Steven H's Reviews > Portraits From Memory and Other Essays

A MARVELOUS (OFTEN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL) SELECTION OF ESSAYS

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970) was an influential British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and political activist. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in recognition of his many books. [NOTE: page numbers below refer to the 246-page paperback edition.]

This book contains a delightful collection of essays, beginning with “Six Autobiographical Essays” [including “Why I Took to Philosophy” and “Experiences as a Pacifist in the First World War”], including “Portraits from Memory” about persons such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, D. H. Lawrence, and others. There are also various other essays, such as “The Cult of ‘Common Usage,’” “How I Write,” “Why I am Not a Communist,” etc.

He admits in an essay, “I have come to think that the mathematical and logical wrappings in which the naked truth is dressed go to deeper layers than I had supposed… Take, for instance, numbers: when you count, you count ‘things,’ but ‘things’ have been invented by human beings for their own convenience. This is not obvious on the earth’s surface because… there is a certain degree of apparent stability. But it would be obvious if one could live on the sun there is nothing but perpetually changing whirlwinds of gas. If you lived on the sun, you would never have formed the idea of ‘things,’ and you would never had thought of counting because there would be nothing to count. In such an environment, Hegel’s philosophy would seem to be common sense, and what we consider common sense would appear as fantastic metaphysical speculation.” (Pg. 40)

In another essay, he notes, “Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young that is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter …that they have been cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overcome it… is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal… and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life... The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome.” (Pg. 52)

In an essay on John Stuart Mill, he observes, “what should a lover of liberty wish to see done in the schools? I think the ideal but somewhat Utopian answer would be that the pupils should be qualified as far as possible to form a reasonable judgment on controversial questions in which they are likely to have to act. This would require… a training in judicial habits of thought, and … access to impartial supplies of knowledge. In this way the pupil would be prepared for a genuine freedom of choice on becoming adult. We cannot give freedom to the child, but we can give him a preparation for freedom; and this is what education ought to do.” (Pg. 141)

In the essay, “Mind and Matter,” he suggests, “a piece of matter is a group of events connected by … the causal laws of physics. A mind is a group of events connected to causal laws, namely, the laws of psychology. An event is not rendered either mental or material by any intrinsic quality, but only by its causal relations. It is perfectly possible for an event to have both the causal relations characteristic of physics and those characteristic of psychology. In that case, the event is both mental and material at once… The supposed problems of the relations of mind and matter arises only through mistakenly treating both as ‘things’ and not as groups of events. With the theory that I have ben suggesting, the whole problem vanishes.” (Pg. 164-165)

In the essay “How I Write,” he significantly admits, “my development has not been by any means rectilinear. There was a time, in the first years of this century, which I had more florid and rhetorical ambitions. This was the time when I wrote ‘A Free Man’s Worship,’ a work of which I do not now think well.” (Pg. 212)

He proposes, “The increase of organization in the modern world demands new institutions if anything in the way of liberty is to be preserved… There is, so far as I can see, only one possible remedy, and that is the establishment of a second police force designed to prove innocence, not guilt… If a man is accused, for example, of a murder, all the resources of the State… are employed to prove his guilt, whereas it is left to his individual efforts to prove his innocence. If he employs detectives, they have to be private detectives paid out of his own pocket or that of his friends… All this is quite unjust. It is at least as much in the public interest to prove that an innocent man has not committed a crime, as it is to probe that a guilty man has committed it.” (Pg. 225-226)

These essays, for anyone who loves Russell’s writing and ideas, are fascinating; this book will be “must reading” for anyone seriously interested in his life and views.