Mysticism and Logic
by Bertrand Russell
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10 brilliant essays by a Nobel Prize-winning philosopher challenge romantic mysticism and promote a scientific view of society and nature. Russell explains his theory of logical atomism in these witty, cogent writings, which include popular treatments of religious and educational issues as well as more technical examinations of problems of logic.
Paperback, Western Philosophy, 192 pages
Published August 16th 2004 by Dover Publications (first published October 1910)
Original Title
A free Man's Worship and other essays
And if we believe strongly, and have for a long time, that God exists, it is simply a characteristic of who we are, for us.
But there’s a catch.
Our perceptions and ideas of the world are fleeting.
And if we’re meditative by nature, we somehow absorb this Ungroundedness into ourselves, by going where the tide takes us in life.
That’s a pretty basic sense of insecurity.
If you’re pretty well satisfied with getting whatever you happen to be desiring at the moment, wherever the wind blows seems good enough.
But you’ll end up at the end of your life with a physical sense of sheer emptiness from life. Not to mention the resulting heavy weight of cynicism.
I’m not kidding.
Having a foundation makes all the difference.
And we all WILL have upsets to our sense of self this way. The higher our approach, the riskier the result - as in mystics like Eckhart and St Francis.
In other words, once we glimpse our Ungroundedness we must rationalize it to ourselves some substantial way. It seems to oppose our ideas of Goodness and Faith.
The mystics of Meister Eckhart’s ilk succeed in correcting this by believing that Being is born in Emptiness (as in the second Creation story in Genesis), and that this Emptiness, paradoxically, is actually the fullness of God.
And to paraphrase Eliot in his Dry Salvages, we have no choice but to venture out to sea.
And that is the very Ascent of Mount Carmel.
So Eckhart turns the loneliness of this apparent insubstantiality of physical and spiritual things into a Dance.
But Russell laughs at Scholasticism.
Russell believed in solid good sense: rather ironically, since he describes physical reality as relative in Our Knowledge of the External World.
I don’t laugh at mystical insights, finding a Zen-like profundity in Eckhartian scholastic insights. You see where this is going, now?
Turns out Russell is perfectly ENTITLED to discredit Faith. As are we all nowadays.
But, as it turns out, Eckhart’s is ALSO an alternate - but by contrast WELL-GROUNDED - path to RELIGIOUSLY sound common sense.
For if you can’t grasp the amazing depth of Mysticism now -
You may be Out of your depth later on.
Russell, in the dedicatory poem of his Autobiography, states that one thing he never got out of life was Peace.
Love, maybe, in his final marriage but lasting peace? No.
And peace is the only panacea that can truly HEAL us...
And save us from our ceaseless discontent. (less)
This is related to another persistent feature of his writing. When he is laying forth a theory or an argument, I often feel that Russell is trying just as hard to convince himself as his audience. He was a man skeptical to the core, and I get the feeling that he was only capable of wholeheartedly believing in things—even logical theories—in short, passionate bursts; and that, after reflection, he would find flaws in every one of his former opinions. The vacillation of his ideas throughout his career shows this in full evidence.
This quality is apparent in the first essay, “Mysticism and Logic.” Russell starts off in praising philosophers who have successfully combined the two notions, and expresses his wish that the mystical impulse be given its due respect. And then he proceeds to demolish every doctrine or idea posited by mystical thinkers. By the end of the essay, the reader is more averse to mysticism than before he started. (For a more productive attempt to combine the two, see Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.)
Then there’s his masterpiece of prose, “A Free Man’s Worship.” That is a piece of writing more passionate that I could have ever thought possible from polite, civilized Bertrand. And yet, in the back of the reader’s mind is Russell’s cordial warning in the preface that he later came to find the sentiments expressed somewhat naïve. As I said, an incorrigible skeptic.
It is getting to be something of a cliché to say this, but I find it valuable to read through this philosophy even if you don’t believe it. Even the late Bertrand Russell himself didn’t believe it. But his mind was cast in a unique mold. Russell was capable—or at least as nearly capable as can be achieved—of contemplation without sentimentality or dogmatism. He questioned everything: an exercise incomparably valuable, if not ultimately productive.
What’s more, Russell’s ability to get to the very heart of a question, to probe it with his logical pincers until every strand of the thing is clearly laid out on the dissection table, is always astounding. Merely following the train of his thought is worthwhile, even if the train leads into blind alleys. Plus, what’s so bad about blind alleys?
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“In advocating the scientific restraint and balance, as against the self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only urging, in the sphere of knowledge, that largeness of contemplation, that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions of the world.”
“The fundamental epistemological principle…is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.”
“It follows that an ‘event’ is not a particular, but some universal of which there may be many instances. It follows also that an ‘event’ must be something short of the whole state of the universe, since it is highly improbable that this will recur.”
“The beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, an in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow.”
“For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed, from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid crust…from the monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil.”
“The vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer as of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.”
“The mystic insight begins with the sense of a mystery unveiled, of a hidden wisdom now suddenly become certain beyond the possibility of a doubt. The sense of certainty and revelation comes earlier than any definite belief. The definite beliefs at which mystics arrive are the result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight…The first and most direct outcome of the moment of illumination is belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called revelation or insight or intuition, as contrasted with sense, reason, and analysis, which are regarded as blind guides leading to the morass of illusion. Closely connected with this belief is the conception of aReality behind the world of appearance and utterly different from it. This Reality is regarded with an admiration often amounting to worship….the poet, the artist, and the lover are seekers after that glory; the haunting beauty that they pursue is the faint reflection of its sun. But the mystic lives in the full light of the vision.
“Time builds and destroys all things.”
“The greatest men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and of mysticism: the attempt to harmonize the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion.”
“You are describing a strange scene, and strange prisoners.”
“They resemble us, I replied.”
“Most men, for example, have in their nature meanness, vanities, and envies of which they are quite unconscious, though even their best friends can perceive them without any difficulty.”
“There is some sense—easier to feel than to state—in which time in an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality…A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.”
“All our thinking consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream: reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be lived, it cannot be conceived in thought.” (less)
As he mentions in the preface, the first five essays are popular, while the last five essays are more technical and aimed at a professional audience. The first five essays have the overarching theme of the refutation of mystical philosophy. According to Russell, all of prior philosophy (especially metaphysics) is rooted in ethical and/or religious ideas. This started with Parmenides and continued, through Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, up to his time. These philosophers were system builders, and the system they tried to build was a world that fitted their preconceived ethical and religious feelings.
This is the primary cause of the lack of progress in philosophy, while the sciences (especially in Russell’s time) were progressing at a spectacular speed and into spectacular depths. It is time philosophers started to take from science what is useful – that is, no more cherry picking from scientific results, and start applying the scientific method to philosophical problems.
Of course, here Russell falls back on his own method of analysis. In this view, philosophy should be solely occupied with studying the relations between concepts (symbolic logic) and studying the forms of propositions (formal logic). In the end, the philosopher works with propositional functions and offers general and a priori propositions, to be used by the scientist. This is a radical break with the metaphysics of the past – and a very fruitful approach to philosophy.
With the help of the analytical method, Russell studied problems in mathematics, physics, psychology, language, etc. One original theory that resulted from this approach is Russell’s analysis of the conflict between psychological and physical theories of perception. The physicist starts from objects, which cause certain effects on/in our body, which results in thoughts and other mental activities. The psychologist (and physiologist) starts from our thoughts and mental life and works his or her way ‘back’ to the outside. This leads to insoluble problems about the existence of the outer world and its connection to our thoughts.
For Russell, objects are classes of particulars, and what I see is just one of these particulars. Thus, when I see the sun, what I see is just one instance of the sun – my perspective of the sun – and the sun itself, as thing, is the class of all its particular instances (including the one within my perspective). In short, perspectives and things – the stuff of psychology and the stuff of physics – are just two ways of classifying particulars.
This theory has to address the problem of permanence: Do things exist when I am not perceiving them? And Russell is able to attack this problem with his theory: permanence originates in our notion of continuity – we assume things to continue in time and space. And it is continuity that Russell dismantles: things are simply the series of collections of their particular instances. We either perceive them or we don’t. When a thing moves, we think we perceive the movement of the thing, while all we perceive is the thing at some particular instants in spacetime. Common sense deludes us and philosophers haven’t realized this leads to their insurmountable problems.
This, by the way, requires there to be two sorts of spaces: (1) private space (our perspective of the thing) and (2) the arrangement of all possible private spaces (all possible perspectives of the thing). And this means the world is nothing but a collection of series of collections of particulars, existing in six dimensions. Here we see Russell’s analytical method leading him to a pluralistic worldview (following William James) and a form of realism that overcomes the pitfalls of naïve realism.
In a similar way he attacks the notions of causality, knowledge and the relation between physics and our sense-data. He doesn’t offer clear cut answers or certain theories: he offers hypotheses that are possible and undermines the ground for the alternative theories instead of trying to refute them. For example, when dealing with Kant’s a priori intuitions, he acknowledges this claim is irrefutable, yet the grounds which led Kant to postulating this theory are delusions and hence the theory becomes simply one alternative. In general, Russell’s sole aim is to offer viable hypotheses to philosophical problems that require the least amount of postulates. As he says in one of his essays: “Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities.”
In sum: Russell tries to reduce all philosophical problems to logical problems; through analysis cut up these problems into solvable and unsolvable parts; solve the parts that can be solved; and formulate a theory which makes the unsolvable parts redundant. All should be reduced to logical propositions, and in the end to a handful of logical axioms. (These essays were written during the time when he was still heavily engaged in reducing all of mathematics to logic, and all of logic to some basic principles.) Which makes me wonder: he utterly thrashes all the earlier system builders, yet he himself is heavily rooted in the Aristotelean tradition of viewing all of the sciences to be (ideally) deduced from logic. If this isn’t system building, I don’t know what is…
Anyway, this collection of essays is truly a masterpiece in clear thinking and clear writing. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these types of subjects. For people who are (relatively) new to philosophy and science: perhaps ‘just’ read the first five essays. (less)
Favorite quote:
���The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish form our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair.���
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"But the greatest of men who have been philosophers have felt the need both of science and mysticism: the attempt to harmonise the two was what made their life, and what always must, for all its arduous uncertainty, make philosophy, to some minds, a greater thing than either science or religion."
Russell goes on to trace instances of these twin forces of philosophy through the ages. He finds several common themes which characterize mysticism, including a feeling of Unity, documented in the writings of Parmenides, and a feeling that Time is an illusion. Is evil real or is everything relative? These are all the cool theories, questions and ideas that draw me to philosophy (the arcane and involved logic of Aristotle and Russell himself, don't excite me like these do, quite possibly because I find them incredibly difficult).
Bertrand Russell is surprisingly direct and sometimes very funny. He almost slipped this one past me,
"even in the most civilised societies men are not put to death for mathematical incompetence."
His method is what appeals to me most and he articulates it beautifully. He has a deep reverence for the human pursuit of scientific philosophy.
"the ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized in the realm of matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments."
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The first essay, "Mysticism and Logic," provides a good overview of the features common to mystical experiences and the tenets common to mystical philosophies. His treatment of the reason/intuition dichotomy is flawed, however, because, reason ultimately gains its legitimacy from intuition. In the section devoted to "Good and Evil," Russell gives no arguments that ethical predicates are ...more
--Mysticism and Logic
--The Place of Science in a Liberal Education
--A Free Man's Worship
--The Study of Mathematics
--Mathematics and the Metaphysicians
--On Scientific Method in Philosophy
--The Ultimate Constituents of Matter
--The Relation of Sense-data to Physics
--On the Notion of Cause
--Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description
Index ...more
This book is a series of essays that develops a mysticism based on mathematics, but without a belief in the supernatural. It starts off supporting the attitude of mysticism as a better way to live while dismissing the worldview behind it. It then presents mathematics as a fit object for mystic contemplation. In the process, a criticism of math education and a support for pure mathematics are presented.
Although the essays stand alone, when read in sequence, they build up to a unified body of thought. The blending of mysticism with science comes about very naturally, and does not violate the tenets of science (and perhaps not even those of mysticism).
I have only a few criticisms.
The first is the language gets a bit flowery at times, to the detriment of comprehension. This is especially a problem because while the titles are technically accurate, they mislead in that they don't give a sense of where the essays are heading. This is especially a problem when considered in light of my second objection below...
The subject is a bit too subtle. Math education flows naturally into pure mathematics which flows naturally into contemplation, life, ethics and dissatisfaction. It's so natural that it's easy to miss the subtle point being made. (less)
I recommend the fourth chapter for everyone out there. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Mystic...
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