Bertrand Russell

The model is taken from logic: just as analysis made arithmetic a chapter of logic, it must break philosophical problems down into propositions whose form is clear. Russell draws a methodological consequence against the tradition: a philosopher must accept concluding nothing about the whole, and producing only partial, technical, revisable results — this is what he calls a scientific philosophy, opposed to systems that answer every question at one stroke. He does not, however, follow Wittgenstein as far as therapy: to clarify is not to give up knowing the world, and the value of philosophy remains for him the enlargement of thought beyond the circle of private interests.

Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), "On Scientific Method in Philosophy" · "Logical Atomism" (1924) · The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. XV

The problem is not to find what a word designates, but to see that an expression can have a logical role while designating nothing at all. By analysing 'the king of France' as a definite description that dissolves into quantifiers — there is an x, exactly one, that reigns over France, and that x is bald — Russell secures three gains at once: statements about non-existent objects become false rather than nonsensical, negation stops being ambiguous, and the ontology slims down without having to people the world with subsisting entities. What is at stake is the trust placed in grammar: the form of a sentence is not the form of the fact it states.

"On Denoting", Mind (1905) · Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), ch. XVI

The position is the outcome of an accepted defeat: Russell came to philosophy to find in mathematics a certainty like the one others seek in faith, and spent twenty years discovering that even there the ground gives way — the paradox of sets that bears his name forced on him technical expedients he was never satisfied with. From that failure he draws not scepticism but a rule of degree: one does not suspend judgment, one grades one's credence by the reasons available, holding every proposition revisable without ceasing to act. He thus refuses both inherited camps: there is no foundational certainty, but neither is there any equal balance of opposing theses.

All human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, and partial.Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, closing lines

Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948) · Portraits from Memory (1956)

If all knowledge of the world comes from experience, there must be data that are not inferred: Russell calls them hard data, what resists the utmost effort of doubt, and out of them he builds everything else by logical construction: objects, other minds, the past. The difficulty is that these data are private and momentary, so that the public world has to be rebuilt at great cost. Russell admits this and retreats: in 1912 he held the data to be indubitable, whereas Human Knowledge (1948) grants them only a probable base, weakening the foundation by that much.

Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), lectures III-IV · Human Knowledge (1948), part II

Against the two rivals of his day, Russell holds that the truth of a belief lies neither in its coherence with other beliefs nor in its useful effects, but in a relation to something that is not a belief. A belief is complex, it orders several terms; it is true if there exists a fact that orders them so, false otherwise — hence two consequences he accepts: there must be facts in the world, and falsehood is not a defect of thought but the absence of the corresponding fact. Against James he objects that a useful belief may be false, and against coherence that a perfectly coherent novel is not thereby true.

The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. XII · "William James's Conception of Truth" (1908)

The argument, formulated in 1911-1912, is one of regress, and it bears on relations rather than qualities: if you want to explain that two white patches are white without admitting whiteness, you will say that they resemble one another — but the resemblance will itself have to be one, and you will have admitted a universal while believing you had eliminated them all. Russell draws from this a result uncomfortable for an empiricist: there are entities we do not meet in sensation and yet know, which bars him from nominalism and makes him grant Plato a merit he denies the rest of his metaphysics.

The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. IX · "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars" (1911)

The thesis is posed as a limit rather than a tribute: what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know — which does not mean that science answers everything, but that no other route yields knowledge. Russell immediately sets aside a whole domain: questions of value, which are neither true nor false and on which science has nothing to say, and this marks him off from a complete scientism. Religion is ruled out not because it consoles badly, but because it lays claim to knowledge without the means to it.

Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.Religion and Science (1935)

Religion and Science (1935), ch. IX "Science and Ethics" · The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

Physics is true, but true in a very particular way: it captures the structure of things — order, relations, laws — without delivering the intrinsic nature of what is thus ordered. Russell therefore takes physical theories to be genuine descriptions of the world, not social constructions or calculating instruments, while conceding that we know nothing of the electron beyond its place in a network of relations. This is the price of his realism: it bears on the form of the real and leaves its stuff undetermined, a thesis that contemporary structural realism takes up under his name.

The Analysis of Matter (1927) · Human Knowledge (1948), part III

The problem is that of induction, and Russell refuses both ways out: it can neither be justified by experience, which would be circular, nor dispensed with, since without it science says nothing about the unobserved. It must therefore be admitted as a family of postulates about the structure of the world — quasi-permanence, the separability of causal lines, analogy — that experience does not prove but without which it would prove nothing. What these postulates yield is never certainty but a degree of credibility, a probability Russell treats as the only honest measure of a scientific belief.

Human Knowledge (1948), parts V-VI · The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. VI

Russell does not defend truth on grounds of usefulness: he readily allows that an illusion may make one happy, and still refuses to buy it at that price. A consoling belief acquired without evidence corrupts the very instrument that serves every other question, and the same indulgence that makes paradise acceptable makes propaganda acceptable. To this he adds an argument from dignity he never stopped reformulating: to see the world as it is, with no purpose to shelter us, is the only freedom available to a being that does not command the universe.

"A Free Man's Worship" (1903), in Mysticism and Logic, ch. III · Sceptical Essays (1928) · Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

All knowledge of the world rests in the end on experience, and Russell calls knowledge by acquaintance that direct contact with sense-data, of which the rest is only knowledge by description. But he is not an empiricist all the way down: logic and mathematics are not learned from experience, and it is they that supply analysis with its instruments. Hence a mixed position, an empiricism of facts armed with a formal a priori.

The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. V · Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948)

A single rule, which he himself offers as scandalous for being so simple: it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. Russell makes of it less a thesis in epistemology than a matter of public hygiene, the habit of proportioning one's confidence to the reasons being, in his eyes, what guards against fanaticisms.

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.Sceptical Essays, "On the Value of Scepticism"

Sceptical Essays (1928), "On the Value of Scepticism"

The argument is direct and empirical: everything we know of character and memory shows them bound to the organisation of the brain, which comes apart at death; nothing therefore licenses the thought that what depends on a structure in that way outlasts it. Russell does not claim to demonstrate that survival is impossible: he shifts the burden of proof, then diagnoses the motive for the contrary belief, which is held not because there are reasons for it but because death is frightening — and explaining a wish is not proving a thing. What disappears is, in his eyes, the person herself, and admitting it is the condition of a life without pretence.

"Do We Survive Death?" (1936) · Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

The starting point is a fact he takes the sciences to have established: man is the product of causes that had no foresight of their result, and nothing in the universe prescribes an end. But from the world's having no purpose it does not follow that a life has none: ends are created by beings that have them, and they lose nothing by not being underwritten from outside. Russell therefore refuses the two symmetrical consolations, providence and despair: the absence of cosmic meaning leaves affection, knowledge and beauty untouched, and these are goods without needing to be duties of the universe.

"A Free Man's Worship" (1903), in Mysticism and Logic, ch. III · What I Believe (1925)

The world physics describes is indifferent, not hostile: it takes no notice of what we value, and the little that we are is provisional in it. Russell takes this picture to be a consequence of knowledge rather than a mood, and draws an unusual conclusion from it: recognising that the universe owes us nothing is what allows us to stop asking it for something. He does not, however, conclude to Schopenhauer's pessimism: the worth of a human life does not depend on the tonality of the real.

"A Free Man's Worship" (1903), in Mysticism and Logic, ch. III · Religion and Science (1935) · What I Believe (1925)

Russell first allowed, in 1912, that one might have knowledge by acquaintance of a subject, then withdrew the concession in 1921: when you look for the self in experience, all you find is experiences. A person is then a series of events bound by laws — chief among them mnemic causation, the fact that a present memory depends on a past event of this series and of no other — and not the substantial bearer of those events. The stake is economy as much as observation: if the laws suffice to constitute the unity of a life, an additional subject does no work.

The Analysis of Mind (1921), lectures I and IX · The Problems of Philosophy (1912), ch. V

Russell turns the question of happiness around: ordinary unhappiness comes not from having too many desires but from desires turned too much toward oneself, and the cure is enlargement, not reduction. The more impersonal interests a person has — a trade, a science, a garden, a cause — the more the failures that strike are cushioned, because they never reach the whole of her at once. This is why The Conquest of Happiness refuses both asceticism, which treats desire as a disease, and continuous excitement, which exhausts it: the sorting he proposes bears not on the intensity of desires but on their direction.

The Conquest of Happiness (1930), ch. XI and XV · What I Believe (1925)

The formula is built to hold together the two halves that moralities usually keep apart. Love alone is blind — affection that does not know how to act harms what it means to protect — and knowledge alone is inert, since it supplies means without supplying an end. Russell draws a consequence against moralism: what men most lack is not the will to be good but information and affection, and conduct is improved more by instructing and by making people happy than by blaming them. The good itself, however, remains for him without objective foundation, which leaves the good life no authority beyond the desire of those who choose it.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.What I Believe (1925), ch. II

What I Believe (1925), ch. II · The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

The argument is historical and therapeutic rather than hedonist: the doctrine that makes sexual pleasure a sin has produced an amount of shame, ignorance and cruelty that no good outweighs, and the first duty here is to take from children the fear that has been passed on to them. Marriage and Morals therefore asks that sexual conduct be judged by its effects on the partners and on the children, and not by a standard of purity. These positions cost him, in 1940, an appointment at the City College of New York, annulled by court order before he could take it up. He does not, however, preach licence: it is lasting affection, not sensation alone, that remains for him the good at stake.

Marriage and Morals (1929) · On Education (1926)

Russell takes the fear of death to be an ill to be cured, but he does not use Epicurus's argument that death is nothing to us since we shall not be there for it. He proposes a shift of attention: as a life lengthens, its interests should bear on things that outlast it, until the disappearance of the self stops being what matters most. The recommendation is gradual and practical rather than metaphysical, and it rejoins his cure for ordinary unhappiness, the widening of interests. He does not, however, go so far as to make death the revealer of existence: he draws from it a rule of conduct for old age, not a structure of being.

Portraits from Memory (1956), "How to Grow Old" · The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

Russell refuses to credit suffering with any fruitfulness: it teaches nothing that could not be learned otherwise, and the doctrine that calls it formative serves mainly to excuse those who inflict it or tolerate its infliction. The consequence is political as much as moral, since it makes the reduction of pain, through medicine, education and social reform, an aim with no spiritual counterweight. He gave the opposite camp a handhold himself: his 1903 essay lends the tragic a nobility whose style he later judged too rhetorical.

What I Believe (1925) · The Conquest of Happiness (1930) · The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969), vol. I

Self-examination is treated here as a cause of unhappiness rather than a road to wisdom: whoever watches himself without pause — the sinner counting his faults, the narcissist checking his effect, the megalomaniac measuring his power — stays shut inside an object too small and too familiar to nourish him. Russell therefore recommends turning attention outward, not out of contempt for the inner life, but because he takes interest to be the only available source of energy. His own work is nonetheless a continuous intellectual self-examination: what he condemns is brooding over oneself, not vigilance over one's beliefs.

The Conquest of Happiness (1930), ch. I and XV

Russell keeps the consequentialist form all his life: an action is judged by what it produces. Against deontologism, he argues that absolute rules are useful generalisations gone rigid, and that invoking a duty without looking at effects amounts to preferring one's own purity to the fate of others — an argument he applies to war, to sexuality and to punishment. His description of the good life in terms of dispositions (affection, curiosity, zest) nonetheless brings him close to an ethics of character. The disagreement that occupies him lies elsewhere: he keeps this criterion of the right after ceasing, in the 1930s, to believe that the good it maximises is a fact, so that the form of his morality outlived its foundation.

"The Elements of Ethics" (1910) · Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)

Having granted with Moore that goodness is an objective quality, Russell talked himself out of it: a moral disagreement is settled by no observation and no calculation, and a statement of value, unlike a statement of fact, rules out nothing that might happen; it therefore expresses a desire, not a property of the world. He refuses, however, to be satisfied with this, and says so publicly: he holds his own conclusion to be at once irrefutable and unbelievable. What is at stake is the reach of his own campaigns: to condemn a war in the name of a desire does not carry the force of condemning it in the name of a truth, and Russell lived with the difficulty without resolving it.

I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values, but I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it."Reply to Criticisms", in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944)

Religion and Science (1935), ch. IX · "Reply to Criticisms", in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944) · Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)

If actions have causes, the notion of desert collapses, and with it that of sin: one cannot both explain a piece of conduct by heredity, upbringing and circumstance, and maintain that its author deserved it. Russell draws from this not the abandonment of all reaction but a change in its object: what remains legitimate is to modify the causes — to instruct, to treat, to prevent — and what falls away is the wish to inflict suffering in return, which he takes to be the most durable root of human cruelty. He keeps blame as a tool, however, which stops him short of abolishing imputation altogether.

"The Elements of Ethics" (1910), § "Determinism and Morals" · "Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilisation?" (1930) · Sceptical Essays (1928)

Russell does not condemn war as intrinsically evil, which would already be to admit an absolute rule; he condemns it because the reckoning is almost always disastrous, for the victor included. He therefore sorts wars by type — colonisation, prestige, principle, self-defence — and shows that only a very few pass the test of the calculation. This structure explains his apparent reversals: he went to prison in 1918 for opposing a war he judged to be about nothing, and supported the war of 1939 because a victory for Hitler seemed to him the only worse evil; the same calculation led him around 1948 to remarks contemplating a threat of war against the USSR to force international control of the atomic bomb upon it, remarks whose exact import remains disputed, and which he first denied before acknowledging and regretting them.

"The Ethics of War" (1915) · Justice in War-Time (1916) · The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969), vols. II-III

Disobedience is for Russell neither a right of conscience nor a revolt, but a means of information within a democracy: when a decision puts everyone's survival at stake and the ordinary channels fail to get what is at stake heard, breaking the law publicly and taking the penalty is one of the few acts visible enough to force attention. Two conditions attach to it — the publicity of the act and the acceptance of the penalty — which distinguish it from fraud. He practised it twice, at forty-six against conscription and at eighty-nine for disarmament.

"Civil Disobedience and the Threat of Nuclear Warfare" (1961) · The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969), vols. II-III

Russell frames the problem as a dosage rather than a choice of camp: there must be enough authority for cooperation to be possible and little enough for initiative to stay alive, and no general formula fixes the point of balance. His reason for leaning toward liberty is psychological: what a society produces comes from individuals, and institutions that absorb initiative dry up the source of what they meant to organise. He examined anarchism with sympathy and set it aside as impracticable, while calling elsewhere for a world government: the greatest conceivable authority, required for the one end that justifies it in his eyes, the prevention of war.

Authority and the Individual (1949) · Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)

The proposal is concrete, and a century ahead of its vogue: a modest income, sufficient for necessities, should be secured to everyone whether they work or not, with a supplement granted for work the community judges useful. Russell derives it less from equality as a value than from liberty as a condition: whoever must take any job at all in order to eat is not free, and socialism is worth having, in his eyes, only if it enlarges that power to refuse. For the same reason he rejects authoritarian levelling: a bureaucracy that distributes everything becomes the sole employer, and so the sole master.

Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918), ch. IV · Authority and the Individual (1949)

The argument is not a right of the individual but an observation about where the good comes from: everything of worth in a civilisation — a discovery, a work, a reform — appeared first in one head, often against common opinion; a society therefore has no other way of improving than to tolerate those who contradict it. Russell draws from this a constant hostility toward collectives that think of themselves as subjects — the state, the nation, the class — and a distrust of unanimity, which he diagnoses as a herd phenomenon rather than an agreement. What is at stake is the very source of innovation, as much as the freedom of whoever produces it.

Authority and the Individual (1949) · Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916)

On education, marriage, punishment and religion, Russell defended change against custom every time, arguing that most inherited prohibitions protect the habit rather than the persons. He grants nothing, however, to progress as a law of history: technical power grows, the wisdom that should govern it does not grow with it, and nothing guarantees that the first will not carry off the second. His progressism is a programme, not a forecast.

Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) · On Education (1926) · The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

Russell's cosmopolitanism is not deduced from any brotherhood but from a technical fact: once one power can destroy the whole species, the political unit within which security can be organised is no longer the nation but the planet, and a world government becomes less a utopia than a condition of survival. He accordingly treats national feeling as the most dangerous loyalty of his time — not because it is base, but because it enlists real virtues, courage and devotion, in the service of a division that has become lethal.

Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955), closing appeal

Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955) · "Man's Peril" (1954) · The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

Russell refuses both inherited camps: neither matter nor mind is fundamental, both are built out of one and the same neutral stuff, made of events that can be grouped by the laws of physics or by those of psychology. To this he adds a remark that has since prospered: physics gives us only the structure of things, never their intrinsic nature, and the one portion of the world we know otherwise than by its structure is our own experience, which is precisely what goes on in a brain. The family of positions that lodge experience in that vacant place has since been called Russellian monism, at the cost of a slippage: Russell, who adopted neutral monism in 1921 after long opposing it, holds the stuff to be neutral, that is, neither mental nor physical, where several of his heirs people it with the experiential properties he refused.

The Analysis of Mind (1921) · The Analysis of Matter (1927)

None of the classical proofs survives examination, and the burden of proof lies with whoever asserts, not with whoever doubts: such is the point of his orbiting teapot, an object too small to be detected and whose existence no one could refute, without anyone being bound to believe in it. Russell distinguishes his audiences, though: before a philosophical one he calls himself an agnostic, since God's non-existence can no more be demonstrated than that of the Olympian gods; before a general one, an atheist, since in practice he does not treat the question as open.

"Why I Am Not a Christian" (1927) · "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?" (1947) · "Is There a God?" (1952)

The conflict is not for Russell a misunderstanding that a division of territories could clear up: religion makes claims about what exists — a creator, a soul, miracles — and as soon as it does, it competes with science on science's own ground, where, on his account, it has lost every battle it has fought. Religion and Science retraces those defeats one by one, from the place of the Earth to the age of the world, to show that the retreat to truths 'of another order' always comes after the defeat and never before. One concession remains: questions of value fall outside science, but they fall outside religion too, which has no particular authority over them.

Religion and Science (1935) · Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)

Written in reply to Haldane's Daedalus, which promised happiness through biology, Icarus turns the image around: science confers power, and power serves the ends already held by those who receive it. A new technique therefore improves nothing by itself; it amplifies, and if the dominant passions are rivalry and domination, it simply makes them more efficient. Russell remains a partisan of science and refuses any turning back: what he asks for is not less power but a change of ends, which makes him an uneasy instrumentalist rather than a critic of technology.

Icarus, or the Future of Science (1924) · The Scientific Outlook (1931) · The Impact of Science on Society (1952)

The argument is arithmetical before it is moral: modern technique has greatly reduced the work needed to keep everyone alive, and that gain has gone not into freeing time but into producing more, sustaining the unemployment of some while the others wear themselves out. In Praise of Idleness proposes converting it into hours — four a day would do — and defends leisure as the condition of everything good that has ever been done: science, art, affection, conversation. What he attacks is a morality, the duty to work, which he analyses as a legacy of societies where the leisure of a minority rested on the forced labour of the majority.

In Praise of Idleness (1932) · Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)

Russell refuses to judge human beings good or bad and proposes to describe them by their impulses, which he divides into two families: the possessive, bearing on goods only one person can have, and the creative, bearing on goods that are not lost by being shared — knowledge, art, affection. Neither is more natural than the other; institutions decide which one grows, and a politics is judged by the one it feeds. Hence a plasticity without optimism: human beings are neither corrupted nor saved by society, they are shaped, and nothing guarantees it will be for the better.

Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), ch. I · Authority and the Individual (1949)

The nuclear threat brings into view, for Russell, an obligation that had never had an object: what is at stake is no longer the interest of one camp but the existence of the species, and against a stake of that size no political calculation is admissible. From this he draws a rule of argument he applied to the end of his life: in a debate about atomic weapons, one must first get one's opponent to think of himself as a member of the species and not as a partisan. One recognises here, by anticipation, a responsibility toward what does not yet exist, which Jonas would systematise into a principle more than twenty years later, though Russell never gave it a theory.

Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955) · "Man's Peril" (1954) · Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959)

The rule of method is explicit, and Russell holds it to be the supreme maxim of philosophical work: wherever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities. It is reductionist out of economy rather than materialism: a point of space, an instant, a physical object, a person, a number all become classes or series of already admitted elements, and whatever cannot be built that way is to be suspected. The reduction aimed at is logical, not physical: Russell does not reduce mind to matter, he reduces both to groupings of events.

"Logical Atomism" (1924) · Our Knowledge of the External World (1914) · Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919)

The thesis is sharp and Russell repeats it: reason never chooses ends, it only calculates the means of reaching those one already has; it is desires that fix what one goes toward. He draws from this one consequence that embarrasses him, since it strips his own campaigns of any rational ground, and one practical consequence he makes a whole book of: if ends come from feeling, then educating the affections matters more than reasoning correctly. He is thus neither an intellectualist nor a sentimentalist in the strict sense: reason keeps full authority over means and has none over ends.

Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954) · The Conquest of Happiness (1930) · Religion and Science (1935), ch. IX

Russell treats the mystical feeling as an important fact and as a source of value, while denying it the least cognitive authority: the emotion of union with the whole can transform a life, but nothing within it lets one tell a revelation from an illusion. He acknowledges having felt it, which is what gives his position its edge: this is not a sceptic who has felt nothing. The sacred therefore resides nowhere beyond nature, which does not stop love, contemplation and impersonal knowledge from having the worth others seek in transcendence.

"Mysticism and Logic" (1914), the title essay of the 1918 collection · "A Free Man's Worship" (1903), in Mysticism and Logic, ch. III

Russell's world is made of events rather than of things that last: substance, that permanent subject supposed to bear changing properties, is in his eyes an error inherited from grammar, which analysis dispenses with by defining an object as a series of events. This is not a philosophy of flux, however: he devoted a famous critique to Bergson, arguing that making lived duration the privileged access to the real mistakes an intuition for an argument. What is at stake is what abandoning substance obliges one to admit: for Russell, events and laws, not a creative becoming.

The Analysis of Mind (1921) · The Analysis of Matter (1927) · "The Philosophy of Bergson" (1912)