A History of Western Philosophy
Tags: philosophy,
Coming from Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy to Bertrand Russel’s A History of Western Philosophy is an interesting transition. Both men have tremendous knowledge and intellect, but they are very different writers. Huxley’s wordiness, at least in The Perennial Philosophy, dulls the impact of his ideas, and when he quotes at length from various writers and mystics he makes little effort to explain how the quotes tie in to his own ideas. He simply assumes the reader gets it, when often the reader sees only hints of connections that should be more explicitly drawn out.
Russell, on the other hand, writes directly and to the point. His ideas come across forcefully because he doesn’t mince words. In his overview of the major figures of Western philosophy, Russell takes time to explain the political, historical and cultural forces that shaped the thinkers whose ideas he summarizes and critiques. In contrast to Huxley’s more expansive mode of thinking, Russell critiques his subjects with a strict and unforgiving logic.
All of the pre-Socratics are fascinating because they approach recognizable truths without relying entirely on reason. Socrates is fascinating because of the way he exposes the assumptions and blind spots of the human thought process.
I very much enjoyed Russell’s critique of Plato. When I first read Plato in college, it was obvious to me that the earlier, more interesting dialogues presented Socrates as Socrates, while the later ones used Socrates as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own wishful beliefs, which would not always stand up to true Socratic examination. It bothered me in college that the other students couldn’t see that, and that the professor made little effort to call this out. It’s nice to see Russell say it all so bluntly.
The only one of Plato’s later dialogues that impressed me was the Parmenides, in which Plato critiqued his own philosophy at least as well as any philosopher who came after him. I always saw that dialog as the capstone of his brilliance, and Russell calls Plato out for his “extraordinary self-criticism” in that work. It’s easy for a smart person to tell you all the ways in which they’re right. It’s not so easy for them to tell you all the ways in which they might be wrong, but Plato did a superb job of that in the Parmenides.
To me, and to Robert Persig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Plato’s greatest flaw was his rejection of the irrational element of human life. I understand why someone might wish that humans were entirely rational, but we’re not that way, and any philosophy that wants to make a claim to human truth has to include the irrational parts of our nature instead of trying to wish them away.
I knew a little of Epicurus and a lot of the stoics, particularly Seneca. Russell covers them just briefly enough for me to want to read more of the original sources.
I had not read Plotinus and knew nothing of the neo-Platonists, but Russell makes clear how Plotinus’ interpretation of Plato meshed with the early Christian ideas of the soul’s immortality, the heavenly realm of perfection, and man’s reason as an avenue of approach to divine contemplation. I used to think that Plato’s thoughts on these matters paralleled early Christian thought due to some zeitgeist that caused many people across different cultures to have similar beliefs at similar times. Russell traces more directly how Platonic ideas made their way from ancient Athens through Alexander and Plotinus into the minds of early Christian thinkers.
Although I attended a Jesuit school, I was ignorant of the history of the early Christian church, which Russell summarizes in some detail in his chapters on Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, Saint Benedict and Pope Gregory. From today’s perspective, the beliefs and practices of the early church, especially from about 200 to 400 AD, look like a form of acute mental illness.
The early saints were maniacally focused on sin, and to them, just about every human act and thought, other than prostrating oneself before God, was a sin. Russell notes that the morality of the earlier Christian believers was almost entirely negative, focusing on avoiding doing wrong–and everything was wrong–rather than actively doing right. Imagine a cross between the repressive moral extremism of the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live and the unforgiving blanket condemnations of Wokeism. No wonder those centuries after the fall of Rome were called the Dark Ages. When the poor peasants weren’t being slaughtered by Huns, Lombards, Goths, and Vandals, they were being condemned to hell by the clergy Jesus had instructed to love them.
Saint Augustine’s interpretation of Christianity was particularly appalling. In his view, everyone deserved to go to hell simply by virtue of being born. God chooses to spare a few people here and there for reasons He will not disclose, but the bulk of the human race is simply a factory pumping out souls to populate Satan’s hell, where they will suffer for all eternity. I have read the gospels many times, and this is never the message I’ve come away with.
At one point, Saint Augustine wrote to Pope Gregory to ask whether married Christians who had had sex on Saturday night should be allowed to worship in church on Sunday morning. I wonder if Saint Augustine ever stopped to ask himself where new Christians came from and how they were made. (The Pope, by the way, told Augustine that the couples could attend, so long as they washed up first.)
The doctrinal struggles of the early church are equally disturbing. As Russell notes, Jesus gave his followers two commandments: love God, and love each other. That’s about as succinct as a religion can get. You don’t need a powerful intellect or years of study to grasp what he’s saying. The challenge of Christianity lies in the practice. How hard is it to love God by always doing right? How hard is it to actually love all of the people you share the world with?
It’s so damn hard that, aside from Jesus himself, no one has ever managed to pull it off.
So, how does the early church help people address this immense, lifelong challenge? Well, first they argue over whether Jesus was one person or two. Then they argue over whether you should say Hallelujah in church, and if so, when. The arguments go like this:
Priest 1: Jesus was one person, human in body, divine in spirit. Priest 2: He was two people. The flesh, being earthly, was entirely separate from the spirit, which was divine. Priest 1: Do you contradict me? Why, then, you’re going to hell! Priest 2: No, you’re going to hell, blasphemer! Priest 1: Since we can’t agree, let’s kill each other. Priest 2: Yes, let’s! I’ll round up my mob, you get yours and we’ll meet in front of the church at noon.
Now repeat the same argument for the Hallelujah issue, and then for dozens of other disputes over many centuries. It seems to me they have entirely missed the point of the original teaching.
When the main character in Gulliver’s Travels gives an account of European history to a creature that had previously known nothing about humans, the creature replies, “by what I have gathered from your own relation… I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Maybe this was how Saint Augustine saw the world. Maybe this was why his assumptions were so pessimistic.
Russell describes the evolving beliefs of the Middle Ages, during which European philosophy was entirely bound up with theology. Priests and monks looked back first to Plato and then to Aristotle to try to bolster the dogma of the Church. Russel notes the dishonesty of medieval philosophy as it began by choosing a pre-determined result (that the teachings of the Church were infallibly correct) and then fashioned arguments to support those conclusions. This approach opposes the spirit of both ancient and modern philosophy, which follow reason and logic (and later, empiricism) to try to discover new knowledge.
Russell rightly points out how the Church philosophers’ slavish submission to the “authority” of ancient philosophers, especially Aristotle, stalled the progress of Western thought for centuries. When Galileo finally arrived with new ideas, the Church refused to accept them. Ideas that contradicted accepted beliefs were automatically wrong, simply because the contradicted accepted beliefs. When Galileo said, “Look through my telescope and I’ll show you what I mean,” the Church said that if the telescope showed them anything other than what they already believed, it was an instrument of the devil, and they refused to look through it.
Though the history of the church during the fifteen hundred years between the death of Christ and the reformation was not particularly admirable, it helps to understand that the Church was a political entity struggling to survive during an era of unending wars. It had to fight like a political entity to survive, and after many centuries, as its doctrines came to be accepted by most of Europe, it did seem to reduce the number of wars at least somewhat by providing a common understanding among people of different countries.
The final third of the book covers modern philosophy, with a particular focus on philosophers who influenced modern political ideas and whose ways of thinking led to the scientific and empirical methods of inquiry that replaced the older, moribund “respect for ancient authority” mindset. Russell summarizes and critiques dozens of philosophers from Machiavelli to John Dewey, describing the cultural and political context in which each lived and worked. The book is very enlightening in this regard.
Because Russel wrote this book during the second world war (it was published in 1945), it has a strong focus on the conflicting currents of rationalism and irrationalism in Western philosophy. John Locke, who most clearly describes the rational form of government, is the only modern philosopher to whom Russell devotes more than one chapter. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who both wrote about and embodied the passionate, irrational libertinism that would blossom during the Romantic era, gets one chapter and then appears again and again in subsequent chapters.
Though the author leans heavily in favor of Locke’s rationalist theories, he points out that both the rational and irrational forms of government, when taken to extremes, lead to misery, war and destruction. Russell saw Soviet Russia as the embodiment of ruthless rationalism in government, while Nazi Germany embodied Rousseau’s reckless passion taken to its extreme.
The one area in which contemporary events seem to cast too much of a shadow on Russell’s analysis is in his review of Nietzsche. He considers only Nietzsche’s political philosophy, and his analysis is damning and seething with contempt. Nietzsche divided the world into a small number of heroes and a large number of people whose lives were essentially worthless. The hero was marked by his strength of will, and the sole purpose of the worthless masses beneath him was to catapult the great heroes like him to power. Russell rightly points out that in this system, as soon as one hero reaches the top, he will suppress or kill all the other heroes, because they are all threats to his power. Thus, Nietzsche’s system is self-defeating for all but the single person who reaches the top.
This analysis is probably correct, but Russell goes on to attack Nietzsche personally as a reclusive, self-absorbed misogynist. There’s some truth in that. Nietzsche’s philosophy was deeply narcissistic, misanthropic and misogynistic. But there was more to him than the political ideas that Russell summarizes and condemns, and in omitting that, Russell leaves him looking like a two-dimensional bad guy.
When I first read Nietzsche in college, I was fascinated by Walter Kaufmann’s translation. I had the vague sense then, and a much stronger sense later, that I was seduced more by Nietzsche’s language than by his thought. In subsequent decades, every time I’ve re-read Nietzsche, I’ve found him increasingly disturbing. He appealed to me at age eighteen because he eloquently expressed the ideas of a self-absorbed adolescent loner who had a powerful intellect and little understanding of how the social world actually worked. Re-reading him in later years, it was no surprise to me that he went insane. Although his insanity supposedly came all at once, in his mental and physical collapse in Turin, you can watch it unfold in slow motion in the course of his later works. Who wouldn’t go mad with a mind like his that had no true friends or loves to temper its excesses?
Russell provides a brief overview of later philosophers, focusing on his own objections to their core arguments. Marx, James and Dewey each get a brief review, but Henri Bergson’s logic is singled out for special scorn. I had not read Bergson before, but from Russell’s summary, he sounds like a poet who, due to a mix up in the registrar’s office, was accidentally shunted into the philosophy class and did his heroic best to muddle through. His philosophy, though weak on logic, is fascinating to read, and I could see why it would have such broad appeal. Bergson expresses his ideas with such poetic eloquence that you want them to be true. But alas, along comes the wrecking ball of Russell’s unyielding logic, and all the remains of Bergson are the ruins of a civilization that we imagine must have once been a pleasant place to live.
Some of the most informative chapters in Russell’s book trace general currents of thought instead of focusing on a single philosopher. These include The Rise of Science, Philosophical Liberalism, The Romantic Movement and Currents of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Again and again, the reader sees today’s social and political conflicts playing out in the minds and wars of previous generations. From the ancient Greeks through the mid-twentieth century, these conflicts tend to follow similar patterns. The most alarming patterns, and the ones we seem on the verge of repeating yet again, are the tendencies of democracies to collapse into tyranny, and the tendencies of popular uprisings to be taken over by ruthless opportunists. The fall of Pericles is an example of the first, the rise of Napoleon an example of the second.
After reviewing the many philosophies that have changed the forms of Western government over the centuries, Russell notes that the challenge of the current age is to find a philosophy that can balance the relentless will of those who seek to control the modern state’s massive technical power against the apathy and resignation of the masses who feel they have no power. We’re not there yet–not even close–and the wars and upheavals of our collective past tell us that if we ever do get there, it’s going to require a long and difficult journey.