THE ACHIEVEMENT OF BERTRAND RUSSELL
A. RANGANATHAN
“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.”