This 80-year-old survey of varied Western philosophy back to the ancient world still is relevant and readable on points important to us
Especially, as I focus on below, his look at how “liberal” government arose in the 1600s provides an important lesson today as we consider the dangers posed by dictatorship, wherever it is situated
[This blog entry repeats one in my other blog, https://jnthetransient.blogspot.com , but here I include extra material on Nietzsche. Please note that any social media postings of some non-Blogger or not-LinkedIn sort you see supposedly by me or about me are neither authorized by me, produced by me, or approved by me. In particular, I do not have the capacity, or the wish, to post videos or photos of myself as if this were a major part of any message. I have enough lack of photogenic virtues in normal circumstances; no social media palaver with my image is something I would make or consent to.]
Subsections below:
[introduction, including part of wordage from scanned intro]
[Side note on the issue of religion connected to government—I am clarifying my own position as not to seem hostile to religion in general]
Specific quotes from Russell on stages of the development of philosophy…
Thomas Hobbes as a “spring robin” for social contract ideas…
The historical roots of U.S. democracy seen in 1600s and 1700s life
The fountain of Locke-ian philosophy as a major turn in political theory
Russell looks to Rousseau as a headwater (or symbol) for darker political developments
Nietzsche: The figure in Western philosophy seeming most to augur Nazism
A last note
I have put together this entry in a quirky way, reflective of the weird challenges some of us face with computer infrastructure, Internet challenges, etc. (Don’t ask on the specifics of this.) An introduction to this entry is still in handwritten form (six pages, not many words per page) as seen here. It is not super-crucial to reading the below, but will give you some sense of how I came to all this stuff originally, and also an outline of Russell’s life as someone who, at 98 years, bridged two different centuries, going from horse-and-buggy days and the weird influence of Hegel pervasive in the 1800s, all the way to 1970, when nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War were among the last things Russell spoke out about, in his 90s.
I will repeat some of the end of the handwritten stuff as follows in the next few paragraphs (with a few editorial changes), then immediately following the quote related to the dark ages is all new material, just in typed form. Above is a table of contents telling you what to expect.
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Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) wrote this History while World War II was raging—it was published in 1945 and my copy is a 14th paperback printing published by Simon & Schuster (not Russell’s original publisher for this). His way of marshalling his material to show both the hope and menace inherent in intellectual life—as seen in Locke regarding civil government and Nietzsche regarding the Nazis—is impressive, giving a good example of how to organize a thesis addressing a huge amount of material, while this book does not seem a tendentious political tract, and Russell usually aims to give a fair hearing to substantially interesting philosophers.
His thematic agenda—even after he has devoted 360+ pages to the ancient Western world’s philosophers and early Christian and Jewish figures—is shown in
“It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence [including the still-fascinating St. Augustine] before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merit of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants. Seeing that these were the preoccupation that the Church handed on to the converted barbarians, it is no wonder that the succeeding age surpassed almost all other fully historical periods in cruelty and superstition” [p. 366].
Though this might seem a “swipe” at organized Western religion, the larger book, not least within this period, shows he took generous pains to explain the issues central with specific figures’ religious teachings or the nature of controversies and other ideas held by religious organizations. In fact, it is true that his rational approach to human issues made him seem rather not to “get” religious inclinations (his interpretation of American philosopher William James, otherwise a figure he found congenial and who shared some of his epistemological views, shows he didn’t “get” James’ own idea of why religious beliefs in the U.S. had validity from a different perspective than what normally concerns scientists and those otherwise concerned with common sense). But he also well knew that religious issues, for many centuries, were the original setting in the West for philosophy to develop as it did beyond the ancient Greeks, and also conditioned the nature of the medieval Roman Catholic Church’s nature and status in the West, which in turn provides the very basis on which both science and civil government strived to come into their own from the late 1500s onward.
(A side note: Russell may seem in some quotes to be rather antipathetic toward organized religion; he is more “this way” than I am, roughly speaking. My own point regarding civil/liberal government is that it should not be explicitly aligned with any one religion, or even some generalized “declaration” of some religious affiliation, such as including reference to God in the U.S. Constitution. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he referred to God, but his position at the time was to issue a pleading for a new governmental standing, which involved some emotion and some sense of “a footing outside the usual human affairs.” Once the Constitution was written, the situation was more of judicious representatives of numerous quarters of the new country designing a framework for government that, rightly, need not declare itself to be divinely aligned or inspired. I say this as a Christian myself, but one who realizes that there are persons of many religions in this country, as there were different religions among residents here in the 1700s, and bot simply to suit atheists, the government should not be designed to be an expression of any religion, but should be an expression of people working together for a means to have government that gives frameworks for adjudicating disagreements, frameworks for people of all creeds to live in their own way in harmony with others, and so on. Some of Russell’s discussion of the issue of the divine associations with the foundations of government will appear below, and be coherent with what I say here.)
Specific quotes from Russell on stages of the development of philosophy, especially regarding civil government versus totalitarianism
I will keep my own comments and explanations to a minimum, and let Russell speak.
Those in the U.S. who think that the U.S. government has its historical roots, especially as conceived as “directly effective,” in religious matters such as the Ten Commandments, or that God has had a direct hand in how the Constitution was set up—and therefore that it is lamentable that God is not referenced in the Constitution—fail to appreciate that when civil government struggled to become a major force in the Western world over centuries, it did this in trying to emerge from control over society by the Church; and also the enterprise of science had the same basic struggle. Note that Russell’s history—while aiming to look at major specific philosophers in their own right and not merely as pieces in a story more aimed at government or general science themes—is concerned both with the development of science and the responsible way in which we have knowledge of reality and the development of “liberal” civil government (and his notion of liberal doesn’t simply embrace what today in the U.S. would be called the liberal side of the political spectrum, but [my own interpretation] the individualistic possibilities in civic life that also include libertarianism).
The way science arose starting in the very late 1500s and through the 1600s he heralds as a major change in a huge part of the tenor of society.
“Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century. The Italian Renaissance, though not medieval, is not modern; it is more akin to the best age of Greece. The sixteenth century, with its absorption in theology, is more medieval than the world of Machiavelli. The modern world, so far as mental outlook is concerned, began in the seventeenth century.” [p. 525]
He discusses the sprouting of science with a look at inductive method, which is not so central to a political discussion except that it was an underpinning, you could say, of what it means to exercise common sense and correct knowledge of reality that are essential prerequisites to functioning as a citizen (this is my own specific interpretation). Meanwhile, Russell also takes pains to show that mere induction—coming to conclusions based on rigorous observation of results—is not all there is to science, which is a theme that would become crucial to his discussion of the very important philosopher Hume later.
“The part played by deduction in science is greater than [Francis] Bacon supposed. Often, when a hypothesis has to be tested, there is a long deductive journey from the hypothesis to some consequence that can be tested by observation. Usually the deduction is mathematical, and in this respect Bacon underestimated the importance of mathematics in scientific investigation.” [p. 545]
Thomas Hobbes as a “spring robin” for social contract ideas of government
An early figure who may seem quirky in some way—e.g., his political theory included the notion that a monarch should be the top figure in a government, which actually was an idea that the development of civil government was moving away from—was Thomas Hobbes. He was an empiricist—a person whose theory of knowledge meant it derives from experience—whose main importance to people today is in coming up with the idea of a “social contract” as the central, theoretical basis for why we have a government, and not the idea that government is by a monarch who governs by divine right.
“[Thomas] Hobbes (1588-1679) is a philosopher whom it is difficult to classify. He was an empiricist, like Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, but unlike them, he was an admirer of mathematical method, not only in pure mathematics, but in its applications. His general outlook was inspired by Galileo rather than Bacon. From Descartes to Kant, Continental philosophy derived much of its conception of the nature of human knowledge from mathematics, but it regarded mathematics as known independently of experience. It was thus led, like Platonism, to minimize the part played by perception, and over-emphasize the part played by pure thought. English empiricism, on the other hand, was little influenced by mathematics, and tended to have a wrong conception of scientific method. Hobbes had neither of these defects. It is not until our own day [1945] that we find any other philosophers who were empiricists and yet laid due stress on mathematics. In this respect, Hobbes’s merit is great. … [Despite his demerits as a philosopher dealing with issues of knowledge,] his theory of the State deserves to be carefully considered, the more so as it is more modern than any previous theory, even that of Machiavelli.” [p. 546]
The idea of the “state of nature” which is the background of the development of a “social contract” may seem a little quaint today, but it was an important part of how early theorists explained how government could arise that was not simply a function of a royal monarch and some theological underpinning (Hobbes, by the way, as Russell notes, was an atheist, another risky position for a person of his career in his day). Hobbes also held the idea that men are naturally equal, which went against the grain of the aristocracy and royal families as being part of the grounds for government in his day.
“Unlike most defenders of despotic governments, Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty…. [From conflict between men that can be envisioned in a state of nature, where there is actually a war of “all against all,”] how men escape from these evils [is] by combining into communities each subject to a central authority. This is represented as happening by means of a social contract. … I do not think this ‘covenant’ (as Hobbes usually calls it) is thought of as a definite historical event…. It is an explanatory myth, used to explain why men submit, and should submit, to the limitations on personal freedom entailed in submission to authority.” [p. 550]
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The historical roots of U.S. democracy seen in 1600s and 1700s life
An important fact to keep in mind is that the U.S. government, which was a product originally of men mostly descended from the English in the U.S. (and hence influenced by the philosopher John Locke, to be discussed below), was not something that arose from anywhere other than northern Europe, amid countries whose economic conditions seemed to require a freer hand in how government operated than may have been seen in countries, like Spain, more imbued with, and controlled by, the Roman Catholic Church and its prerogatives.
“Early liberalism was a product of England and Holland, and had certain well-marked characteristics. It stood for religious toleration; it was Protestant, but of a latitudinarian rather than of a fanatical kind; [and] it regarded the wars of religion as silly. It valued commerce and industry, and favoured the rising middle class rather than the monarchy and aristocracy; it had immense respect for the rights of property, especially when accumulated by the labours of the individual possessor.” [p. 597]
In short, we can say that “liberal” government arose largely from England, and its development happened with a struggle to come from under the control of the church and other more medieval long-time conditions (the Magna Carta of the 1200s, which also was created in England, has long been cited in modern American education about the history of civil government as an early sprouting in this direction, though it would be centuries before a form of government that really clipped the king’s wings took root in England). Civil government of our type did not develop in Eastern Europe, or in the Mediterranean area, for whatever that’s worth. And it also didn’t develop at the hands of the Church; so any modern talk about, say, posting the Ten Commandments on school grounds as if to show the U.S. government somehow directly developed from this is highly misleading, both as to the history and as to the intellectual forces and concerns that gave birth to the U.S. government.
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So far, Russell’s overarching thematic talk about the development of government may seem to be “still held by us” by and large. One part of his discussion that may seem dated or off-base concerns his discussion of Jean Jacques Rousseau, to whom he refers somewhat often in his discussion of some late-1700s and 1800s figures. I know that Rousseau was not covered at all by any philosophy professors I learned from in the 1980s, but Russell focuses on him because Rousseau’s notion of “truth” for people being what comes from their heart would seem to be an intellectual wellspring for what Russell felt was the world-historical bugbear of Nazism during World War II. Using “the heart” as the source of what was true would seem to explain the kind of Nazi notions as “Think with the blood!,” as one of Hitler’s followers expounded.
(As it happened, by the time I studied philosophy in the 1980s, the “big enemy” in intellectual and political thought was communism, hence the “heart as the source of truth” was replaced by issues surrounding totalitarian organization, fear of the loss of individualism in its best sense, and so on. Russell was certainly aware of the poisonous potential of communism—he even published a work decrying the failure of communism in Russia in the 1920s, before Stalin even came to power; but his main concern about “enemy forces” in political life, in the 1940s, was understandably Nazism.)
“A new movement, which has gradually developed into the antithesis of liberalism, begins with Rousseau, and acquires strength from the romantic movement and the principle of nationality. In this movement, individualism is extended from the intellectual sphere to that of the passions, and the anarchic aspects of individualism are made explicit. The cult of the hero, as developed by Carlyle and Nietzsche, is typical of this philosophy.” [p. 600]
The fountain of Locke-ian philosophy as a major turn in political theory
We turn back to the discussion of political development in England, leading to a look at Locke.
“The conflict [in England] between king and Parliament in the Civil War [of 164X—you can Google the English Civil War] gave Englishmen, once for all, a love of compromise and moderation, and a fear of pushing any theory to its logical conclusion, which has dominated them down to the present day [1945].” [p. 601]
“John Locke (1632-1704) is the apostle of the [English] Revolution of 1688, the most moderate and the most successful of all revolutions. Its aims were modest, but they were exactly achieved, and no subsequent revolution has hitherto been found necessary in England. Locke faithfully embodies its spirit, and most of his works appeared within a few years of 1688.” [p. 604]
The “state of nature” idea comes up again.
"[Locke] begins by supposing what he calls a ‘state of nature,’ antecedent to all human government. In this state there is a ‘law of nature,’ but the law of nature consists of divine commands, and is not imposed by any human legislator. It is not clear how far the state of nature is, for Locke, a mere illustrative hypothesis, and how far he supposes it to have had a historical existence…. Men emerged from the state of nature by means of a social contract which instituted civil government. This also he regarded as more or less historical.” [p. 613]
“In regard to the state of nature, Locke was less original than Hobbes, who regarded it as one in which there was war of all against all…. The view of the state of nature and of natural law which Locke accepted from his predecessors cannot be freed from its theological basis; where it survives without this, as in much modern liberalism, it is destitute of clear logical foundation.” [p. 624]
Touching again on the lack of a “theological sanction” or religious grounding for civil, liberal government, Russell points out the “worldly” nature of how such government develops.
“[Of two main types of theory about the social contract in Locke’s time, a second main type]—of which Locke is a representative—maintained that civil government is the result of a contract, and is an affair purely of the world, not something established by divine authority. Some writers regarded the social contract as a historical fact, others as a legal fiction; the important matter, for all of them, was to find a terrestrial origin for governmental authority.” [p. 619]
Russell looks to Rousseau as a headwater (or symbol) for darker political developments
Russell’s way of generalizing about types of theory in Western intellectual life may sometimes seem a bit glib, but as you read the whole book, you realize he is not being shallow, but is really trying to thematically organize what points he wants to make, based on a river of historical developments and a set of rich individual sets of theories, while wanting us to keep in mind how civil government and its opposite, a kind of dictatorship, are two developments that, arguably, had roots (or inspiration, or some kind of “justification” made by later apologists for various governments) in different individual philosophies.
“From the time of Locke down to the present day, there have been in Europe two main types of philosophy, and one of them owes both its doctrines and its method to Locke, while the other was derived first from Descartes and then from Kant. Kant himself thought that he had made a synthesis of the philosophy derived from Descartes and that derived from Locke, but this cannot be admitted, at least from a historical point of view, for the followers of Kant were in the Cartesian, not the Lockian, tradition.” [p. 641]
When he turns to Rousseau more specifically, he is pointed about what he sees as one lamentable consequence of Rousseau’s type of philosophy.
“[Rousseau] is the father of the romantic movement, the initiator of systems of thought which infer non-human facts from human emotions, and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorships as opposed to traditional absolute monarchies. … At the present time [1945], Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill [an outcome] of Locke.” [pp. 684-85]
Nietzsche: The figure in Western philosophy seeming most to augur Nazism
There are considerable figures—in number and nature—in the history of Western philosophy between Rousseau and Nietzsche, such as Kant and Hegel, the latter of whom Russell also sees as providing some “comfort” to the later Nazi regime. But I prune my discussion here to focus on a figure who might seem to have been a sine qua non for the development of Nazi “theory,” though the reality is more complex and subtle.
(There is much more to quote from Russell on Nietzsche, who Russell takes some delight in discussing, both trying to explicate his theory fairly and then criticize it, which is a method Russell very commonly, and to his credit, uses.)
“[Friedrich] Nietzsche is not a nationalist, and shows no excessive admiration for Germany. He wants an international ruling race, who are to be the lords of the earth: ‘a new vast aristocracy based upon the most severe self-discipline, in which the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be stamped upon thousands of years.’
“He is also not definitely
anti-Semitic, though he thinks Germany
contains as many Jews as it can assimilate, and ought not to permit any further
influx of Jews. He dislikes the New Testament, but not the Old, of which he
speaks in terms of the highest admiration. In justice to Nietzsche it must be
emphasized that many modern developments [at the hand of Nazi Germany] which
have a certain connection with his general ethical outlook are contrary to his
clearly expressed opinions. [p. 764]
…
“[T]here is a great deal in him that must be dismissed as merely megalomaniac. Speaking of Spinoza he says: ‘How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!’ Exactly the same may be said of him, with the less reluctance since he has not hesitated to say it of Spinoza. It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires [from his reading] were military. His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion toward them, which [in his case] is obviously one of fear. ‘Forget not thy whip’ [a quote Russell had cited earlier, with some derisive irony about it]—but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.” [p. 767]
To interpose a point: Russell, as I have said, has seemed a little hostile to religion, but the reality is more complex; he certainly took pains to discuss religious ideas fairly, as part of his being a judicious historian, but also I think Russell had some “Christian inclinations” that he valued as central to himself even while he would have views as if he was not Christian (he published a book, Why I Am Not a Christian, which doesn’t mean he was a “mean-spirited atheist” but that he took a rational, analytical approach to criticizing some of the basis for Christianity in the theological sphere, while in the moral sphere, I think he had his feet planted in Christianity more than he thought). Importantly, some of Russell’s final criticisms of Nietzsche had him espousing Jesus, as one exponent of what he believed as ethical precepts that he embraced that were opposed to those of Nietzsche. But to return to the passage I started quoting above:
“He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear: I am afraid my neighbor may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly display the contempt for him which of course I feel [Russell earlier explicated Nietzsche’s express hatred for Christianity]. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear, which he would fain disguise as lordly indifference. His ‘noble’ man—who is himself in day-dreams—is a being wholly devoid of sympathy, ruthless, cunning, cruel, concerned only with his own power. King Lear, on the verge of madness, says:
I will do such things—
What they are yet I know now—but they shall be
The terror of the earth.
This is Nietzsche’s philosophy in a nutshell.” [p. 767]
[Added to what is already posted on other blog:]
When I was in college in the 1980s, Nietzsche tended to be taught, whether at the survey/introductory level or at a more specialized level, as to look at what content of his philosophy could be still adaptable to modern people’s mentalities or to some kind of use of a workable piece of philosophy. Thus, he could be looked at as a kind of existentialist, with his ideas of self-assertion being adaptable to that, even though his books showed a rather strident version of existentialism. However, what today would most be relevant to interested laypeople about Nietzsche would be his ideas that were most seized on by the Nazis, and these ideas in Nietzsche seem as if they couldn’t help but spur, or buttress, some kind of vastly ruthless political movement.
In particular, his idea of the Ubermensch (with an umlaut over the U) seems almost a disquieting caricature of Nazi ideas. With this, a person was exhorted—assuming the person had the “talent” for this—to be a kind of ruthless, highly self-disciplined leader who exerted highly manipulative power over people who were more sheep-like, or as Nietzsche would describe what he considered mediocre people, “the bungled and botched” (and indeed Russell refers to this idea, amid his chapter covering much of the Nietzsche-ian ideas of ruthlessness and brutal political order; I here post a reproduction of the full chapter so you can see how Russell covered him, as well as appreciate Russell’s rounded style of writing on arcane ideas in general; my apologies for the copy quality, and note handwritten explanation on first page of two different kinds of red brackets used on later pages).
Nietzsche’s ideas on the use of power—indeed, a central concept for him is the “will to power,” which is quite useful in interpreting what is “quintessential” about him—are integral to his views on standardized religion, and in this regard he had contempt for both Christianity and Judaism, because he saw both religions as promoting what could be called (not his word) sheep-like behavior, extolling a kind of rather passive, herd mentality. So in this regard, what some might consider his antipathy toward Jews wasn’t unique to them; it was also directed to Christians, which showed he effectively was opposed to the reigning social order overall.
To show what the idea of the Ubermensch entailed, I will quote a passage from a 1972 Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia (vol. 17, p. 370), to show how such an idea was explicated in even a rather banal context for average readers, which should show the stark nature of this idea: “All life, for Nietzsche, was will to power. The established ideals of civilization he holds to be ends that bold and masterful men have set for themselves; but the ideals that formed the appropriate goals of their own high nature have become exalted traditions for subsequent ages. Against these self-assertive supermen stand the weak, the mediocre, the timorous, and the sickly, who, realizing their incapacity for individual achievement on an heroic scale, band together and set up a standard of life glorifying humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness and love, the traits that protect their own weakness and make for their common safety. These traits, Nietzsche maintains, are idealized as virtues, such virtues being the marks of a slave morality….
“…slave morality, with its glorification of mediocrity, is to be maintained and encouraged for the vast body of inferior men. It becomes disastrous only when those who are born to be masters permit themselves to be imposed upon by it and so forfeit their birthright of independence and absolute self-determination. [Note that Russell, in his chapter (p. 769), discusses in some depth the question of whether those meant to be Ubermensches were “born to be that” or could be trained to be that, and Russell looks at the whole concept of aristocratic tendencies to show that an idea of an elite as Nietzsche seemed to extol could raise the question of why elites exist—were they primarily a function of history, or might they depend on some individuals’ ideas of entitlement for themselves?] Although the mature master is free and accountable to no one but himself, his freedom is attained only through the imposition of a stern discipline in his childhood and youth, this discipline being continued by himself.” (By the way, if I strictly followed German grammar, the plural of Ubermensch would be Ubermenschen.)
We can see that this vision, including what he felt constitutes society that Nietzsche held as needing to be overcome, basically serves the interests of a kind of bullying snob, to put it mildly (Russell eventually dismisses part of Nietzsche’s morality as “erect[ing] conceit into a duty” [p. 773]). This plus Nietzsche’s sometimes febrile or almost-hysterical ideas (such as on women) might have seemed the fancies of a bookish man, but when adapted by a political order, they could mean serious trouble (and of course it takes more than a philosophic text to create a political order with “Ubermensches” walking all over the “bungled and botched”).
A last note
As a minor point leading to a major point, Russell shows that Nietzsche didn’t entirely, in his views, inspire Nazism—and indeed, as far as I am concerned, no one philosopher could have “inspired” Nazism, because in general any philosopher, no matter how “fevered,” would never embrace or recommend genocide, pogroms, and the like. This is not what philosophers concern themselves with. It is politicians, especially those who misuse philosophical, scientific, and other rationally based ideas, who end up forcing through programs that are hugely inimical to human life.
