Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness, 1921-1970 [Hardcover]

The breakup was really not that dramatic. Russell recognised Wittgenstein's brilliance and persuaded him to take up philosophy, treating him with considerable and apparently typical generosity at both a material and intellectual level. For a while the two men were colleagues and friends, until Wittgenstein broke away on finding his own philosophical direction. Russell admired Wittgenstein's early work but was dismayed by the rest, considering it a journey into mysticism. (And indeed Wittgenstein is one pavingstone on the road that led to Derrida, though fortunately he is much more than that.)

Their friendship ended with some anger and mutual disappointment but no real scenes, no dramatic denunciations. Wittgenstein and Russell attended the same social events long after the breakup, including the famous incident where Wittgenstein waved a poker, threateningly in some accounts, at Karl Popper. (Russell's stern, "Wittgenstein, put that poker down!" was easily the most sensible and ethically incisive remark made during that infamous meeting of minds, and Wittgenstein?s acquiescence suggests some lingering respect for Russell.)

The relative lack of heat between the actual protagonists has not prevented their followers from carrying on the dispute, though more on the Wittgensteinian than the Russellian side. Wittgenstein founded a cult based around himself, and to some extent that cult-like aura remains, while Russell's style and fortunes were different. Russell was the world's best-known philosopher and a leader of the world peace movement. His reputation and renown were vast in the 1950s and 1960s until his death in 1970. As a result, by the 1980s Russell was as unfashionable as flared trousers. Russell had no "cult" except in the different sense that mass phenomena like U2 or Madonna were "cult figures". Instead, Russell inspired one generation and was forgotten by the next. Russell's philosophical reputation is only recovering now from that late-twentieth century nadir (as are flared trousers). Meanwhile Wittgenstein's cult grew steadily, while remaining in many respects cult-like.

Monk?s book appears to be part of the Wittgenstein-Russell fall-out. Monk is the author of a very good and sympathetic biography of Wittgenstein, which does all the things that his two-volume biography of Russell (of which this is the second volume) fails to do. Wittgenstein was an impossible man who caused enormous damage to many of his followers. But Monk's biography rightly shows that Wittgenstein's worst is balanced by his best, and tries to reveal the human beneath the sometimes arrogant or vindictive or destructive behaviour. Similarly, Monk gives a sympathetic account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, showing why it is of enduring value.

His biography of Russell has none of these merits, and of the two volumes the second ("The Ghost of Madness") is far the worse. Monk presents us with Russell's vices (his vanity, his failures to see or sometimes sympathise with the human feelings of those around him, including his lovers and his family, who he on occasion treated appallingly badly), but with little or no attempt at understanding, or placing these faults in perspective. This is not to say that I think that any of the facts Monk has chosen to present are incorrect, or that there are not incidents here that make me think less of Russell. But I have read other accounts of what Russell was like, and it is clear that Monk has selected fiercely, avoiding stories that show Russell as funny, or decent, or kind. Monk's Russell is simply a monster with none of the roundness of a human being: not a portrait but a caricature.

Monk's antipathy to Russell is so strong that he even despises Russell's virtues, inviting us to do the same. Russell turned to popular writing partly because he had given his money away to various good causes, from women's suffrage to the peace movement. He lost his Cambridge post after being jailed for speaking against the First World War. Monk tries to present Russell's courage in the cause of peace (he went to jail again, in that cause, in old age the 1960s), the generosity that made him poor, and his response to financial privation by writing, as faults: not merely valueless but actually disgraceful. That won't do.

Similarly, Monk's account of Russell's philosophical work, after the split with Wittgenstein, is not explication but dismissal. To Monk, Russell did some interesting but failed work in _Principia Mathematica_ and _The Principles of Mathematics_, which Monk presents rather as half-blind precursors to Wittgenstein. Monk's Russell, unlike the real one, soon abandoned serious philosophical work. In reality Russell's later work, on epistemology rather than mathematics, on the resigned compromises we must engage in when we say we "know" something, is (I observe and predict) leading the revival of interest in and appreciation of Russell. Monk sees no value in this work, and indeed from a Wittgensteinian point of view it _has_ no value.

AJ Ayer concludes his own book on Russell as person and philosopher (recommended) by describing Russell as "not a saint, but a good man". With all his faults and weaknesses, Russell deserved better than this book, in which Monk descends from biography to partisan hatchet job. We still need a good, balanced, life of Russell using material that couldn't be used while key people were alive. The time for hagiography is past; but there is no real need for demonography either.

Cheers!

Laon

Ray Monk, although he puts Russell's mathematical achievements at the pinnacle of human endeavour, finds everything else about Russell to be pathetic and disgusting.

This book, which is about the second half of Russell's life (and Ray Monk has written a biography of the first half called 'The Spirit Of Solitude' which is equally compulsive reading, but suffers from the same love-hate relationship with Russell) has much more biographical material than any previous book on Russell BUT almost every new fact is framed from Ray Monk's perspective of disdain and contempt.

Russell had a traumatic childhood, with the death of his sister (diphtheria) then that of his mother and father coming in rapid succession at about the age of four, followed by a mostly isolated upbringing by his grandparents.

Instead of finding this tragic early influence a basis for sympathy and understanding, Monk uses it as a basis for finding a river of underlying insanity and evil flowing beneath the actions and writings of what he considers to be a monster who should not have lived past the completion of his mathematical masterpiece.

Just as it is important to have a biography written by someone who is not blind to the faults of their subject, it is also important to have the biographer not hate their subject, or have some kind of grudge against them or some aspect of their lives.

Monk cannot bear the fact that Russell does not live up to Monk's lofty expectations, that a god of mathematics, a subject of absolute moral purity, has human frailties and imperfections.

Consequently, despite the fact that Russell did an enormous number of interesting things in the second five decades of his life, in literature, philosophy, politics, science, mathematics, logic, education and psychology, this is all not good enough for Monk, who sees anything short of the stature of Russell's greatest work as being an example of Russell's decline.

There is so much detail in Russell's life, and so much analysis by Monk, that even if you question Monk's almost exclusively unfavourable conclusions, you will find this book an extraordinarily mesmerising helter-skelter ride through humanity's most dramatic period of change, as seen through the life of one of its most active and influential participants, even if that life is itself viewed through exceptionally unsympathetic eyes.

So reading The Ghost of Madness was a sad revelation. I had already read, with great enjoyment, Monk's Duty of Genius and Spirit of Solitude, but this volume took me quite a while to get through, cause on nearly every page there was another revelation of Russell's pettiness, and just-plain-meanness, especially to his schizophrenic son and granddaughter, Lucy.

Monk's other 2 main works deserve 5 stars, this one one less cause he lost any semblance of an "objective" biographer's stance (I know I know "objectivity" is problematic...), starting with the preface and acknowledgements.