Bertrand Russell

No blog list is complete without something about Betrand Russell.

As you probably know if you're reading this, he was an "Analytic" philosopher from the early 20th Century. He lived a long life, 1872-1970. He did about everything you could do in the world of "high ideas." He was considered a "philosopher," and a logician and a mathematician. Along with Whitehead he wrote books on mathematics. He was a fan of Albert Einstein and wrote accessibly on the theory of relativity. With Whitehead they seemed to have a disagreement (Whitehead was older) about their styles, Whitehead being obscurant and Russell being plain and accessible.

Russell is considered also to be an anti-idealist and this is what matters here. This means that he fought against a system evolved from Hume that stated that "mind makes reality." An idealist believes that true things exist only in and from the mind. The tree has metaphysical truth (truth that it is a thing) only in the sense that a mind perceives it. This is idealism. This is the very thing that Thomas Reid rallied against in the 1760s during his battle with Hume.

What does it mean to say that truth exists only in the mind? It means that reality as we know it does not exist. It means, as Hume might say, that it "could" exist but there is no way to verify it. The only value in terms of truth is that things occur in the mind or the mind gives substance to a thing. Kant went so far as to say that humans imbue objects with categories of space and time and that our understanding of them is merely this. The substance of an object, its place and duration, is given to it by our mind. This is the phenomenal world, for Kant. The Noumenal world is more real but completely inaccessible to us except (in some sense magically) through transcendental awareness. For various reasons, idealists believe that our senses cloud perception and that objective verification is impossible. The only thing I know, said Descartes, is that I am "knowing." My only real ontological (theory of being, what "is") significance I can have is my own thoughts. The rest is ephemeral. It may be true, but who knows?

Russell clearly wanted to be a realist, like Reid. He didn't seem to have read Reid, but he wanted the same thing for various reasons. One of those reasons is to ground morality in objectivity so that humans can get better at it. As one might imagine, if you don't ground morality in something universal, people end up doing what they want. They may call it something else, but their actions show a fetish for subjectivism. Interestingly enough, Kant also wanted to solve this and this became his big ethical "thing." Kant wanted to show a universalized formula for gaining absolute truth with ethics. Many of the other things he wrote contradicted this goal, so maybe students are unhappy with him.

And what we find in Russell is the same thing. It may be because the problem lends itself to this contradiction - that it doesn't provide the truth we need. But Russell made claims about the "real" world existing and he clearly wanted to be "sure" of this, yet his conclusions made it impossible. Russell was constantly writing that external reality almost exists (for a lack of better phrasing and quotology). He makes it clear that we cannot be sure that our senses are showing us actual things. The only absolute ground on which we can rely, according to Russell (see "The Problems of Philosophy") is intuition. Without intuition, induction and inference and all of our absolutes fall apart. What Russell was basically saying is that the skepticism that defined Hume (we can't verify cause, self, or world) still stands. In terms of absolute truth or "real" objectivity, we cannot get any closer than Hume. Russell wanted to believe in objective ethics and his life proved this out (lifelone pacifist, anti-imperialist, etc) but his words fell short. Unlike Reid, and later Rand, he spent no time (most likely because he thought it moot) working up a theory that would convince anyone of objective morality. If we take Russell at his word (and not his actions) we are left with an HC/empiricist model, where truth is not in any sense absolute.

"The Problems of Philosophy," Bertrand Russell, 1912

"We can be sure, he says, that anything we shall ever experience must show the characteristics affirmed of it in our a priori knowledge, because these characteristics are due to our own nature, and therefore nothing can ever come into our experience without acquiring these characteristics." Russell on Kant, p. 61

"All such general principles are believed because mankind have found innumerable instances of their truth and no instances of their falsehood. But this affords no evidence for their truth in the future, unless the inductive principle is assumed." p. 48 (If I had a dollar for every time an academic told me that between 2000 and 2020)

"The most we can hope is that the oftener things are found together, the more probable it becomes that they will be found together another time, and that, if they have been found together often enough, the probability will amount almost to certainty." p. 45

"When we try to look into ourselves we always seem to come upon some particular thought or feeling, and not upon the "I" which has the thought or feeling." p. 34 (stolen it seems directly from David Hume with no citation …) see below,

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception." David Hume, “Of Personal Identity” (from A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739) page, unknown. Stolen by me from Miamioh.edu

" … all our knowledge of truths depends upon our intuitive knowledge. It therefore becomes important to consider the nature and scope of intuitive knowledge, in much the same way as, at an earlier stage, we considered the nature and scope of knowledge by acquaintance." p. 79. (Russell seems to steal from both Hume and Kant, though that kind of theft could also be called "learning." He here seems to make an relatively elaborate worldview about "truths" and considers, nearly like Kant, to divide them into knowledge known by material means and facts and knowledge by general principles. This is similar to Kant's synthetic and analytic. One may need to be much more familiar with all three thinkers for this to make much sense.

So, it is in an unsystematic way, we bring up two points. One being that Russell failed to be a "realist" in the eyes of a CCS thinker. The other is a nuanced discussion about original ideas and what they really look like. See: the other essay about "original thought."