Bertrand Russell: 1921-1970, the Ghost of Madness

by Ray Monk

Book Overview

In the second half of his life, Bertrand Russell transformed himself from a major philosopher, whose work was intelligible to a small elite, into a political activist and popular writer, known to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743212150
• ISBN13: 9780743212151
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.5" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Thanks Ray!

Having read "Wittgenstein", then vol 1 of this biography, this was a natural and exciting follower. I certainly have to wonder what connection there is to a life associated, at least ab initio, with mathematics and failure in one's personal life. Considering the connection between logic, mathematics, and reasoning, and our need for success with those to be successful in one's life in general, this certainly brings up an issue of a golden mean between extremes. It perhaps also brings up an issue of autism and the genetic predisposition to autism as a range of autism might on one hand lead to outstanding mathematical accomplishment accompanied by outstanding social failure. It is such a shame that such a great mind would give up such important work for lack of - self discipline? Self control? A family madness? Most telling I thought was the quote given in response to the question "Why did you give up philosophy?" Since his response is shocking but stabs to the heart of the personal difficulties experienced by BR and successfully passed on to almost all of his children and grandchildren one has to wonder was this nurture or nature. A clue seems to be the success of those who had the earliest and longest break in contact. The less contact the more success? Perhaps an errata sheet should be made available regarding the apparent deleted words. One sentence especially seemed to need "not" to make sense in context, but in general I found my reading to be abruptly halted with the awareness of a word missing - in a context where I could know precisely what word would have been right. I half wonder if RM was using a new word processor or something? I did not notice this at all with vol. 1. Regardless, of all the things worth reading this will always be high on my recommend list. Great philosophers are easier to understand when we know as much as we can about them as persons. Thanks Ray! Eternally grateful.

A tormented volcanic island who spilled a lot of lavae

This exceptional book is a sequel to The Spirit of Solitude, written by Ray Amok, which covers the first 50 years of Russell's life, and which could be summarized by achieving world fame and academic glory by means of his early work as a philosophical mathematician, specially trough his "Principia Matematica",a monumental theoretical work, with the co-authorship of Whitehead. Ray Monk magistrally portrays Russell as facing now the challenge of taking a new direction to his life, trying to achieve the same level of academical glory when entering into new fields of knowledge. The story is of a genius who had to prove to himself that he had not lost his intelectual vigour in the ageing proccess and at the same time , balancing his mundane needs trough popular texts written to readers not specialized in philosophy and mathematics, and many other areas where he was proficient. He marriages now for the second time in his life, with Dora, with he would generate a son (John) and a daughter (Kate), began for him a new era as an educator and as a mass-comunicator, where he approached all the available means (newspapers, magazines, radio panels and lectures) in order to make money thus providing the material means for his special ideas on how to educate his children. He wrote many books on the subject and even inaugurated a special school where his two children where educated along with the children of some upper-class Englishmen and Americans. He was two be married again twice and to have more children with Peter (yes, a very special nickname of his third wive). In terms of the outcome he got, it was nothing anyone could foresee at the beginning. To sum it up, the book is a faithful portrait of a tormented man, surrounded by all kinds of people who loved/hated him, and who seems to destroy every inch of happiness one could have before getting to know him. Strange as it seems, the man who was trying to save the world with his pacifist stand against nazism, and later comunism, and all forms of totalitarianism, was incapable of understand the human nature of all people who lived with him. This is a good book to read to everyone interested in philosophy and in the life of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

Remarkable biography.

The chilling story of Bertrand Russell's disastrous later life: his ferocious battles with his children, wives and mistresses, his financial needs covered by second-rate newspaper articles and American lectures for older women, his sometimes quite naive political struggles on the side of socialism (all land and capital must be the property of the State) and the peace movement. At the end of his life, he allowed himself to be totally neutralized by an American CIA agent (I quote Bryan Magee). For the author, the reason for these disasters were two fundamental traits of Russell's character: a deep seated fear of madness (a constant in his family) and a quite colossal vanity.The big shock of his life was the destructive First World War. He became a profound misanthrope, who lost all confidence in humanity. It put nearly an end to all serious philisophical and mathematical work.Thoroughly documented and extremely well narrated work. The author is very good acquainted with philosophy and mathematics. I miss one name in this provoking work: Karl Popper.

Book easily rates 5 stars, but needs serious health warning

Don't get me wrong, I am a serious Ray Monk fan, and a serious Russell devotee, but that's just the problem.Ray Monk, although he puts Russell's mathematical achievements at the pinnacle of human endeavour, finds everything else about Russell to be pathetic and disgusting.This book, which is about the second half of Russell's life (and Ray Monk has written a biography of the first half called 'The Spirit Of Solitude' which is equally compulsive reading, but suffers from the same love-hate relationship with Russell) has much more biographical material than any previous book on Russell BUT almost every new fact is framed from Ray Monk's perspective of disdain and contempt.Russell had a traumatic childhood, with the death of his sister (diphtheria) then that of his mother and father coming in rapid succession at about the age of four, followed by a mostly isolated upbringing by his grandparents.Instead of finding this tragic early influence a basis for sympathy and understanding, Monk uses it as a basis for finding a river of underlying insanity and evil flowing beneath the actions and writings of what he considers to be a monster who should not have lived past the completion of his mathematical masterpiece.Just as it is important to have a biography written by someone who is not blind to the faults of their subject, it is also important to have the biographer not hate their subject, or have some kind of grudge against them or some aspect of their lives.Monk cannot bear the fact that Russell does not live up to Monk's lofty expectations, that a god of mathematics, a subject of absolute moral purity, has human frailties and imperfections.Consequently, despite the fact that Russell did an enormous number of interesting things in the second five decades of his life, in literature, philosophy, politics, science, mathematics, logic, education and psychology, this is all not good enough for Monk, who sees anything short of the stature of Russell's greatest work as being an example of Russell's decline.There is so much detail in Russell's life, and so much analysis by Monk, that even if you question Monk's almost exclusively unfavourable conclusions, you will find this book an extraordinarily mesmerising helter-skelter ride through humanity's most dramatic period of change, as seen through the life of one of its most active and influential participants, even if that life is itself viewed through exceptionally unsympathetic eyes.

Harrowing tale of a complex life

Ray Monk's biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his first volume of Bertrand Russell, are two of the finest biographies of the twentieth century. While this second volume of Bertrand Russell's life covers the period after his great work in logic and mathematics (and may thus be less fascinating to readers primarily interested in this work), it still has much to offer. This is the fullest treatment to date of Russell's complicated and tragic family life: of the impact which his life had on those around him. Russell is often thought of as a great campaigner for peace: Ray Monk shows what was left aside when Russell devoted himself to that campaign. The biography, though, is not merely an exposure of the private flaws of a great public figure: there are moments of charm and comedy within the family life too, as when Katherine describes her father on the beach looking "a little like a cockatoo", with his big red sunburned nose, twinkling eyes, crest of white hair and abrupt laughter. There is also a comic side to a hysterical campaign against Russell in America in 1940, when he was denied a lecturing position (in mathematics and logic) because he was alleged to be " lecherous, salacious, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, atheistic, irreverent, narrow-minded, bigoted and untruthful", a description more remarkable for its love of adjectives than for its acuity. Much of the book, however, is harrowing reading: all the more so because some of Russell's best intended initiatives (his conviction that he must not let his baby son see that he adored him) had predictably disastrous results. The most tragic life in the Russell family, and the one which Ray Monk is the first to do full justice to, though, is that of Lucy Russell, Russell's granddaughter. Reading the last pages of this book, it is difficult not to agree with Monk that Russell (and his entire family) was, indeed, haunted by the ghosts of madness.