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Russell vs Lawrence and/or Wittgenstein

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Fergus Kerr O P
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Extract

Bertrand Russell, by any reckoning, must count as a figure of central importance in British intellectual history. Many of his books continue to be reprinted, in cheap paperback editions, up to sixty years since he first brought them out. He is standard fare for first- year philosophy students and some of his essays are classical points of reference in current debates in the analytical tradition. In 1915 he was brought to Pulborough by Lady Ottoline Morrell to meet D H Lawrence. By that time Russell (1872 - 1970) was aged forty- three and had already achieved his most original and influential contributions to philosophy. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was thirty, with Sons and Lovers published (Duckworth, 1913), and The Rainbow about to be so. Their common interest lay in opposition to the War — in which, to place the other main characters in this essay, F R Leavis (then aged twenty) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (aged twenty-six) were both volunteers, Leavis as a stretcher-bearer in Flanders, Wittgenstein as an officer in the Austrian army.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 63 , Issue 748 , October 1982 , pp. 430 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 All the quotations referring to Russell come from The Collected Letters of D H Lawrence (1962 edition)

2 The quotations and information come from Ronald Clark's Life of Bertrand Russell (1975); the lectures on ”The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” are reprinted in Logic und Knowledge, edited by R C Marsh (1956)

3 Quoted from the astounding chapter on Hegel in Russell's History of Western philosophy (1946)

4 Notebooks 1914–1916 (published 19691, p 62

5 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, volume I (1980), No 630Google Scholar

6 Page 61, Must we mean what we say (1969)

7 philosophical Papers (1959), p 258

8 See his immensely valuable Companion to Wittgenstein's Investigations (1977)

9 See Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1932–1935, edited by Alice Ambrose (1979)

10 See Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1932, edited by Desmond Lee (1980), p 26. “Philosophy is the synopsis of trivialities”: “synopsis”, at this stage at least, is obviously Wittgenstein's awn attempt to translate the German idea which has become misleadingly canonized as “perspicuity” (Investigations, No 122).

11 See Culture and Value, edited by G H von Wright (1980 edition), p 44, a remark noted in 1944.

12 Page 96

13 Culture and Value, p 17 (dated 1931)

14 Ibid, same year, pp 18 and 16 respectively.