure of other men to act in purely rational ways struck him as perverse and dangerous. Had he been able to concede that men were not being deliberately villainous, but were working—perhaps for the very ends he espoused—from motives and considerations which were just and wise by their lights, his guidance would have been more often sought than scorned.