It starts strong.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
Okay. There’s someone who should be able to guide the reader through all the happenstance and minutiae that comprises most lives and provide an interpretative overlay that puts emotions and actions into a contextual framework, philosophic or otherwise.
But, ummm, not so much.
In the train -- Cambridge
Sunday November 4th 1984
5.15 P.M.
My dearest Alys:
It is a great pity all my letters come in a lump and I’m very sorry to have addressed Friday’s Hill. I hope it won’t happen again. I’m so glad thee’s happy and busy too -- if I were imagining thee unhappy it would be unendurable not to see thee tonight -- as it is it gives me pleasure to think thee is near. It has been perfectly delightful to be at Cambridge again. Moore and Sanger and Marsh were so nice to see again. I love them all far more than I supposed before. We had a large meeting last night. McT. and Dickinson and Wedd came, at which I could not help feeling flattered. Thee will be glad to hear that several of them thought my paper too theoretical, though McT. and I between us persuaded them in time that there was nothing definite to be said about practical conduct. I have left my paper behind as Marsh and Sanger want to read it over again. McT. spoke first and was excessively good, as I had hoped. I said in my paper I would probably accept anything he said, and so I did. For my sake he left out immortality, and reconciled my dilemma at the end without it. I can’t put what he said in a letter, but I dare say I shall bring it out in conversation some day. We had a delightful dinner at Marsh’s before the meeting, and I was so glad just to be with them again that I didn’t talk a bit too much. Moore though he didn’t say much looked and was as glorious as ever -- I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody. I always speak the truth to Marsh, so I told him we were separated three months to please my grandmother: the rest asked no inconvenient questions. Most of them were pleased with my paper, and were glad of my making Good and less good my terms instead of right and wrong. The beginning also amused them a good deal. I stayed up till 2 talking to Marsh and then slept till 10.30, when I went to breakfast with Sanger. I lunched with Marsh, and talked shop with Amos and saw my rooms. As he has furnished them -- they’re brighter but not near so nice. Sanger thought my bold idea in my Space paper “colossal” -- I hope Ward will think so too! Amos tells me Ward said I was so safe for a Fellowship that it didn’t matter a bit what I wrote on -- but this must be taken cum grano salis -- it is slightly coloured by Amos’s respect for me. They all urged me to do what I’m good at, rather than fly off to Economics, tho’ all of them greatly respect Economics and would be delighted to have me do them ultimately. I have great respect for their judgments because they are honest and know me. So I shall do 2 Dissertations next year and only Space this -- or Space and Motion, as Ward suggests. But of course I shall work at Economics at once. Sanger is working at Statistics, and explained several hideous difficulties in the theory, important for practice, too, since the whole question of Bimetallism and many others turn on them. I had never suspected such difficulties before, and they inspired me with keen intellectual delight from the thought of obstacles to overcome. My intellectual pleasures during the last years have been growing very rapidly keener, and I feel as if I might make a great deal out of them when we’re married and all our difficulties are settled. I am convinced since reading Bradley that all knowledge is good, and therefore shouldn’t need to bother about immediate practical utility -- though of course, when I come to Economics, that will exist too. I’m very glad to find that passion developing itself, for without it no one can accomplish good thinking on abstract subjects -- one can’t think hard from a mere sense of duty. Only I need little successes from time to time to keep it a source of energy. My visit to Cambridge has put me in a very good conceit with myself and I feel very happy to think we are within our fortnight and that Mariechen will make it fly. I laughed more than in all the time since I left Friday’s Hill and I talked well and made others laugh a great deal too. ...
The most interesting thing about that letter are the editorial ellipses that come at the end. Evidently, the letter continues on at greater length, but the author decided that 750 words of that kind of detailed minutiae was enough to get his point for including it across.
Except I have no idea what that point is. Disappointingly, of the 376 pages of the edition I have, 193 of them are taken up with correspondence like this. And the overwhelming majority of them are not in the flow of the story -- as in, here’s a letter that’s worth your attention at this point because it captures an essential idea -- but in long and painful “appendices” at the end of each chapter. Why Russell thought it would be helpful or interesting for a reader to pore through communications like these is literally beyond my comprehension.
I Wish There Had Been More of This
Among all those tedious letters, Russell also includes a few excerpts from a journal he kept as a young man. These were written in 1888, when he was not quite sixteen years old.
April 2. I now come to the subject which personally interested us poor mortals more perhaps than any other. I mean the question of immortality. This is the one in which I have been most disappointed and pained by thought. There are two ways of looking at it, first by evolution and comparing men to animals, second, by comparing men with God. The first is the more scientific, for we know all about animals but not about God. Well, I hold that, taking free will first, to consider there is no clear dividing line between man and the protozoan, therefore if we give free will to men we must give it also the protozoan; this is rather hard to do. Therefore, unless we are willing to give free will to the protozoan we cannot give it to man. This however is possible but it is difficult to imagine, if, as seems to me probable, protoplasm only came together in the ordinary course of nature without any special providence from God; then we and all living things are simply kept going by chemical forces and are nothing more wonderful than a tree, which no one pretends has free will, and even if we had a good enough knowledge of the forces acting on anyone at any time, the motives pro and con, the constitution of his brain at any time, then we could tell exactly what he will do. Again from the religious point of view free will is a very arrogant thing for us to claim, for of course it is an interruption of God’s laws, for by his ordinary laws all our actions would be fixed as the stars. I think we must leave to God the primary establishment of laws which are never broken and determine everybody’s doings. And not having free will we cannot have immortality.
This is among the handful of fresh philosophic ideas that Russell has to offer in this book (fresh, at least, to me). I’ve heard people say before that if God knows everything, then he knows the deterministic fate of every atom in the universe. But what I hear Russell adding here is the direct connection of that divine knowledge to the concept of God’s divine plan. In other words, God not only knows what will happen to every atom, what happens to every atom is what He intends to happen. Under that construct, it is not possible for man to have any kind of free will that would allow him to take actions against those plans. Why would an all-knowing, and therefore a deterministic, God allow such a corruption to His plan?
But I’ll take it one step further. Does such a God even need to exist? How is such unalterable unwinding of the universe distinct from just nature itself? If atoms are going to do what atoms are going to do, does there need to be an entity that “decides” what they will do, or even is present to set them in motion? Determinism, from my perspective, doesn’t just threaten the concept of human free will, it also threatens the concept of divine plans.
Here’s another journal entry worth thinking about:
Monday, April 6. I do wish I believed in the life eternal, for it makes me quite miserable to think man is merely a kind of machine endowed, unhappily for himself, with consciousness. But no other theory is consistent with the complete omnipotence of God of which science, I think, gives ample manifestations. Thus I must either be an atheist or disbelieve in immortality. Finding the first impossible I adopt the second and let no one know. I think, however disappointing may be this view of men, it does give us a wonderful idea of God’s greatness to think that He can in the beginning create laws which by acting on a mere mass of nebulous matter, perhaps merely ether diffused through this part of the universe, will produce creatures like ourselves, conscious not only of our existence but even able to fathom to a certain extent God’s mysteries. All this with no more intervention on his part. Now let us think whether this doctrine of want of free will is so absurd. If we talk about it to anyone they kick their legs or something of that sort. But perhaps they cannot help it for they have something to prove and therefore that supplies a motive to them to do it. Thus in anything we do we always have motives which determine us. Also there is no line of demarcation between Shakespeare or Herbert Spencer and a Papuan. But between them and a Papuan there seems as much difference as between a Papuan and a monkey.
I guess my main focus here is really on that first sentence. A machine endowed with consciousness is more than just an interesting turn of phrase. Given what modern neurology is increasingly telling us -- namely that the chemical initiators of motor action occur before the chemical initiators of conscious volition -- Russell may be saying much more than he realizes. Yes, Bertrand, in a way, we are the consciousness that watches what we have been determined to do, but almost none of us can continually discern that reality through the suffocating illusion of what seems very much like our own free will.
And there are other philosophic tidbits in the later letters that are worth quoting.
One of the things that make literature so consoling is, that its tragedies are all in the past, and have the completeness and repose that comes of being beyond the reach of our endeavours. It is a most wholesome thing, when one’s sorrow grows acute, to view it as having all happened long, long ago: to join in imagination, the mournful company of dim souls whose lives were sacrificed to the great machine that still grinds on. I see the past, like a sunny landscape, where the world’s mourners mourn no longer. On the banks of the river of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave; but in the quiet country of the past, the tired wanderers rest, and all their weeping is hushed.
That’s almost poetry. And:
And yet I could not bear to lose from the world a certain awed solemnity, a certain stern seriousness -- for the mere fact of life and death, of desire and hope and aspirations and love in a world of matter which knows nothing of good and bad, which destroyed carelessly the things it has produced by accident, in spite of all the passionate devotion that we may give -- all this is not sunshine, or any peaceful landscapes seem through limpid air; yet life has the power to brand these things into one’s soul so that all else seems triviality and vain babble. To have endowed only one minute portion of the universe with knowledge and love of good, and to have made that portion the plaything of vast irresistible irrational forces, is a cruel jest on the part of God or Fate. The best Gospel, I suppose, is the Stoic one; yet even that is too optimistic, for matter can at any moment destroy our love of virtue.
If only there had been more of these observations and insights, it would have been a much more engaging read. Here is a man who thought deeply about the universe without, but sadly, to the seeming neglect of his own universe within.
Help! Help! I’m Being Repressed!
Because the other monumental takeaway I have from Russell’s story of his own life is how painfully emotionally repressed he must have been.
When we came home, we found Mrs. Whitehead undergoing an unusually severe bout of pain. She seemed cut off from everyone and everything by walls of agony, and the sense of the solitude of each human soul suddenly overwhelmed me. Ever since my marriage, my emotional life had been calm and superficial. I had forgotten all the deeper issues, and had been content with flippant cleverness. Suddenly the ground seemed to give way beneath me, and I found myself in quite another region. Within five minutes I went through some such reflections as the following: the loneliness of the human soul is unendurable, nothing can penetrate it except the highest intensity of the sort of love that religious teachers have preached; whatever does not spring from this motive is harmful, or at best useless; it follows that war is wrong, that a public school education is abominable, that the use of force is to be deprecated, and that in human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that. …
At the end of those five minutes, I had become a completely different person. For a time, a sort of mystic illumination possessed me. I felt that I knew the inmost thoughts of everybody that I met in the street, and though this was, no doubt, a delusion, I did in actual fact find myself in far closer touch than previously with all my friends, and many of my acquaintances. Having been an imperialist, I became during those five minutes a pro-Boer and a pacifist. Having for years cared only for exactness and analysis, I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty, with an intense interest in children, and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable. A strange excitement possessed me, containing intense pain but also some element of triumph through the fact that I could dominate pain, and make it, as I thought, a gateway to wisdom. The mystic insight which I then imagined myself to possess has largely faded, and the habit of analysis has reasserted itself. But something of what I thought I saw in that moment has remained always with me, causing my attitude during the first war, my interest in children, my indifference to minor misfortunes, and a certain emotional tone in all my human relations.
I did not know what to make of this passage when I stumbled across it, and I still don’t know what to make of it now having transcribed it. The loneliness of the human soul is unendurable? That’s what occurred to him on the sight of a woman’s suffering, and upon five minutes reflection he became a new person with a philosophy opposite from the one he had before? That in dominating pain he can find a gateway to wisdom? Rather than some spiritual awakening, it sounds much more to me like he simply took a hit of acid.
But, oddly, this is not the only time in his story that Russell decides to turn his world upside down on the spur of the moment.
I went out bicycling one afternoon, and suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys. I had had no idea until this moment that my love for her was even lessening. The problem presented by this discovery was very grave. We had lived ever since our marriage in the closest possible intimacy. We always shared a bed, and neither of us ever had a separate dressing-room. We talked over together everything that ever happened to either of us. She was five years older than I was, and I had been accustomed to regarding her as far more practical and far more full of worldly wisdom than myself, so that in many matters of daily life I left the initiative to her. I knew that she was still devoted to me. I had no wish to be unkind, but I believed in those days (what experience has taught me to think possibly open to doubt) that in intimate relations one should speak the truth. I did not see in any case how I could for any length of time successfully pretend to love her when I did not. I had no longer any instinctive impulse toward sex relations with her, and this alone would have been an insuperable barrier to concealment of my feelings. At this crisis my father’s priggery came out in me, and I began to justify myself with moral criticisms of Alys. I did not at once tell her that I no longer loved her, but of course she perceived that something was amiss. She retired to a rest-cure for some months, and when she emerged from it I told her that I no longer wished to share a room, and in the end I confessed that my love was dead. I justified this attitude to her, as well as to myself, by criticisms of her character.
Okay. Now this one I’m just not going to believe. He lived in the closest possible intimacy with his wife, but “discovered” one magical day that he no longer loved her? One of those assertions can’t be true if the other one is. This is one of two things -- he is either aware that he is writing to history and wants to obscure his poor decisions and behavior, or he is actually oblivious to the currents of desire that flow within his heart and his soul.
And yet, after the thunderclap of a revelation, Russell and his wife Alys supposedly stayed together for nine more years.
When the autumn came we took a house for six months in Cheyne Walk, and life began to become more bearable. We saw a great many people, many of them amusing or agreeable, and we both gradually began to live a more external life, but this was always breaking down. So long as I lived in the same house with Alys she would every now and then come down to me in her dressing-gown after she had gone to bed, and beseech me to spend the night with her. Sometimes I did so, but the result was utterly unsatisfactory. For nine years this state of affairs continued. During all this time she hoped to win me back, and never became interested in any other man. During all this time I had no other sex relations. About twice a year I would attempt sex relations with her, in the hope of alleviating her misery, but she no longer attracted me, and the attempt was futile. Looking back over this stretch of years, I feel that I ought to have ceased much sooner to live in the same house with her, but she wished me to stay, and even threatened suicide if I left her. There was no other woman to whom I wished to go, and there seemed therefore no good reason for not doing as she wished.
I kept putting question marks in the margin next to passages like this, really struggling with the concept that Russell was this obtuse -- that even writing with the benefit of hindsight, he could barely perceive his own emotions or the painful impact that this inability was visiting on his wife. Initially, we are to believe, there was no other woman to whom he wished to go, but eventually, that would change, and, when it did, it -- guess what -- seemed to fall out of the sky on an unsuspecting Russell.
The atmosphere of Ottoline’s house fed something in me that had been starved throughout the years of my first marriage. As soon as I entered it, I felt rested from the rasping difficulties of the outer world. When I arrived there on March 19th, on my way to Paris, I found that Philip had unexpectedly had to go to Burnley, so that I was left tete-a-tete with Ottoline. During dinner we made conversation about Burnley, and politics, and the sins of the Government. After dinner the conversation gradually became more intimate. Making timid approaches, I found them to my surprise not repulsed. It had not, until this moment, occurred to me that Ottoline was a woman who would allow me to make love to her, but gradually, as the evening progressed, the desire to make love to her became more and more insistent. At last it conquered, and I found to my amazement that I loved her deeply, and that she returned my feeling. Until this moment I had never had complete relations with any woman except Alys. For external and accidental reasons, I did not have full relations with Ottoline that evening, but we agreed to become lovers as soon as possible. My feeling was overwhelmingly strong, and I did not care what might be involved. I wanted to leave Alys, and to have her leave Philip.
He was amazed to discover that he loved her deeply? I suspect what he actually realized was that he wanted to have sex with her, but perhaps in the idiom of his age, these passions had to be framed as one and the same. Either way, again, it is baffling to me that a man as intelligent as Russell could be so ignorant about his own dreams and desires.
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