A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars An Engaging History Biased Against Dogma In A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell introduces the lives and explains and critiques the philosophies of key figures from the history of western culture. The subtitle of Russell’s book says that he will cover philosophy’s “Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day,” and often his book is at least as much a history of western culture as of western philosophy. Russell is good at explaining different philosophies and the cultural contexts they influenced and were influenced by. Russell demonstrates, for example, that Marx contributed to philosophy by showing how past philosophers were all shaped by their subjective biases and then points out that Marx himself was no different (believing in progress, for instance). The reader should keep in mind that the “Present Day” when Russell stops his survey was the 1940s and World War II. Sometimes he dates himself, as when he comments that dictators don’t pass on their rule to their descendants or that big corporations loathe war or that Japanese professors are fired if they cast doubt on the Mikado being descended from the sun-goddess. Russell divides his history into three sections: I. Ancient Philosophy: pre-Socratics like Pythagoras and Anaximander; the three giants Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; and their successors like the Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans, and Stoics. II. Catholic Philosophy: Jewish antecedents and Islamic contemporaries; saints like Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Benedict; the Schoolmen like John the Scot and St. Thomas Aquinas. III. Modern Philosophy: Renaissance figures like Machiavelli, Erasmus, and More; post-Renaissance figures like Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley; Romantic figures like Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Byron; and more modern figures like Nietzsche, Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, Williams James, and Russell himself. Rather than dryly presenting a series of different philosophies and the cultural eras that shaped and were shaped by them, Russell also critiques the men (always men) and their philosophies with a dry wit and an appealing rational humanism. His book, then, is quite biased, in mostly, for this reader, a good way reminiscent of other works of history by individual, knowledgeable, and opinionated writers, like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, or E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. I learned a lot from Russell (though I am a philosophy neophyte). Russell’s aim in critiquing different philosophies is to objectively understand them and their inconsistencies, aware that “No one has invented a philosophy that is both credible and self-consistent.” His bete noir is dogmatism, which is the enemy of philosophy, for, he says, the philosopher’s task is to openly and never-endingly inquire into the nature of the world and of the universe and of truth etc. He thus disapproves of the too long and too potent influences of Aristotle and Aquinas and prefers open-minded empirical philosophers like Locke. He is also no fan of Romanticism with its overemphasis of emotion at the expense of reason: “Tigers are more beautiful than sheep, but we prefer them behind bars. The typical Romantic removes the bars and enjoys the magnificent leap with which the tiger annihilates the sheep. He exhorts men to imagine themselves tigers, and when he succeeds, the results are not wholly pleasant.” Russell prefers open-minded reason and thought to blind belief and raw emotion. He holds that any philosophy that contributes to human pride is dangerous. He likes men like Boethius who achieve something outstandingly unusual for the ages in which they lived and men like St. Francis and Spinoza who genuinely cared about the suffering of others. His take down of Nietzsche is amusing, one of the high points of the book being a fanciful moment when Buddha and Nietzsche debate the relative merits of caring about all people or only the superman. The audiobook reader Johnathan Keeble effectively uses two modes: his base natural voice for Russell, which is educated, intelligent, and engaged, and his older, gruffer, authoritative voice for the quotations of historical philosophers. This immediately signals whenever Russell is quoting a philosopher, which is helpful, as sometimes his text does not introduce a quotation. And it a relief that, unlike some readers of audiobooks of history, Keeble does not artificially change his voice to suit the presumed accents when speaking English of philosophers who were Greek, French, German, Scottish, and so on. Russell writes many great lines full of wit and wisdom. Here are several: “Seneca was judged in future ages rather by his admirable precepts than by his somewhat dubious practice.” “Those who do not fear their neighbors see no necessity to tyrannize over them.” “Men who have conquered fear, have not the frantic quality of Nietzsche’s ‘artist-tyrant’ Neros, who try to enjoy music and massacre while their hearts are filled with dread of the inevitable palace revolution.” “His [Nietzsche’s] opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear.” “To frame a philosophy capable coping with men intoxicated with the prospect of almost unlimited power and also with the apathy of the powerless is the most pressing task of our times.” Russell ends his book abruptly but potently, with an appeal to the pursuit of “scientific truthfulness. . . the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings,” for the resulting “habit of careful veracity” will decrease fanaticism and increase “sympathy and mutual understanding.” His closing words ring in my ears due to the egregious miasma of untruth belched forth every time the current occupant of the White House speaks or tweets. 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