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The eloquent and intimate biography of one of the most significant figures of the last century. Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher.
Table of contents
- Bertrand Russell
- Account Options
- Front matter
- Editions of The Life of Bertrand Russell by Ronald William Clark
But Russell took his sexual partners a lot more seriously than did Byron.
Bertrand Russell
His relations with women seem to have followed the same pattern as with men: he was constantly looking for somebody wonderful and astonishing, somebody who would change his life. If they were women, he would often go to bed with them. But not if they were men: this must be one the few recent biographies to offer no revelations of homosexual yearnings. On first encountering G.
Lawrence, Ottoline Morrell or Wittgenstein, he would become convinced that he had met someone immensely superior to himself, intellectually, morally, or both. But he would then decide, often fairly quickly, that he had been wrong. To a few people—Conrad, for example—he remained a good friend and a loyal admirer over the years.
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Many others must have wondered why he was now so ready to dismiss them with a witty phrase, when he had been all over them last month, or last year. Russell spent his 30s and 40s on the fringes of Bloomsbury, in the days when or so it now seems most of the artistically or intellectually gifted members of the English middle and upper classes knew one another and conversed and corresponded incessantly. It will attract, and gratify, at least two sorts of readers: people who find Bloomsbury endlessly fascinating, and philosophy buffs.
I am not sure that I ought to be as interested as I am in the tangled sexual and intellectual connections among the members of that set. Eliot, as well as his teacher and collaborator Alfred North Whitehead? My hunch is that it is with books about Bloomshury as it is or so am I told with string quartets: the audience is getting steadily older and dwindling.
Those of use for whom these latter writers were paradigmatic may be the only people still willing to shell out money for biographies of Lytton Strachey or Vita Sackville-West. And this may be the case even for biographies of Moore or Russell, and maybe even Wittgenstein. It is possible that Monk—whose biography of Russell is just as thoroughly researched and as engrossing as the stunning biography of Wittgenstein that made him famous five years ago—had published his book in the nick of time. If you consider Moore and Russell outside of their piquant Bloomsbury-cum-Cambridge ambiance, simply as figures in the history of philosophy, they do not look nearly as important as they once did.
There are as many versions of Wittgenstein on the market these days as there are of Plato or of Hegel. Moore and Russell, by contrast, really are as unambiguous and straightforward as they prided themselves on being. So it is much easier to find them obsolete. Monk is steeped in philosophy and he seems to have no doubt that his subjects did epoch-making philosophical work. And one cannot begin to understand that without some understanding of the philosophy itself.
Monk certainly has a point. It you write a biography of a person much of whose life was devoted to solving problems in a certain special area, you have a tremendous advantage if you are thoroughly familiar with that area. The best biographies of physicists are usually written by physicists, the best biographies of movie stars by people who have helped to make movies. Still, when curt equations begin appearing in the former, or detailed discussion of the comparative merits of camera booms in the latter, leaders start to skim.
Our interest in heroic figures such as Niels Bohr or Marlene Dietrich may not bold up under the pressure of too many, or too minute details. When it comes to biographies of philosophers, things get complicated.
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Some philosophers—Plato, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Kuhn—put forward philosophical views whose point is pretty clear right off the bat. If you accept what those philosophers have to say on those subjects, it may well change your intellectual habits and your self-image. You can get the point of their philosophical initiatives even if you skim over some of the technicalities.
Front matter
In such cases, if you do not get the technicalities, you get nothing. Philosophy professors, of course, get excited by the technicalities. They are our meat and drink. For us, Monk cannot provide too many details. But most of us would be reluctant to insist that any self-respecting intellectual ought to share our professional thrills. Similarly, economics professors might think that any self-respecting voter has a duty to hold some views on economic policy, but concede that the general public is excused to follow the debate between the followers of Keynes and the followers of Friedman.
No doubt any self respecting human being should have a worldview, but he or she may be excused from most of the debates over, say, the validity of the ontological argument between Descartes and Hume, or between Kant and Hegel. The ontological argument, you may recall from Philosophy , says that since God is the most perfect being, and since it is more perfect to exist than not to, God necessarily exists. Another version says that God is that being whose very essence is existence, so the suggestion that he does not exist is self-contradictory.
Still, Russell is arguably the most influential philosopher to have written in English in this century. Dewey and Kuhn are the only plausible rivals for this position. Surely Russell must have said something—and something distinctly philosophical—which it behooves everybody, not just the professionals, to know? Maybe, but I am not sure what it was, and I doubt that Monk is, either. Russell was very influential in his capacity as Monk puts it as a nineteenth-century Whig. A godson of John Stuart Mill and a grandson of Lord John Russell—he was born in l—Russell updated and enlarged the liberalism of these two great Victorians for the benefit of twentieth-century audiences.
He made a big difference to public opinion on a lot of social and political questions, and he did a great deal of good. But his views on moral, social and political questions, and on the meaning of life, have nothing at all to do with the work which made Russell philosophically influential.
Editions of The Life of Bertrand Russell by Ronald William Clark
Even in their own work, they portrayed moneyed leisure with uneasy self-awareness. Dalloway and all the other fine ladies! Dalloway Orlando, FL: Harcourt, , First published Dalloway but all her privileged class to the servile humiliations of wage labor. Clarissa Dalloway can lie on the couch for an hour after lunch. Reprinted from The Hedgehog Review This essay may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission.
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