Bertrand Russell's "History of Western Philosophy"

[vincanity1]

Russel's History or Western Philosophy anybody?

[NickAdams]

I own it and read some. It's a good start. One could defintely explore many philosophies in one book. After that, it's important to get to the works themselves.

[Scheherazade]

It is not in public domain yet so will not be able available online free for some time yet.

[Ron Price]

Bertrand Russell's three volume autobiography, published in the years 1967 to 1970, years that were at the start of the letter writing section of my memoir, has in its prologue words that lend credence to its characterization as an epic. These words are: "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair." So much of the despair and the pity was for my own dear self and my health, my relationships and and assortment of life's problems. Much of it was in the context of my Bahá’í experience.

In writing this work I face the great problem of autobiography in general and which Stephen Spender says is the necessity to create that true tension between the inner and the outer, subjective and objective worlds. Some autobiographers employ strategies of evasion or, conversely, they sensationalize or titillate their readers. I must admit to the former, not wanting to confess all my sins of omission and commission, but I deny any pretensions to the latter. I have locked away in my journal the description of some of my sins and leave to a future age the exploration of them should it be the desire of that age. The first gay autobiography was composed between 1889 and 1893, but was not published until 1984. There was not the reticence to describe the details of the intimate relationships that this memoirist experienced because he knew publication would be long after his death.

In the case of other autobiographers, like Edward Carpenter, who published his story in his own lifetime, that reticence is writ large. A necessary circumspection about his sexual proclivities resulted in his work bordering on the impersonal, in a certain absent presence to the sexual realities of his life. In my case I do not need to write a coming out, but I do need to write an assessment of my life. Like Wilde's De Profundis my memoir is an attempt to discover and exhibit an authentic self. I present many facts about me, different facts than other writers. My facts should not be seen as apologia or even as a plea for understanding. Whatever facts I have revealed about my life, it seems to me, in retrospect, that I have revealed them as part of my life's essentials not as sensational facets of the daily round. They are all, in one way or another, realistic depictions of my experience and aspects of my life and personality that I would like to think predispose readers in favour of a particular interpretation of my life and its values. I suppose you could call this exercise a gentle apologia for I do not desire to exaggerate my sufferings or my talents. I would like to be seen as a spokesman for sober discretion in an age of excess. The complex springs of my action underneath which lie a swarming mass of causes and which make me sensitive to their minute, their subtle and elusive causality and which impel my capricious passions often result in my frustration at grasping the whys and wherefores of my experience.

I look back at the road I have travelled and am confronted again and again with the context of toil in which performance struggles after ideal, and only occasionally attains. There is an immensity and wonder in our age and I am simply unable to capture it in words. I am able to chart the consequences of my action but am far from being able to plumb the depths of my motivation, always hidden beneath the veiling of utterance. I feel I am unable to explain, although I can chart, my own life, how much more is this true of the lives of others. I have found that reason and virtue have pursued a steady and even a uniform course in my life, but the extravagent wanderings of vice and folly seem to grow with the years in ways which only those closest to me can ever see. Since there are few who ever get close there are few who are ever aware of either my vice or my folly.

There was an epic quality to my work, a quality I have discussed above. There were governing passions in my life as well. I could characterize them as: knowing, loving and doing. This autobiography is, in a way, a testimony to this trilogy. There was sufficient passion, deriving from these three forces, to drive a lifetime of engagement in relationships, in issues and in the mundane. There was also sufficient detachment to allow me to modify my views and change my positions; without an element of intellectual flexibility I would have been in trouble in these changing times.

Russell describes the stages "in the slow abandonment of many of the beliefs that had come to him in his moment of conversion in 1901" before he was thirty. The process, he says, was as much the result of private experience as of world events; but the important point is that the change was a result of conscious reflection on experience–an experimental process that involved both principled engagement in the world and the possibility of modifying principles on the basis of experience. The beliefs I had acquired in my teens and twenties were, for the most part, never abandoned, but they certainly experienced an icy chastening, a deeper understanding, a finer tuning, so much so that in many ways they seemed like different beliefs. We all experience life differently and someone's autobiography offers opportunities to readers to help define their own experience. I hope this is the case here. The autobiographies of some artistic and not-so-artistic people, like John Ruskin for example, are almost useless as a record of their public and professional career. Their memoris are stories of their intellectual journey not their external and personal narrative in the world of the everyday.

I'd like to make a few remarks about how we experience memoirs, autobiographies and biographies in recent decades, at least the decades since I became a Bahá’í in the late 1950s. Until the late 1950s, as I say about the time I became a Bahá’í, films were based on a model of history which insisted that change occurred not because inequalities or unresolved social or economic unrest created tensions, but rather because uniquely gifted individuals, distributed through our history and certain strata of our population, were able to see into the future and give us innovative and improved ways to live. This view had and has some truth. The end of the 1950s marked the end of Hollywood’s time as the unchallenged purveyor of public history and this view of history in particular.

One of the big screen’s most powerful functions in its first decades was its cultivation of people’s notions of history. Soon after the excitement of early contact and diffusion in the fifties and sixties, television inspired nothing so much as a kind of docile—and dull—familiarity. This was true in Canada by the same late fifties and, in Australia, by the late sixties and increasingly as the decades advanced. All, of course was not docile, like so many things, the story, the role, has many sides, too many to analyse here.

Rather than seeing history from afar and with a certain awe as we did on the big screen until, say, the early 1950s, TV shows offered us a world of lessons by seeming to talk at the viewer, by making the viewer feel personally connected to history in an intimate and startlingly casual way. “You are there,” was the tone and texture of the new wave. Unlike much of Hollywood’s escapist fare, TV also had shows which seemed designed to let spectators revel in the lowest or most deviant forms of human behavior and the quantity of that lowest denominator increased as the new millennium apporahced and was passed.

Real-life mini-dramas did not simply lay the groundwork for tabloid shows of later years; in their own time they cultivated a different set of values in the audience, and shaped an alternative template for depicting historical figures. They prepared us for a world of what might be called pathography and this pathography would characterize all biographical musings in a post-Watergate world, that is the world after the mid-seventies. In an era when watching did not mean going out to a theater as it had meant to my mother and father before I was born, a world of entertainment which was designed more like a temple or shrine, this world was transformed into a casual place for slouching on the couch like a common vegetable, potato I believe has become the parlance, watching a small box plunked down in a home where you “received” your history amidst the dull fare and pressing cares of real life which went on around the living room screen. The grandiosity and magnitude of cinematic fame and biography came to seem somewhat intimidating, even grating or foolish? The aesthetic of TV was the casual not the grandiose, the easy-going not the formal.

Until the time of my late teens, the world of biography in cinema, biopics as they were and are called, presented history’s causes as clearly explainable and just as clearly shown. Those in power, and those who possessed authority, accepted change, in the good part of the world at least, because clearly shown decisions to stay put or innovate were arrived at through democratic consensus, fueled by the common good. Ultimately, Hollywood’s version of history showed that no choice was made without the support of the ultimate arbiter: the great common sense of “the people.” Brokered through open and democratic debate, these leaders and their innovations and achievements were thus “shown” to have evolved towards the natural shapes and values for their times. Most importantly, these films suggested that change occured through the agency of individual intervention, through strong leaders. The rest of us, who were not on the same level with these exalted beings but who knew them as wives, brothers, and neighbors, could only admire or oppose them, follow their commands, be their audience and community. I don't want to go into too much detail and analysis here for there are many books that serve that purpose, but I will say one or two more things.

If debates about history’s truth status are never resolved; if contemporary writers are mired in a diversity of views and a sea of relativism, Hollywood’s strategic claim—that their biopics “possess” the truth—and its deployment in a variety of discourses about both film and biography, is difficult to accept at the least. Surveys of people's experience of studying history in school and in life tell us that they find it “dull and irrelevant.” Hollywood is guilty of contributing its own share of dullness and irrelevancy to our national pool; there are areas where historians fail, but intrepid Hollywood excels. Hollywood knows how to make people “feel connected and stay connected.” It is all part of the vast carnival which makes up American commercial amusement. The “true” story of a figure we have chosen to celebrate and condemn, has played and continues to play a significant part in determining how our culture constructs its notions of fame, and what it takes to be a celebrated figure. Thus the whole environment in which entertainment is made and experienced has changed since the time I became a Bahá’í in 1959. In the same way, the world in which fame was figured has changed as much as the capacities we have to store and retrieve our thoughts about this change. Literary and artistic reputations change like the wind and exist within such a myriad mosaic of coteries that it seems just about pointless to be concerned about how influential one's work is, the extent of one's popularity, the degree of one's literary merits, the stridency or enthusiasm of one's critics, one's genius or stupidity, one's intelligence and wisdom or the sterility and tedium of one's writing.

[aabbcc]

I was given this work years ago, by my first Philosophy professor (I have been taking private Philosophy lessons since the age of ten), as a sort of "reference book" at the very beginnings of my delving into philosophy, and I must admit it served its purpose quite well. I still own it, and at random times skim through it, as it is with all "introduction to philosophy"s I have got, or have used when I was younger. This was one of the better ones.

[Lyn]

Love it. I've made it about half way through. Concise, clear, entertaining and not pretentious in the slightest.

[Nossa]

I love that book. I first came across it when I was looking for references for my culture and philosophy course. It's a brilliant book if you ask me. However, I agree with Nick that you should just consider that book as a start, and then try moving on to the books of each philosopher. But it's def. a great book and gives you a more than a simple idea about many philosophies.