Einstein's Genius Club

by Feldman, Burton, Williams, Katherine

  Self-dramatizing was a mode of operation for Russell, especially with women. To them he would reveal these impulses: “[M]ost people would despise my inner turmoil.” Yet his tone was clinical. “Only intellect keeps me sane: perhaps this makes me overvalue intellect as against feeling.”88 Ray Monk argues that Russell sought to control his frightening impulses by dint of cold reason.89 Although Russell records no “murderous” episodes or feelings after his fifties, his wish to douse feelings with intellect never deserted him, to the extent that, as Crawshay-Williams argues, his public persona of “materialist temperament and unfeeling intellect” obscured his “sympathetic emotions.”90

  Russell also had uncontrollable impulses of a more benign sort. He called them “conversions,”91 since they struck him with the force of a mystical experience, bringing him an understanding that his intellect could not achieve.

  His relationship with Ludwig Wittgenstein was one such “conversion.” Wittgenstein was a wealthy but unknown young Austrian who came to study logic with Russell in 1911. Driven by his search for truth, caring nothing for feelings or consequences as he pursued his own vision, the twenty-two-year-old Wittgenstein began to consume the thirty-nine-year-old Russell. He often appeared in Russell's rooms at midnight, pacing the floor as if caged, silently. He harangued Russell hour after hour with philosophic discourse. He raged at those who claimed not to understand him. He threatened suicide. He was impervious to any ideas except his own.

  Russell, always generous when he saw intellectual fire and interest, put up with and even encouraged his strangely irrational and brilliant disciple. In only a few months, Russell came to see himself as the disciple. “[Wittgenstein] has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs.” The conversion was complete. “Wittgenstein has been a great event in my life… I think he has genius…. I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve.”92 Yet two years later, Wittgenstein pronounced the manuscript of Russell's new book, Theory of Knowledge, “all wrong,” demolishing the thesis in a series of devastating exchanges. Now it was Russell's turn to think of suicide.93

  This episode is often viewed by Wittgenstein's adherents as a clash between youth and aging genius. In many ways, Russell agreed. By the end of their relationship, Wittgenstein had convinced the older man that he “could not ever hope again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”94 Still, what overwhelmed Russell more than Wittgenstein's intellectual agility was his imperially romantic personality. The self-absorbed young Austrian either dominated those around him or banished them from his sight—a “tyrant,” Russell called him.95 Yet Russell felt that Wittgenstein had “a kind of purity…. [H]is personal force was extraordinary.” By force of personality, the youthful Wittgenstein swept Russell away: “He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”96 Russell had other philosophic opponents during his life: Henri Bergson, William James, G. E. Moore, F. H. Bradley, John Dewey, the later Whitehead, and Henri Poincaré. But he never allowed their criticism to affect him as did Wittgenstein's.

  The same intensity characterized his brief friendship with the novelist D. H. Lawrence. They met in 1915, when Lawrence was twenty-six and Russell forty-three. Lawrence was convinced that a wholly new social order was necessary to prevent more wars. Russell, tired of “Sunday-schooly” pacifists, welcomed Lawrence's iconoclasm. Having taken up the cause of pacifism with a vengeance, Russell hoped that the fiery Lawrence “could give me a vivifying dose of unreason.”97 He was looking for a prophet, and he found one in Lawrence. After their first talk, Russell was enthralled. He described his new friend to Ottoline Morrell:

  “[Lawrence] is amazing; he sees through and through one.” “Yes. But do you think he really sees correctly?” I asked. “Absolutely. He is infallible,” was Bertie's reply. “He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet… he sees everything and is always right.”98

  Russell took Lawrence to meet his cabal of Cambridge friends: the economist Maynard Keynes, the classicist Lowes Dickinson, and G. E. Moore. A few years earlier, Wittgenstein had denounced Russell's Cambridge circle as utter fools and derided Russell for being polite to them. Lawrence, likewise, “hated them all with passionate hatred and said they are ‘dead, dead, dead.’” At first, Russell did not disagree, thinking that such an imaginative genius had “an insight into human nature deeper than mine.” But he was increasingly repelled by Lawrence's mystical philosophy of “blood consciousness”—which, as opposed to intellect, was that aspect of “consciousness… belonging to darkness.”99

  The two men fell out when Russell argued the unexceptionable view that people were capable of kindly feelings towards one another. Lawrence responded by letter, furiously accusing Russell of hypocrisy and cowardice. Like everyone else, Lawrence argued, Russell only wanted to satisfy his “lust to jab and strike.” He scornfully advised Russell to give up peace work and stick to sterile mathematics. As he had been after the quarrel with Wittgenstein, Russell was devastated.

  I was inclined to believe he had some insight denied to me, and when he said that my pacifism was rooted in blood-lust I supposed he must be right. For twenty-four hours I thought I was not fit to live and contemplated suicide.100

  Then he came to his senses. “One must be an outlaw these days, not a teacher or preacher,” Lawrence had earlier written him. But Russell quite rightly reflected that “I was becoming more of an outlaw than he ever was.”101 His infatuation with yet another dominating romantic genius ended; their friendship had lasted a year.

  Russell did not stick to “sterile mathematics,” and his contributions to original philosophical thinking virtually ceased by the early twenties. He returned, briefly, to so-called “technical” work only once, in 1924, when he revised the Principia Mathematica for a second edition. But the bulk of his postwar work lay in politics and popular writings. To a lay audience hungry for knowledge, he wrote highly accessible books on relativity, the atom, and twentieth-century philosophy.

  Russell's wide-ranging interests and radical political activities were tame in comparison with the tumult of his emotional life. He was married four times, first to Alys Pearsall Smith, whom he married in 1894, then to Dora Black, who was pregnant with Russell's first child when they married in 1921. Russell and Black divorced in 1935. They had two children together—John and Katherine. After enduring their parents’ messy divorce, the two children found themselves with a difficult stepmother, Marjorie (Peter) Spence, whom Russell married in 1936. Conrad, their only child, was born the following year. After years of acrimony and anger, with children caught in the middle, Peter and Russell divorced in 1952. Russell's fourth and final marriage, to Edith Finch, lasted serenely and congenially until Russell's death in 1970.

  Yet Russell's marriages tell only part of tale. Having grown up in utter repression, Russell entered married life sexually and emotionally ignorant. His great awakening came in 1911, when he met Lady Ottoline Morrell, wife of Philip Morrell, a successful antiques dealer and member of Parliament. Their affair was marked by great passion on Russell's side and inevitable rancor when the relationship cooled. By then, Russell had taken up with Lady Constance Malleson, an actress whose stage name was Colette O'Neil. Russell befriended and may have had romantic relationships with several other women, including Evelyn Whitehead (the wife of his colleague Alfred North Whitehead), the writer Katherine Mans-field, and Vivienne Eliot (wife of the poet T. S. Eliot).

  Russell and Dora Black began their relationship in 1919, two years before their marriage. In Dora, Russell found an intellectual partner. She was an activist and scholar, well traveled and independent. When Russell went to Russia in 1920, she followed, though their paths never crossed and they both returned home singly. Not so for Russell's next trip abroad. He and Dora spent the academic year 1920–21 in China (which he loved), during which time Russell lectured at the National University—and n
early died of pneumonia. Russell had traveled twice to the United States before the war; in 1924, he returned to lecture at universities, institutes, and clubs across the country. Subsequent tours from 1927 through 1934 helped Russell afford upkeep for his children.

  Swept up by various radical philosophies of education, Russell and Dora began a school for children (including his own) in 1927. Russell and Dora tried to chart a middle ground between conventional schooling and the relative anarchy of “new schools.” The experience left the Russells not only in debt, but disillusioned by the cruelty of the children. Their progressive pedagogy failed to stem bullying. One of the most vulnerable was their son John, who, like his sister Katherine, survived by retreating into a “shell.”102 Meanwhile, Russell's marriage to Dora was deteriorating; they separated in 1931. At the time, Dora was pregnant by her lover Griffin Barry, and Russell was cohabiting with “Peter” Spence. The school became Dora's, and she ran it until the war.

  Russell had cast his lot far from the security (and orthodoxy) of academia for most of his life. In 1937, with the birth of his third child, Conrad, with Peter, he looked about for a permanent university position that would solve his financial problems. But none was forthcoming. With war on the horizon, Russell, Peter, and Conrad set sail for the United States in 1938 on the promise of a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago. For the next six years, Russell and his family moved from one position to another—or, in the notorious case of the City College of New York, which rescinded an offer when a mother complained that Russell was too radical to teach at her son's college, from one position to no position at all. With the declaration of war, Russell was stuck in the United States. His prolific writing did not cease, and he was a popular lecturer. But his reputation as a libertine and a sexual radical preceded him at every moment. In the end, his years in the United States did not solve his financial difficulties; they only served to intensify his longing to return to England. He did so, finally, in 1944, as the war waned, and he was finally able to secure transport for himself, Peter, and Conrad.103

  Far from having been forgotten in England, Russell was received warmly. In early 1944, his old Cambridge college, Trinity, offered him a fellowship starting in the fall—healing the breach caused by his expulsion during World War I. Back in London, he became a popular lecturer on the BBC and soon a member of the highbrow quiz show, The Brains Trust. Then, in 1945, his History of Western Philosophy became a runaway best seller, at last ending his financial troubles at the ripe old age of seventy-three. In 1948, he became a folk hero of sorts. Flying from Norway to Sweden in a storm, his plane crashed and nineteen people drowned. But the seventy-six-year-old Russell swam through icy waters to a rescue boat, none the worse for wear. In 1949, he became truly respectable. He was made a member of the Order of Merit, Britain's highest honor to its intellectual and artistic elite. In 1950, while visiting Princeton again, he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Russell certainly did not think of himself as having slowed down in his later years—nor did others. Hearing of Russell's financial straits in 1937, George Santayana immediately and generously sent the sixty-five-year-old Russell a yearly stipend. “Old and penniless” Russell might have been, but in Santayana's view, he was “still brimming with undimmed genius and suppressed immortal works.”104 Still, for all his energy, Russell's most important philosophic work had stopped in 1927, at about the same time as Einstein's most important scientic work. Russell's mathematical work lay in the distant past.

  MATHEMATICS AND LOGIC

  Russell's philosophical career can be divided into two parts: first logic, then philosophy of science. The split came in 1910. In that year, he and Whitehead completed the Principia Mathematica. It would be hard to overestimate the lasting importance of this work. It grew out of the profound conflict Russell felt as a young philosopher schooled, along with other Cambridge Apostles, in the idealism that was in vogue. Gone were the empiricists, including Russell's revered John Stuart Mill. Instead, he read Kant and Hegel and Berkeley. However beguiling, idealism was something thrust on Russell, a version of metaphysics that could not satisfy his longing for “truth.” Absolute idealism locates reality within the mind. Only mental conditions and constructions are real. For Plato, the universal “ideals” constitute reality. Hegel distinguished between finite nature and infinite ideas, finding only the latter to be “real”—thus, his “absolute idealism,” as opposed to Kantian “subjective idealism,” which limits our knowledge to our mental impressions of the external world, which can (if it exists) be perceived only indirectly, through organizing “categories” inherent in the mind.

  Russell, for all his exposure to idealism at Trinity, came away unconvinced. With G. E. Moore, for whom “common sense” was the rule, Russell abandoned absolute idealism, arguing that an objective world susceptible to analysis did, indeed, exist. When Russell taught Leibniz for a semester, he was thunderstruck by the latter's method of analysis. If language could be broken down to reveal its basic structure, so then could logical analysis become a tool for discovering the truth. And what better foundation for logic than mathematics?

  The new century intervened with the First International Congress of Philosophy and the Second International Congress of Mathematics, held one after the other in Paris in the summer of 1900. The backdrop was the great Exposition Universelle. Whereas all of Paris was transformed by new architecture—the Grand and Petit Palais, the Eiffel Tower—Russell was transformed by the work of one man: Giuseppe Peano, the great mathematician of Turin. For months afterward, Russell read Peano's works and corresponded feverishly with him. Peano's system of symbolic notation was, Russell believed, extendable to the logic of relations. Fellow Apostle A. N. Whitehead joined Russell at his house in Fernhurst, and soon the two men committed to a collaboration on what would become the Principia.

  In three volumes, written jointly over the course of ten years, Russell and Whitehead, following Gottlob Frege, laid down the principles and elements of logicism. In short, logicism asserts that all mathematical truths can be stated in the form of logical truths and that mathematical proofs can be derived from logical proofs.

  For the young Russell (he was thirty), mathematics was a haven from his increasingly unhappy and complicated private life. He had fallen out of love with Alys and was embroiled, romantically though probably not sexually, with Whitehead's wife, Evelyn, who suffered terrible pain from angina. Some forty years later, Russell was to remark caustically that Gödel was mired in Platonism. Yet he, too, felt drawn towards the “enchanted region” of mathematics, where “in thinking about it we become Gods.”105 In a letter to his friend Gilbert Murray, he pronounced mathematics and philosophy to be concerned with “ideal and eternal objects.”106

  As he and Whitehead worked through the intensely technical matters of the Principia, Russell must have found those “ideal and eternal objects” increasingly remote. By its nature, the Principia led Russell face-to-face with paradox, the inevitable spanner in the mechanics of logic. In answer to his own famous paradox (To what class does the class of all things which do not belong to themselves belong?), Russell wrote “On Denoting,” delivered in 1905. He was able, paradoxically, to construct a “no-class theory,” taking both classes and numbers out of the realm of the ideal.107 What was left—propositions—still carried weight as Platonic “truths,” but soon, this “haven of peace” disappeared, to be replaced by the doubt more suited to his empiricist roots.

  It took seven years of extraordinarily intense and exhausting work to complete Principia Mathematica. After that, Russell ceased, for all practical purposes, to do highly technical and demanding work on logic. He was thirty-eight years old. He had come to hate the shuttered concentration that logic demanded. Writing the Principia was like juggling several dozen balls at once for years on end. In a logical system, he said, writing to his longtime friend Lucy Donnelly, “one mistake will vitiate everything.” The toll, he acknowledged, was tremendo
us. He described at length, and in dramatic fashion, the “sheer effort of will” necessary for such work:

  Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, involuntarily, one slowly inters oneself.108

  And, indeed, these words were written in 1902, when Russell had finished his precursor work, The Principles of Mathematics. In 1910, having finished the much longer and grander Principia, he was “somewhat at loose ends. The feeling was delightful, but bewildering, like coming out of prison.”109 He never went back in.

  In My Philosophical Development, written half a century later, Russell thinks back upon his devotion to a nonhuman, idealist mathematics. As the contradictions mounted, Russell lost that devotion. He came to accept Wittgenstein's dismissal of mathematics as “tautologies.” In the face of “young men embarking in troop trains to be slaughtered on the Somme because generals were stupid,” mathematics and the “world of abstraction” were for all intents and purposes lost. Perhaps his disappointment lay in his character. As one critic has it, “as one reflects on Russell's philosophical career, it appears that behind this thirst for certainty there lurked an even deeper craving for disillusionment.”110 Still, once the godson of John Stuart Mill had completed the monumental Principia, his world changed.

  From mathematics, he turned to philosophy. Although (perhaps because) Russell wrote some seventy books and hundreds of essays on philosophy and philosophical topics, his own philosophy is difficult to summarize. Like Einstein, he hated disarray in the foundations of knowledge. His major philosophical work examines the premises and beliefs undergirding logic and science. The titles of his important works illuminate his grand scope: The Analysis of Matter, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. But his was truly an experimental and question-driven philosophy. He was always ready to try a new approach to find solutions. He often revised his views, but never thought this a failing. In a way, he modeled his philosophic approach on the piecemeal and provisional approach of physics. He never built a grand system. Instead, he inspired the modern movement known as “analytic philosophy.” Like Russell, his philosophical heirs, Wittgenstein and the logical positivists, were better at dissecting than building.