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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Russell and Adorno « Previous | |Next »
March 11, 2004

The first Philosophy Jammm of the year was held last Tuesday night. Graham Nerlich, who had been Professor of Philosophy at Adelaide University spoke on Bertrand Russell. The talks this year are intended to be on books of the twentieth century and although Graham had nominated a particular text, An Inquiry Into Meaning And Truth, he did not really address this text, choosing instead to talk about Russell’s life. The main reason for this was that, apart from Principia Mathematica, Russell’s writings have been rather ephemeral in character and somewhat unremarkable. So the speaker concentrated on Russell’s life and the nature of the philosophy it embodied. This largely took the form of a comparison with Socrates. Socrates described himself as the ‘gadfly of society’. He was a deliberate thorn in the side of the state. Like Socrates, Russell saw philosophy as spoken and conversational, rather than written and discursive. The idea of a professional philosopher was an anathema to Socrates. One reason advanced for the ephemeral nature of much of Russell’s writing was that his principal concern was to communicate with ordinary people, rather than specialists.

I walked back to my car with Suzie after the meeting and we talked about being a writer. In had been remarked in the talk that Russell was a prolific writer, producing five thousand words a day. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in the early fifties. We decided that writing had nothing to do with success in publishing or reaching a public. It didn’t matter whether you won a Nobel Prize or no one ever heard of you. A writer is someone who writes, not just occasionally but as a routine day-to-day practice. It’s a way of life and not a measure of some literary success. Most writers aren’t successful in that sense. Whether or not he was successful philosophically, you’d have to say that Russell was a writer who was successful.

One of Australia’s great literature teachers, who before her death taught at the Australian Military College, wrote of Bertrand Russell in The Music Of Love (p. 149): ‘Bertrand Russell’s The Problems Of Philosophy, especially in the last chapter, gives a purer aesthetic pleasure than most of what passes for literature in the world of the modern novelist.’ She had just previously written, ‘For my own part I shall happily go on getting more pleasure from more works of non-fiction than from most modern novels’. Russell gave her that literary pleasure.

I got out my copy of The Problems Of Philosophy. It’s yellowed. It was printed in 1974. But before you start thinking that perhaps I’ve had all this cultural baggage for yonks, let me say this: I bought my copy of Russell’s book in about 1975 but I never read it all. In fact, I have probably read very little of it, and what I did read I probably didn’t read properly. Russell didn’t have a high status in philosophy when I was studying, so being a good little student I didn’t have a very high opinion of him either. The Problems Of Philosophy probably had nice white pages when I last opened it. And if it wasn’t for Graham Nerlich’s talk and Dorothy Green’s remarks I mightn’t have opened it again to find out how yellow it had become. Some books have to wait years for you to read them but books are very patient things.

The last chapter of The Problems Of Philosophy does contain some very pleasant prose. Here’s an example:

‘The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole exclusive desire for knowledge – knowledge as impersonal, as purely comtemplative as it is possible for man to gain.’ (p. 93)

I was just talking to Wayne about this sentence. He thought that Rosenstock-Huessy wouldn’t like it but we were on the phone and I didn’t get the chance to follow it up. Other things took precedence, and then a locksmith I’d been expecting showed up. Perhaps Rosenstock-Huessy wouldn’t have liked the calmness of Russell’s vision of a free intellect. You may find it hard to believe but I’m not too calm myself when it comes to philosophical discussions. Ask any of the guys. I get a bit passionate about it.

Anyway, I won’t rave on. Just let me say this: another brief look at The Problems Of Philosophy has made it quite clear that Russell is completely hogtied by his peculiarly British philosophical baggage. The penultimate chapter makes it perfectly clear that he hasn’t got the slightest idea what’s going on in Hegel. It’s strange because, as Graham pointed out, he began his philosophical life as a student of McTaggart, who was one of the leading English neo-Hegelians, but they had the strangest ideas about Hegel as well. Perhaps I can induce Gary to say something about the English neo-Hegelians. He knows more about them than I do.

Back to the baggage: the idea of epistemology as first philosophy reigns supreme. Graham didn’t mention that this wasn’t the case with the ancient Greeks, that it is something that creeps in at about the time of Descartes. There is also a notion of the self as essentially incomplete and seeking completion which is rather like the existentialists. It won’t drag all this out. It’s not the point.

The point is that I think that, hogtied as Russell was, he tried to reach beyond philosophy to say what needs to be said, even if he was unaware that that was what he was doing. Consider the sentence I quoted. It’s the kind of sentence that appealed to Green, I’m sure, a sentence with a noteworthy rhetorical beauty. But why was Russell trying to sell the idea with beauty? Why was he trying to seduce us? Well, his philosophising was useless, confused and misdirected, but he knew where it should lead.

Interestingly, another book that Green much admired is Adorno’s Minima Moralia, a book that seek very much the same goal that Russell is trying to articulate through rhetoric. Here’s the last passage from Minima Moralia:

‘Finale. – The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from self contact with its objects - this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair's breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.’ (p. 247)

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I was wondering where your definition of a writer left Celine? In 'Castle to Castle' he states "what words to say! When fate grabs a hold of you, all you can do is cofess..." (p. 204).