The Worldly Philosopher

Einstein was a great theoretical physicist. Jack Benny was a great comedian. Both played the violin. Neither was therefore a great violinist. Bertrand Russell was a great mathematician and technical philosopher who was assumed (not least by himself) therefore to be a great moral sage and a world-class political analyst.

It has never been unusual for philosophers to pontificate on the conduct of the world. Plato was only the most influential thinker to proclaim that rulers should defer to the supremely intelligent. His predecessors-notably Anaxagoras, who was in Pericles’ kitchen cabinet during the great days of the Athenian empire-were often drawn to earthly powers. Avid for shortcuts from the ivory tower to the command post, clever men frequently attach themselves as advisors to tyrants and autocrats. They rarely have a good effect on their conduct. Aristotle was tutor to Alexander the Great, Seneca to Nero. Voltaire had a special relationship with Frederick the Great. Hegel justified the Prussian monarchy. Heidegger fawned on Hitler; Sartre on Mao.

Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, always considered himself a democratic socialist. For most of his life he was ardently, sometimes belligerently, anti-Communist. Yet if he never endorsed absolutisms, he did not doubt his right of entree to the highest councils. At times he even seemed to come downstairs to them; in the 1960s, full of years and self-importance, he addressed himself to John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev with didactic condescension.

Russell’s abiding claim to intellectual renown rests on two major works of a period preceding that covered by the second volume of this magisterial biography. Ray Monk’s mastery lies, not least, in his capacity-rare among Russell’s other, more opportunistic, biographers-to explain the complexities both of “Principia Mathematica” (Russell himself once said that only six people had ever understood it, at least two of them Poles) and of “The Principles of Mathematics.” At once a professional philosopher and an unblinking detective, Monk began this job more than 10 years ago as one of Russell’s most knowledgeable admirers. How far that esteem has fallen, on more intimate acquaintance, is the measure of how high it once was.

Both Russell’s parents were dead by the time he was 3. The brilliant solitary boy was educated by tutors in the echoing mansion of his grandparents. He craved reliable certainties in a world nightmarish with privileged privation. Bertie’s grandfather had been prime minister of England when Britannia ruled the waves and England’s word was law. Russell once boasted that 400 years of history flowed in his veins. So did the fear of hereditary insanity, of which he was reminded by his remorselessly Christian grandmother. His later rebellion against God and Christian morality was, at least in part, an attempt to exorcise childhood fears.

When he went up to Cambridge after his lonely adolescence, he found in mathematics a providential realm without shadows or doubts. “In logic,” Wittgenstein was later to say, “there are no surprises.” Nor, in the world of symbols, do we find madness, morals or things that go bump in the night. Russell rejoiced to follow Plato in believing that mathematics gave access to eternal verities. He was also credulous of Plato’s promise that whoever mastered the sublime heights of human knowledge was thereby qualified to officiate over the lower plains.

When, as Russell’s pupil, Wittgenstein came to convince his teacher that mathematics was less the acme of knowledge than a complicated form of tautology, it entailed a loss of authoritative faith from which the older man never fully recovered. Russell would, however, continue to act as if the world were an equation theoretically capable of solution and as if mankind and its variables could some how be ordered in a coherent and peaceful system.

Until he was 40, Russell’s cloistered dedication to the logic of mathematics kept him in a state of almost incorporeal exaltation. D.H. Lawrence accused him of being “all disembodied mind.” After abandoning a first “romantic” marriage, with Alys Pearsall Smith, Russell refuted this judgment by becoming a goat-footed womanizer of rare and shameless agility. While he was on one of his detested but lucrative U.S. lecture tours in the 1920s and someone asked him why he had renounced serious philosophy, he replied, “I found that I preferred f---ing.” The famous voice was apt and keen to shock nice people. His cultivated tactlessness made him loathed, revered and very, very celebrated.

This volume begins in 1921. The Great War had ended with Russell the most famous pariah in proper English circles. He had opposed the bloodshed with courageous insolence. Polemical defiance of the ruling class, to which he belonged, cost him his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was possessed by hatred of those who had sent the young to die only because, so he alleged, “they themselves did not know how to be happy.” Scathing simplification of his opponents’ motives was always a feature of his rhetoric.

As time went by, he contrived to become younger than his contemporaries, not least through rampant success with nubile women. His most urgent private wish, however, was to have children, especially a son. He did not inherit the title of Earl Russell until 1931, but continuing his line was an obsession. When Dora Black, a young feminist who believed in (and persisted in practicing) Free Love, became pregnant by him, he married her. The prospect of fatherhood led him to forsake her rival, “Colette” Malleson, who-preceded by Lady Ottoline Morrell-was the great passion of his life. As an undergraduate, I was once directed in a Turgenev play by her husband, the chinless actor Miles Malleson. I was bold enough to ask if he had liked Russell. “The cuckold,” he replied, “enjoys proximity without pleasure.”

Russell was always quicker to spot the flaws in other people’s reasoning than to question his own. He lacked the ability of his admired close friend, the novelist Joseph Conrad, to entertain-or to be entertained by-ambiguities. In his best-selling “Marriage and Morals,” Russell insisted that infidelity, if not its possible illegitimate consequences, was somehow morally justifiable and more honest than exclusive monogamy. Wanting even the passions to have a rationale, he blessed marriage with a theory that would suit his practice. Having therefore decided that jealousy was an unreasonable (and hence illicit) emotion, he then suffered cruelly from it, and from denying that he did. He became Mr. Do-As-You-Wouldn’t-Be-Done-By.

His oldest child, John, was born in a bed that Wittgenstein had designed. Russell was later to say that one of the greatest achievements of his life had been to prevail on Wittgenstein to be a philosopher rather than “an aeronaut.” Yet nothing so joltingly disconcerted Russell as Wittgenstein’s sporadic and pitilessly candid criticism. When Russell began to publish popular philosophical pot-boilers, Wittgenstein said that such books should be bound in blue, and no one should he allowed to read them (millions have). The worthwhile stuff could be bound in red, and everyone should read it (few ever do).

Decades later, when he wrote his massive and amusing, but also partial and eclectic “History of Western Philosophy,” Russell excised his great pupil’s name from the index of acknowledged philosophers. It was the revenge of talent on genius. The book made its author a fortune and lost him much respect in his captious profession.

Monk’s philosophical expertise is seldom required in his account of the last 50 years of this long life. Heidegger once remarked that Aristotle’s biography could be kept very short. “He was born, he worked, he died.” No such brevity takes care of Russell’s tumultuous, almost always controversial involvement with politics, manners and morals. If he had ceased to believe in certainties, he had little doubt that, when he had opinions, they were likely to be valid. They were more commonly superficial and muddled, but they were sustained by the elegance of his phrasing and by his critics’ fear of his rasping scorn.

Socrates saw himself as a “gadfly,” buzzing and stinging in order to goad his fellow citizens into examining their lives and questioning their assumptions. Russell probably saw his own role in society as very similar. If Monk is right in criticizing his inconsistencies and sweeping flippancy, he errs, perhaps, in failing to keep in view just how hypocritical was the society that Russell loved to provoke. Now that our betters no longer demand that we acquiesce in war and imperialism, practice premarital chastity or deny women equality, it is easy to forget how brave it was to challenge them. The young gadfly buzzed in fields full of sacred cows. But as the period of high seriousness (and British hegemony) passed, Russell dwindled from being a leader to being a leader-writer, and finally from a gadfly to a daddy-long-legs.

The great economist John Maynard Keynes would sum up Russell’s systematic absurdity in geopolitical thinking. “He held two ludicrously incompatible beliefs: on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from conducting human affairs in a most irrational way; on the other that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally.”

Most pathetic was the self-delusion of a man who could write a confident guide to “The Conquest of Happiness” at a time when his own life was evidence of his anguished inability to find or deliver it. Wittgenstein remarked, puncturingly, “If a person tells me that he has been to the worst places, I have no right to judge him, but if he tells me that it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.”

The two mothers of Russell’s children came to hate him; the second had a nervous breakdown. His first son, on whom he had once lavished such hopes, he later tried to have committed, callously, to a lunatic asylum. For 20 years his second son, Conrad (now a distinguished professor of history), preferred to live with his mother and never spoke to his father. His brilliant daughter Kate became a Christian, despite (and because of?) the progressive, supposedly “scientific” education to which she and her brother had been submitted at the school that Russell founded for their improvement. They were miserable there. Because his educational theory postulated that they would be made happy, he never observed their desolation. So much for empiricism, its scope and limits.

As the need to make money for his families pressed, he accepted almost any commission. When, in the 1930s, the American philosopher Sidney Hook asked what had made him write some particular unworthy newspaper article, he replied, “Fifty dollars.” Hook’s “Out of Step” is much more outspoken than Monk about Russell’s phallic narcissism and his insatiable desire for flattery. Cast adrift by the academic world, he became a modern sophist, a mercenary mendicant living by his wits and telling people either what they wanted to hear or what they would find enticingly outrageous. He supplied a piquant smorgasbord of cold or reheated dishes-sexual morals, education, world government, relativity and potted wisdom-from which people could help themselves.

Yet he always craved respectability among his peers and, in old age, he returned to Cambridge, England, from America, where he had spent most of the war. He had been for a while in Los Angeles, at the heart of the European intellectual diaspora. He also spent a fat period in lucrative Philadelphian frustration, working for the institute of Dr. Albert Barnes from whom, as from many people, he parted the worst of friends. He remained certain of his own eminence and was mortified, when again he reached London, not to have it confirmed by a new generation of philosophers with whom-apart from A.J. Ayer-he became increasingly testy.

Although it is not surprising that Monk does not include my testimony in his painstaking account, it was in the 1940s that my life brushed, by a hair’s breadth, against the great man’s. When I was 13-years-old, I had lunch with my mother in the same quiet restaurant where Russell had taken his son Conrad. I recognized his voice from the Brains Trust, a radio program on which he gave off-the-cuff answers to listeners’ questions. (When asked “What is truth?” he answered, “The truth is what the police require you to tell.’)

I heard his son ask him if his ancient Greek would be any help in learning Welsh (the Russells had recently taken a place in Wales). Russell said, “I think that you may find your Sanskrit more useful in that department.” It may well be, of course, that the old man was making a straight-faced joke, but I was immediately filled with envy: I imagined having a father who said things like that. How fortunate was Conrad in having one?

At Cambridge in the early 1950s, I attended a series of lectures given by Russell. The first audience overflowed into Mill Lane outside the lecture hall. Russell affected disapproval. “I have a feeling,” he told us, “that some of you are here for the wrong reasons. Accordingly ... “ (How often is that word ever used in dialogue?) “next week’s lecture will be twice as difficult.” The audience was not twice as small.

I was among those who congregated at a Bohemian house in Jordan’s Yard where there was good jazz, cosmopolitan company and pretty girls. One Saturday night, there was a knock at the door (which was never locked) and a visiting Dutch student went to open it. We heard him say, “If you weren’t asked, push off.” The door banged. When he came back, I said, “Who was that then?” The Dutchman said, “Some old fool. He said his name was Bertrand Russell. Mean anything to you?”

How much does it now mean to anyone? A.J. Ayer maintained that Russell was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. That view is hardly normative. The shift from theories of knowledge to theories of meaning has left him obsolete in a world markedly less Anglo-centric than in his heyday. But it had not only been Russell’s brains that gained him the world’s attention. Like Winston Churchill, he was among the last products of British supremacy. If Russell’s ideas were heterodox, they had nevertheless emanated from the center of world power. When, in the 1920s, he advocated world government, he still assumed-as H.G. Wells did-that the (preferably Anglo-Saxon) white man would be in charge. Preaching “socialism,” he had callow ideas about its practice. In truth, he was a natural oligarch. His language remained that of his great Whig ancestors who took for granted their right to command. All that was left, by the 1950s, was an impotent parody of the old authority, the final snarl of the Cheshire cat.

In his 90s, avid for flattery and confirmation that he was still a world force, Russell fell under the influence of Ralph Schoenman, an American 1960s activist whom some alleged, because of his provocative overstatements, to be an agent of the CIA, planted to make the Left look deranged. For several years, the peace-loving Russell lent Schoenman’s blood-curdling Guevarist pronouncements his signature. At one stage, he even tried to adopt him as a son (his own progeny having failed him). Oddly enough, Jean-Paul Sartre consented to be manipulated in a similar way by “Benny Levy,” a Maoist given to Schoenman’s style of insolent appropriation.

Trying to repeat in old age what had made him a heroic martyr in 1916, Russell became a vieillard terrible. While his families crumbled into raging and suicidal dysfunction, he imagined that civil disobedience, with him at its head, could save the world from nuclear incineration. After Khrushchev was persuaded to refuse Fidel Castro nuclear weapons (to which Schoenman-Russell had previously argued that Cuba had a perfect right, though Great Britain did not), Russell was easily persuaded to regard himself as the savior of mankind. He resented any suggestion that Kennedy’s steady nerve (and nuclear muscle) might have been more significant than his own busy tongue.

Today’s paucity of durable heroes is due in good part to publishing scoundrels, commissioned to dig the dirt on great men. The scrupulous Monk is not of their number. His disappointment in Russell is matched by his pity for him and for the lives he distorted, blighted or destroyed. Some British veterans of 1960s demos and sit-ins have resented Monk’s failure to sustain the juvenile illusions that they acquired from Bertie, not least that America was the source of all evil and uniquely responsible for taking the world to the brink. Several of these nostalgic people have since had splendid academic careers in the United States.

Russell’s most reliable intellectual battle honor probably derives from his (and G.E. Moore’s) repelling of obscurantist Hegelian influences from British philosophy. Their insistence on coherence, clarity and the need for valid evidence (even if Russell’s own opinionated habits ignored this rule) ensured that English-language philosophers were suspicious of both jargon and mystification, at least until recently.

Russell was in some respects like Thales, the 6th century BC “Father of Philosophy” who was observed by a Thracian peasant girl so lost in studying the heavens that he fell down a well. Russell was so busy dreaming of an ideal world educated, under his aegis, to happiness and peace that he tripped into a mundane abyss of vanity, anguish and personal tragedy.