The Heart is the Matter . . .

The passage I recently quoted in relation to Bertrand Russell [27th September: Synchronicity or What . . .?] describes a perceived gap between Russell as philosopher and Russell as man.

Russell as philosopher is described as ‘the man of pure intellect who is cut off from all feelings.’ And this is the conventional view of philosophers in general: people who have risen above the common herd and who exist in a rarified atmosphere of pure logical thought, following, as philosophy lecturers like to say, ‘the argument wherever it might lead.’

In other words, they are perceived as people whose head rules their heart—having decided on the rational course of action in any situation, they bend the human side of their nature to act in accordance with their will, and not the other way round.

Russell makes an interesting case history as to the extent such a thing is in actual fact possible.

Famously, he was engaged in an ‘open marriage’ with his second wife, Dora. The terms of this were that each could continue to see others outside the marriage and, somewhat implicitly, if any children were born as a result of such liaisons on Dora’s part, they would be recognized by Russell as his own.

Dora seems to have been the leading proponent of this arrangement. Russell, it must be said, as sometimes strangely happens with ‘great’ men, was arguably something of a suggestible old sod. But the fact that he had a stated philosophy that after five years any woman becomes boring and due for trading in may have encouraged him to think that he and Dora were working along common lines.

In fact, they weren’t.

Nonetheless, Russell, aided by Dora, sought to knit a rationalist theory to justify their state of affairs. ‘The New Morality,’ as it was called, represented a call to arms for ‘progressive’ people, that involved undermining ‘traditional attitudes to religion and morality,’ and spoke for a new society based on reason in which people would be free to satisfy their every need without, in Dora’s words, ‘those confounded silly jealousies.’

[I should point out here that I have no particular interest in and no opinions to offer on Russell’s and Dora’s domestic arrangements. The thing that I am after is the extent to which the Olympian ideal of a world ordered purely on reason—unbuffetted by the frustrations of life and our inherited animal natures—is possible. On the evidence of Russell’s case, it is not.]

Russell was never comfortable with the arrangement he had entered into, although, gamely enough, he continued to write and preach in support of it, and practise it. The breaking point seems to have come when Dora became pregnant by someone else, someone whom Russell [now Earl Russell] deeply despised. Even then he tried to bend himself to the ethic he had forged and gave his name to the daughter who resulted. But at that stage, it seems, the marriage was definitely ended. Nor were matters helped by Dora getting pregnant for a second time by the same man.

The extent of Russell’s descent from the Olympian ideal—and from the progressivist ethic advanced by him in the 1920s—is indicated by a remark attributed to him in his old age, concerning the ‘daughter’ he had originally legitimized: ‘I have no second daughter. That was my wife’s child. It took me ten years to get the bastard out of Burke[‘s Peerage].’

Is it possible for human beings to rise above the tides of life to a serene world where pure and selfless thought becomes the sole motivator of our actions? The case of Russell, doyen of liberal opinion for much of the twentieth century, suggests no.

What about the saints? Perhaps. But if I remember my reading of the Confessions correctly, their perfection was due mainly to the grace of God. Man on his own behalf, according to Augustine, was capable of achieving very little. And in the case of the saints, often what seems to have been involved is a process of transformation, a change of nature or character, and not simply a rigid enforcement of the will—an escape into an atmosphere (and I am snatching purely at memory here) of ‘freedom, perfect freedom.’

I remember several years ago hearing someone talk about their time working in a nursing home in the North. He was describing a retired Presbyterian minister who was suffering from dementia. ‘You should hear the language of him,’ he said. ‘And the nurses can’t go in on their own or his hands are all over them.’

And as is the way of these things, I found myself in an instant forming a picture of the man. I saw him as someone who had bent his life to doing the right thing, as he saw it, and avoiding the wrong—thus ‘proving’ to me that it was possible to live a life of hard subjection to the will. But there had been no process of transmutation involved—or to use the Freudian term, sublimation. Rather it had been akin to stuffing a suitcase full of one’s dirty laundry only to have it burst open on the station platform. The moment his mental functioning began to falter all the old repressed desires and instincts came tumbling out of their storage space unchanged.

Now, as I say, this image is purely a work of the imagination. Yet I have a strong feeling that it presents an accurate picture of the reality. From time to time, when I still think of him, I genuflect in recognition of the strength of will and the self-discipline involved in shaping oneself over such a long time to such an uncongenial task—at the same time I recognize what seems to me the utter futility of it.

[The raw facts in this posting come from the two-volume biography of Russell by Ray Monk and published in paperback by Vintage in 2001. In some subsequent posting—and if there is anybody out there to read it—I would like to look at the matter from the viewpoint of Dora Russell, for in its own way I think it has much to say for the whole process of abstract philosophical reasoning and the assumptions that underlie it.]