Einstein's Genius Club

by Feldman, Burton, Williams, Katherine

  Once Russell turned away from logic, where he had made his true mark, he looked toward physics as the sole arbiter of certain knowledge. Modern physics, he thought, had the best chance of being true about the external world. What was left over, the empirical world that we know through our senses, yields information quite different from the truths of physics. Most of Russell's philosophical career was spent pondering these two paths towards truth. Logic, his first passion, was no longer the high-road, only a tool.

  Still, Russell was drawn back into his early world of mathematical logic from time to time. In The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, a collection of essays in Russell's honor, several contributors revisited the Principia and Russell's place in the history of mathematical logic. Russell dutifully commented on all contributions, save one, written by the agonizingly exacting Kurt Gödel and submitted months late.111

  UTOPIAN ENEMY AGENT

  Russell was forty-two when war was declared in August 1914. He was already seen as one of the world's important logicians and philosophers, having been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1908 at only thirty-six and offered a teaching position at Harvard in early 1914. Up to then, his life had been that of a scholar and teacher. But he was restless and uncertain. His love affair with Otto-line Morrell began that year. It was as if, once he left mathematical logic behind, his sexual passions exploded. Yet his intellectual engine never stopped. As always, he turned out a prodigious number of books, articles, reviews, lectures, and letters. As for the war, it so changed Russell that he later thought of himself as a Faust figure who, on that fateful August day, met his Mephistopheles.112

  The war swept him into new roles. He became a pacifist, a war resister, and a man of action. None of this could have been predicted. Up to then, he had supported Britain's colonial wars—the Boer War, for instance, had been a necessary adjunct to the spreading of “civilized government.”113 But he could see no sane purpose in the European war, and said so with increasing bite and fury. Once he was committed, his courage and defiance never wavered, though he was berated as a traitor to his country and class. He was, after all, the Honorable Bertrand Russell, grandson of a prime minister, son of a lord, and brother of an earl. He lost close friends. The otherwise cherubic Alfred North Whitehead, his collaborator on the Principia, caught war fever and could not abide Russell's lack of patriotism. His old friend, the Greek scholar Gilbert Murray, denounced Russell as “pro-German” in print. Russell understandably took to decrying the “bloodthirstiness of professors.”114

  For almost four years, his life became a marathon of political maneuvering, writing, and speaking. At the start of the conflict, he helped found the Union of Democratic Control, an antiwar movement. Russell suddenly blossomed as a mover and shaker. The UDC boasted such influential figures as the future prime minister Ramsay MacDonald; the peace activist and future Nobelist Norman Angell; the journalist and tireless campaigner against King Leopold's Congo, E. D. Morel; the writers Leonard Woolf and Lytton Strachey; and Russell's old Cambridge friends Lowes Dickinson and Charles Trevelyan. Russell soon dominated the movement. As an observer noted, “No resisting the force of his ruthless dissection of motive; no reply possible to the caustic comments he would emit in his high squeaky voice.”115

  By the summer of 1915, after only one year of war, over a quarter million English soldiers had been killed or wounded, all of them volunteers. Britain had never contemplated a conscription law. In the face of this mass slaughter, it did so, and in January 1916 a law was passed requiring all males between eighteen and forty-one to register for military service. The UDC voted not to oppose conscription, and Russell quit. He had consistently reproved the UDC for having “no intensity of will.”116 He promptly joined the more radical No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), which had supported conscientious objectors since the war's outset.117

  These new experiences and emotions liberated Russell as never before. In 1916, he gave lectures on a new theory of society based on “creative” and “instinctual” alternatives to the destructiveness of war (published as The Principles of Social Reconstruction in 1916). It was the first of many briskly rational, quasi-utopian proposals that he launched periodically throughout his long life. He gave stump speeches and orated at rallies. He visited conscientious objectors in prison and lobbied tirelessly on their behalf, salvaging their mental health and perhaps even their lives in the face of ferocious governmental hostility.118

  At times, his antiwar fervor bordered on the obsessive. “It is a real ferment,” he wrote of the no-conscription movement, “like the beginning of a new religion.” Religion indeed: “I rather envy the men they persecute. It is maddening not to be liable.”119 His young comrades, admirable as they were, lacked “the thirst after perfection—they see the way out of Hell but not the way into Heaven.” Yet “they will joyfully become martyrs.”120 In upswing moods, he declared that “I want actually to change people's thoughts. Power over people's minds is the main personal desire of my life.”121 As one UDC member shrewdly noted, Russell

  had a dynamo within that was too powerful for his own comfort and far too powerful for that of others: inevitably, he first swallowed admirers and then, with what they felt a heartless cruelty, spewed them out.122

  Russell quickly arrived on the government's list of troublemakers. Fearful that he might travel to the United States and foment opposition to the British effort, the authorities sought a reason to refuse him a passport. In 1916, his wish for martyrdom nearly came true. A No-Conscription member was sentenced to two years at hard labor, and six others were then sent to prison for circulating an anonymous leaflet protesting the case. Russell publicly admitted writing the leaflet and was arrested and fined £100. When Russell refused to pay, the authorities impounded his books and furniture from Trinity.123 The conviction allowed the government to revoke his passport, forestalling a showdown. Trinity College, his alma mater, quickly used the conviction as an excuse to remove him from his lectureship. Whitehead and others protested. But Russell was (at least outwardly) euphoric at the news. “I no longer have the feeling of powers unrealised within me, which used to be a perpetual torture…. I have no inward discords anymore.”124

  By now the government spied on Russell, absurdly, as an “enemy agent.”125 He was banned from restricted areas, lest he signal enemy ships—an absurd idea, though a convenient cover for stopping Russell from lecturing to and encouraging conscientious objectors.126 Russell tried another tack, writing a letter to President Wilson urging him to force Europe to the peace table. The letter managed to slip by the censors of the Foreign Office. Wilson ignored it, but the letter (and details of its secret journey) was printed in full by The New York Times.

  Russell continued his antiwar efforts. When the Russian Provisional Government put forth a peace offer, he was ecstatic. With great fervor, he threw his support behind the revolution and its British admirers. In July 1917, however, a meeting of revolutionary sympathizers at Hackney disintegrated into violence, leaving Russell shocked and disheartened. He returned to his philosophical work, spending the fall and winter writing and lecturing on logical atomism.

  Ironically, just as Russell had become disillusioned with the efficacy of protest, he was arrested in 1918 for “insulting an ally”—the United States, which had entered the war. The alleged crime—he had written a short article advocating peace with Germany—was the pretext for a harsh sentence: six months at hard labor in the so-called “second division.” The sentence was not to be taken lightly. Long stretches in the second division had left his colleagues Clifford Allen and E. D. Morel physically devastated, and men could be crippled during such a sentence. Friends, including Gilbert Murray, brought pressure on the government to shift Russell to the “first division.”127 At his appeal, the magistrate, citing Russell's contributions in logic and philosophy, acceded. Russell served his six months in the relative comfort of the “first division.” Because he could pay, he had a large separate room, with meals brought in from ou
tside, a servant to clean the “cell,” daily delivery of the Times, and a well-stocked library of chosen books. Russell compared it to “life on an Ocean Liner.”128 Visitors came three times a week. In such enforced but tolerable isolation, the exhausted Russell revived and soon wrote two books, an Introduction to Mathematical Logic and a draft of The Analysis of Mind.129

  Even with this seriocomic finale, Russell's career as a war protester makes Einstein's antiwar efforts pale by comparison. The anti-war movement energized Russell and propelled him forward. He saw in the future “infinite possibilities.” It would be hard to guess from this excited language that he meant teaching philosophy to “working-men who are hungry for intellectual food…. Think of building up a new free education not under the State!… I could give heart & brain & life to that.”130

  IN THE WILDERNESS: BETWEEN THE WARS

  The day World War I ended, Russell in victorious London was depressed: Millions had been pointlessly slaughtered, but people were wildly celebrating in the streets. Russell had spent the war years in feverish political activity. Almost fifty years would pass before he plunged again into antiwar protests, against the nuclear bomb and the Vietnam War.

  During the last half of his life—from 1920 on—Russell's affection for his country grew in tandem with his popularity. He became the plain-speaking oracle, the dauntless opponent of injustice and folly, the philosopher with a gift for connecting to the common people. Russell the philosophical popularizer blossomed after the First World War. Had he not been radicalized by that war, he would likely have returned to teaching philosophy and logic, his works known only to an inner circle of specialists. The oracle and gadfly would have been stillborn. As it was, he never returned to a full-time academic career. He became, instead, a freelance writer, an educational innovator, and a prophet of social change.

  In crucial part, Russell's popularity stemmed from his passionate belief in the usefulness of philosophy. Unlike many of his fellow academics, Russell had taken up philosophy to find consolation and meaning in life. For him it was no academic exercise. “I wish to understand the hearts of men,” he wrote in his Autobiography. This desire may have led him to abstruse mathematics, but it was nonetheless ordinary and human. On his journey, he experienced a “failure” that was yet a “victory…. I may have conceived theoretical truth wrongly, but I was not wrong in thinking that there is such a thing, and that it deserves our allegiance.”131 Russell has been consigned to history, rather than philosophy, by a modern tradition that prefers the technical to the metaphysical. Yet, notes Frank McLynn,

  Russell was that rare bird, a professional philosopher who actually tried to answer the questions that ordinary people naively imagine can be answered by philosophy. He was in fact a “philosopher” in a sense that would be recognised by the man in the pub. This was why he, alone of his breed, could move between the worlds of Whitehead and Wittgenstein and those of Conrad and Lawrence.132

  And, as Michael Foot writes, “[a] particular, persistent reason” for his “appeal, throughout his ninety-odd years, especially to the young, was the trouble he took to write plain English.”133 In recent years, it had become not only fashionable but occupationally imperative for academic philosophers to write for other academic philosophers rather than for a general reader. Despite his ability to write (with the more mathematically adept Whitehead) the Principia Mathematica, Russell was no technician. Alan Wood has described him as “a philosopher without a philosophy. The same point might be made by saying that he is a philosopher of all the philosophies.”134 In later years, he came to believe in philosophy writ large—in other words, philosophy that is concerned with “matters of interest to the general educated public, and loses much of its value if only a few professionals can understand what is said.”135

  The aristocratic Russell had one thing in common with the populace for whom he wrote: He was perennially short of money. He was fifty when John, his first son, was born. Delighted as he was with the novel sensations of parenthood, he faced the “inescapable responsibility” of providing financial support. To that end, he churned out potboilers on sex, marriage, and divorce; on conquering happiness and praising idleness; on atoms and relativity. He became a regular columnist for the American Hearst newspapers. He lectured across the United States several times in the 1920s and 1930s, and in his seventies was a popular voice on the BBC.

  In 1938, badly needing a steady income, he did try to return to teaching, but not in England. He moved his family to the United States to find a suitable university position. A series of small fiascos ended in two big ones. He taught at Chicago (they wouldn't keep him) and Los Angeles (where he quarreled with the chancellor), and then was appointed in 1940 to teach philosophy at the City College of New York. There, the political and religious establishments blocked the appointment, accusing him of immorality, incompetence, degeneracy, godlessness, anti-Americanism. His works were damned (in the words of one lawyer) as “lecherous, venerous, lustful, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful and bereft of moral fiber.”136 Einstein, Whitehead, John Dewey, and even Charlie Chaplin rose to his defense, but in vain. After months of fighting, with hate mail pouring in, Russell's position was simply eliminated. He lectured at Harvard (an engagement that predated the City College debacle), but thereafter American universities shunned him. Compounding his dire financial straits was his escalating disdain for America. He was homesick for England, which had survived the Battle of Britain but still faced great danger.

  Russell was rescued by an eccentric millionaire in Philadelphia. Dr. Albert Barnes, a chemist, had spent his fortune (made on the drug Argyrol) amassing French Post-Impressionist paintings. His private museum housed hundreds of Picassos, Cézannes, Matisses, and Van Goghs. It was open only to a select few, those whose taste suited him. In late 1940, on the recommendation of John Dewey, Barnes offered Russell a handsome salary to give popular lectures on philosophy at the museum. Russell began what was to be a five-year term in January 1941. At first, Barnes was enthusiastic. Within a few months, however, he began meddling in Russell's classes. There were quarrels. Barnes's ego was further bruised by Russell's wife, Peter, whom he deemed “imperious” and banned from the museum. Barnes fired Russell a few days after Christmas 1942. Russell sued for breach of contract and won, but was forced to wait months for payment. Beginning in 1943, he tried to find transport back to England, but it was the spring of 1944 before he, his wife, and their young son Conrad finally embarked. Meanwhile, he kept busy writing his History of Western Philosophy.

  As always, he planned ahead. What would become his last work of philosophy, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, was in its planning stages. Throughout October 1943, Russell delivered a series of five lectures on successive Fridays at Bryn Mawr College. The lectures were received by an enthusiastic audience who braved “torrential rain.” Their titles are notable to us, for they suggest what was on Russell's mind at the time: (1) “Limitations of Deductive Logic,” (2) “Probable Inference in Practice,” (3) “Physics and Knowledge,” (4) “Perception and Causality,” and (5) “Induction and Analogy.”137

  Human Knowledge was to be, in the words of Ray Monk, Russell's “last major philosophical work.”138 His purpose was “to examine the relation between individual experience and the general body of scientific knowledge”—in sum, the age-old dialectic between the concrete and the abstract, applied in particular to the world of science. Philosophy flourishes as an adjunct of science, especially physics. The problem is to find the link between what we see and what is there (always the problem in epistemology), or, in other words, the common world around us and the world described by science. It is telling that “individual experience” comes first in his thesis. For, again, Russell held always to the world of experience, however desirous he was of an overarching certainty. Yet, as the philosopher A. C. Grayling remarks, “he was… critical of certain forms of empiricism” because a focus on “sensory experience,”139 the very definition o
f empiricism, cannot account for scientific knowledge. Thus, Human Knowledge takes up the problem of “non-demonstrative inference,” the primary method by which science works, and the difficulty of finding structures to ensure truth-finding in science.

  Pondering these questions, in late 1943 or early 1944, Russell rented a lakeside house near Princeton. There, once a week, he walked in the bitter cold to 112 Mercer Street and chatted with Einstein, Gödel, and Pauli.

  GÖDEL: GHOST OF GENIUS

  Einstein's closest friend at Princeton was Kurt Gödel. The wonder is that they were friends at all, so different were they in temperament and style. Einstein was twice Gödel's age. He loved jokes and laughter. He was generous, down-to-earth, and the epitome of sanity. Gödel was distrustful of people's motives, a hypochondriac, often depressed and paranoid. In the end, he starved himself to death, convinced that his doctors were trying to poison him. One cannot imagine Gödel enduring what Einstein took in stride—wearing an Indian war bonnet for photographers, chatting with Charlie Chaplin or Winston Churchill, trading cookies with a neighbor's child. Einstein loved Bach and Mozart. Gödel said that Bach made him “nervous” (his taste ran to “O Mein Papa” and “The Wheel of Fortune”).140 Einstein played the bohemian. When he lived alone in Berlin, he cooked soup and eggs all together in the same pan to save time. Gödel was a thorough and contented bourgeois, living snugly with his wife in a Princeton bungalow full of kitsch. When his wife set a pink flamingo on the lawn, Gödel thought it “terribly cute.”141 Einstein felt compelled to fight injustice, though it cost time and energy away from physics. Gödel, though he had fled Nazi Vienna, never so much as glanced up from his equations.