With my own sanity and mental health at greater peril than ever before, i start reading, for some inexplicable reason, about Bertrand Russell’s personal life. I have read some of his books before, on happiness, marriage, etc. and of course the classic “On the History of Western Philosophy”–but I find that while i am obviously not of the same level, there are various personal similarities which i can’t help but noticing. If you go to the Amazon page for Ray Monk’s biography of Russell’s early middle-age years you find the following blurb from Publishers Weekly:
At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, “Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity.” His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk’s first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell’s own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell’s compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) “whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth.” When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, “It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood.
This revisits a theme that i;’ve thought about continuously for much of my adult life: which is what you want out of people in your personal life and what you hope for for humanity at large–and if there is any sort of psychological connection between the two. People–biographers, or just people who have had substantial contact with the man, have said that his love of humanity was abstract–that he was afraid of flesh and blood, that he had problems dealing with real people. And then there is talk of the compensatory nature of logic, and i find that *compensatory* to be quite illuminating. Why? Because logic and the disinterested pursuit of truth in science and mathematics allows one to dwell in rarefied world, away from the messiness and inconstancy of human life. There is a real sense in which someone with an IQ as high as Russell’s is also just not going to be able to “get” other people. sure he will need other people–I was reading about Conrad’s wife and Joyce Carol Oates described her as offering “maternal solicitude”–and I’ll be damned if there aren’t a bunch of male intellectuals who go for women like that…in any case, these uber-intellectuals and writers need regular people sometimes–they project their own fantasies and needs on them. I bet that the reason that Russell was a pacifist was because he believed that the nuclear arms race was a form of irrational madness based on lies that the government tells the people to get them into acquiesce–and this offended his deepest intellectual instincts. Human beings are mad, they are stupid. And yet you must love them so you try to steer them in what you consider the right way.
And what about Russell’s personal life, his compulsive womanizing? Again, echoes of my own life, except that I am not that compulsive and not that much of a womanizer–but again, the vector points in the same direction, just with lesser magnitude. The need to stave off madness and loneliness–i know that all too well.
I would go as far as to say that a man’s deepest redemption from loneliness–the loneliness brought about, in part, by his intellectual and existential instincts. Therefore, there is always this balancing act going, because the intellectual and artistic pursuits drive you in one direction, drive you in a direction that could conceivably lead to madness, or at least, shall we say suboptimal mental health. And that is why you need a woman, to assuage and ameliorate the pain that is brought on by that very pursuit.
somewhere else i read about Russell’s “unyielding” type of personality–another word which sent the flashbulbs off in my mind, because I believe that is why I have such problems following careers such as journalism and filmmaking, things that I ostensibly am in love with and respect–because I have something in me that predisposes me towards logic and mathematics, same as Russell (though obviously not on the same level). But the same proclivities are there, and the same political leanings–which means that whatever “advice” I could glean from his writings or writings about him could really be quite useful and therapeutic for me. And that’s perhaps, why, in times of extreme, duress, articles such as this and the thoughts they contain “find” me.
