HE DIDN'T ADD UP.

Bertrand Russell
The Ghost of Madness, 1921-70
Ray Monk
The Free Press, $40, 574 pp.

When he died in 1970, Bertrand Russell would probably have been regarded as one of the most influential philosophers and significant public figures of the twentieth century. The earlier volume of Ray Monk's masterly biography, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 (1996) covers the period when Russell was an "influential philosopher"; the second volume (reviewed here) concerns Russell as a "significant public figure." The two periods in Russell's life are sharply distinguished: He produced almost nothing which was philosophically "influential" after 1921. The fact that he appeared a towering philosophical presence by the end of World War I was the basis of his emergence as a "significant public figure" later in his very long life. The publication of the Monk biography is an occasion for evaluating Russell as philosopher and public figure.

Russell's monumental philosophical work (co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead) was the Principia Mathematica, published in three massive volumes, 1910-13. Russell and Whitehead aimed to derive the truths of mathematics from formulas of pure logic. Principia is an extraordinary technical accomplishment which suffers from two significant defects. In the first place, almost no one has ever read it. The work consists of page after page after page of algebraic notations. It is not until page eighty-six of volume II that one gets a proof that 1 + 1 = 2. Russell quipped that three Polish logicians and three Texas philosophers were the only persons who ever read the whole thing. Second, the subsequent work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and later Kurt Godel has convinced philosophers that the basic project of the Principia cannot be achieved. Logic is not the only avenue to truth.

The Principia project did suggest the need for precise logical formulation of the truth conditions of sentences--something that became a consuming interest of logical positivism and some species of "analytic" philosophy. Russell deserves credit for pressing the need to analyze ordinary statements, though almost no one accepts the bedrock analysis, which he proposed. "The cat is on the mat" is analyzed into something like "I am having cat-ish and mat-ish sensations" and cat-ish sensations are further reduced to sense data reports so fleeting that Russell said that one had to speak very quickly to catch the referent. English-speaking philosophy of today is dominated by "ordinary language" philosophy, thus abandoning Russell's reductive analyses. In short, Russell's time as an "influential" philosopher seems to have passed.

What about his status as a "significant public figure"? At the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Russell fired off telegrams to Kennedy and Khrushchev. To Kennedy: "Your action desperate. Threat to human survival. No conceivable justification." To Khrushchev he was more conciliatory. "I appeal to you not to be provoked by the unjustifiable action of the United States in Cuba. The world will support caution." As it happened, Khrushchev chose to make a major public statement in the form of a reply to Russell's message. All of a sudden this octogenarian philosopher seemed to emerge as a world statesman. Russell would later claim--with characteristic modesty--to have been crucial to the avoidance of a nuclear war.

There is no question that Russell had standing in the public domain by virtue of his reputation as a philosopher. He was more than willing to use his philosophic fame to further political causes. He vigorously protested Britain's entry into World War I, even enduring a brief jail term for his support of conscientious objectors. As a declared socialist he traveled with a delegation of the Labour Party to the Soviet Union in 1920 where he met Lenin and Trotsky. He came away a determined opponent of communism because of the repression of freedom that he perceived even at that early date. From the 1920s to the end of his life he published voluminously on issues of morals and politics in everything from the scholarly press to the Reader's Digest. Repeated lecture tours of the United States, which were a financial mainstay, were devoted almost exclusively to social issues.

Having noted intensive and extensive activity, one has to say that Russell's contributions to political or moral thought are minimal. No serious moral philosopher is likely to spend time with any of his writings on the subject. On political issues he was from time to time on the side of the angels--his advocacy of peace--but he missed the threat of Hitler and did not come to support the British war effort until some six months after the outbreak of hostilities. In the last two decades of his life a residual anti-Americanism, exacerbated by a sensational court case in 1940 when he was denied a teaching position at CCNY because of his "immoral" philosophy, he became virtually paranoid. In November 1965 Russell wrote:

   In every part of the world the source of war and suffering lies at the door
   of U.S. imperialism. Wherever there is hunger, wherever there is
   exploitative tyranny, wherever people are tortured and the masses left to
   rot under the weight of disease and starvation, the force that holds down
   the people stems from Washington.

Despite the general rejection of his basic philosophical work and the flimsiness of his moral and political opinions, there is no doubt that Russell was a thinker of genius. How so? One might cite the case of Zeno as a precursor. Zeno presented profound paradoxes: the runner will never get to the finish line of the race because he always has at least half the distance to go, then half of that half, half that half and so on, so that there is always half the distance yet to be traversed. The reasoning is impeccable; the conclusion is obviously wrong. Zeno's argument is a paradox, against the doxa (common-sense truth). Russell's philosophical work presented extraordinarily compelling rational analyses for conclusions that were paradoxical--that is no mean feat. Paradoxes of genius compel genius to solve them and this is what Russell's student, Wittgenstein, accomplished in his famous Tractatus Logico Philosophicus published in 1922. (Ray Monk has also written a brilliant biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, 1990). Wittgenstein's refutation was clear to Russell by 1913 and it left him desolate and suicidal. He never recovered faith in his philosophical abilities. His turn to moral and political issues was in part the result of his sense that his technical philosophical project was a failure.

It would seem a purposeless and even cruel task to recount in some five hundred pages the cranks and crotchets of a great mind, but there is the personal Russell to be chronicled. Bertrand Russell ended his life as Earl Russell, a title he inherited when his older brother, Frank, died in 1940. The Russells were one of the oldest and most distinguished families in the realm. After the early death of both his mother and father, Bertrand ("Bertie") was raised at Pembroke Lodge, the home of his grandfather Lord John Russell who had been prime minister in 1846-52. Monk speculates that in his latter-day dealings with Khrushchev and a raft of world leaders, Bertie fancied himself as prime minister without portfolio.

Life at Lord Russell's was dismal for young Bertie and his brother. The household was much given to sighing about the sad fate of the youths thrust into their care. Frank rebelled, Bertie discovered mathematics. There was a world where Truth could be demonstrated in sharp contrast to the pious platitudes of Pembroke Lodge. At age eleven he was given a copy of Euclid. "I had never imagined that there was anything so delicious in the world...[It was] as dazzling as first love."

If mathematics was Bertie's first love, in a sense it became the template for all his other loves and a clue to the multiple disasters of his personal life. Russell was married four times. In between and alongside there were numerous liaisons and minor affairs. With the exception of the marriage of his old age, his other marriages ended in emotional debacles for the wives and children. There were two children from his second marriage: John, upon whom Russell placed great hope of continuing the Russell tradition, who descended into schizophrenia; and Kate, who became a Christian, which might have seemed to Russell its own species of walking madness had she had the courage to tell him of her conversion. (Russell opined that Whitehead's one-time interest in the Catholic Church was "scarcely sane.") Conrad, the child of his third marriage, was estranged from his father, visiting him for the first time only a year before the philosopher's death.

Is there a link and key between Russell's philosophic and personal lives? Monk notes that in the last decade of his life a phrase that occurs repeatedly in interviews and articles by the great man is, "It is quite simple." For example, when asked why he had abandoned the Labour Party: "Oh, because they are a gang of murderers. It is quite simple." Three volumes of close equations to show that 1 + 1 = 2 may not seem "simple" but it is in the sense of reducing the complex realm of mathematics to a minimum set of logical axioms. Russell dreamt of going beyond the number 2 to shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings: reduce the whole mess of things to simple sense data in logically proper form. For Russell the urge to "simplicity" was "religious." He was enchanted by Spinoza's vision of the great unification of Deus sive Natura, a deductive system based in a singular ultimate reality. His great love and confidant, Lady Ottoline Morrell, was much annoyed by his interminable harangue about rational religion a la Russell. Religious herself, Lady Ottoline preferred the messy immediacy of emotional life to the arid reaches of a mathematical rationality. She writes in her diary, "His intellect is so immense, but en l'air: not in rapport with the things of this sensual life." William James wrote to Russell in 1908, "Say goodbye to mathematical logic if you wish to preserve your relations with concrete realities." Russell commented to a friend, "I would much rather, of the two, preserve my relations with symbolic logic." His personal life suggests that he persevered in that wish--alas for the "concrete realities" of wives and children.

Russell's philosophic reaction to James's moral and pragmatic injunction offers a final lesson. Russell's exalted notion of truth was, he said, "as stern and pitiless as God." He ironically cited the pope as someone who also holds to exalted truth--though of course the pontiff had it all wrong. The issue for Russellian scientists and papal catechists is to avoid the temptation of simplifying the intricate, entangled world of concrete realities in the interest of a simplistic and thus stern and pitiless Beyond. A contemporary philosopher, Nancy Cartwright, writes powerfully against the Russellian kind of scientific simplification in favor of what she calls "the dappled world"--a phrase deliberately taken from Gerard Manley Hopkins (The Dappled World, 1999). Her concern is ultimately moral. Those who seek to simplify physical and emotional reality make a mess of the multiple multilayered nonreducible realities of human life. Bertrand Russell's life is a proof text of that assertion.

Dennis O'Brien is president emeritus of the University of Rochester and the author of The Idea of a Catholic University (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press).