Einstein's Genius Club (12 page)

In three volumes, written jointly over the course of ten years,
Russell and Whitehead, following Gottlob Frege, laid down the principles and elements of logicism. In short, logicism asserts that all mathematical truths can be stated in the form of logical truths and that mathematical proofs can be derived from logical proofs.

For the young Russell (he was thirty), mathematics was a haven from his increasingly unhappy and complicated private life. He had fallen out of love with Alys and was embroiled, romantically though probably not sexually, with Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, who suffered terrible pain from angina. Some forty years later, Russell was to remark caustically that Gödel was mired in Platonism. Yet he, too, felt drawn towards the “enchanted region” of mathematics, where “in thinking about it we become Gods.”
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In a letter to his friend Gilbert Murray, he pronounced mathematics and philosophy to be concerned with “ideal and eternal objects.”
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As he and Whitehead worked through the intensely technical matters of the
Principia,
Russell must have found those “ideal and eternal objects” increasingly remote. By its nature, the
Principia
led Russell face-to-face with paradox, the inevitable spanner in the mechanics of logic. In answer to his own famous paradox (To what class does the class of all things which do not belong to themselves belong?), Russell wrote “On Denoting,” delivered in 1905. He was able, paradoxically, to construct a “no-class theory,” taking both classes and numbers out of the realm of the ideal.
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What was left—propositions—still carried weight as Platonic “truths,” but soon, this “haven of peace” disappeared, to be replaced by the doubt more suited to his empiricist roots.

It took seven years of extraordinarily intense and exhausting work to complete
Principia Mathematica.
After that, Russell ceased, for all practical purposes, to do highly technical and demanding work on logic. He was thirty-eight years old. He had come to hate the shuttered concentration that logic demanded. Writing the
Principia
was like juggling several dozen balls at once for years on end. In a logical system, he said, writing to his longtime friend
Lucy Donnelly, “one mistake will vitiate everything.” The toll, he acknowledged, was tremendous. He described at length, and in dramatic fashion, the “sheer effort of will” necessary for such work:

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, involuntarily, one slowly inters oneself.
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And, indeed, these words were written in 1902, when Russell had finished his precursor work,
The Principles of Mathematics
. In 1910, having finished the much longer and grander
Principia,
he was “somewhat at loose ends. The feeling was delightful, but bewildering, like coming out of prison.”
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He never went back in.

In
My Philosophical Development,
written half a century later, Russell thinks back upon his devotion to a nonhuman, idealist mathematics. As the contradictions mounted, Russell lost that devotion. He came to accept Wittgenstein's dismissal of mathematics as “tautologies.” In the face of “young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on the Somme because generals were stupid,” mathematics and the “world of abstraction” were for all intents and purposes lost. Perhaps his disappointment lay in his character. As one critic has it, “as one reflects on Russell's philosophical career, it appears that behind this thirst for certainty there lurked an even deeper craving for disillusionment.”
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Still, once the godson of John Stuart Mill had completed the monumental
Principia,
his world changed.

From mathematics, he turned to philosophy. Although (perhaps because) Russell wrote some seventy books and hundreds of essays on philosophy and philosophical topics, his own philosophy is difficult to summarize. Like Einstein, he hated disarray in the foundations of knowledge. His major philosophical work examines the premises and beliefs undergirding logic and science. The titles of his important works illuminate his grand scope:
The
Analysis of Matter, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits
. But his was truly an experimental and question-driven philosophy. He was always ready to try a new approach to find solutions. He often revised his views, but never thought this a failing. In a way, he modeled his philosophic approach on the piecemeal and provisional approach of physics. He never built a grand system. Instead, he inspired the modern movement known as “analytic philosophy.” Like Russell, his philosophical heirs, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, were better at dissecting than building.

Once Russell turned away from logic, where he had made his true mark, he looked toward physics as the sole arbiter of certain knowledge. Modern physics, he thought, had the best chance of being true about the external world. What was left over, the empirical world that we know through our senses, yields information quite different from the truths of physics. Most of Russell's philosophical career was spent pondering these two paths towards truth. Logic, his first passion, was no longer the high-road, only a tool.

Still, Russell was drawn back into his early world of mathematical logic from time to time. In
The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell,
a collection of essays in Russell's honor, several contributors revisited the
Principia
and Russell's place in the history of mathematical logic. Russell dutifully commented on all contributions, save one, written by the agonizingly exacting Kurt Gödel and submitted months late.
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Russell was forty-two when war was declared in August 1914. He was already seen as one of the world's important logicians and philosophers, having been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1908 at only thirty-six and offered a teaching position at Harvard in early 1914. Up to then, his life had been that of a scholar and teacher. But he was restless and uncertain. His love affair with Otto-line Morrell began that year. It was as if, once he left mathematical
logic behind, his sexual passions exploded. Yet his intellectual engine never stopped. As always, he turned out a prodigious number of books, articles, reviews, lectures, and letters. As for the war, it so changed Russell that he later thought of himself as a Faust figure who, on that fateful August day, met his Mephistopheles.
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The war swept him into new roles. He became a pacifist, a war resister, and a man of action. None of this could have been predicted. Up to then, he had supported Britain's colonial wars—the Boer War, for instance, had been a necessary adjunct to the spreading of “civilized government.”
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But he could see no sane purpose in the European war, and said so with increasing bite and fury. Once he was committed, his courage and defiance never wavered, though he was berated as a traitor to his country and class. He was, after all, the Honorable Bertrand Russell, grandson of a prime minister, son of a lord, and brother of an earl. He lost close friends. The otherwise cherubic Alfred North Whitehead, his collaborator on the
Principia,
caught war fever and could not abide Russell's lack of patriotism. His old friend, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray, denounced Russell as “pro-German” in print. Russell understandably took to decrying the “bloodthirstiness of professors.”
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For almost four years, his life became a marathon of political maneuvering, writing, and speaking. At the start of the conflict, he helped found the Union of Democratic Control, an antiwar movement. Russell suddenly blossomed as a mover and shaker. The UDC boasted such influential figures as the future prime minister Ramsay MacDonald; the peace activist and future Nobelist Norman Angell; the journalist and tireless campaigner against King Leopold's Congo, E. D. Morel; the writers Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey; and Russell's old Cambridge friends Lowes Dickinson and Charles Trevelyan. Russell soon dominated the movement. As an observer noted, “No resisting the force of his ruthless dissection of motive; no reply possible to the caustic comments he would emit in his high squeaky voice.”
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By the summer of 1915, after only one year of war, over a
quarter million English soldiers had been killed or wounded, all of them volunteers. Britain had never contemplated a conscription law. In the face of this mass slaughter, it did so, and in January 1916 a law was passed requiring all males between eighteen and forty-one to register for military service. The UDC voted not to oppose conscription, and Russell quit. He had consistently reproved the UDC for having “no intensity of will.”
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He promptly joined the more radical No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), which had supported conscientious objectors since the war's outset.
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These new experiences and emotions liberated Russell as never before. In 1916, he gave lectures on a new theory of society based on “creative” and “instinctual” alternatives to the destructiveness of war (published as
The Principles of Social Reconstruction
in 1916). It was the first of many briskly rational, quasi-utopian proposals that he launched periodically throughout his long life. He gave stump speeches and orated at rallies. He visited conscientious objectors in prison and lobbied tirelessly on their behalf, salvaging their mental health and perhaps even their lives in the face of ferocious governmental hostility.
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At times, his antiwar fervor bordered on the obsessive. “It is a real ferment,” he wrote of the no-conscription movement, “like the beginning of a new religion.” Religion indeed: “I rather envy the men they persecute. It is maddening not to be liable.”
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His young comrades, admirable as they were, lacked “the thirst after perfection—they see the way out of Hell but not the way into Heaven.” Yet “they will joyfully become martyrs.”
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In upswing moods, he declared that “I want actually to
change
people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life.”
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As one UDC member shrewdly noted, Russell

had a dynamo within that was too powerful for his own comfort and far too powerful for that of others: inevitably, he first swallowed admirers and then, with what they felt a heartless cruelty, spewed them out.
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Russell quickly arrived on the government's list of troublemakers. Fearful that he might travel to the United States and foment opposition to the British effort, the authorities sought a reason to refuse him a passport. In 1916, his wish for martyrdom nearly came true. A No-Conscription member was sentenced to two years at hard labor, and six others were then sent to prison for circulating an anonymous leaflet protesting the case. Russell publicly admitted writing the leaflet and was arrested and fined £100. When Russell refused to pay, the authorities impounded his books and furniture from Trinity.
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The conviction allowed the government to revoke his passport, forestalling a showdown. Trinity College, his alma mater, quickly used the conviction as an excuse to remove him from his lectureship. Whitehead and others protested. But Russell was (at least outwardly) euphoric at the news. “I no longer have the feeling of powers unrealised within me, which used to be a perpetual torture…. I have no inward discords anymore.”
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By now the government spied on Russell, absurdly, as an “enemy agent.”
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He was banned from restricted areas, lest he signal enemy ships—an absurd idea, though a convenient cover for stopping Russell from lecturing to and encouraging conscientious objectors.
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Russell tried another tack, writing a letter to President Wilson urging him to force Europe to the peace table. The letter managed to slip by the censors of the Foreign Office. Wilson ignored it, but the letter (and details of its secret journey) was printed in full by
The New York Times
.

Russell continued his antiwar efforts. When the Russian Provisional Government put forth a peace offer, he was ecstatic. With great fervor, he threw his support behind the revolution and its British admirers. In July 1917, however, a meeting of revolutionary sympathizers at Hackney disintegrated into violence, leaving Russell shocked and disheartened. He returned to his philosophical work, spending the fall and winter writing and lecturing on logical atomism.

Ironically, just as Russell had become disillusioned with the efficacy of protest, he was arrested in 1918 for “insulting an ally”—the United States, which had entered the war. The alleged crime—he had written a short article advocating peace with Germany—was the pretext for a harsh sentence: six months at hard labor in the so-called “second division.” The sentence was not to be taken lightly. Long stretches in the second division had left his colleagues Clifford Allen and E. D. Morel physically devastated, and men could be crippled during such a sentence. Friends, including Gilbert Murray, brought pressure on the government to shift Russell to the “first division.”
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At his appeal, the magistrate, citing Russell's contributions in logic and philosophy, acceded. Russell served his six months in the relative comfort of the “first division.” Because he could pay, he had a large separate room, with meals brought in from outside, a servant to clean the “cell,” daily delivery of the
Times,
and a well-stocked library of chosen books. Russell compared it to “life on an Ocean Liner.”
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Visitors came three times a week. In such enforced but tolerable isolation, the exhausted Russell revived and soon wrote two books, an
Introduction to Mathematical Logic
and a draft of
The Analysis of Mind
.
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