Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

Tyler Cowen thinks highly of the work of Harold Bloom. In particular he recommends Bloom’s The Western Canon (1994), which is a one-volume conspectus of Western literature from Dante through Samuel Beckett. As skeptical as I am of Bloom (see my remarks on Bloom in The Discipline of Literary Criticism) Cowen’s got me there. I don’t know of any other comparable one-volume introduction to Western literature, though I imagine that, with a bit of care, you could have your favorite top-of-the-line chatbot do something comparable for you.

But if what interests you is not so much the sweep of Western literature as the sweep of the Western mind, then you might consider Bertrand Russell’s one volume History of Western Philosophy. The emphasis is different, obviously, but philosophy is literature-adjacent. And the sweep is grander, from the Pre-Socrates to the 20th century. It has been criticized for its, shall we say, idiosyncratic emphasis and judgements,  but the same can be said for Bloom. Neither man pretended to take stock of their respective domains as a neutral observer.

Moreover Russell was arguably one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century. His early contributions to mathematical logic and analytic philosophy are foundational; he was also a public intellectual of considerable influence, writing God knows how many essays collected into dozens of books, and a political activist as well, collaborating with diverse figures in opposition to nuclear weapons (Albert Einstein) and the war in Vietnam (Jean-Paul Sartre). (Alas, he was also a eugenicist in the first half of his life.)

And, I suppose, roughly the same chatbot strategy that would allow you to displace Bloom from your reading list would also work with Russell.

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FWIW, I’m only four degrees of separation from Bertrand Russell, and all the links are strong, none of them mere acquaintance. Here’s the chain:

(1) Bertrand Russell taught Ludwig Wittgenstein;
(2) Wittgenstein taught Margaret Masterman;
(3) Masterman was a colleague of David Hays;
(4) David Hays was my teacher and then colleague.

Given my teachers at Johns Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo I’m likely no more than two links from Bloom in two or three directions. For example, I audited a graduate course on the Victorian novel taught by J. Hillis Miller, who also wrote me a letter of recommendation for graduate school. He became Bloom's colleague at Yale as one of the infamous “Yale Mafia.”

I’m Four Degrees of Separation from Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell taught Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in turn taught Margaret Masterman. Masterman is one of the founders of computational linguistics, as is my teacher, David Hays. I don’t know much about their intellectual relationship, but I know it was substantial. Hays had a white sweater which she had knitted for him and she was a close intellectual confidant. Hays hired one of her students, Martin Kay, to work with him at RAND.

These four relationships, 1) Russell & Wittgenstein, 2) Wittgenstein and Masterman, 3) Masterman & Hays, and 4) Hays & Benzon, are all substantial ones and not of mere acquaintance. Did I get any “juice” from Russell through that chain that I hadn't already picked up by reading Russell and Wittgenstein before I ever even knew about Hays?

They say it's my birthday, and it is. [+ Bertrand Russell]

77

Here’s what I posted on my 76th birthday, an update of a long post I did on my 70th: Reflections on entering my eighth decade and why it portends to be the most productive one of my life. Between now and back then there have been times when I thought that title was nuts. “The most productive one of my life!?” No way. But those periods always pass. FWIW, I had more New Savanna posts last year than in any previous year, 1004. The next highest was 2019, with 910. When this is posted I’ll have 968, and then year isn’t over. Of course, number of blog posts is a superficial measure of productivity. What matters are idea. We’ll see.

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Since I’ve been thinking about Bertrand Russell and he was a hero of mine in my youth, I thought I’d post some excerpts from his Playboy interview from March 1963, not half a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. I would have been 15 when that issue was published and may well have discovered Playboy by that time. I’d have to walk, I don’t know, maybe as much as a mile, to get to a store where I could buy it and then sneak it back into the house.

In his introduction to the interview, Norman MacKenzie notes that Russell played a small role in bringing it to a close. This is from the interview itself:

PLAYBOY: What do you believe was the effect of your own personal intervention with Khrushchev via your much publicized cable appealing for Russian prudence in responding to the American blockade of Cuba?

RUSSELL: He carried out the promise he made in the letter replying to my cable -- the promise to do nothing rash that would risk conflict. Within hours of my communication, 12 Soviet ships had turned back from their Cuban destination and Khrushchev had stopped further shipment. This left Cuba illegally blockaded in violation of international law. I believe that if a blockade is defensible when applied to Cuba, then the precedent can be applied also to Berlin and even to Britain, which is an advanced American nuclear base. America should remember the War of 1812 when the United States would not tolerate a British blockade. This is the very heart of what I have been saying for years: If nuclear bases are intolerable in Cuba, then they are intolerable anywhere in the world. Nuclear bases threaten the survival of mankind and the Cuban crisis has shown us how very close we are to annihilation.

Are there any current intellectuals who have such influence? Later in the interview:

PLAYBOY: In 1957 you wrote in The New Statesman, the liberal British journal, an appeal to Premier Khrushchev and then-President Eisenhower for just such a lessening of world tension, to which both the Russian leader and John Foster Dulles responded with public reassurances. Six years have elapsed since then without a noticeable decline in global strife and division. At this critical moment in the cold war, would you care to make another such appeal, perhaps suggesting specific ways in which relations can be improved?to Khrushchev and President Kennedy?

RUSSELL: If I were to make another such appeal, I would have to begin by repeating what I said in 1957. I should say simply to both men: “You seem anxious to destroy the world, to create vast misery and total destruction. All this preparation for war is childish and suicidal. If you could only begin to tolerate each other, you would be perfectly happy.” I would go on to suggest that the overridingly urgent necessity is to come to an agreement. This is far more important than the precise form the agreement takes. Last summer, I sent a message to Moscow in which I expressed the wish that in all negotiations between East and West, the negotiator for the Communists should begin by saying that the universal victory of capitalism would be less disastrous than nuclear war. At the same time, the Western spokesman should start by admitting that the universal victory of communism would be preferable to the destruction of mankind. In a speech last July, Khrushchev singled out this suggestion and said that he entirely agreed. I was rather pleased. I would suggest further that the likelihood of war could be lessened immeasurably if both sides would place a great deal more emphasis on the ghastly destructiveness of war. At present, the major organs of publicity in both East and West are inclined to make the public believe that nuclear war wouldn’t really be so terrible after all. That is why I am opposed to Civil Defense preparations. They are diabolical inventions calculated to tell lies and to deceive. Everyone who knows anything knows that. People may think themselves safe in their deep shelters but they will roast. Governments must be made to give up the habit of lying in order to persuade people to die quietly. Thirdly, I would strongly recommend an agreement on both sides not to teach that the other side is wicked. For Americans, communism is the Devil; for the Russians, capitalism is the Devil. The truth is that neither is wickeder than the other. They are both wicked.

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal, to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle, to allow moments of insight to impart wisdom in mundane times. Social, to envision in imagination, an attainable society in which the individual can grow freely, in which hate and greed and envy will die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I still believe. So you can see that the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

On My Politics

I view of the recent election I’ve been thinking about my politics. Here’s an edited version of note I recently sent to my friend Frank Munley, whom I’ve known since 1966 or 67. It frames my politics in events in my life.

Ever since I read Bertrand Russell in my teens I’ve been on the left. Just exactly where on the left, that’s another matter.

Bertrand Russell, as you know, there’s really no one like him today. He was born into the British aristocracy in the late 19th century and was an enormously influential logician and philosopher throughout the first half of the 20th century. He was a pacifist, went to prison for it, and worked for nuclear disarmament during the Vietnam era. He was also a prominent essayist (got a Nobel Prize in Literature) and public intellectual. But I digress.

I was born in 1947, but of course I don’t remember Truman. I do remember Eisenhower. And I remember the 1959 steelworker’s strike, almost 4 months, over 500K workers. I grew up in a steel town, Johnstown. I seem to have identified as a Republican during the JFK era (before Russell). I think that’s because I thought my father was a Republican. I’m not too clear on this.

I remember one Halloween; I had a good haul and my bag was breaking. We went to the house of a friend, "Nick Canoni” was his name, something like that. His dad asked me what party I was and I replied “Republican.” “Well, let me give you a good Democrat bag,” he replied. And he did.

Anyhow, some-time during my mid-teens my father told me that the company “encouraged” (required?) management to contribute to the Republican Party. He was an engineer, hence white collar, and worked for Bethlehem Mines. He also told me Bethlehem employees were not supposed to buy foreign cars. Once the restriction was lifted, however, and he got a VW Beetle as a second car. These shenanigans by management did not sit well with me.

That’s when I began reading Bertrand Russell. I think I started with a book I found in a cardboard box in a closet in the basement, the same box where I found 1984. I must have read 10 or so books by Russell, including his big fat History of Western Philosophy. Meanwhile the war in Vietnam got nasty and very visible and I opposed it. I joined SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] during my freshman year at Johns Hopkins and met you, I believe, in my second year. When the draft was instituted in the late 1960s I drew #12 in the lottery and got called up. I became a conscientious objector and performed my civilian service in the Chaplain's Office at Johns Hopkins.

I don’t think I voted in a presidential election until 1976 or perhaps 1980. I think I voted Democrat every time, except for the year when I voted for Nader. So, yes, I voted for Harris this time. Perhaps I should have voted for Stein as I live in New Jersey. But, Trump lost NJ by 16 points in 2020; he only lost by 9 points this time out.

Basically, ever since my college years I’ve believed that our political/economic system was fucked.

This next passage is from a comment I made to a post by Michael Liss at 3 Quarks Daily. It embellishes on what my note to Frank says about my electoral politics.

Ever since I started reading Bertrand Russell in my mid-teens I've been on the Left and opposed to war. I remain opposed to war, and I'm still of the Left, for whatever the hell that means. I've never thought of myself as a communist, much less a party-member Communist. Democratic socialist? I like the sound of that, but I don't know what that means.

For my purposes, I'm not sure it matters. I need a politics to guide me in the voting booth, not just for the presidential election, but for the state and local elections too. I don't need a well-defined politics to make those decisions. So, I'm willing to leave the heavy political thinking to others. That's not the intellectual responsibility I've taken on for myself. I've got other matters I think about.

Finally, I should say a word about Art Efron and Charlie Keil. I met Art at graduate school in the English Department of SUNY Buffalo. He taught a course on radical approaches to literature; I signed up because I wanted to see what it was about. He introduced me to the anarchist thinking of Alex Comfort, which I found congenial. We’ve got to be careful about that word, “anarchism,” which tends to mean pointless rabble-rousing and trouble-making. But that’s not what anarchism is about as a political philosophy. It’s about self-organization and tends to favor smallness. Those are things I find attractive.

Charlie Keil is an anarchist as well. He was at Buffalo when I was there, but he was in American Studies so I didn’t know he was there – though our paths did cross one time just before I left. But I met up with him two decades later and we’ve been working together ever since. We’ve marched together in New York and even Vermont and over the last few years I’ve worked with him on some small book projects.

In 2015 and 2016 we worked on a small collection of materials built around a Benjamin Rush published in 1793, “A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States.” With the addition of materials by Mary Liebman, Frederick L. Schuman, Charlie, and me, we had the first volume in a series of pamphlets on the theme of local paths of peace today: We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody’s Business, Nobody’s Job. A couple of years later I put together a collection of essays by the economist Thomas Naylor, Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary, in which he argued that nations and corporations have grown too big for effective governance. It also had something of an anarchist feel. The most recent addition to the series is a collection of essays on music, Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature.

Those are all political books, each in its own way. But they don’t provide much practical guidance in the electoral politics of the United States. The first argues for peace. Who doesn't want peace? But actually create a department of the federal government for it...? It's been tried and failed. No reason not to keep trying, but I don't see how that's going to help get us through the second Trump administration. Naylor wants to downsize the polis. He lived in Vermont so he could participate in the secession movement that's been active there for years. Not gonna' happen. The last book urges people to act locally to support live music in every way, especially among kids. That people can do. I'm all for it. Not sure it'll have much effect on electoral politics. These books advance ideas, and that’s important too.

10 Influential Books [Updated, once again]

I've just been watching this conversation between Howard Gardner and Steven Pinker and was reminded of Erik Erikson. His book, Childhood and Society was very important for me. It made Freudian ideas more intelligible than Freud himself had done. Anyhow, that's why I'm once again bumping this post to the top of the queue.

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The "10 Influential Books" meme seems to be making the rounds again. I originally published this back in March of 2010. Here it is again, without revisions.

Urged on by a reader, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? This sort of thing is something of a crap-shoot, yadda yadda, but why not? I’ve limited my list to non-fiction.

My Teacher

David Hays, Cognitive Structures (HRAF Press 1981). Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.

Some Others

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve already discussed. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.

John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.

Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. I’ve read a good deal of Piaget, and this wasn’t the first (most likely that was The Origins of Intelligence in Children.) Though now somewhat eclipsed, his concept of developmental stages was enormously useful and, I believe, still holds water. But be careful. (Given its subjects, this book connects nicely with an interest in literature.)

Lev Vygotsky, Language and Thought. Vygotsky argued that children acquire language by completely internalizing that started as interaction with another. First the parent uses language to direct the child’s attention and behavior. Over time the child becomes able, first to use his own speech for those tasks, and then becomes able to dispense with external speech entirely.

Karl Pribram, Languages of the Brain. Pribram was a champion of the notion that the brain processes and stores information holographically. You’ll find that idea here, plus much more besides. Pribram was, and remains, one of our most comprehensive thinkers about the brain and its mind. But this book’s a tough read.

 

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Medievals and Early Moderns didn’t think about children as we do, which Ariès argued from paintings, diaries, and other sources. The basic idea is that people way back when didn’t think and act about something very basic in the way we do. Children are children, no? Well, biologically, yes. Culturally, no.

William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers has two ideas, both from control theory (& one of them is more or less given in his title), and both quite elegant. This is how to go about theorizing, be as clear as you can and use elegant examples. FWIW, Powers was an engineer and very much concerned with building real things.

Philosophers

Except for the Powers, all of the above books came to me within a minute or two. Then I drew a blank for a couple of minutes. “But you know,” says I to myself, “I was quite influenced by some philosophers early on, even if I no longer read philosophy. Oo why not mention them.” So I will. That I had to kick Merleau-Ponty into the omissions pile, rather than one of these, is somewhat arbitrary.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Two things got me, the rigorous order of the whole affair, each proposition numbered in outline form. And the mysticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Read a lot of Nietzsche too. But his account of the birth of tragedy linked up with other things in a powerful (including two of the books in the omissions pile.) And, of course, the Apollonian and Dionysian.

Omissions

Since the exercise limited us to ten I didn’t list The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) The Phenomenology of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), The Four Ages of Music (Walter Wiora, Has anyone else ever heard of this one, much less read it?) or Art and Illusion (Ernst Gombrich). The more I think about this, the longer this list will get.

EDIT: Jeeze, how did Freud not make the list? I only thought of him when I read someone else’s list just minutes ago (and 2 hours after I first posted this). & Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell. Well, I know why Russell didn’t make the list. I read a lot of his stuff in my mid-teens, but not after. I hadn’t started “serious” thinking when I left off reading him. And then there's Charlie Keil's Urban Blues (1966).

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These are comments I made to responses back at The Valve (now defunct):

I find it interesting that you list a number of books from high school & earlier, Luther. I didn't list any from my high school years, which is when I read most of the Bertrand Russell, his popular stuff, not the technical philosophy and logic. Love your comment about Norman Brown. & perhaps I should have listed Suzanne Langer among my philosophers; Feeling and Form was a key work for me. I used both her and Nietzsche in my music book (Beethoven's Anvil, 2001).

Interesting, Rohan, what we take "influence" to mean. Without so much as a thought otherwise I took it to mean "influential in my research." If I'd construed the term more broadly, as you did, I'd have a somewhat different list. That list might have included, for example, Peter Pan (the Golden Books version via Disney), Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy, and Holling Clancy Holling, Lucille Webster Holling, Pagoo (just look at those illustrations).

Celebrity Philosophers: Russell, Sartre, and Comments by Harman

Graham Harman has had two recent posts on celebrity philosophers. The first looks at a NYTimes column on the subject and defends Žižek: he may be a celebrity, but he's also serious. He then goes into an anti-analytic philosophy riff, as the Times pieces seems to have been the work of an analytic snarking on Continental philosophy. Harman's second post responds to a post Jon Cogburn had made in response and is yet another discussion of the analytic/Continental divide. In this post Harman mentions Bertrand Russell, who was, of course, an analytic philosopher and a public intellectual.

I don't know what Playboy magaine is up to these days, assuming it still exists, but there was a time when the monthly interview feature had some pretty interesting pieces, including interviews of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell. Does that mean the Playboy was straddling the analytic Continental divide?

That divide, incidentally, seems to be a recurring motif in Harman's thought, at least on his blog, though he also points out that Latour seems to operate outside that divide. If one were to work a deconstructive turn, this little riff strikes me as being an interesting way in. The distinction seems to matter a great deal to him as a philosopher.

Harman to Holt to Russell: Philosophy, Knowlege, and the World

There's this notion that philosophy, in effect, is the scouting party of knowledge. Once the philosophers have explored a territory and put boundaries on it, they pass it off to specialists, who till the soil, erect homes, breweries, observatories, roads, garbage dumps, and so forth. I don't know when I first came across this notion, though not expressed in those terms, but I do think of it from time and time. And rather often in recent weeks and months as I think about the relationship between philosophy and more specialized disciplines.

What I mostly wonder is whether or not that story is true or whether its just a nice 'just-so' story.

So this morning I see a post by Graham Harman on complaints physicists have been lodging about philosophers. Harman is referring to a NYTimes op-ed by Justin Holt, Physicists, Stop the Churlishness. This is the paragraph in Harman's piece that caught my eye:

I also couldn’t disagree more with the Russell passage cited here, to the effect that philosophy aims at knowledge, and that once knowledge is achieved in an area it ceases to be philosophy. I’m with the Meno on this one. Philosophy does not aim at knowledge. That’s even the whole point.

See that first sentence? That's more or less the idea I've been wondering about, and Holt attributes it to Bertrand Russell. So I high-tail it over Holt's piece to see if he has more from Russell. Alas, he does not, but nonetheless the paragraph's worth quoting in full:

As Bertrand Russell (himself no slouch at physics and mathematics) observed, philosophy aims at knowledge, and as soon as it obtains definite knowledge in a specific area, that area ceases to be called “philosophy.” And scientific progress gives philosophers more and more to do. Allow me to quote Nietzsche (although I know that will be considered by some to be in bad taste): “As the circle of science grows larger, it touches paradox at more places.” Physicists expand the circle, and philosophers help clear up the paradoxes. May both camps flourish.