Confession and Concealment in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell wrote versions of spiritual autobiography throughout his life, and in its final form his Autobiography resembles inchoate spiritual autobiography. Equally strong, though, is the doubt of the perpetually inquiring skeptic. Russell presents a series of transient revaluations and glaring discontinuities between his emotional and intellectual aspects. As a narrator he is most remarkable for "the absence of the presence," a vision both lucid and murky, wherein candor vies with self-delusion, insight with blindness. Aware of something he called "Satanic mysticism," he struggled with suicidal despair. Philandering was a desperate means of treating his self-loathing and misanthropy, as he reveals indirectly in "concealed confessions." Ultimately there is no grace abounding for this chief of sinners, despite the nobility of so much of his life, expressed movingly in the postscript to the Autobiography.