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BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE LOGIC OF A LITERARY SYMBOL S.P. ROSENBAUM Once when he was still a philosopher, T.S. Eliot took his friend Ezra Pound to a meeting of the Aristotelian Society. Pound absorbed as much of the discussion as he could take and then retired outside with Eliot where they encountered G.R.S. Mead. Mead expressed surprise at finding Pound there, and many years later Pound recalled how Eliot had replied 'with perfect decorum and suavity ... "Oh, he's not here as a phil-os-opher;fHe's here as an an-thro-pologist." '1 I can neither participate in these centenary rituals* as a philosopher nor observe them as an anthropologist. I am here rather as a literary historian interested in the interrelations of modem English literature and British philosophy. This may well strike many philosophers, literary critics, and even anthropologists as a curious preoccupation, for it is widely assumed that there are no such interrelations. I have tried elsewhere to illustrate some of the connections that have existed between British philosophy and English literature.' On the occasion of the centenary of the most celebrated British philosopher of the past hundred years, I would like to look at one particular aspect of Russell's relevance to English literature , and that is the symbolic significance that he has been given in a number of literary works. This is by nO means the only connection that can be made between Russell and his native literature, though I believe it is the most interesting. Russell has testified how important English literature was for him.' Unlike so many other English philosophers of the time, he was not schooled in the classics. The influence of the early and prolonged study of Greek and Latin literature on modem analytic philosophy has not yet, as far as I know, been studied; when it is, the importance of translation for conceptual analysis may emerge along with at least a partial explanation of why so many philosophers - though again Russell is an exception - have become deadened to literature. Russell's literary education consisted largely of unsupervised reading of English, European, and American writers. He "This paper was originally presented at the Bertrand Russell Centenary Celebrations, McMaster University, 13 October 1972. UTQ, Volume XLII, Number 4, Summer 1973 302 S.P. ROSENBAUM is reputed to have memorized all of Shakespeare's sonnets;' the romantic poet-radicals Blake, Shelley, and Whitman were deeply admired by him, as were the works of such diverse writers as Milton, Gibbon, and Carlyle. Gilbert Murray and Joseph Conrad affected Russell strongly through both their friendship and their literary work. Despite all these influences, the nature of Russell's achievement in philosophy is such that English literature is largely irrelevant to it. So remote has English literature become for modern symbolic logic that I suspect the identity of Waverley and perhaps Scott himself will have to be explained by some teachers of logic before they can proceed with Russell's theory of descriptions and his famous conundrum of what exactly George IV meant when he asked if Sir Walter Scott were the author of Waverley. Gray's Elegy possibly offers fewer difficulties for the student of logic seeking to comprehend "The meaning of the first line of Gray's Elegy" is the same as "The meaning of The curfew tolls the knell of parting day'," and is not the same as "The meaning of 'the first line of Gray's Elegy' ".'0 Russell once used a more apt illustration from English literature. He invoked Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy to exemplify a paradox of Cantor's that is the converse of Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. After Tristram Shandy had taken two years to chronicle the first two days of his life, he realized that as his life went on he would be farther and farther away from the end of his life's history. Russell argued, however, that 'if he had lived for ever, and had not wearied of his task, then, even if his life had continued as eventfully as it began, no part of his biography would have remained unwritten in all time.' This paradoxical proposition...

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