Bertrand Russell: The Pilgrimage of Scientific Philosophy

BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE PILGRIMAGE OF SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY LEWIS S. FEUER I EVERY philosophy is a work of autobiography. Behind the impressive aspect of logical demonstration there is the man, with hopes and anxieties. It was, however, the great dream of Bertrand Russell that a scientific philosophy could be constructed rising above human trammels, god-like in its ethical neutrality. Now we ask: Was the pilgrimage of scientific philosophy a quest after a non-existent god? When we have probed beneath the logical surface of Russell's philosophy , do we find that its apparently logical fonnulae have been shaped to express bis emotional needs? Russell has himself come to recognize that logic is not the whole of philosophy. He distinguishes questions which are scientific aRd amenable to general agreement from those which concern the ultimate import of the universe and history. And philosophy in this latter sense, Russell states, is an "organic whole of extra-rational decisions"; its answers are born of the philosopher's personal circumstances, not of logical or scientific evidence.' We are led to ask, however, whether there is indeed a co-existence of two modes of philosophy. Or does every basic tenet of Russell, the scientific philosopher, tum out upon analysis to be a disguised "extra-rational" decision of Russell, the human individual? The key to Russell's philosophy is indeed not its method of logical analysis. Its source lies in various images and motifs, set forth on his part wit!) candour. As the dominant image of his psychological unconscious changes, so changes his scientific philosophy. The early years of his thinking were an .epistemological poem, devoted to his loneliness --solipsism, as the philosophers call it. Russell grappled with devices that would help him to reach out to the common-sense external world, only to find that his logic was already committed to loneliness. He was then the defiant rebel who would have surmounted the world of time as an aristocratic logician, a free man who sought to dwell in eternity. During the First World War, his parental affections and sense of duty were awakened. He tried to influence ordinary men, and suffered imprisonment. His political philosophy exalted the individual against repressive forces. He was drawn to anarchism and internalional socialism. When at this time he wrote his metaphysics, lA Hi!tOTY of Western Philosophy (New York, 1945), 787. 217 Vol. XXIV, no. 3, April, 1955 218 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY he found that the universe, too, is composed of anarchist particulars, without inner connection. The search for political values and ethical certainties took Russell in 1920 to the Soviet Union, where he was repelled by the cruelty in Lenin's personality, and found the Bolshevik philosophy too much like that of American industrialism.2 The commissar, like the financial magnate, regarded human beings as the means to the elevation of production statistics. His search for a political creed drew Russell on to China, where he stayed for nearly a year; he came to love China's "large tolerance and contemplative peace of mind.'" There, too, he became ill, and was for several weeks at the point of death. His faithful students of the Peking University, partisans of the Young China movement, "wished to be present at the deathbed of the philosopher Lo Sou," and asked to bury him by the Western Lake.' But Russell recovered, returned to England to open a school for children, wrote books on education and the reform of sexual ethics. A recurrent primitivism occurs in Russell's thinking. If, he thought, education could preserve the natural vitality of the child, the world might still be saved. The man who disliked his contemporaries with a Swiftian contempt, loved children. "The nursery-school, if it became universal, could, in one generation," he wrote, "remove the terrible dead-weight of disease and stupidity and malevolence which now make progres.. so difficult.'" With the coming of economic depression, he once more developed communistic sympathies; but by 1937, he had found the world so irrational that he wrote: "Freud's 'death wish' may be more or less mythological, but on the whole it affords a better explanation of the present behaviour of Europe than is possible on...