Russell's Logical Atonomism also has affinities to LP, but
> is a quite distinct view. Though no Bolshevik, indeed a critic of
> Bolshevism, Russell was a radical socialist, and a militant,
> put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is actvist his whole long life.
Two winters ago, during one of the now too common isolated days I
spend at my small house in the woods of New Brunswick, I read
Russell's Autobiography, to learn about the really serious isolation
he suffered as a child who had lost his parents and sister by the
age of 3. But this Spring, while staying somewhere in Boston,
where I could see humans around, I came upon a really revealing
review of a two volume biography of Russell (London Review of
Books (March 2001), by Monk, which had the following cited
passages:
"that this has been a difficult book to write [second volume] has
been my growing realization of the tragedy of Russell's life...I do
not just mean that there was sadness in Russell's life, though, to
be sure, the degree of suffering he endured - and caused - has
been one of the hardest revelations of my work on this book...what
I mean when I speak of tragedy is principally that Russell's life
seems to have been inexorably drawn towards disaster, determined
on its course by two fundamental traits of character: a deep-seated
fear of madness and a quite colossal vanity"
"Russell's best philosophical writing is subtle, nuanced and
unafraid of complexity [...] He supports his views with rigorous and
sophisticated arguments, and deals with objections carefully and
respectfully. In most of the journalism and political writing that he
produced in the second half of his life, however, these qualities are
absent, replaced with empty rhetoric, blind dogmatism and a
cavalier refusal to take the views of his opponents seriously. The
gulf in quality between Russell's writings on logic and his writings
on politics is cavernous"
The reviewer, A. Phillips, later says: "Russell, it seems treated his
children rather as though they were ideas. Everyone adores their
children: it is liking then and living with them every day that is
difficult. Russell's solution to the difficulty was to turn them, his first
child John especially, into projects; as Monk suggests, his
relationships with his children were not dissimilar to the
relationships he had to the causes he took up and the beliefs he
professed: intransigent, subtly (and not so subtly) domineering,
and infinitely rationalised. They were there to reflect him, and to
reflect well on him. Russell, Monk documents in patient and
disturbing detail, could only spread the estrangement that he had
felt as a boy. Despite his always good (i.e. justified) intentions,
Russell left what Monk lists as a catalogue of disasters: 'two
embittered ex-wives, an estranged schozophrenic son and three
granddaughters who felt themselves haunted by the "ghosts of
maniacs", as Russell himself had described his family back in
1893'. Put like this, Russell sounds like the anti-hero of a
contemporary gothic horror, in which the transgenerational haunting
is unstoppable, and every life seems ghost-written.Especially
haunted, Monk writes, was Russell's granddaughter Lucy: 'In the
early morning of 11 April 1975, Lucy caught the bus from
Porthcurno to Penzance and got off at the village of St Buryan,
where she walked into the churchyard, climbed on top of one of the
graveyard monuments, poured paraffin over herself and set herself
on fire'"
