Russell's Neo-Spinozism, Scientific Philosophy, and the Philosophers of the future

General readers will recall that I have been blogging about Bertrand Russell’s (1916). Principles of Social Reconstruction that originated in a series of public lectures. (Also known in America as Why Men Fight.) In previous posts I have tried to take the work on its own terms. But while I have admiration for Russell’s courage to oppose war during wartime (and the work is significant anticipation of the themes of Marriage and Morals), my general estimation of these essays is that they are very uneven.

However, there is a reason to be very interested in the collection. And that’s because it reflects Russell’s social views while he is co-inventing analytic philosophy not the least enduring features of its methodology (as Alexander Klein has emphasized). It’s a decade after “On Denoting,” and only a few years after he published Problems of Philosophy, Principia Mathematica, and Our Knowledge of the External World. And shortly thereafter he will publish Mysticism and Logic and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. Today’s post links Russell’s meta-philosophical views to his scientific philosophy and social theory.

While the titles of the collection’s final two essays — “Religion and the Churches” (essay 7) and “What Can We Do” (essay 8) — suggest otherwise, they are intimately connected. Chapter 7 alerts us to the idea that there is a need to renew spirit (which alongside mind and instinct is one of the three key principles of social life that need to be balanced against each other—and Russel emphasizes the need to create “harmony between mind and instinct” (p. 154)). Russell’s account of the life of spirit includes one of his most lyrical passages; so I quote in full:

The life of the spirit centers round impersonal feeling, as the life of the mind centers round impersonal thought. In this sense, all art belongs to the life of the spirit, though its greatness is derived from its being also intimately bound up with the life of instinct. Art starts from instinct and rises into the region of the spirit; religion starts from the spirit and endeavors to dominate and inform the life of instinct. It is possible to feel the same interest in the joys and sorrows of others as in our own, to love and hate independently of all relation to ourselves, to care about the destiny of man and the development of the universe without a thought that we are personally involved. Reverence and worship, the sense of an obligation to mankind, the feeling of imperativeness and acting under orders which traditional religion has interpreted as Divine inspiration, all belong to the life of the spirit. And deeper than all these lies the sense of a mystery half revealed, of a hidden wisdom and glory, of a transfiguring vision in which common things lose their solid importance and become a thin veil behind which the ultimate truth of the world is dimly seen. It is such feelings that are the source of religion, and if they were to die most of what is best would vanish out of life. (p. 143-144 in the English edition)

For Russell it is pretty obvious that existing churches are becoming incapable of reanimating the life of spirit. Before long he expects that “it will be possible for a new organic society and a new inner synthesis to take place which the Church held for a thousand years.” ((pp. 138-9) Much of the seventh essay hints at the Nietzschean idea (familiar also from Carnap and Parfit later) that Russell views himself as a philosopher of the future with a life-affirming philosophy. As he puts in the eight chapter, “The world has need of a philosophy, or a religion, which will promote life.” (p. 168)

In this seventh essay, one of Russell’s regulative ideas is that “the life of the mind, although supremely excellent in itself, cannot bring health into the life of instinct, except when it results in a not too difficult outlet for the instinct of creation.” (p. 148) He rejects, for example, the praiseworthy attempts by “vitalism, futurism, pragmatism, and the various other philosophies which advertise themselves as vigorous and virile.” They all fail because they subordinate “thought to instinct, a refusal to allow thought to achieve its own ideal.” For Russell, “thought must achieve its full growth before a reconciliation with instinct is attempted.” (p. 148) Or as he puts it in the next essay, “what integrates an individual life is a consistent creative purpose or unconscious direction.” (p. 158) So, Russell invites his reader into thinking that he has an alternative philosophical program that can provide such integration.

In chapter 8, Russell explains more concretely what he has in mind:

We must recognize that the world is ruled in a wrong spirit, and that a change of spirit will not come from one day to the next. Our expectations must not be for to-morrow, but for the time when what is thought now by a few shall have become the common thought of many. If we have courage and patience, we can think the thoughts and feel the hopes by which, sooner or later, men will be inspired, and weariness and discouragement will be turned into energy and ardor. For this reason, the first thing we have to do is to be clear in our own minds as to the kind of life we think good and the kind of change that we desire in the world. (p. 155)

Russell discusses a number of episodes of moral progress which originate in small groups that eventually are seen to be ahead of the times. The underlying idea can be traced back to his godfather, Mill (and, of course, Machiavelli’s ‘new prince’ or the Christian apostles), who embraces an idea of moral progress that is rooted in the activities of a moral elite/avant-garde. “The power of thought, in the long run, is greater than any other human power.” (p. 156; Mill’s own feminism is offered as one example.) Russell himself may well have thought of Bloomsbury, although he explicitly mentions Labour.

Being part of a moral elite entails hardship and isolation:

Those who are to begin the regeneration of the world must face loneliness, opposition, poverty, obloquy. They must be able to live by truth and love, with a rational unconquerable hope; they must be honest and wise, fearless, and guided by a consistent purpose. A body of men and women so inspired will conquer—first the difficulties and perplexities of their individual lives, then, in time, though perhaps only in a long time, the outer world. Wisdom and hope are what the world needs; and though it fights against them, it gives its respect to them in the end. (pp. 169-170)

In context, Russell also hints at his inspiration. As he writes, “the right kind of thought is rare and difficult,” (p. 156)* and this evokes the closing lines of Spinoza’s Ethics. This is indeed the philosophy that promotes “life.” As he puts it a few pages down:

In order to promote life it is necessary to value something other than mere life. Life devoted only to life is animal without any real human value, incapable of preserving men permanently from weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty. Those who best promote life do not have life for their purpose. They aim rather at what seems like a gradual incarnation, a bringing into our human existence of something eternal, something that appears to imagination to live in a heaven remote from strife and failure and the devouring jaws of Time. Contact with this eternal world—even if it be only a world of our imagining—brings a strength and a fundamental peace which cannot be wholly destroyed by the struggles and apparent failures of our temporal life. It is this happy contemplation of what is eternal that Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God. To those who have once known it, it is the key of wisdom. (pp. 168-169; emphasis added)

What’s peculiar about this passage is that while evoking Spinoza, Russell explicitly deviates from Spinoza’s own way to generate intellectual love of God. For, Spinoza would deny that one has genuine contact with the eternal world if it is a world of our imagining (and, anticipating Nietzsche, Spinoza would deny willing a fiction is itself life-affirming).

Now, if I understand Russell correctly in these two essays, he is not himself claiming that he has a fully worked out philosophy that can generate a life-affirming spirit. Rather — and he explicitly compares this with Augustine’s publication of City of God after the sack of Rome (p. 170) — he thinks he can provide a “new hope.” So, I take him to be claiming that the happy contemplation of an imperfect world of our imagining may be prefatory to the birth or generation of something eternal.

Russell here evokes an important passage (that figured in one of my first attempts at blogging (here) at NewAPPS in conversation with Jeff Bell) from “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” (1914) [in Mysticism and Logic] that helps explain what he has in mind:

I do not deny the importance or value, within its own sphere, of the kind of philosophy which is inspired by ethical notions. The ethical work of Spinoza, for example, appears to me of the very highest significance, but what is valuable in such work is not any metaphysical theory as to the nature of the world to which it may give rise, nor indeed anything which can be proved or disproved by argument. What is valuable is the indication of some new way of feeling towards life and the world, some way of feeling by which our own existence can acquire more of the characteristics which we must deeply desire. The value of such work, however immeasurable it is, belongs with practice and not with theory. Such theoretic importance as it may possess is only in relation to human nature, not in relation to the world at large. The scientific philosophy, therefore, which aims only at understanding the world and not directly at any other improvement of human life, cannot take account of ethical notions without being turned aside from that submission to fact which is the essence of the scientific temper.

So, in 1914 Russell makes a fairly sharp distinction between practice and theory. And Spinoza’s work is held up as the kind of thinking that can animate practice. Russell implies here that his own scientific philosophy has no impact on “improvement of human life.” Of course, as Alexander Klein has argued, Russell’s meta-philosophy embraces the scientific temper with an “antinationalistic agenda.”

As I have noted before, this anti-nationalism is also visible in the 1916 lectures/collection that is my present focus. For Russell associates nationalism with a zero-sum imperialist mentality:

The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that center round possession. The State at present is very largely an embodiment of possessive impulses: internally, it protects the rich against the poor; externally, it uses force for the exploitation of inferior races, and for competition with other States. (p. 163; emphasis in original

As I have already noted in my discussion of Russell’s treatment of eugenics (here), it is pretty clear that in 1916 Russell embraces natural inequality of populations. So even though Russell is against exploiting them, he thinks there are inferior races. Such ‘benevolent racism’ stance is not uncommon among anti-imperialists of the age—we also see it among some liberals like Hobson and (recall) the classicist Gilbert Murray.

Be that as it may, Spinoza matters to Russell because he is treated as pointing toward a non-zero-plus orientation toward our impulses and desires and to promote a species of creativity. We might say, then, that in Russell of this period, Spinoza’s neo-Stoicism is elevated at the expense of Spinoza’s own defense of property rights and nationalism.

But unlike in 1914, Russell does not separate practice from theory sharply in 1916. For he hints that a neo-Spinozist philosophy that promotes the supreme principle does have a connection with his own more scientific philosophy. For, according to Russell, the most creative life is actually the life of science, “The men of science, who have less difficulty than any others in finding an outlet for creativeness, are the happiest of intelligent men in the modern world, since their creative activity affords full satisfaction to mind and spirit as well as to the instinct of creation.” (p. 147) Spinozism promotes a creative life; and, in the modern world, that means turning to science.

The crucial point is hinted at obliquely in the following sentence: “In them a beginning is to be seen of the new way of life which is to be sought; in their happiness we may perhaps find the germ of a future happiness for all mankind.” (p. 147, emphasis added.) Is this germ supposed to blossom with the aid of a scientific philosophy?

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*Russell continues, “but it is not impotent.” Throughout these essays, Russell’s anxiety about manhood and virility are lurking not far under the surface. I leave it to another to interpret the significance of this.