Three lives in two volumes
Anthony Gottlieb
BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE by Ray Monk Jonathan Cape, f25.00, pp. 695 Bertrand Russell died at the ages of 48, 76 and 97. Well, almost, on the two earlier occasions. Such a triplicate existence was fitting for a man who achieved enough to fill at least three notable lives. By the time of his first premature obituaries in 1921, when he was believed to have succumbed to pneumonia while travelling in China, Russell was already a world-famous sage. He had revolutionised philosophy, inaugu- rating the now-dominant 'analytical' move- ment, and co-written the monumental Principia Mathematica. In 1913, the Specta- tor hailed Principia as a landmark in the history of speculative thought — and this was long before the development of com- puter languages, which were a later and unexpected by-product of Principia's pro- ject. Russell had also campaigned for free trade and for votes for women, been imprisoned for his opposition to the first war, stood for Parliament, written widely on social and political subjects, and written most of his 2,000 letters to the great love of his first life, Ottoline Morrell.
Yet this was only the beginning. It was between the ages of 48 and 76, his second life, that he produced the works which brought him a wider audience than any earlier philosopher, including the incompa- rably readable History of Western Philoso- phy, such popular books as The Conquest of Happiness and Marriage and Morals, vast amounts of journalism, and two of the first classics of popular science, The ABC of Atoms and The ABC of Relativity. Most of these books are still in print. He also mar- ried his second and third wives and inherit- ed an earldom. Then at the age of 76 he swam through freezing water to survive an aeroplane crash that killed nearly half the other passengers.
And still there was another life to come. In the next two years this rebel was embraced by the establishment: a fellow- ship for life at Trinity, the Order of Merit, a Nobel prize and the first Reith lecture- ship. But he refused to calm down. There followed two decades of radical protest at home and abroad, most famously against nuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam, plus another spell in prison and another wife. At his death in 1970, Russell had pro- duced more than 3,000 publications and 60,000 letters. With such a subject, it is no extravagance to produce an enormous biography; rather it was an act of restraint for Ray Monk to limit it to two volumes, of which this is the first.
Mr Monk is, remarkably, the only one of Russell's biographers so far to understand Russell's professional work. Imagine if all Beethoven's biographers had been tone- deaf. Mr Monk has previously published a study of the life and work of Wittgenstein, and lectures on the philosophy of mathe- matics at Southampton University. Yet it is his passionate desire to understand Russell the man rather than Russell the philoso- pher, coupled with an evident talent for the laborious sifting and detective work required to satisfy this desire, which makes The Spirit of Solitude an enthralling book.
Russell's most famous discovery, in his early work on the foundations of mathe- matics, was a contradiction in the theory of classes that has come to be known as `Gentlemen, things look pretty grim' Russell's Paradox. Though few readers may be interested enough to follow Mr Monk's brief explanation of this paradox, they will quickly find themselves drawn into another one. The central paradox in Russell's life is the way he combined an urge to alleviate the sufferings of humanity with an ability to inflict suffering on some of those who were closest to him. The urge was perhaps best explained by his perceptive daughter, Katharine Tait:
In Grandmother Russell's religion . . . the life of this world was no more than a gloomy testing ground for future bliss. All hope, all joy were centred on the life after death and were to be achieved only by unceasing war- fare against evil in oneself and others. My father threw this morbid belief out the win- dow, but he was never able to obliterate the emotional pattern with which it had stamped him. All the yearnings of his powerful nature were directed to the future, to a golden age to come, if not in heaven, then on earth.
Still, this was an earth on which Russell sometimes felt he did not belong. Standing in the Tottenham Court Road on Armistice Day, he said he felt 'strangely solitary amid the rejoicings, like a ghost dropped by accident from some other plan- et'. A sense of distance and ghostly discon- nection from ordinary mortals seems to have let him sometimes hurt others without quite realising what he had done, or not done.
Russell apparently realised that it was the ghost of a departed religion which was the root of his troubles:
What Spinoza calls 'the intellectual love of God' has seemed to me the best thing to live by, but I have not had even the somewhat abstract God that Spinoza allowed himself to whom to attach my intellectual love. I have loved a ghost, and in loving a ghost my inmost self has itself become spectral.
He was exaggerating his own flaws here — a result, perhaps, of the distorting sense of sin which comes from conducting unceasing warfare against the evil in one- self. Mr Monk's full and cogent account of Russell's life lets one see both this and understand that Russell's self-diagnosis was along roughly the right lines.
The creed with which he sought to replace Grandmother Russell's religion was a faith in the power of reason that was never extinguished. Whatever the limita- tions of this creed, one has to admire the light it enabled him to shine through his works into many dark corners. A mission- ary newspaper announced Russell's first `death' with the remark that missionaries might be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief at hearing of it. The enduring attrac- tions of Russell's writings are living proof of how misguided the author of that remark was. And the fascination of Mr Monk's first volume makes one breathe a sigh of relief that the missionaries were misinformed.
Anthony Gottlieb is on the editorial staff of The Economist He is writing a history of western philosophy.
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