Philosophy 104: History of Western Philosophy

The Contemporary Period

Course Notes: Bertrand Russell

Aside from his early relationship with Whitehead, mathematics, and logic, Russell was deeply associated with two other great philosophers of the period --- George Edward Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Moore was a contemporary at Cambridge, beginning as a student with whom Russell associated in a dramatic attack on Idealism. Wittgenstein, whom we will also read later, came from Vienna to study under Russell and became a life-long associate, even though he returned to Vienna for a long period in the middle of his life. Without any doubt, these three men influenced the future paths of philosophy more than any others in the 20th Century.

In their earliest years as philosophy students, Russell and Moore, like most other English philosophers, were swept along in the tide of Hegelian Idealism. When they emerged from this influence, it was like a flight from the Black Death. They fought back with everything they had, seeking to defend what was, for them, the obvious intuitive point of view about the real sensed world. For Moore, this led to a systematic defense of Common Sense; for Russell, it took a more complex direction that emphasized science, mathematics, and logic, and ended in a powerful approach to the ways we construct and use language. As Russell aged, he lost interest in these elementary problems of perception and reality, thinking that they had been largely solved, and he turned to education, class, morality and politics. He was especially active in the pacifist movement, and he spent some time in prison during the First World War to pay for his beliefs. Russell became infamous for his radical denials of the existence of free will, immortality, and god.

Knowledge of the World

Clearly, as we read Russell's book, The Problems of Philosophy, we recognize that Russell takes it as a serious matter whether or not we can have knowledge about the world. Furthermore, Russell is seriously concerned that we should escape the Idealist conception of the world and put in its place a Realist conception. What I will address here is, first, why we should care one way or the other and, second, what this discussion means.

We should care about what the world is, we think, because we live in the world and we must act in it. Freud himself pointed out, rightly I suspect, that the ego forms under the context of the Reality Principle. That is, we become functional individuals by differentiating "I" from "World." The task of the ego, according to Freud, is to restrict the instinctive pleasure-seeking activity of the primordial id by making it conform to the realities of the external world. Survival depends on it. As we develop, the concept of survival becomes more sophisticated, of course, stretching well beyond mere appreciation of the physical world. Whether or not Freud's analysis was correct, though, people have almost universally agreed that we need to act in ways appropriate to the forces of the world and that we must know certain things about what the world really is in order to do this.

The Catholic Church, for instance, has traditionally maintained that the real world includes realms other than those seen (heaven and hell), individuals other than those seen (a trinitarian god, a heavenly host, and souls of humans in various states of judgment), and various rules or ordering concepts (sin, grace, etc.) bearing on human actions. Since humans can have no direct knowledge of these things it is essential, for Catholicism, to understand and conform to a hierarchy in which knowledge is passed from the one most blessed with it (pope) through others who have been properly prepared to receive it (cardinals, bishops, priests, etc.) to lowly individuals. It would be risky in the extreme to act without this knowledge; thus, life within the Church is requisite to success.

Consider one other example. In the early years of radiology, around the First World War, patients in sanatoria, suffering from tuberculosis, were usually examined (and their progress monitored) by standing between an x-ray emitter and fluorescent screen, for long periods of time, while doctors watched their lungs fill and empty. Clearly, many of these patients (and doctors) suffered a host of long-term symptoms of what we now call radiation sickness. It is important to know things about the world we live in so as to behave appropriately in it!

While it is certainly possible to take a "whatever!" attitude toward knowledge of the world. This is notoriously precarious and the practitioner should take note of the implicit vacuum in which he/she then acts. If all that we have in order to frame our activities is that which immediately comes to us through the senses, we have, in fact, very little upon which future activity can be based rationally. Normally, we act on the basis of "what we know;" but what we know is usually "what we (think) we know about the world." Beginning in antiquity, people distinguished between ignorance, mere opinion, warranted belief, and (certain) knowledge. One would like to act always from the strongest position.

What does all of this discussion (Idealism vs. Realism, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, mind vs. matter) mean? If we care about acting in the world from the position of greatest strength, then we want to know as much about the world as we possibly can. What is the world like? And how can we know things about it?

The debate about human experience and the real world began in antiquity. As living humans, we have experience in sensations, thoughts, and feelings. But the basic distinction of "I" and "World" acknowledges both a regularity of objects and a separation or independence of objects in this experience. We regularly see well defined things and they occur with apparent independence of us. It is natural to talk about this situation in terms of reality and appearance, that is, the real world and how it appears to me. It also seems natural to take note of the fact that everything in the realm of appearance changes (at different rates, of course) and, hence, to suggest or suspect that the real world might be something permanent and that does not change. Knowledge about such permanence would obviously be very powerful in guiding our actions.

Most of the alternatives had already been suggested by the 4th Century BC. Heraclitus suggested the way of understanding experience as a flux of opposing forces that ultimately express a unity of what is. Parmenides suggested that knowledge must be guided by Being, not the realm of Becoming, and that beings are permanent, uncreated, and complete. Plato's Theory of Ideas was the first thorough treatment of a world of Being and its relationship to life in the realm of appearances. Throughout Western thought, the desirable object of knowledge has been the realm of Being, where we could arrive at certainty.

Early European thinking about the world derived from the Christianized Roman world view and Christianity had been strongly affected by neo-Platonism. In the early second millennium, Aristotle's logic and cosmology were widely discovered through their Arab translations and were Latinized. Well into the 17th Century, the European world view was guided by a Christianized version of Aristotle, known as Scholasticism. Modern philosophy --- beginning with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, and John Locke --- was stimulated by the development of modern science --- Galileo, Newton, and others --- largely because the conceptual system of Aristotle had to be replaced in order to rationalize "the New Science." Philosophers and scientists alike required a new concept of the realm of Being; but a new concept of Being requires new conceptions of how Being relates to the realm of appearances and, hence, how, through appearance, we can know anything about Being. The concepts and problems that guide Russell's inquiry into our knowledge of the external world all began with the modern era in philosophy, in the 17th Century.

Philosophers on the Continent and in England struggled with these issues throughout the 17th and 18th Centuries. There seemed to be two potential routes to knowing --- reason (rationalism) and sensation (empiricism). In a somewhat complementary way, there seemed to be two different kinds of Being --- ideas (Idealism) and matter (Materialism, somewhat confusingly called Realism). By the late 1700s, the mass of arguable positions had become so complex and indecisive that Immanuel Kant could seriously suggest and maintain the position that we will never know "the thing in itself" (ding an sich) and that we must accept knowledge of the phenomena as all we have to work with. We cannot know Being but we must still guide ourselves. In fact, Kant was confident that we do guide ourselves quite successfully; he was confident that mathematics and science produce knowledge on which actions are securely based. He was also confident that we have reliable specific knowledge regarding rules of ethical behavior. For Kant, then, one of the great challenges was to understand how scientific knowledge is possible, that is, how we can have certain knowledge about the things that we experience so that we can actually anticipate their future behaviors accurately --- all the while not basing this on metaphysical assumptions about Beings.

Generally speaking, however, philosophy has not taken Kant seriously in the last two centuries. By the early 19th Century, Hegel constructed a gigantic, complex metaphysical system based on Idealism. It remained popular throughout the century, in Europe and in America. By the middle of the 19th Century, German scientists (Ludwig Büchner and others) had constructed a philosophy of science called Mechanical Materialism in which they understood scientists -- contra Kant -- as literally observing the behaviors of fundamental material beings that literally cause all experienced appearances through mechanical interactions analyzable by Newtonian physics. European scientists pursued the expansion of physics and chemistry into biology. Through the discovery of synthetic organic chemistry (urea) and through the application of thermodynamics to biological systems, they suggested that all living systems are equally explainable as mechanical complexes of matter. Darwinian evolution, in the hands of "Social Darwinists," pressed the point into an interpretation of human history.

English philosophy had remained largely under the influences of Hegelian Idealists, though Russell's Cambridge was an important site of scientific research. Though Russell was no scientist himself, his sympathies were clear and were guided by his early interests in mathematics and logic. The natural home for Russell's Realism was a thoroughgoing logical analysis of the language through which we try to talk about the world. Like Kant, Russell assumed that we are in possession of a successful science so the only reasonable question to ask is how this science is possible. As a question in logic and language, Russell suggested that scientific propositions could be understood as "molecular" propositions which are made up by the logical combination of "atomic" propositions. The truth of the molecular propositions would be guaranteed by logic and the truth of the atomic propositions would be philosophically defended. The project, then, is a matter of discovering atomic propositions. For Russell, it seemed clear that atomic propositions would represent primitive data regarding objects. What elemental (atomic) objects can we know with certainty?

The primitive experience of sensation, both Russell and Moore argued, is "sense data" -- that is, individual, primitive sense contents, such as a "blue patch of color." Of these sense data there could be no doubt. Thus, the scientific treatment of experience must begin here. We have knowledge of our own sense data by acquaintance.

As an aside, one should observe that late 19^th Century researches into human perception had stimulated a great deal of speculation over whether we see sense data or sensed objects. The Impressionist painters experimented widely with this issue, many of them literally constructing visual scenes out of swatches of pure color. Others would argue that we see objects -- a book, a tree, a chair, etc. -- and not separable color data. The separation only occurs in our analytic, philosophical minds.

At any rate, if we do know sense data by acquaintance, we need to ask What other objects are there? Here Russell departed significantly from much of the philosophical tradition by asserting that we actually have acquaintance of universals. When I examine a couple sense data that fall into the general category that I name "blue," Russell argued, I actually know the universal object blue by acquaintance, simultaneously recognizing that the universal is not identical with either of the particular sense data. Indeed, I know blue by acquaintance in thought and not in sensation. One never senses a universal; rather thought is directed to the universal object as a party to particular sensations.

The whole issue is extremely important to Russell's program because, as he observes, there is scarcely a sentence that does not have a universal in it, especially when we consider that universals consist of both qualities and relations. Thus, "John likes chess," while it makes reference to a particular object (John) and a particular well-defined game (chess) uses an abstract universal concept (likes). For this proposition to represent meaningful knowledge, Russell needs to pin the universal to an object with which we can be acquainted.

Aside from acquaintance, we can also have knowledge by description, Russell asserts. While we cannot have the same level of certainty about this, the extension into descriptions is necessary for us to construct any significant "knowledge community." In effect, so long as each portion of a proposition for which I cannot provide the basis of personal acquaintance can still be meaningfully related to someone else's acquaintance, then the whole proposition can still be meaningful to me and, indeed, represent knowledge. A crucial medium in this argument is the testimony of one's own memory. Only by admitting the testimony of memory and of other people can we propose to know things about the past or about distant things that we have not yet personally experienced.