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| Bertrand Arthur William Russell |
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the British philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer, was born in Trelleck, Wales. He was the grandson of Lord John Russell, who introduced the Reform Bill of 1832 and later twice served as prime minister under Queen Victoria.
John Stuart Mill, a close friend of Russell’s parents, was his godfather in an informal sense. Russell’s parents died when he was a little child. Both of them had been freethinkers, and his father’s will had provided that he and his brother were to have as their guardians friends of his father’s who shared the latter’s unorthodox opinions.
As the result of litigation the will was set aside by the Court of Chancery and the two boys were placed in the care of their paternal grandparents. Lord John Russell died two years later, and it was the boys’ grandmother who determined the manner of their upbringing.
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| Trinity College |
Russell was not sent to school but received his early education from a number of Swiss and German governesses and, finally, English tutors. He entered Cambridge University in October 1890 and studied mathematics and philosophy at Trinity College from 1890 to 1894.
He was a fellow of Trinity College from 1895 to 1901 and lecturer in philosophy there from 1910 to 1916. In 1916 Russell was dismissed by Trinity College because of his pacifist activities.He was reinstated in 1919 but resigned before taking up his duties.
What is generally considered Russell’s most important work in philosophy was done between 1900 and the outbreak of the first world war. From 1916 until the late 1930s Russell did not hold any academic position and supported himself by writing and public lecturing.
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| Marriage and Morals |
During this period he wrote some of his most influential books on social questions, including Marriage and Morals (London, 1929) and his two books on education—On Education, Especially in Early Childhood (London, 1926) and Education and the Social Order (London, 1932).
These views were put into practice in Russell’s experimental school, the Beacon Hill School, which he started with his second wife, Dora, in 1927. Russell left the school in 1934 after he and Dora were divorced (the school itself continued until 1943).
Russell returned to more concentrated work in philosophy around 1936. He moved to the United States in 1938, teaching first at the University of Chicago and then at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1940 he accepted an invitation from the Board of Higher Education of New York City to join the department of philosophy at City College.
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| City College |
However, he never had an opportunity to take up this appointment, having been found unfit for this position in a remarkable opinion by a judge who felt he had to protect “public health, safety and morals.” From 1941 until 1943 Russell lectured at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (these lectures were later expanded into A History of Western Philosophy).
Dr. Albert Barnes, the head of this foundation, dismissed Russell in January 1943, on three days’for wrongful dismissal. In 1944 he returned to Cambridge where he had been reelected to a fellowship at Trinity College notice. In this instance Russell successfully brought action for wrongful dismissal. In 1944 he returned to Cambridge where he had been reelected to a fellowship at Trinity College.
Russell was a candidate for Parliament on three occasions and was defeated each time: In 1907 he ran at Wimbledon as a candidate of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, in 1922 and 1923 he stood as the Labour Party candidate for Chelsea.
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| Barnes Foundation |
Russell was twice jailed—in 1918 for six months on a count of an allegedly libelous article in a pacifist journal and in 1961, at the age of eighty-nine, for one week, in connection with his campaign for nuclear disarmament.
In 1908 Russell was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. He became an honorary fellow of the British Academy in 1949, and in the same year he was awarded the Order of Merit. Russell twice served as president of the Aristotelian Society and was for many years president of the Rationalist Press Association.
In 1950 he received the Nobel Prize for literature. In making the award, the committee described him as “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.”
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| Royal Society |
Russell had three children and was married four times. In 1931, upon the death of his brother, he became the third earl Russell.
Writing in 1935 the German historian Rudolf Metz referred to Russell as “the only British thinker of the age who enjoys world-wide repute.” At that time his works could not circulate in Germany, Italy, or Russia. Now they are available in every major and a great number of minor languages (a truncated version of A History of Western Philosophy was allowed to circulate even in the Soviet Union).
It is safe to say that not since Voltaire has there been a philosopher with such an enormous audience. Russell also shares with Voltaire a glittering and graceful prose style and a delicious sense of humor. It is perhaps Russell’s humorous irreverence as much as the substance of his heretical opinions that has so deeply offended several generations of moralists and religious conservatives.
Life and Social Theories
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| Life and Social Theories |
Russell’s childhood and adolescence were unhappy. The atmosphere in his grandmother’s house was one of puritan piety and austerity, and his loneliness, he recalls, was almost unbearable. Only virtue was prized—“virtue at the expense of intellect, health, happiness, and every mundane good.”
At the age of five Russell reflected that if he lived to be seventy, he had endured only a fourteenth part of his life, and he felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of him to be unendurable. In adolescence, he remarks, he was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, he was “restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.”
His grandmother had gradually moved from Scottish Presbyterianism to Unitarianism.As a child Russell was taken on alternate Sundays to the parish church and to the Presbyterian Church, while at home he was taught the tenets of Unitarianism.
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| theological doctrines |
When he was fourteen he began to question theological doctrines and in the course of four years abandoned successively belief in free will, immortality, and God, the last as the result of reading John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography.
For some time, however, Russell had metaphysical attachments that served as substitutes for religion, and it was not until the end of the first world war that he became a militant opponent of all forms of supernaturalism.
EARLY PLATONISM AND HEGELIANISM. Under the influence of J. M. E. McTaggart and F. H. Bradley, Russell came, in his early years at Cambridge, to believe “more or less” in the Absolute and the rest of the apparatus of British Hegelianism. “There was a curious pleasure,” Russell wrote in retrospect, “in making oneself believe that time and space are unreal, that matter is an illusion, and that the world really consists of nothing but mind.”
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| J. M. E. McTaggart |
In a “rash moment,” however, he turned “from the disciples to the Master.” G.W. F. Hegel’s remarks in the philosophy of mathematics he found “both ignorant and stupid,” and in other ways Hegel’s work appeared a “farrago of confusions.”
After that Russell was converted by G. E. Moore to a “watered down” version of Plato’s theory of Ideas, regarding the subject matter of mathematics as eternal and unchanging entities whose exactness and perfection is not duplicated anywhere in the world of material objects. Eventually Russell abandoned this “mathematical mysticism” as “nonsense.”
Following Ludwig Wittgenstein he came to believe “very reluctantly” that mathematics consists of tautologies. As to the timelessness of mathematics, Russell now regarded this as resulting from nothing more than that the pure mathematician is not talking about time. Aside from this, it became emotionally difficult for him to remain attached to “a world of abstraction” in the midst of the slaughter of the Great War.
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| Ludwig Wittgenstein |
“All the high-flown thoughts that I had had about the abstract world of ideas,” he wrote later, “seemed to me thin and rather trivial in view of the vast suffering that surrounded me.” The nonhuman world, he added, “remained as an occasional refuge, but not as a country in which to build one’s permanent habitation.” After his abandonment of Platonism, Russell wrote, he was not able to find religious satisfaction in any philosophical doctrine that he could accept.
PACIFISM. Russell was interested in social questions throughout his life. He was an early member of the Fabian Society and for some time in the 1890s, under the influence of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, championed imperialism and supported the Boer War. In 1901 he had a quasi-religious experience.
He became “suddenly and vividly aware of the loneliness in which most people live” and felt the need to find ways of “diminishing this tragic isolation.” In the course of a few minutes he changed his mind about the Boer War, about harshness in the education of children and in the administration of the criminal law, as well as about fierceness in personal relations.
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| Fabian Society |
This experience led him to write his famous essay “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903). Although Russell became a pacifist right then, for another ten years or more he was preoccupied with work in mathematical logic and theory of knowledge. It was not until the war that he became passionately concerned about social issues.
It is probable, he observed later, that “I should have remained mainly academic and abstract but for the War.” The war, however, “shook him” out of many prejudices and made him reexamine a number of fundamental questions.
He decided that he had been quite mistaken in believing the claims of pacifists that wars were the work of devious tyrants who forced them on reluctant populations. Although he was not then familiar with the theories of psychoanalysis, Russell concluded that the majority of human beings in our culture were filled with destructive and perverse impulses and that no scheme for reform would achieve any substantial improvement in human affairs unless the psychological structure of the average person was suitably transformed.
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| reluctant populations |
Russell recalls that his decision to oppose the war was made particularly difficult by his passionate love of England. Nevertheless, he had no doubt as to what he had to do. “When the war came I felt as if I heard the voice of God. I knew that it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be.My whole nature was involved.
As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me.As a lover of civilisation, the return to barbarism appalled me”. Russell remarks that he never believed much tangible good would come from opposition to the war, but he felt that “for the honor of human nature,” those who “were not swept off their feet” should stand their ground.
He patiently argued in lectures and books that the slaughter of millions of men was not justified by any of the possible gains of a defeat of the Central Powers. Russell’s pacifism was not mystical. It was not then and had not been his contention at any time that the use of force is always wrong, that war can never possibly be justified.
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| national propaganda |
He maintained that this war in these circumstances was not worth all the pain and misery, and the lying of all the parties. Consistently with his general position, Russell favored the Allies during World War II on the ground that the defeat of the Nazis was essential if human life was to remain tolerable. The Kaiser’s Germany by contrast was “only swashbuckling and a little absurd,” allowing a good deal of freedom and democracy.
At Cambridge, Russell’s teacher and friend McTaggart led a move for his ouster.Meetings addressed by Russell were broken up by violent mobs without any police interference. Eventually he was prosecuted by the government. For writing a pamphlet on the case of a conscientious objector he was fined £100.
When he would not pay the fine the government sold parts of his library, including rare books on mathematics that Russell was never able to recover. In 1918 he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for an article in the Tribunal, a pacifist weekly, in which he had written that “unless peace comes soon … the American garrison, which will by that time be occupying England and France,... will no doubt be capable of intimidating strikers, an occupation to which the American army is accustomed when at home.”
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| general position |
In a fierce denunciation which accompanied the sentence, the magistrate, Sir John Dickinson, referred to Russell’s offense as “a very despicable one” and added that Russell “seems to have lost all sense of decency.” It should be added that as the result of the intervention of Arthur Balfour, Russell was treated with consideration while in prison—he finished there his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and began work on The Analysis of Mind.
Attitude toward the Soviet Union. Russell’s isolation was not ended with the return of peace. This was due to his failure to support the Bolshevist regime in Russia. Like many Western socialists he at first welcomed the news of the revolution, but, wanting to see things for himself, he visited Russia in 1920 and came back totally disillusioned.
Some of Russell’s friends argued that any criticism of the revolution would only play into the hands of the reactionaries who wanted to reestablish the old order. After some hesitation Russell decided to publish the truth as he saw it.
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| cruel bigots |
Russia, he later wrote, “seemed to me one vast prison in which the jailors were cruel bigots. When I found my friends applauding these men as liberators and regarding the regime that they were creating as a paradise, I wondered in a bewildered manner whether it was my friends or I that were mad.”
The little book in which he recorded his views of the Soviet Union, The Theory and Practise of Bolshevism (1920), was remarkable for, among other things, its prescience. Long before most Westerners had heard of Joseph Stalin, Russell predicted, point by point, the reactionary features that came to characterize the Soviet system under Stalin—its militarism and nationalism, the hostility to free art and science, its puritanism, and the gradual ascendancy of bureaucrats and sycophants over the early idealists.
Russell was able to reprint the book in 1947 without a single alteration. His isolation after his return from Russia was even greater than during the war. The patriots had not yet forgiven him his opposition to the war, while the majority of his former political friends denounced him for his opposition to the Soviet regime. But Russell has never played to the galleries. As on many other occasions he acted in accordance with his favorite biblical text—“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.”
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| Joseph Stalin |
Education and sexual morality. Probably the most controversial of Russell’s opinions are those relating to education and sexual morality. These were closely connected with his observations of the joy people took in the fighting and killing during the war.
Russell wrote that he thought he saw the inward and outward defeats that led to cruelty and admiration of violence and that these defeats were, in turn, largely the outcome of what had happened to people when they were very young. A peaceful and happy world could not be achieved without drastic changes in education. In sexual matters, although not only in these, irrational prohibitions and dishonesty were exceedingly harmful.
“I believe,” he wrote in Marriage and Morals, “that nine out of ten who have had a conventional upbringing in their early years have become in some degree incapable of a decent and sane attitude towards marriage and sex generally” (p. 249). Conventional education was judged to be at fault in a great many other ways as well. Its general tendency was to cramp creative impulses and to discourage a spirit of critical inquiry.
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| sexual morality |
While a certain amount of discipline is necessary, very much of the coercion traditionally employed cannot be justified. The child who is coerced “tends to respond with hatred, and if, as is usual, he is not able to give free vent to his hatred, it festers inwardly, and may sink into the unconscious with all sorts of strange consequences throughout the rest of life.”
Russell’s views on sexual morality featured prominently in the New York City case of 1940. When his appointment was announced, Bishop Manning of the Episcopal Church wrote an inflammatory letter to all New York City newspapers in which he denounced Russell’s subjectivism in ethics and his position on religion and morality.
It was unthinkable that “a man who is a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality, and who specifically defends adultery” should be held up “before our youth as a responsible teacher of philosophy.” The bishop’s letter was the beginning of a campaign of vilification and intimidation unsurpassed in a democratic nation in recent times.
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| defends adultery |
The ecclesiastical journals, the Hearst press, and numerous Democratic politicians joined in the chorus of abuse. Russell was described as “the Devil’s minister to men,” as an advocate of “the nationalization of women,” as “the mastermind of free love and of hatred for parents,” and also, needless to say, as an exponent of communism.
The climax of the campaign was a taxpayer’s suit by a Mrs. Jean Kay of Brooklyn demanding that Russell’s appointment be annulled. The case was heard before Justice McGeehan, who had previously shown his notions of tolerance by trying to have a portrait of Martin Luther removed from a courthouse mural illustrating legal history.
In a startling decision, which was bitterly criticized by legal experts as in many respects grossly improper, McGeehan voided Russell’s appointment on three grounds: First, Russell had not been given a competitive examination; second, he was an alien and there was no reason to suppose that the post in question could not be competently filled by an American citizen; and, finally, the appointment would establish “a chair of indecency.”
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| Jean Kay |
Elaborate arguments were adduced in behalf of this last claim. Among other things it was maintained that Russell’s doctrines would tend to bring his students “and in some cases their parents and guardians in conflict with the Penal Law.” In some fashion not explained by the judge, Russell’s appointment would lead to “abduction” and rape.
Russell’s opposition to the laws that make homosexuality a crime was misread as advocacy of a “damnable felony ... which warrants imprisonment for not more than 20 years in New York State.” Evasive actions of the mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, prevented any effective appeal against this monstrous decision, and Russell was never able to take up his position at City College.
In 1950, shortly after receiving the Nobel Prize, he returned to New York to deliver the Machette Lectures at Columbia University. He received a rousing reception that those who were present were not likely to forget.
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| Nobel Prize |
It was compared with the acclaim given Voltaire in 1784 on his return to Paris, the place where he had been imprisoned and from which he had later been banished. As for McGeehan, it is safe to say that he will go down in history as a minor inquisitor who used his one brief moment in the limelight to besmirch and injure a great and honest man.
Epistemology and Metaphysics
Russell exercised an influence on the course of Anglo American philosophy in the twentieth century second to that of no other individual. Yet, unlike many influential thinkers, he neither founded nor attached himself to any definite movement.
Although he wanted above all to be empirical, he always had reservations of one sort or another to the proposition that all acceptable beliefs can be derived from purely empirical premises, and although his stress on analysis as the proper philosophical method is one of the chief sources of the analytical bent that philosophy currently has in English-speaking countries, he never accepted the view that philosophy is nothing but analysis.
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| Epistemology and Metaphysics |
EARLY REALISM. Russell’s first distinctive philosophical work was colored by a violent reaction against the absolute idealism then dominant in England, which was ultimately based on the thought of G. W. F. Hegel and whose outstanding British exponent was F. H. Bradley.
According to Bradley if we try to think through the implications of any fact whatever, we will inevitably be forced to conclude that everything that there is constitutes a single, immediate unity of consciousness.
In Russell’s view the main weapon used to bludgeon people into submission to this result was the “doctrine of internal relations,” according to which any relational fact—for example, that x is above y—is really a fact about the natures of the terms involved. This doctrine in effect refuses to take relations as ultimate.
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| F. H. Bradley |
It follows from this position that whenever x and y are related, each “enters into the nature of the other.” For when x is above y, then being above y is part of the nature of x and being below x is part of the nature of y.
Hence, y is part of the nature of x and x is part of the nature of y. Since everything is related to everything else in one way or another, it follows that everything else enters into the nature of any given thing, which is just another way of saying that there is no “other thing” relative to a given thing.
In other words, the only thing that exists is one all comprehensive entity. From the related principle that when we are aware of something, that something enters into the nature of the awareness or of the mind which has the awareness, it follows that it is impossible to conceive of anything which is not included within consciousness. Thus, the one all-comprehensive entity is a unity of consciousness.
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| metaphysical side |
LOGICAL ATOMISM. Thus far we have concentrated on the epistemological side of logical constructionism, its concern with reducing the number of assumptions we make and with exhibiting clearly the basis for what we claim to know. But it also has a metaphysical side, although Russell wavers about this. Sometimes he talks as if his constructionism is metaphysically neutral.
At such times he says that in showing that minds can be constructed out of sensations and images we do not show that there is no ultimate, irreducible subject of awareness; we show merely that everything we know about minds can be expressed without assuming the existence of such an entity.
At other times, however, he claims that by showing that minds can be constructed out of sensations and images we have shown what minds really are—we have revealed their metaphysical status. And by carrying through constructions of everything that can be constructed out of simpler entities we will have developed a complete metaphysical scheme.
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| Logical Atomism |
Ideal language. The most systematic presentation of this metaphysical side of logical constructionism is found in the set of lectures The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, which Russell gave in 1918. Here Russell makes explicit the principle on which a metaphysical interpretation of logical constructionism depends—namely, isomorphism of the structure of an ideal language and of the structure of reality.
If we can determine in outline how the world would be described in an ideal language, we will have, in outline, an account of what the world is like. The restriction to an “ideal” language is essential.
Since there are alternative ways of stating the same body of facts, it could not be the case that all these ways reflect the real structure of the world. In this approach to metaphysics the basic metaphysical commitment is to the identity of structure between reality and an ideal language, and one shows one’s hand metaphysically by choosing one rather than another set of criteria for an ideal language.
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| ideal language |
For Russell the most important requirement for an ideal language is an empiricist one, formulated in the “principle of acquaintance”: “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.”
In other words, we can understand a linguistic expression only if it either refers to something we have experienced or is defined by other expressions which are so used. This principle plays a part in the constructions we have been surveying, as do the considerations we have already made explicit.
That is, Russell holds not only that if physical objects were not defined in terms of sense experiences we would have no way of knowing anything about them but also—and even more important—we would not be able to understand talk about them.
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| logical framework |
In logical atomism this principle is reflected in the requirement that the expressions which figure in the “atomic” sentences in terms of which everything is to be expressed must get their meaning through direct correlation with experience.
They will, therefore, be names of particular sense data and terms for properties of sense data and relations between sense data. Russell is forced to exclude the logical framework of sentences from this requirement (“is,” “the,” etc.), but he is recurrently uneasy about this exclusion and recurrently disturbed by the question how, in that case, we can understand them.
In addition to the need for its undefined terms getting their meaning through correlation with immediately experienced items, the ideal language will have to satisfy some more strictly logical requirements. These will include the absence of vagueness and having one and only one expression for each meaning. But the most important restriction concerns the form of the basic sentences.
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| the absence of vagueness |
An atomic sentence will be one that contains a single predicate or relational term and one or more than one name, the whole sentence asserting that the entity named has the indicated property (“This is white”) or that the entities named stand in the indicated relation (“This is above that”).
If a sentence
- has this form,
- contains only terms that get their meaning through correlation with experienced items, and
- has to do with entities that cannot be analyzed into anything simpler,
It is clear that for Russell the sentences which satisfy these requirements will all state a minimal fact about a momentary content of sense experience.
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| sense experience |
Logical atomism can then be presented as the thesis that all knowledge can be stated in terms of atomic sentences and their truth-functional compounds. A truthfunctional compound of two sentences is one whose truth or falsity is a determinate function of the truth or falsity of the components. Thus, “I am leaving and you are staying” is a truth-functional compound of “I am leaving” and “You are staying.”
For the compound is true if and only if both its components are true. There is an empiricist motivation for maintaining this thesis. Atomic sentences, in the sense specified above, can be conclusively verified or falsified by a single experience, and as long as we are dealing only with truth-functional compounds of these no further problem can arise concerning their truth or falsity.
Consider a “contrary-to-fact conditional,” such as “If I had offered him more money, he would have accepted the job.” As it stands this sentence is not a truth-functional compound of its constituents. For in saying it we are presupposing that both its constituents are false, yet this does not settle the question whether the whole statement is true or false.
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| empirical evidence |
There is a corresponding puzzle about what empirical evidence would settle the question. Obviously I cannot go back in time and offer him more money and see what he will do. If we could find some way to restate this as a (very complicated) truthfunctional compound of atomic sentences, it would become clear which experiences would verify or falsify it.
Pluralism and knowledge by acquaintance. The metaphysical correlate of this sketch of the ideal language brings together two of Russell’s deepest convictions, the logical independence of particular facts (pluralism) and the dependence of knowledge on the data of immediate experience.
In this view reality consists of a plurality of facts, each of which is the sort of fact which could be infallibly discerned in a single moment of experience and each of which could conceivably be what it is even if nothing else were in existence. All the familiar and seemingly relatively simple objects in the world of common sense are really extremely complicated complexes of atomic facts of these sorts.
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| atomic facts |
Russell was well aware that logical atomism in this extreme form was untenable. For example, he insisted that generalizations could not be truth-functional compounds of atomic sentences. The most promising way of so construing them would be to take, for example, “All lemons are yellow” as a conjunction of a large number of atomic sentences of the form “This lemon is yellow,” “That lemon is yellow,”....
But as Russell points out, even if it were possible to list all the lemons, the conjunction would say the same thing as the original universal generalization only if we added the conjunct “and that is all the lemons there are.” And this last addition is not an atomic sentence. Moreover, Russell had doubts about so-called intensional contexts, such as “Smith believes that the White Sox will win,”where the truth or falsity of the compound is clearly independent of the truth or falsity of the components.
Whether Smith has this belief does not in any way depend on whether the White Sox win. Russell has always hoped that neutral monism would help him to get out of this difficulty. If we could construct beliefs out of sensations and images we might be able to restate this fact as some truth-functional derivative of atomic sentences.
Ethics and the Critique of Religion
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| Ethics and the Critique of Religion |
ETHICS. Much of Russell’s life, as we saw in an earlier section, was devoted to the advocacy of certain moral and political ideals. In this sense of the word moralist, in which it has no derogatory implications, Russell was certainly a moralist and frequently a very passionate one at that. Unlike many other moralists he was also concerned with what are now referred to as “metamoral” or “metaethical” issues.
He repeatedly addressed himself to questions about the status of moral principles—what, if anything, they mean, what kind of disagreement there is between people who support opposite moral positions, and whether inferences from nonmoral premises to a moral conclusion can ever be valid. In discussing Russell’s ethics, we will be concerned only with his metamoral theories.
Early views. In his first important essay on this subject, “The Elements of Ethics” (1910), Russell defended a position closely akin to that of G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica. “Good and bad,” he wrote, “are qualities which belong to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is right.”
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| Principia Ethica |
The goodness or badness of a thing cannot be inferred from any of its other properties. “Knowledge as to what things exist, have existed, or will exist, can throw absolutely no light upon the question as to what things are good.”
Russell was by no means unaware at this time of the wide appeal of the familiar arguments for subjectivism—the “divergence of opinion” on moral questions and the difficulty of “finding arguments to persuade people who differ from us in such a question” (“The Elements of Ethics,” in Readings in Ethical Theory, edited by Wilfrid Sellars and John Hospers, New York, 1952, pp. 6–7).
But he did not then regard these arguments as having any logical force. “Difficulty in discovering the truth,” he wrote, “does not prove that there is no truth to be discovered” (p. 6). Like Moore, he argued that if subjectivism were true it would follow that in a moral dispute there is never really any “difference of opinion” between the disputing parties.
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| John Hospers |
If when A says x is good and B says x is bad, A and B were really talking about their respective feelings or desires, they might well both be right at the same time and “there would be no subject of debate between them.” At that time Russell regarded this as plainly false. “As a matter of fact,” he observed, “we consider some tastes better than others: we do not hold merely that some tastes are ours and other tastes are other people’s.”
When “The Elements of Ethics” was reprinted in 1952 in Readings in Ethical Theory, the anthology mentioned above, Russell added a footnote in which he explained that “not long after publishing this paper [he] came to disagree with the theory that it advocates.”
He explains that the change in his views was originally due to George Santayana’s criticisms in his Winds of Doctrine, but he adds that he “found confirmation” for his later position “in many other directions.”
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| Ethical Theory |
Russell’s later position was first mentioned very briefly in a 1921 preface to a paperback reprint of “A Free Man’s Worship”; it was explained in some detail in What I Believe (1925) and in The Outline of Philosophy (1927), and it received its fullest formulations in Religion and Science (1935), Power (1938), “Reply to My Critics” (in P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, 1944), and Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1955).
The subjectivity of values. Except on one basic issue, Russell’s later position is a point-by-point denial of the earlier theory. “Good” and “bad” are no longer regarded as qualities belonging to objects, and in this respect they are now explicitly contrasted with “square” and “sweet”: “If two men differ about values, there is not a disagreement as to any kind of truth, but a difference of taste” (Religion and Science, pp. 237–238); “There are no facts of ethics” (Power, p. 257); “I see no property analogous to truth that belongs or does not belong to an ethical judgment” (“Reply to My Critics,” p. 723).
“Taste” in the first of these passages is used in a very broad sense to cover all kinds of psychological states and attitudes, including desires. Russell does not, of course, deny the plain fact that people regard some tastes as better than others and some desires as higher than other desires, but now he is willing to maintain that this merely means that the tastes or desires are their own. “What we ‘ought’ to desire is merely what someone else wishes us to desire” (What I Believe, p. 29).
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| Platonic theory |
CRITIQUE OF RELIGION. No such doubts as Russell has expressed about his subjectivism in ethics mark his views on religion. Unlike many academic philosophers whose position is very similar to his, Russell did not hesitated to express his convictions publicly and without equivocation or compromise.
Ever since he abandoned the Platonic theory of ideas, Russell was a forthright opponent of religion in more senses than one: He regards the basic doctrines of (supernaturalistic) religions as intellectually indefensible, he argues that religious belief has not on balance been a force for good but quite the opposite, and he hopes and believes that religion will eventually die out.
“I am myself,” he wrote in 1922, “a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out.… I regard religion as belonging to the infancy of human reason and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing” (Sceptical Essays, p. 101).
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| television interview |
In a television interview thirty-seven years later he slightly qualified this prediction. If great wars and great oppressions continue so that many people will be leading very unhappy lives, religion will probably go on, but “if people solve their social problems religion will die out” (Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, p. 31).
God. Russell wavered between calling himself an agnostic and describing himself as an atheist. He evidently did not attach too much importance to this distinction, but he had made it clear that if he is to be classified as an agnostic, it would have to be in a sense in which an agnostic and an atheist are “for practical purposes, at one.”
In the television interview mentioned earlier the interviewer asked Russell, “Do you think it is certain that there is no such thing as God, or simply that it is just not proved?” “No,” Russell answered, “I don’t think it is certain that there is no such thing—I think that it is on exactly the same level as the Olympic gods, or the Norwegian gods; they also may exist, the gods of Olympus and Valhalla. I can’t prove they don’t, but I think the Christian God has no more likelihood than they had.
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| Olympic gods |
I think they are a bare possibility” (Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, pp. 24–25). He explained his views more fully in an interview published in Look magazine in 1953. An agnostic, in any sense in which he can be regarded as one, Russell said, “may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice” (Leo Rosten, ed., A Guide to the Religions of America, New York, 1955, p. 150).
Immortality. On survival, Russell’s position is similarly negative. All the evidence indicates that what we regard as our mental life is “bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy.” There is every reason to believe that mental life ceases when the body decays.
Russell admits that this argument is “only one of probability” but adds that “it is as strong as those upon which most scientific conclusions are based” (Why I Am Not a Christian, p. 51). It is conceivable that evidence from psychical research might change the balance of probability some day, but, writing in 1925, Russell considered such evidence far weaker “than the physiological evidence on the other side.” He did not later see any reason to modify this judgment.
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| balance of probability |
Russell’s views on the body-mind problem are known as “neutral monism,” and it would be inaccurate to call him a materialist. However, he always emphasized that as a theory about man’s place in the universe his philosophy is closely akin to materialism.
“Emotionally,” he wrote in 1928, “the world is pretty much the same as it would be if the materialists were in the right” (In Praise of Idleness, p. 143). The opponents of materialism, he adds, have been actuated by the desire to prove that the mind is immortal and that the “ultimate power” in the universe is mental and not physical.
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| ultimate power |
On both these points, Russell makes clear, he agrees with materialism. When he returned to the subject in 1959 he had not changed his opinion at all. “I still think,” he wrote then, “that man is cosmically unimportant, and that a Being, if there were one, who could view the universe impartially, without the bias of here and now, would hardly mention man, except perhaps in a footnote at the end of the volume” (My Philosophical Development, p. 213).
Harmfulness of religious belief. Russell’s views about the nature of the emotions that inspire religious belief (“it is based, primarily and mainly, upon fear”) and also about the harmful influence of religious organizations are very similar to those of David Hume, Baron d’Holbach, and other eighteenth-century freethinkers.
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| cosmically unimportant |
He did, however, devote rather more attention to the bad effects of the habit of accepting propositions on faith—in the absence of or even in opposition to the evidence. It is an error, Russell contends, to suppose that a person who does not form his beliefs on the basis of evidence in one domain can remain open-minded and scientific in another. Furthermore, somebody holding comfortable beliefs on faith dimly realizes that they are myths and “becomes furious when they are disputed.”
Such a person will therefore do his best to suppress all critics who might remind him of the feeble backing of his beliefs. Russell makes it clear that in this context he is not criticizing Christianity only. “The important thing,” he writes, “is not what you believe, but how you believe it.” The objections to “faith” do not depend on what the faith in question may be.
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| Baron d’Holbach |
“You may believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible or of the Koran or of Marx’s Capital. Whichever of these beliefs you entertain, you have to close your mind against evidence; and if you close your mind against evidence in one respect, you will also do so in another, if the temptation is strong.” The person who bases his belief on reason will support it by argument rather than by persecution and will abandon his position if the argument goes against him.
If, however, his belief is based on faith, he will conclude that argument is useless and will “therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young whenever he has the power to control their education” (Human Society in Ethics and Politics, pp. 207–208).
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| stunting and distorting |
