Wu Jing
A rigorous soul burns in the pain of loneliness.
—Bertrand Russell
The name Bertrand Russell, not only has a great influence in the Western world, but also has a wide popularity in China, which is inseparable from his long list of titles that span many fields, including philosopher, mathematician, logician, historian, writer... In addition to this, he was the founder of analytic philosophy, a Nobel Prize winner in literature, an advocate and organizer of the world peace movement, and has been called the last encyclopedic scholar in the West. Chinese readers who know a little about Russell are unlikely to have access to his intractable works on mathematics and logic, nor may they have read his three-volume the famous The history of western philosophy (1945), or even wrote a book devoted to China, The Problem of China (1922), but may be familiar with his well-known classic essay, The Three Passions. （Three passions）。 Russell himself attached great importance to the article, so much so that he quoted the famous passage at the beginning of his Autobiography: "There are three simple but extremely strong passions that govern my life. It is the desire for love, the pursuit of knowledge, and the deep compassion for human suffering. Indeed, these three passions have run through Russell's long life for nearly a hundred years and have become a commentary on his life-filled with his dazzling history of marriage and love, his exploration and achievements in many fields of human knowledge, and his efforts in the anti-war struggle, so that the general public is very easy to be blinded by Russell's star-like dazzling career, mistakenly thinking that he is just pretending to be sad in the following sentences: "These three passions are like wild waves that lead me to drift around the sea, wandering uncertainly, until the abyss of the bitter sea, on the verge of despair". And what stands behind these "three passions" is Russell's lonely life, sometimes painful and sometimes desperate.
Bertrand Russell
The New Ethics Experiment: Liveliness and Desolation
In 1920, an interesting incident occurred during a visit to China by Russell and his party. At the time, Russell was accompanied by his beautiful and capable Cambridge disciple, Dora Black, and the Chinese media, who was unknowingly referred to as "Mrs. Russell," ended up with a joke. After receiving the apology letter from the Declaration, Russell graciously replied that it was "insignificant", and at the same time turned around and said, "In fact, the relationship between the two of them, in addition to requiring legal recognition, is not much different from that of husband and wife." The reporters who had just woken up from a dream found that an explosive news had arrived! As a result, the Republic of China Daily, Women's Magazine, and others scrambled to launch the "Divorce Problem Number" and "Russell Marriage Research Number", using the "Russell Marriage" to criticize arranged marriages, from the freedom of marriage to the freedom of love and women's liberation, and even the youth should break through the feudal shackles, and Russell's "free love spirit" was greatly touted.
In fact, although it is called "free love", Russell knows in his heart that this is a very different thing. At that time, Russell had been separated from his wife for many years and was in the process of divorce. Outside of marriage, he enjoyed the extramarital affairs and open marriages that were popular in British aristocratic circles. Before arriving in Shanghai, he had three or four lovers by his side, and Dora was just one of them. However, Russell, although affectionate, was not a frivolous person, and he had a deep and unique reflection on marriage issues, and eventually wrote the influential book Marriage and Morals (1929), which advocated trial marriage and divorce from simplicity, and a tolerant attitude towards extramarital sex and homosexuality, which still represents a certain avant-garde idea even nearly a hundred years later.
Later, when Qian Zhongshu wrote "Siege of the City", he offered Russell's view of marriage to point out the topic, and he borrowed Chu Shenming in the third chapter of the novel: "I also talked to him about Bertie (Russell's marriage and divorce). He quoted an old English saying that marriage is like a birdcage with golden paint, and the birds outside the cage want to live in it, and the birds inside the cage want to fly out; so the knot is separated, the knot is separated, and there is no round. This passage corresponds to Russell's rich history of marriage and love in his life. Similar to his avant-garde spirit in academia, Russell also tried to carry out radical new moral experiments in his married life, but behind the seemingly hilarious marriages and relationships, it was a complete and utter rout. In a sense, all of Russell's lovers, lovers, and lovers work together to illustrate the background of his lonely and desolate life that haunts his life.
Of Russell's four best-known marriages, his second wife, Dora Black, had the most profound influence on his life. The feminist and social activist did fit Russell's ideas in many ways, not only with love and children as emotional bonds, but also with common goals and similar values. Dora had argued that she and Russell were comrades in their struggle against stereotypes, educators who guided people to the "right to happiness," and pioneers in propagating new sexual morality. In order to promote a new type of education, they also founded the Beacon Hill School together. At the same time, the two signed an agreement not to interfere with each other's extramarital affairs, and even invited their lovers to live in the same room. However, they all clearly underestimated the weaknesses of human nature, and the cold reality hit them hard in the face, and this radical marriage experiment ended up with a chicken feather.
The essence of marriage is a contract, rousseau wrote at the beginning of the Social Contract: "Born free, but always in chains." "All freedom has its boundaries, and once broken, the resulting collapse will inevitably lead to a series of chain reactions. Couples who were incomparably loving in the past can become enemies of tomorrow. In addition to sex, the influence of jealousy in emotional relationships can be described as far-reaching, and forbearance is nothing more than a fermentation in the dark. When Russell develops a lover relationship with his colleague Peter while working at school, and the latter tries to replace Dora as "Russell's Lady", he is jealous that the "flower of evil" in human nature blooms extremely enthusiastically, and it is even more ironic that Peter is actually a teacher recruited by Dora herself to enter the school. Out of revenge, Dora also took her lover, the American journalist Griffin, to school and gave birth to a pair of children for the latter.
In this chaotic marriage caused by excessive freedom, an almost deformed family is eventually formed: Russell and Dora and their two children, as well as Dora's lover, and Dora and her lover's children, plus Russell's own lover, a 20-something Oxford student Peter, living together. As a result, this experiment with the new morality has largely destroyed everyone. Russell's son John becomes lost, introverted, broken inside, and eventually falls into a frenzy during his bitter divorce tug-of-war with Dora. Even more tragically, this madness even continued to his granddaughter's generation, and this sensitive and beautiful woman eventually fell into madness and set herself on fire. What is even more incredible is that Russell opened his fourth marriage at the age of 80, and peter, who had successfully "usurped the throne", finally left and tasted the same bitter fruit as Dora. In retaliation, she never let Russell see the child again.
The Russell Biography: The Lonely Spirit 1872-1921
Throughout his life, Russell wandered among many women (in addition to four wives, there were countless lovers), always in the confrontation between rational calm and passionate fanaticism, individual life and human beings as a whole, rich reality and abstract meaning, soul communication and sexual enjoyment. Perhaps when a person's intelligence and passion are too superior, the people around him will feel tired, helpless, and even desperate, and one of his lovers, Collette, once said of him: "Russell's intellectual superiority exhausts other men; emotional intensity makes women exhausted." He exhausted his friends, drained their energies, and switched from one person to another, never giving anyone real pleasure. Or never found any happiness. Perhaps, this is the tragic loneliness of Russell's life.
Careers as a Freelance Writer: Ideals and Costs
No one ever doubted Russell's genius, even though it had shrunk somewhat after he met Wittgenstein, who once lamented: "For the passion of philosophy, Wittgenstein is an avalanche, and I seem to be just a snowball." Russell, however, had a distinctive multifaceted genius, which was evident in his teenage years. Russell was 5 years old when he was first exposed to philosophical problems, playing on the beach with his aunt, picking up hat shells and catching sea anemones, when he suddenly asked his aunt: "Can hat shells think?" At the age of 11, Russell began to study Euclidean geometry, saying: "I did not expect that there would be such a wonderful learning in the world, it was as dazzling as first love." Later, when he was teaching at Cambridge University, after only a few months of study, he formed a convincing new view of Leibniz's work, and became the authority of Leibniz's research in one fell swoop. According to himself, these all stemmed from the epiphanies of his life. There is no explanation but genius.
However, Russell's mathematical talent is inextricably linked to his childhood experiences. Due to the early death of his parents, Russell in his childhood felt the impermanence of the world and tasted loneliness. In an atmosphere of total solitude, the solitary nature of geometry, which does not depend on any particular individual, but is self-evidently true, and does not change with the passage of time, gives Russell great comfort, which is what he calls "the wonderful feeling of first love." It can be said that Russell's pursuit of geometric and logical knowledge in his early years was not some kind of technical thing, but the basis and motivation of his life. Only by understanding this can we understand the second of what he calls the "three passions"—the precise meaning of the pursuit of knowledge. Unfortunately, after meeting Wittgenstein, his philosophical passion seemed much smaller, and his passion for mathematics was almost extinguished. Because Wittgenstein made him painfully aware that mathematics was essentially tautistic, that the eternal world without human distractions was suddenly gone.
At the same time, the outbreak of World War I brought Russell into the anti-war ranks, and his active involvement in political issues made it difficult for him to survive in the academic system, and he was deeply disappointed in the rigid academic system. Russell considered himself a free thinker in the age of dogmatism, a rationalist in the age of irrationality, a spiritual aristocrat in the age of rabble-rouser rule, and he instinctively admired those who made a living by writing. Thus, driven by a combination of internal and external factors, Russell's transformation from an academic school to a freelance writer was almost inevitable. However, while becoming a freelance writer made Russell famous and profitable, it also made him pay a heavy price - writing for the general public was a great waste of his personal genius. In this regard, the biographer Ray Monk wrote: "The position of lecturer is duller and more boring than the life of a freelance writer, but he can at least engage in philosophical research, free from the temptation of superficiality." This is bound to happen when one has to sell everything one writes. ”
To a certain extent, public writing and speech satisfied Russell's vanity, slightly alleviated the loneliness that was difficult to get rid of in his heart, and achieved the reputation of a modern "saint" among the general public. However, his brilliant career in philosophy and mathematics before World War I was almost interrupted (principia Mathematica (1910-1913), co-authored with Whitehead, was hailed as "one of the highest achievements of the human mind"), and philosophical scholarship had only a superficial respect for Russell's post-mortem research, but was in fact indifferent. Even his high-ranking Wittgenstein held respect for his early work and was fiercely critical of the series of popular works he later wrote. As for Wittgenstein himself, he never wrote a newspaper article that was in the mood. Worse still, as a freelance writer, Russell was sometimes forced by financial pressure to concoct some superficial texts, and even found someone to ghostwrite, which had to be deeply regretted.
History of Western Philosophy
As for the "History of Western Philosophy" (once hailed as the "best-selling philosophical book of the 20th century" that had a great influence among readers), Russell himself did not value it, which is inseparable from the background of the book's birth. In the 1940s, Russell was unfairly criticized and tried in New York for his earlier liberal advocacy on marriage, sexuality, and related moral issues, so that he lost the teaching position he had already received. At this time, a foundation invited Russell to be the keynote speaker of a popular lecture, and most of the audience had no philosophical background. In preparation for this lecture, Russell hastily wrote a history of Western philosophy, which, for the consideration of the audience at the time, highlighted the connection between philosophy and the general political and social situation. But from a professional point of view, there are many problems, such as the short introduction to Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are regarded as general satire objects, and the masters such as Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger are mentioned without mentioning the masters, but the whole chapter is devoted to the less influential Bergson, Dewey, and Lord Byron. The author's view of philosophy as a tool for solving political or social problems rather than as a liberal scholarship with independent value has made the book highly criticized in academia.
Of course, not all of Russell's works in the second half of his life as a freelance writer are not all "quick-finished products". "The Analysis of Things" is the crystallization of more than ten years of thinking, occupies a very high position in his classic works, and is also one of the few important works published in the second half of his life. But on the whole, this transformation of his is regrettable, his achievements in logic have never surpassed those of Gödel and Turing, who are more "nerdy", nor have their philosophical achievements as those of his disciples Wittgenstein, and the political essays he has spent a great deal of time and energy on, though not useless, are inevitably lackluster and inconsistent compared to the acumen and intellect displayed in his professional works, and are by no means as clever as the general public expects. If one links many of these articles and speeches to what he calls his third passion, one is reminiscent of Sartre's ironic maxim in Existence and Nothingness: Man is a useless passion.
Incarnate Anti-Combatant: Prophecy and Fantasy
As a hereditary aristocrat, the political enthusiasm of his predecessors has always been deeply imprinted in Russell's heart. Therefore, Russell was very concerned about the development of the country in the early years, and was an out-and-out "angry youth". Later, the outbreak of the First World War deeply stimulated Russell, and many of his friends became unrecognizable because of the war. He said: "These days are living in hell, and I wish I had died before 1914." Opposition and skepticism about the war ran through almost his life. For this reason, Russell once lamented: "The biggest problem in this world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves, while the hearts of the wise are always full of doubts." He told the public: "Don't be absolutely certain about everything" and "Don't be afraid to hold a unique view of yourself, because the common sense we accept now has been a unique view." ”
From Britain's entry into the war in 1914 until the end of 1917, Russell campaigned for anti-war activities, organized the "Committee of Objection to Military Service", and in 1918 was sentenced to prison for writing an anti-war article and resigned from Trinity College. His last words when he left Cambridge were: "To be patriotic is to kill or be killed for some boring reason". One day, as Russell was walking down the street, an angry old lady came up to him and asked him, "Now that all the other young men are putting on their uniforms and fighting for civilization, aren't you ashamed of your own dress?" "Ma'am," he replied, "I am exactly the kind of civilization they fought for. This unique idea has always influenced Russell's political attitude.
After World War I, Russell visited the Soviet Union and China. In Beijing, Russell and his party were warmly received by Liang Qichao, and the two talked about the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese and Western cultures, and Russell expressed great admiration for the ancient and long-standing Chinese culture. Later, he visited the United States several times. In 1922, Russell recognized the United States as the most powerful of the world's great powers, and he was one of the first Britons to see this. In response, he predicted that "the United States will begin its imperialist career — not so much territorially as economically." He told the American audience, "It is not the Washington administration that rules America. You are ruled by oil and Morgan. The United States, a financial empire that overrides the world, is extremely crude and cruel, and it casts a shadow on our future. "A hundred years later, any earthling has to marvel at Russell's prophecy of God.
The even more tragic Second World War made Russell see the great threat of nuclear weapons to humanity, which made him resolutely throw himself into the anti-nuclear movement. In 1955, he and Einstein jointly published the famous Russell-Einstein Declaration as a means of opposing nuclear weapons. Three years later, to promote nuclear disarmament, Russell launched the Committee of the Hundred, a nonviolent resistance movement, and gave speeches and radio speeches at mass gatherings across Britain. He organized a large number of scientists to study the pollution of atomic energy, the control of nuclear weapons and the social responsibility of scientists, and finally effectively led to the signing of part of the nuclear-test-ban treaty. In 1961, the 89-year-old Russell was briefly imprisoned for organizing an anti-nuclear demonstration. When the verdict was announced, someone shouted "shame, shame, 89 years old is still in prison." Russell was furious: "What does age have to do with this?" "When he walked out of the courtroom, people greeted him like a hero.
Russell-Einstein Declaration (1955)
Of course, we must see that although Russell's anti-war career was remarkable and had many divine prophecies, his political ideas were not as prominent as his philosophical and mathematical fields, and sometimes even superficial and ridiculous. For example, during World War II, Hitler was swept across the Continent, and many countries pinned their hopes on this old empire, Britain, but Russell proposed a solution: disarm everything, as long as we have no desire or desire, Hitler will lose the desire to attack and conquer. This is reminiscent of Alekjevich's famous quote in SecondHand Time: "Westerners seem naïve to us because they have not suffered the same as we do." For Russell's political and social reform ideas, the 27-year-old Mao Zedong was deeply disappointed after listening to his speech during his visit to China, and he replied to his friend Cai Hesen: I have two comments on Russell's ideas, that is, "it makes sense in theory, but it can't be done in fact." What cannot be done is only fantasy.
In fact, Russell's observations and insights on political issues have some hidden connection with his mathematical training. His training in mathematics has led him to tend to think in a highly simplified way when thinking about general problems, but this way of thinking is not necessarily a good thing for a political observer. Russell himself knew this, "although he had expertise in mathematics and mathematical philosophy, this did not give him the authority to express his views on political issues." "Wise men with many geniuses like Russell still make many ridiculous mistakes, which shows how difficult it is to be a public intellectual. Until the last moments of his life, Russell was concerned about peace in the Middle East. On 31 January 1970, he issued a statement condemning Israeli attacks on Egyptian and Palestinian refugee camps. Two days later, Russell died at the age of 98.
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Liu Wei