The Last of the Victorian Rebels

AT Plas Penrhyn, his comfortable country house in northern Wales, he worked until the very end--a sparrow of a man, 97 years old and still trying to straighten out the world. A statement went off to Cairo on the Middle East crisis; letters and papers were prepared on Viet Nam and the plight of political prisoners. Then, after a whisky, he retired with a touch of flu to his bedroom overlooking Tremadoc Bay. Not long afterward, the long, passionate life of Bertrand Russell came to an end.

Only five mourners, including members of the immediate family, were present at the private cremation, and there were no ceremonies. But the world took note. Prime Minister Wilson laid clumsy claim to him as "the British Voltaire." Izvestia extolled him as "most representative of the progressive spirit outside the Communist world." The World Jewish Congress called him "one of the greatest humanitarians of all time." The Queen pointed to his "distinguished contribution to 20th century thought."

It was Russell's thought that had primacy and gave weight to the workings of his large and sometimes foolish heart. Skeptic, agnostic and above all rationalist, he won his first fame as a mathematician, later as a philosopher by creatively applying mathematical methods to the linguistic mysteries of meaning. His most notable work, Principia Mathematica, written with the collaboration of his fellow mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead, is a bench mark of 20th century philosophy. Paradoxically, though, Russell was less a man of the 20th century than the last of the eminent, eccentric Victorian rebels.

Aristocratic Disdain. The Rt. Hon. Bertrand Arthur William Russell, third Earl Russell, was born into a tradition of aristocratic disdain for what the neighbors might say, if not with an active desire to epater le bourgeois. His grandfather, the first earl, was Prime Minister of England. His parents were ardent freethinkers and campaigners for women's rights. Bertie, considered frail, was educated at home, and there was much coming and going of tutors.

Perhaps mercifully, both his parents died before he was four years old, and Russell was raised by his grandmother, a Presbyterian of strict selfdiscipline. At eleven, Bertie discovered Euclid under the tutelage of his older brother --"one of the great events of my life," he wrote, "as dazzling as first love." For the next 27 years, mathematics was his "chief source of happiness."

Liberating Numbers. Sex soon began to run a close second. Russell rhapsodizes in his three-volume autobiography about the joys of honeymooning with his first wife Alys, a Quaker from Philadelphia. Stimulated by such delights, Russell wrote his first major work, The Principles of Mathematics, at the breakneck rate of 200,000 words in three months. The book was designed to liberate numbers from the mystique that had clung to them since the days of Pythagoras and to demonstrate that all mathematics derives from logic. The three-volume Principia Mathematica took Russell and Whitehead ten years. Most of it is completely inaccessible to non-mathematicians, but not all. For example, it contains a careful explication of what is generally considered Russell's greatest philosophical "discovery": the Theory of Descriptions.

This was designed to purge language of the built-in ambiguities that tend to muddy strictly logical thought. Russell takes as an example the sentence: "The golden mountain does not exist." The ambiguity is that the words "golden mountain" may be taken to indicate a something where there is really a nothing. One might ask: "What is it that does not exist?" The answer would be "the golden mountain," implying that it has some kind of reality. Russell's solution was to turn the substantive phrase into what he called a descriptive phrase, i.e.: "There is no entity c, such that 'x is golden and mountainous' is true when x is c, but not otherwise."

According to this theory, a man, a concept or an object can only be considered to exist in terms of its exact description. Obviously this requirement can have a devastating effect on such imprecise words as evil or God. Russell's aim--and the aim of the linguistic school that has burgeoned in his wake with the work of his pupil Wittgenstein and many others--was to make over and diminish philosophy. Its traditional function was as a dispenser of wisdom, a guide to right and wrong; the linguistic school saw it merely as a tool to test the truth of limited propositions.

Russell's tremendous intellectual effort to forge that tool was complicated by his discovery--apparently as a sudden revelation while bicycling along a country road--that he no longer loved Alys. But he slogged along for nine years with both wife and book until Principia Mathematica was finished. So, almost, was he. "My intellect never quite recovered from the strain," he wrote. "I have been ever since definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before."

Indeed, he never again put his intellect to a comparable test, but began a new phase as a public--and private --personality that lasted the rest of his life. First he plunged into an affair with a rangy, red-haired bluestocking named Lady Ottoline Morrell, the wife of an acquaintance. He promptly told Alys. "After she had stormed for some hours," he writes in his autobiography, "I gave a lesson in Locke's philosophy to her niece, Karin Costelloe, who was about to take her Tripos. I then rode away on my bicycle, and with that my first marriage came to an end." He did not see Alys again for 39 years.

This cool-cat manner, displayed many times during his four marriages and numerous affairs, is a token of the ascendancy of head over heart. Recounting one of his most successful affairs, he wrote: "We did not go to bed the first time we were lovers, as there was too much to say." At least as important, however, was Russell's pre-Freudian ignorance and indifference about his own and others' subsurface motivations.

On the Public Stage. World War I, for Russell, was a "rejuvenating" experience. Like his grandfather before him, the arid mathematician-philosopher became an actor on the public stage. As a passionate pacifist, he was sentenced to six months in jail. After the war, he visited and wrote about Russia, where he found too much government, and China, where he found too little. He started a widely publicized progressive school with his second wife ("We allow them to be rude and use any language they like"). He lectured at the University of Chicago, U.C.L.A. and Harvard.

Declension of Logic. Adolf Hitler was too much for Russell's pacifism; he supported the Allies in World War II. After the war, the honors began rolling in: Britain's Order of Merit in 1949 (an encomium limited to 24 living Britons) and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

The postwar period also brought the declension of a great logician into a rhetorical polemicist. In 1948, astonishingly, he urged preventive war against the Soviet Union. "Either we must have a war against Russia, before she has the atom bomb, or we will have to lie down and let them govern us." His first recommendation was ignored, and so by the 1960s he was seriously suggesting that the second be adopted. The Ban-the-Bomb movement and then the Viet Nam War set the old humanitarian excitement running high, and this bright-eyed disturber of the peace must have rejoiced when, at the age of 89, he got himself sent to jail again for seven days for leading a demonstration against nuclear weapons. Less elegantly, Russell's anti-Americanism (which he denied on the astonishing grounds that he had had two American wives) became obsessive. The Americans in Viet Nam, he said, were "at least as bad as the Nazis."

Far truer to his life was the courageous confession--in an essay called

"Reflections on My 80th Birthday"-that the mathematical structure he had worked so hard to erect was nothing but an illusion: "I set out with a more or less religious belief in a Platonic eternal world, in which mathematics shone with a beauty like that of the last Cantos of the Paradiso. I came to the conclusion that the eternal world is trivial and that mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words."

Long before his death, he shed the Victorian optimism that had envisioned a gradual spread of freedom and prosperity and decline of tyranny and injustice. He feared, instead, a nuclear war that would exterminate mankind with terminal horrors of loot, rapine and anarchy. But he was not entirely pessimistic: "I may have conceived the theoretical truth wrongly, but I was not wrong in thinking that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance. I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that it is worthwhile to live with a view to bringing it nearer . . . These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken."

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