Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)

I had my doubts: how can a privileged white, male philosopher tell me, a modern-day female minority about the conquest of happiness via a book that was written before my dad was born? How could we possibly have anything in common? Color me surprised. It's striking how relevant his writing is, to our society today.

I started reading this book after a stressful year in my life where I got too caught up with feelings of anxiety and lack of achievement despite working hard most days. I will not show more go through the gory details because I doubt they will be relatable or useful to anyone, but nothing that I did or read during that year helped till this book arrived. I needed a "why", and this book gave me an answer to that, and to "how".

Keep in mind that this book is not going to be helpful to anyone who suffers from real tragedy or grief, it's simply meant to be used as a framework to understanding why you are unhappy despite having a semi-comfortable life. Which I think applies to most people who are capable of reading for leisure. Russell starts out with declaring that most of your unhappiness stems from a preoccupation with yourself and a lack of genuine interest with the external objects. The book is divided into two main parts: Causes of unhappiness, and causes of happiness. I found the first part to be most insightful because I suffered from every, single, cause, that he mentioned, to some degree.

CAUSES OF UNHAPPINESS
1. Byronic Unhappiness: I frequently attributed some of my sorrows to how devastatingly bad and evil the world can be.
2. Competition: Competitive success is too dearly purchased if you sacrifice all other ingredients to happiness in order to obtain it. It's also damaging in the sense that success should not be represented as the purpose of life, since after obtaining it, you're bound to fall prey to boredom and listlessness because you do not know what to do with it... so you occupy yourself with making more success. It's a harmful cycle.
3. Boredom and Excitement: It's true that we are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more terrified of being bored. A life full of excitement is not to be desired since it is exhausting and a certain amount of boredom and inactivity is required in order for you to be able to achieve the important things in your life. No great achievement is possible without persistent work. "A certain power of enduring boredom is essential to a happy life".
4. Fatigue: Probably my favorite chapter in the book. I highlighted all of it.
5. Envy.
6. The Sense of Sin: Speaks about what it really means to have your conscience prick you.
7. Persecution Mania: It's very easy to fall prey to this mania in a world where you see people getting ahead not based on merit alone, and when you are too preoccupied with yourself.
8. Fear of Public Opinion: "One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." I found this chapter incredibly insightful.

I cannot believe how underrated this book is. I mean, it is true, that it's speckled with classist remarks and an abundance of gender stereotypes/roles; but it was the 1930's... it's quite remarkable - and depressing - how close it is Saudi Arabia's 2017. But, please, do not dismiss this book because of it.

Recommended. show less

As a former roommate of mine once indelibly said on the topic of the internet (the internet is my metaphor of choice for this book?), "it's got a lot of stuff on it." This 800-page monster goes right back to Thales, who was "the first philosopher", and right there you can see what one of its essential flaws is going to be. This matter of positivism--it's like, I recognize that talking about concepts like "civilization", say, or "correctness", is complicated, and I'm by no means unwilling to show more venture out of my relativist fastness (spend most of my time taking the air out on the battlements anyway), but this is a bit much. In part, of course, it's no more than you might expect from the lion of the "secular humanist" movement (the people who don't get that 90% of us are secular humanists and think it means something to be all proclaimin' alla time); in part, it's merely the vagaries of being a famous public philosopher for a long damn time and having to keep up with social and rhetorical currents (I read that somewhere else, in 1929, Russell said that black people shouldn't be exterminated because they work better than white people in the tropics--"apart from questions of humanity"); in third part, though, I think it's an approach Russell would ultimately defend, because he started out as a late Victorian trying to salvage belief in the Absolute through math amid the ripening and loosening of a society. The flip side of the "extermination of Negroes" business, and one which is less easy to chalk up to ephemeral habits of thought and expression, is that he figured it was right for Europeans to colonize North America and any place where they put the land to "better use" than the indigenous inhabitants.

So the guy believes in progress. It seems absurd, since his fundamental conception of philosophy is as "something intermediate between theology and science"--addressing, like theology, areas of human interest about which definite knowledge has not so far been accessible, but assaying, like science, to base its conclusions on reason and evidence rather than revealed truth. (It goes without saying that the boundaries between philosophy and science/theology respectively are going to be fuzzy.) That's a good, practical definition, but I can't see how, ultimately, you can then avoid cleaving away ontology and metaphysics--as well, of course, as things like physics and physiology, over time, on the latter of which Russell would certainly agree with me. He is very good as a historian of these dead letters--Heraclitus on being being flux, say, or Aquinas on cognitive psychology--and to give him his due, even good at drawing connections forward and being suggestive of ways that Heraclitus (e.g.; or, better, Democritus) prefigures the state of our knowledge today.

Where we part ways is on the ontological and metaphysical--theory of knowledge, say, or proofs of the existence of God. In the latter case, Russell would agree that these are not possible, but would also say that this needs to be rigorously proven, which I think totally misreads the nature of belief. (He is beyond, like rational proofs, but still has a lot of time for refuting William James's instrumental argument for God, which must have seemed a lot more necessary in his day. In the former case, he does seem to feel that we are on the verge of great mathematical advances that will dissolve completely problems like the relation of subject and object, or mind and body, and to the degree that I can admit this, I'd say it's empirical science that has achieved those answers, not logic.

But enough--he's a logical positivist, and this book is redolent of. Fine. It's also redolent of TONNES OF INFO, in a much more erudite and cross-allusive style than Wikipedia. I knew a bit about the Pre-Socratics, but nothing at all about Orphism, the mystical Greek brotherhood which helps me close the gulf between Olympian belief and Plato and also to understand the significance of Pythagoras-as-mystic on subsequent philosophy (world of forms!). Great stuff. The chapters on the Hellenistic philosophies maybe hardsell his conviction that thought-systems represent "the" essence of their times a bit--I don't disagree that Stoics and Epicureans and Skeptics and Cynics all performed in their various ways turtling manoeuvres against a declining and uncertain world, but--as evidenced by the complex subsequent history of each of these terms--there's no reason at all to downplay the generative or fecund aspects of these philosophies, no reason to be as goddamn programmatic as Russell all the time about what is and isn't useful. Like, whether we leave ontology and metaphysics behind or not, I think that he and I would agree that the, or a, role of philosophy is in ethics and aesthetics and rhetoric (and, still, teasing at the crevices in the scientific understanding of knowledge and the mind), and if the Hellenistic Four are basically ethical philosophies, then surely somebody who's writing a book about the history of philosophy's relation to its cultural context can have a bit more time for the idea that their systems are as good as ours, and just made for different times? But no, the positivist again rears its head. (By the way, names for four rabbits--don't steal 'em--Pyrrho, Epicurus, Diogenes, and Zeno.)

The stuff on the Church Fathers, again, really good, and hauls me some part of the way back from the sour thoughts I traditionally have about St. Augustine. Good quick investigations of heresies, which are actually kind of a new weird interdisciplinary field all of a sudden in the middle ages--as opposed to being simply persecuted or ignored, they come--the designation of a belief as heretical comes--to grant it a special entity, a multiutility, between philosophy and religion and politics and law. I've forgotten which one now was about how God is better than Christ, and which one was about how Christ has two natures, and which one was about how he has one nature but two substances, and etc., but I do remember that "faith without works is dead" is Pelagianism, because that shit's moral and true.

I come to realize that some of the glazing over I do with certain philosophers isn't because I'm just a stupid; it's cos certain philosophers are just too boring--Kant--or abstruse--Berkeley--for words. (Others, for instance Hegel, are actually fascinatingly weird, as long as you can read Russell telling you about it and never have to crack an actual Hegel book, ew.) I find that the discussion on Descartes takes me only tenuously from the cogito to the actual methodological understanding of rationalism that I hoped to get from the book--like, I get the ultimate contingency of knowledge and the advisability of proceeding from first principles (really I do, I did mushrooms and wrote gibberish about it when I was 19 and took it to my professor's house at 4 in the AM!), but I don't get how you go from there to actually establishing principles to work on in thinking about the mundane world, except with something that looks an awful lot like just an asterisked empiricism.

With Locke, there is a valuable discussion of how he was responding to the divine right of kings as expressed by one Thomas Filmer, that can be easily used to bolster my discussion of his work on language in my thesis--as there is no intrinsic chain of command in human affairs, necessitating a social contract, so there is no intrinsic chain of meaning in speech, necessitating a compact bestowing meaning on arbitrary signs. With Leibniz, all I know is monads sound adorable and I want to eat them up, yum! With Spinoza, I want to eat him up, because he sounds like a dear soul.

I don't mean to imply by leaving anyone out (I am leaving out many) that they are not covered--he walks us through Rousseau, with scorn; through Hume, who comes across like a ghost in the machine of ultimate probabilism and relativism, a predeconstructionist; through the utilitarians, with nothing new to say; and through a chapter on Byron that rather idiosyncratically traces a lineage from him through Fichte and Nietzsche to Hitler. (You get what he was going for, of course, and it's a good bracing reminder that nobody writing in 1943 saw Nietzsche as a prophet of fierce joy like the scholarly types do today.) Up against that call-it-Dionysian, irrational German Idealist revolt against the empirical, he puts a Apollonian, rationalistic revolt that starts with Smith and Ricardo, goes through Marx, and ends up in Stalin--a framework that Slavoj Zizek would make hay with and that does leave you thinking about how far we can separate these philosophers of the optimistic 19th century from their appropriations in the dark 20th--not to condemn them, not even thinking that concentration camps and gulags are anywhere in Nietzsche's or Marx's thought, but just to keep in mind the potential for misuse (all true of liberal philosophy too, of course, and still going on).

The last few chapters are more speculative--the stuff on Bergson, whom I wasn't familiar with, is interesting; his metaphor for life, as a "shell that bursts into pieces that are themselves shells", and his action-model, make me think of Deleuze in the illogic of their metaphor-delving approach, only a dynamic Deleuze that wants to punch you in the face kinda. How accurate that is, I don't know, but certainly by the end Russell has roughly sketched out the contours of 20th-century analytic and continental philosophy, in all their pedantic and spurious respective glories. There is also "neutral monism", which if I knew more about it might just show me that there is still a place for a philosophy-type model of inquiry/perception/experience, as merely one form of interaction between materials. There's a lot of stuff in this book, and you don't need more than a medium dash of healthy skepticism (not Pyrrho's kind!) to avoid Russell's biases leading you down the garden path. show less

I don't know if these essays are truly his best, but they are very good. Russell is a philosopher/mathematician who rejects the common idea that science and philosophy are totally separate. He advocates a scientific philosophy, and his appreciation for science shines through these essays, while not being a blind love affair. He is also able to see the problems that rise when you combine science with government or big business, and develop weaponry that can wipe out entire populations at a show more single blast. Still, Russell insists that philosophy should not ignore science, and that philosophical conclusions should not violate natural laws. Written in clear, lucid prose that can be understood by non-philosophers, he is a joy to read when you find yourself bogged down in the endless jargon of more modern philosophers. show less

Understanding History & Other Essays is a short book containing several essays by the 20th c. philosopher, Bertrand Russell. They vary in length and subject matter and some are of more interest than others. Understanding History, the title essay is perhaps the best known and the one I will concentrate on in this review. In it, he makes it clear that his interest is not as an historian but as someone who loves the subject:

My subject is history as a pleasure, as an agreeable and profitable way show more of spending leisure as an exacting world may permit

For Russell, history can be divided into two types: history in the large and history in the small

History in the large helps us to understand how the world developed into what it is; history in the small makes us know interesting men and women, and promotes a knowledge of human nature

Russell seems to give little credence to history in the large which he claims is

actuated by a desire to demonstrate some “philosophy” of history; they think they have discovered some formula according to which human events develop

It is history of the small that Russell seems to consider the proper purpose of history- the story of great men of genius who, according to him, are responsible for progress. And it is clear that, when he talks about men of genius he means men and mostly men of western civilization. Women and people of other civilizations factor little in his history and, when they do, not favourably.

Written in 1943, this essay gives an interesting account of what one of the most prominent philosophers of the first half of the 20th c thought about history and its study. His attitudes about women and race are, perhaps surprisingly (or maybe not) not that unusual for the time period.

There have been criticism of this essay that it clearly demonstrates Russell’s belief in Eugenics. That he did is also perhaps not surprising given the influence of Eugenics on the ‘great men of genius’ of the times whether in science, education, or government including fascist governments. It was one of the prevailing ‘scientific’ theories of the early 20th c., influencing not only the Nazis but Margaret Singer and her philosophy of planned parenthood and the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment among other things and Russell, despite his own genius, was a product of his time. It should be noted that, in later years, he would become a vocal critic of Eugenics.

It has always been my understanding of history that it is, at its most basic level, the recorded account of mankind’s past or, to quote Edward Hallet Carr, it is ‘a dialogue between the present and the past’. It is, simply put, the story of us since we first put stylus to papyrus and said ‘we were here’. As such, I am not sure I would recommend Understanding History as an introduction to understanding history; I would, however, recommend it to anyone interested to understand the attitudes of the time towards race and gender as espoused by one of the greatest men of genius of the time. show less