Books: Wrangler’s World

THE WISDOM OF THE WEST (320 pp.)—Berfrand Russell—Doubleday ($12.50).

In a prodigious feat of analysis, narrative and condensation, Bertrand Russell has compressed the history of Western philosophy into 320 pages. (In a 1946 volume, he took nearly three times as much space.) As ground bait in the chilling stream of philosophic speculation, the publishers have sprinkled 500 illustrations, half of them in color, through this volume. From Thales (circa 624-546 B.C.), about whom little is known, to Whitehead and Wittgenstein, both of whom the author knew well, Russell tells something of the life as well as the ideas of the hundred-odd philosophers who have helped to make the mind of the West. Says he: “The current trend towards more and fiercer specialisms is making men forget their intellectual debts to their forbears.”

In the Arena. It is an exciting, if exacting spectator sport to see a spirited logician in broken-field running (using the split-hair formation) tear through a platoon of Platonists or a squad of schoolmen. Russell puts living and dead philosophers in the same intellectual arena. Turning to 6th century B.C. Greece, for example, he respects Anaximander’s intuition that man is biologically related to fish, but laughs at his injunction that therefore man should not eat fish. “Whether our brethren of the deep cherish equally delicate sentiments towards us is not recorded,” Russell snuffles in a donnish gibe. It is almost as if the Greek fellow were declining the Dover sole as guest of the author at Trinity High Table.

In a lively 19th century dispute with Hegel, Russell triumphs over the ponderous metaphysics of German idealism. In this victory can be heard the thud of Dr. Johnson’s boot against the stone in the good doctor’s celebrated refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s notion that matter is something in one’s mind.

As for Marx, Author Russell demolishes the Red bogeyman not only for sociological or economic errors but for his faults in epistemology (theory of knowledge). Unfortunately, the power of logic stands somewhat diminished when Russell is bound to mention, almost as an afterthought, that “nearly half the world today is governed by states that put implicit trust in Marx’s theories.”

All the Queen’s Tutors. Some fairly surprising personal views emerge from Russell’s book. His aristocratic father had wanted him brought up an agnostic. Orphaned at three, he was made a ward of Queen Victoria’s court, but all the Queen’s tutors and all the Queen’s nannies couldn’t put Bertrand’s faith together. By the time he left Cambridge in 1894, a philosopher and high Wrangler (the university’s term for top mathematicians), he was close to what his father had wanted him to be, and since then, Rationalist Russell has frequently attacked religion. All the more notable is his conclusion that science can never say what ought to be done. In this view, the reader can find a reproach to the hubris of today’s vociferous army of scientist-prophets, notably the late Albert Einstein in the U.S., J.B.S. Haldane in Britain, Joliot-Curie in France.

Logic, argues Russell, cannot provide a man with a set of ethical beliefs. Russell does not even claim to know why he himself believes in the virtue of free inquiry, though logic can tell him the implications of such a belief: “If, for example, it is held that one should act with honesty, then this does not depend on the size, shape or color of those with whom one happens to be dealing. In this sense, then, the ethical problem gives rise to the conception of the brotherhood of man. It is a view first stated explicitly in the ethical doctrine of stoicism, and later found its way into Christianity.”

The Four Unreasons. A Christian will object that the doctrine is in Christianity because its founder, no Stoic, put it there. But many of Russell’s judgments might be echoed by the Christian faith, notably his disdain for the existentialism of France’s Jean Paul Sartre. “Poetic vagueness and linguistic extravagance,” sputters Russell, who sees freedom “in a knowledge of how nature works [whereas] the existentialist finds it in an indulgence of his moods.” Russell may or may not be pleased to find the same thought expressed in the Bible.*

For two generations, Russell’s skeptical prejudices have had their share in depopulating the church in Britain; now he can occasionally be seen looking in its direction with the suspicion that perhaps that is where the body of ethics lies buried. His refutation of Plato’s ethics, which tended to equate virtue with knowledge, is a case in point. Men who know most, suggests Russell (who knows a great deal), are not necessarily the best men.

Skeptic Russell also speaks far more respectfully of medieval scholastics such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam than he does of the modern West’s fashionable philosophers, most of whom, in their different ways, have abdicated man’s proudest aspiration, which is to know what is what. Marxist and pragmatist agree that truth depends not on what is said, but on who says it—and why and when and with what results—so that for Americans who have accepted the notions of William James and John Dewey, no less than for Nikita Khrushchev, truth is apt to be just a matter of whose ox is gored. Britain’s logical positivists, who believe that philosophy can never reach beyond semantics, are engaged in the self-devouring enterprise of proving their right to say less and less about fewer and fewer things.

In the face of these affronts to the honor of human reason, Russell looks wistfully at the philosophers of the Grecian archipelago of 2,500 years ago. Philosophy, says Russell, must continue to deal with “impractical” questions, such as the meaning of life (“if indeed it have any at all”), which few boys, fewer men, and—on the record—no women have ever worried about for very long.

*A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover (i.e., uncover) itself.” (Proverbs 18:2)